Category: Purpose

  • Objectivity, and the path to joy

    Sometime back, a colleague and I had a conversation on retaining objectivity during decision making. I felt that if one does not do that in life generally, it won’t happen at work either. We live in our narratives, and the brain, after all, is only so flexible.

    That led to a train of thought. Objectivity (also) comes from being able to step out and get a view of one’s self from outside. Insights into one’s self can happen all the while, if you allow it. Two recent incidents to highlight this. (more…)

  • Peak Abstraction

    Saturday mornings are sometimes spent at the lake nearby – walking/jogging around it. A few weeks ago, I saw a few dressed-for-exercise folks spending the entire time doing an intense “exercise” – posing for selfies! To be fair, the lake is pretty, but..

    It led me to an interesting line of thought. Before I let you in on that, some context setting, or you might close the tab at the ridiculousness of it. Given that the species has lacked telepathy, we have been abstracting for a very long time. Sensations, emotions and thoughts that make up our subjective reality needed to be conveyed. We converted them into everything from facial expressions and actions to drawings to language – spoken, written and then published soon as we entered the machine age. You are now reading what I am thinking.  (more…)

  • A devious self

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    These days when I think of the self, I am regularly reminded of this. I use ‘ego’ interchangeably with ‘self’. Ego as in egotism, not the Freud definition. The inflated view of the self that most of us refer to when we say ‘ego’. While the scientific-philosophical perspective is something I am very interested in, it is more the day-to-day reveals that are more frequent.  (more…)

  • That passion – profession debate, again

    In many beer fueled conversations, I have heard the sentiment of “quitting my job and doing something I am passionate about.” While I see merit in that line of thought, these days I also end up playing party-pooper by asking if he/she has a business model in mind, especially since the ‘passion’ is more often than not from the usual suspects list – digital photography, cooking/baking, writing, travel and so on. To clarify, unlike funded startups this model doesn’t even have to scale, but in the medium-long term, the revenue has to be greater than expenditure. That’s a requisite for survival in the world, unless one has alternate sources of income.

    I saw a meeting of worlds when I noticed yet another job listing that demanded the person to be “passionate about digital marketing“? As someone who has been working in the domain since 2004, I have seen a version of this phrase appear in many job descriptions. I could replace digital marketing with startups, consumer insights, programming and so on, the question remains the same. (more…)

  • Free* Will

    *Conditions Apply

    The first documented appearance of the subject on the blog is in 2011, and I seem to have posted on the subject every alternate year, the last being in 2015. But it’s sheer coincidence and not really pattern following that led me to think, and write, about free will now.

    Across my life, I have moved from having a faith and believing in predestination (will of God), to being agnostic and believing in karma, to being an atheist and believing in the influence of luck (random chance) in all the plans I make. In the last version, the view is that my free will is dominant – I make my own choices which dictate my future and nothing is predetermined. The luck explains the good and bad out-of-ordinary things that change my future, but it is random. Karma stories are a forced narrative based on hindsight. (more…)