Category: Self

  • Relative rationality

    After a failed exchange plan, I gave our TV to the apartment security guy. I had thought it would be an upgrade for him, but it turned out he had no TV at home, and therefore no clue what to do with it. I suggested talking to the cable guy in his neighbourhood, but the next day he gleefully announced that his daughter had connected it to the mobile and they were now watching YouTube. I told him about data charges but overall, the issue was resolved.

    Them

    Around the same time, D got a call from a relative in Kerala about her daughter joining a college in Bangalore. She wanted to know if we knew about the college, and also check how far we were from it. We were especially far away, and I wondered why they didn’t use Google Maps since all relevant locations were known to them. Later, it turned out that they even visited Bangalore to get the hostel sorted and apparently went right back because classes had not begun and any stay in the hostel would involve extra charges! This time I wondered why they didn’t use the phone to call ahead and ask the college before setting out! I found it especially surprising because the girl’s brother claimed to regularly shop from Amazon! I automatically compared these two kids to the security guy’s daughter, roughly the same age. Did staying in Bangalore provide a kind of ‘tech privilege’, or was it a mindset?

    Us

    We also have a few friends in their 40s who have settled abroad. A conversation about waiting times for doctors in Europe led to a quality of life comparison. We have now spent close to two decades in Bangalore, and never really made any attempts to settle elsewhere. I remember how in my 20s, my mindset was that we’d be second class citizens anywhere else in the world. I also didn’t want to move far away from Kerala, though this was at a time when culture – food, movies etc – wasn’t as portable as it is today. Traffic notwithstanding, I really like Bangalore and wouldn’t trade places, but the 40s are when you face your “what ifs” head on, and ideally get some closure! But I digress.

    The discussion made me wonder how an objective observer would evaluate our decision to not move abroad. I think we could have easily done it in our 30s if we had decided to, especially given we had no procreation plans. And yet we didn’t really consider it or even have a serious discussion about it. Arguably, the quality of life in at least some parts of the West is better, and so, would that observer think of it as an opportunity wasted? And think of us the same way I thought of D’s relatives – not using the access they had to ‘unlock’ information and opportunities?

    Everyone

    The concept, of course, is bounded rationality – the idea that rationality is limited when individuals make decisions, and under these limitations, rational individuals will select a decision that is satisfactory rather than optimal. Satisficing vs optimising. But what I am realising now are a couple of things. One, it is practically impossible to be objective about it. I continued to rationalise even as I wrote about our domicile non-decision! And it’s not just for the self after time has passed – it’s a moving target because one evolves. Not stepping into the same river twice and all that. It is also for others about whom one can be relatively more objective. Funny how I expect them to optimise when I don’t always do it in my personal life. Yet another reason to stay from being judgmental about others, and self! And two, the increasing levels of satisficing that happens as one grows older. Interestingly, I automatically compartmentalise work and life and am an optimiser in the former. But in personal contexts, it’s a struggle because there are two opposing mindsets – “growth happens at the end of your comfort zone” vs “you do you”. And I can’t even say do what you’re comfortable with because that’s clearly in the comfort zone. Maybe a better framing is “what makes me feel alive”.

  • Habit much!

    Nearly five years ago, when I wrote about the closure of my second (and probably final, given the zero usage now) book of accounts, I had ended it with how the days of our lives have found a rhythm, a familiarity. They actually point to the habits that have become a part of my life. Earlier this year, when I wrote The building blocks of freedom, the ending was again a commentary on habits. As I quoted in it (from a splendid post Routine Maintenance), while habits are indeed a way to off-load cognitive overhead… at their most extreme, habits can slide into addictions and compulsions, patterns that resist our conscious efforts to break them… Ritual dissolved into routine.

    Habits, as I wrote, are possibly a micro-version of intentionality. They are are physical, mental and even emotional. But when we don’t review them, it is almost as though they hijack our intentions and make them subservient! It’s almost like the new Batman’s point about scars – Our scars can destroy us, even after the physical wounds have healed. But if we survive them, they can transform us. They can give us the power to endure, and the strength to fight. As I have realised many times recently, it is extremely difficult to be objective about my habits. It is only when I am deeply mindful that I observe some of my habits, and sometimes laugh at their absurdity. But when I go back and understand where it came from, I also give a mental hug to my earlier self. 🙂

    Very recently, it also made me review my deep-set approach to retirement. I had mentioned that in my previous post – the third point in Uma Shashikant’s excellent article (below).

