Category: Self

  • 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…)

  • Finn, Tolstoy, and happy families

    “You’ve heard that line about all happy families being the same?”

    “War and Peace”, I said.

    “Anna Karenina, but that’s not the point. The point is, it’s untrue. No family, happy or unhappy, is quite like any other.”

    I read this in The Woman in the Window by A.J. Finn recently. I use the Anna Karenina principle quite a bit in many contexts and discussions. In fact, recently, while reading Guns, Germs & Steel, I realised he had used this framing too. To put it simply, there are x number of conditions that definitely need to be met for something to succeed. The ‘something’ could be anything from origin of life to economical supremacy, and the ‘x’ conditions would change with that context. But in a given context, only those who fulfill all the x conditions will succeed.

    Naturally, as a believer, I was miffed by Finn’s (character’s) statement. But, could he be right?

    As I write this, D and I are a day away from celebrating 21 years of being together, 15 of them in a married state. Speaking of state, Kerala in the late 90s and early noughties, much like other non-metros in India, wasn’t friendly to intimacy or dating. In fact, the reaction to our relationship was actually a combination of the two – intimidating! Especially since a couple of religions were involved. Anyhow, here we are, 21 years later – happy.

    The stage was set for a thought experiment. Are we happy in the same way other couples are? I’d think not. I don’t really have data, so I will use  a simple non social-media-posturing observation. There are a lot of happy families with kids.* We chose not to succumb to that genetic pressure. So we’re different from other happy families. Does that mean Finn is right, and Tolstoy was wrong?

    I think it just isn’t as binary as that. Tolstoy was right because if one figured out the conditions that need to be met for a happy marriage, I have a feeling the successful couples would be meeting them (children most likely will not feature in that list). Finn is right too, because the way in which the couples met them would be drastically different from each other.

    In any case, I don’t think we have found an objective framing of happiness to begin with!

    *There is interesting data (Google searches and experiments) to show how “kids bring happiness” is just belief transmission for evolution’s needs and not the truth it is portrayed to be. But people have their own narratives of what happiness is, so I’ll leave it at that. 

  • 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…)

  • No help for it

    No, not the help. A different kind of noun.

    Reflecting on a few recent events, I realised that we are capable of providing different kinds of help.

    There’s the help that we think we can give. It’s the story we tell ourselves so as not to make ourselves seem unkind or miserly with respect to our self image. It’s convenient, and we don’t really lose much on this, except..

    There’s the help we want to give. A part of our mind knows we should probably be doing more. We tell ourselves a story to make up for the deficit – “but that other thing we want for ourselves is something we really need“. Besides… (more…)

  • DOODALL (Dhoni, OODA Loop & Life)

    I don’t watch cricket anymore, but did catch the video of Dhoni’s very colourful exchange with Manish Pandey in the 2nd T20 vs South Africa earlier this year. Interesting as it was, what really caught my attention was how Dhoni calmly hit a six in the very next ball! Think about it – you’re annoyed about something but able to quickly not just get over it, but do a spectacular job in the next few seconds! This not a one off incident, because this is essentially how the man earned the “Captain Cool” moniker.

    I related it to this fantastic long read at Farnam Street about how fighter pilots technique quick and accurate decisions. It’s called the OODA loop and the letters stand for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast & Slow is one of the most insightful books I have read, but I wished there would be an application guide on how to practice it in daily life. I think the OODA loop is the best practitioner’s guide I have seen. (more…)