Category: Flawsophy

  • Zoned Out

    On hindsight, I should have known it wouldn’t be that easy. A little over 150 days after Comfort Zoned appeared here, 2021 did a 2020 to me with a heart attack. Yes, literally. There is no hidden wordplay, as most of my friends assumed when I let them know! Should have done Anjuna to angina, since we had just returned from Goa the previous week! For someone paranoid enough to have done a genome-based preventive health assessment to detect and insure, this was insulting. I hadn’t expected it for at least another 3 years.

    Heart attacks seem to be common now, and I checked in and out after a 3D/2N (Columbia) Asia sojourn. But cliched as it sounds, I had a lot of time to reflect. More so because while in the ICU after the angioplasty, I could hear the man who lay opposite my bed, in throes of pain and anguish, trying to find some meaning in the life he had lived. Maybe he sensed something. He became silent in an hour, even as nurses and doctors frantically tried to save him. A few minutes later, a long beep was all that remained.

    It made me revisit the luxury (and privilege) of my comfort zone, and since this will be published after my second angio (done on a date that has other life-changing memories), I thought a good way for me to figure out the next chapters would be to frame the story so far.

    Money

    • D and I arranged our own marriage, and began our lives in Bangalore with a 1 lakh loan from Citibank. Everything that followed – the hard work, the decisions – was to prevent dependence on anyone. This is not an easy responsibility and probably what led to a scarcity mindset.
    • It has an effect on many things, including career choices i.e. how you make money. If I had to “follow my passion”, I would probably be a travel writer, try my hand at script writing, and maybe even aspire to blink-and-miss roles. But that’s a bet. You get paid a lot if you’re in the top 1%, but the world is mostly the 99% who didn’t. Instead, I chose financial security as my North Star, and thankfully marketing isn’t the most boring career. In terms of learning, it never stops, but the focus for 20s, 30s and 40s – explore, expand, and extract respectively. See, alliteration! It’s important to keep your side interest alive. 🙂 You’re fortunate if you manage to do both.
    • I think financial security is underrated – there is a trade-off, but it gives you the agency to lead the life you want. Even when you’re only moving towards it, you will become increasingly comfortable investing in things you like – in my case, books, travel, good food and alcohol, ridiculous decor… And I think, if/when you’re able to tame your ego and self image and get rid of delusions of significance, things become even better! The biggest trick in the book is starting early – compounding is an extraordinary phenomenon, and it needs time.

    Relationships

    • One problem with the scarcity mindset is that it also tends to define relationships. It was only after I got to a certain comfort level in terms of our “f*** you money”, that I even let most people in. Because early on, I had at least a couple of experiences when a friend/relative borrowed money, and only after a couple of missed deadlines told me about their philosophy of “Do I even have to pay you back?” That led to exits – money and relationship, and I became cynical about the value of relationships.
    • Only recently, I realised that the early mindset of being independent and not taking help might have caused a judgmental “not giving help” side effect. Funnily enough, this isn’t applicable to causes and the world-at-large, but instead, directed at friends and relatives (The intrigues of my empathy). I am still cynical, but more conscious of it, and its machinations.
    • Find and hold on to people who can give you non-judgmental company. It’s a treasure. I think you have to be lucky to find new friends in your 40s! That damn ability seems to shrink with age. And once you have made certain consequential and irreversible choices – the kind of apartment you buy, being parents (or not, like us) – it adds constraints. On a side note, I think folks who are parents are better at compromises and negotiations!

    Health

    • Back in 2006, I first came to know about my stratospheric cholesterol levels. Since then, in one form or another, I have been exercising five days a week. I love my beef and chocolate, and my rum and whiskey, but everything is consumed in moderation. But fitness and health are different things that we tend to conflate. Also, the genes have a will of their own, and despite reading a lot about it, I thought I could beat it with a diet and exercise regime. Nah.
    • Do yourself a favour and at least at 35, start an annual checkup habit. Yes, you might have to do trade-offs, but at least to me, being in control of the narrative seems like a better choice than a take-it-as-it-comes approach, because the latter also has an effect on your spouse/partner/family. One realisation is that we have a remarkable ability to normalise things, even those we thought we could never change/live without.

    Navigation

    A couple of things that are applicable to all three aspects above

    • Habits: Another underrated phenomenon. And they work as a force multiplier in both directions i.e. the good ones will give you superpowers, and the bad ones will pull the rug from under you. Take the time to understand what kind of person you are, and want to be. And build your habits around that. The caveat to that is moderation. For instance, I am a compulsive planner. The good part – I could guide D while experiencing a heart attack, because I had the scenario planned. The bad part – irritation when things don’t go according to plan e.g. not enjoying a vacation because the plan is chockablock. On a related note, it is in the nature of things to change. I can assure you that you will laugh at the things you decided/did when you were younger. In that context, acknowledge that habits will need rewiring too. To borrow from another context, “we first shape our habits, then our habits shape us”. A good idea to revisit them every once in a while, and look at them objectively.
    • Trade-offs: Many things in life are finite, include time and money. While “All I want is everything” is a perfectly normal stance, reality most likely will include trade-offs. Some conscious, and some that you realise only later. The higher the ‘conscious’ tally, the better I feel. You will need to find your own balance. A related application is in decision-making. A friend taught me to ask myself “how important will this be in five years?” For the past few years, my optimisation has been to give myself optionality, with a broad idea of where I want to be. Reality is a full contact sport, and there’s only so much control you have.

