Category: Self

  • Opinion poles

    A few months ago, D and I were talking about something at work making me angry. Since Yoda has said that it is fear that leads to anger, and is the path to the dark side, I needed to figure out the root of that anger, and then understand the fear. I knew it wasn’t job loss (I had already quit), but was stuck.

    I would learn later we tend to focus on negatives, because in the savannah, avoiding the things that might kill you was more important than seeking the things that will give you pleasure. Pleasure and pain are just feedback mechanisms, not an end. Whether it’s the pain caused by your body failing you, or mental agony. Psychological pain is an indication that our subjective map of the world needs a revision. (Cognitive Fitness, Anil Rajput) And that indeed turned out to be the case.

    D insightfully pointed out that my faith in my value system, which I mistakenly assumed others at the workplace also subscribed to, might have been broken by the incident. And that would make me afraid because that is the only one I am comfortable with, and any changes in it would be a compromise I couldn’t abide by.

    I would also learn later that there is a term for something like this, borrowed from physics. Hysteresis – the lingering values of a previous age continuing to guide our judgments.

    The last couple of months have been a great learning experience. About myself, the world at large, and the relationship. One of the important lessons has been that I am free to hold on to my values, and continue to negotiate with others, but as Marcus Aurelius rightly said, “the universe is transformation, life is opinion.“

  • The flavours of death

    Once upon a time, the only kind of death that would have been written about here would be Death by Chocolate from Corner House. But middle age brings its own set of journeys.

    I don’t remember being afraid of death. I think it was only reinforced after my heart attacked me in 2021! Even during the trip to the hospital and the procedures, I don’t remember being afraid. I wondered later whether it was a remnant of the arrogance of an earlier self – you know, the aura of invincibility and immortality we (or at least I) had around the 20s. They have reduced it to a single word now – swag.

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  • Karma meets an iceberg

    A recent event reminded me of a post about karma I had written half a dozen years ago. The idea of the post was thanks to Umair Haque, who had a definition of karma that was different from the garden variety ‘consequences of your actions’.

    Karma isn’t what you “have” or something you “do”. It’s what you are….. Karma is all the concepts and notions you hold in that tiny little head. All those concepts are stitched together by the idea of “you”, right? So karma is all those concepts, together, which determine your intentions, actions, behavior, all of it.

    Umair Haque
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  • Share Values Part 1

    In business, the share price of a company is an abstraction of value – a single number that subsumes every quality and quantity that affects the business. Or, in the succinctly insightful words of Ben Evans, an opinion of the future. This post is not about share prices, it is about sharing. But I felt a connect with both the above ‘definitions’. On the first, given the volume of sharing we now do online, it is no surprise that likes/shares/subscribers/followers are an abstraction of value. In many ways, the commoditisation of an individual. And so on the second, can the answer to ‘why we share’ explain the changing mindset of society at large, and thus shine some light on what this will lead to?

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  • Accustomed Reality

    Shared understanding is something I have been interested in for a while and have written about in some of my earlier posts – Default in our stars, An IG Story* – among the most recent ones. While the posts were primarily on the individual context, my concern has also been at the societal and species levels because the ability to create and act on a shared understanding is what got us this far. Variety, serendipity, and the opportunity to debate, agree, disagree, identify biases, agree to disagree but hopefully in a civilised manner.

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