    P.S. A good book to read on many of these things – Morgan Housel’s The Psychology of Money.

  • Default in our stars

    The thought first occurred to me a couple of years ago, when I realised that thanks to outsourcing and automation, we would struggle today to do many things that were once life skills. We also lost a little more than that – learning.

    Sometimes directly, and sometimes, through the interactions with the world, they facilitated a learning experience that taught one how to navigate the world and the different kinds of folks that made up its systems. 

    Regression Planning

    It was continued with a bit more specificity in a subsequent post.

    Instagram, Facebook, Tinder, Spotify, Netflix, Amazon – everything is a feed of recommendations, whether it be social interactions, music, content or shopping! Once upon a time, these were conscious choices we made. These choices, new discoveries, their outcomes, the feedback loop, and the memories we store of them, all worked towards developing intuition. 

    Intelligence, intuition and instincts. The journeys in the first two are what have gotten the third hardwired into our biology and chemistry. When we cut off the pipeline to the first two, what happens to the third, and where does it leave our species?

    AI: Artificial Instincts
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  • Brands, Activism & Morality

    A while back, someone had joked on Twitter that by 2025, babies will be born outraged. But in 2020, the joke, at least in Indian advertising, is that when the Tanishq brand manager begins to think of a campaign, #BoycottTanishq starts trending. When I was writing the article on brands and empathy for Business Insider, I realised it would need a lot of effort for brands to go beyond signalling.

    However, with inequities becoming even more of a pressing topic, and the expectation from brands to be active participants in society – activism to action, is there an inevitable movement that we will see? And hence, this post on brands through the prism of activism and morality, from the perspectives of a consumer and a brand marketer, and the safety of an armchair.

    “We are living in an era of woke capitalism in which companies pretend to care about social justice to sell products to people who pretend to hate capitalism.”

    Clay Routledge
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  • The Presentation of Selfie in Everyday Life

    I will get to that “weird” title in a bit, but two things triggered this post. The first is the number of people urging, well, other people, to watch “The Social Dilemma”. Quite amazing. Especially considering how much of this advice is on WhatsApp groups. All I’ll say is, well done Facebook. Not to mention the irony of watching it on Netflix, which as I tweeted, is quite a paragon of virtue when it comes to behavioural manipulation. The second is the connection to the “Occult of Personality” – something I posted a few weeks ago. While the second order consequences on an algorithmically driven landscape was worrying, I realised that celebrities and “leaders” getting professionals to manage their social media presence was only a second order consequence of how they behaved as people on social platforms.  I also realised that this was in essence an early stage of algorithms dictating humans. Because who’s really in control when you’re always “appearing” as opposed to being?

    That provides a good context to the title, which is a bit of a wordplay on an excellent book that was written many decades ago – The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. The author Erving Goffman uses the metaphor of a theatrical performance to explore the nuances and interplay that occur in practically every interaction we have. A deep analysis of “All the world’s a stage” and the “performances”  we give everyday to guide others’ impression of us. “Shelf worth’ on Zoom calls is a recent example. Goffman uses “backstage” as a space where we can be true to ourselves, and not be putting on an act. These days, thanks to the ubiquity of the mobile phone and social media, “backstage” is shrinking. And thus the title.

    Because we’re busy scrolling, and judging others and ourselves, and putting on a show. Leading to never-ending validation cycles that include feelings of inadequacy and envy. Once upon a time, there was happiness about something we did/experienced. As I wrote in Peak Abstraction, maybe, as we continue posturing, we will reach a stage when our signalling of happiness and its effect on others will become our measure of our own happiness. Or maybe it has already happened. Thanks to the highlight reels as presented on Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp, things have escalated far beyond Keeping up with the Joneses. After all, with social media, everyone is a neighbour/friend, and as Gore Vidal famously said, “Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.”

    Evolution has hardwired envy in us. In the early stages of human evolution, because we were competing for resources and mates, it was an important tool that ensured we adapted, survived, and passed the gene to the next generation. Has it changed a lot, if we look at dating, jobs, promotion etc? Probably not. But it depends on whether we consider these as necessary for survival, and whether we think of them as zero-sum “games”. Journeys inward are tough, but ultimately satisfying. Asking the self about happiness is one such. Understanding it, and being able to influence yourself would be quite an amazing feat in the age of influencers! Looking evolution in the eye, and overturning its effect is also a good way to show respect.

    (in context, a wonderful short film I discovered on, wait for it, social media!) 😉

  • Occult of personality

    Recently, Badshah took the rap for allegedly paying for fake views on a music video, in a bid to break a YouTube viewership record. I’m surprised that a lot of folks were surprised! Whether it’s social media (FB, Instagram, Snapchat etc) or media networks (YouTube, TikTok, and largely Twitter too), digital ecosystems have been built around reach. Just like traditional media was. Reach that is then sold to brands and advertisers. Reach that is usually also a poor surrogate for efficiency and effectiveness. That’s why all this reminds me of Goodhart’s law – when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. The unintended but predictable consequences of optimising for the measure. So why do brands still do it? Hey, everyone has KRAs and no time for real outcomes. Output is good enough. Influencer marketing does just that. Besides, a case can even be made for credibility in the audience’s mind. But that’s a separate story. (more…)