    I always assumed that the day I stopped working for a living, I could switch into a ‘different me’. I now see how it’s quite impossible. I will have to start looking at the ‘difference’ right now, and build new habits and junk old ones that can help me move in the direction of the ‘new’ me. The idea is that it won’t seem new. Turns out this isn’t a problem that only I encountered. In a couple of books and articles that I read recently, I came across some very insightful perspectives.

    Familiarity and habit impoverishes the way they look at things. They are mostly unable to break away from the past and see things in a fresh way. It doesn’t help that breaking away might mean losing everything that made them great/admired. Lack of interest and curiosity are aggravated by biological conditions, and this intellectual and emotional indifference may cause inertia. 

    Simone de Beauvoir, The Coming of Age

    …Marcel wrote of the human tendency to become stuck in habits, received ideas, and a narrow-minded attachment to possessions and familiar scenes. Instead he urged his readers to develop a capacity for remaining “available” to situations as they arise. Similar ideas of disponibilité or availability had been explored by other writers, notably André Gide, but Marcel made it his essential existential imperative. He was aware of how rare and difficult it was. Most people fall into what he calls “crispation”: a tensed, encrusted shape in life — “as though each one of us secreted a kind of shell which gradually hardened and imprisoned him.”

    “On the Ontological Mystery,” Gabriel Marcel, via At the Existentialist Café

    And while being too lazy to type out the one above, I found someone had already written about ‘crispation’. And found this (below) there. It reminded me of the converging life Amor Towles wrote about.

    “We all end up as packaged goods,” Westbrook Pegler remarked a little while before he died. The dreary road to the wrapping and bundling counter is probably inescapable: there is the hunt for the discovery of what works, then the erosion of curiosity about what else might work, then the disappearance of all curiosity about anything unfamiliar, and at last the prison of the safety of one’s own accepted manner. Yeats was a little way off the mark; the peril for the artisan no less than for the artist is not that his circus animals may desert him but that he will let slip past the time when he ought to turn them back to the forest.

    via James Mustich

    And finally, my favourite story on what habits can do, and where I don’t want to end up. Poignant, hard-hitting, and true.

    via James Clear

  • A sense of senescence

    Srinivas Rao drives me to work on a Monday morning in his WagonR. He is probably in his 50s, there seems to be many more older cab drivers these days. At work, we are busy with the survey we run at this time of the year. We have been doing this for the last three years – asking our customers what financial freedom means to them. Retiring without worries is a common theme, and unfortunately, not something many are prepared for. Mr.Rao would have probably given me a sardonic smile if I had asked for his take. He is the dystopian future my scarcity mindset throws at me – me lasting longer than my money, and thus being forced to work even in old age.

    Later in the week, a friend sends me a Shashi Tharoor column from a few years ago, titled “In Praise of Gerontocracy“, in which he makes a case for the years after 60 being the most productive in one’s life.

    In praise of Gerontocracy ~ Shashi Tharoor

    D immediately and rightly pointed out how the privilege is so deeply embedded that it’s not even an afterthought. I also wondered whether the massive changes in physical (diet, exercise, pollution), as well as mental and emotional (social media, work stress) changes that separate the earlier generations from the current ones, have been factored in. There is a limit to what science and medicine can currently accomplish. In real life, we see our own elderly relatives sometimes struggling to even comprehend what is happening to the one person they thought they knew – themselves.

    I have been reading Maus, which has had quite an effect on me. It wasn’t just the Holocaust and its horrors, it was also what happened to Vladek, the author’s father, a survivor, on whom the book is based. Old age with all of the baggage of what he had gone through, and no one around who could really understand his mindset and behaviour.

    It took me back to something I had read earlier – The Coming of Age (1970). Simone de Beauvoir writes how old age exposes the failure of our entire civilisation. “The sadness of old people is not caused by any particular event or set of circumstances: it merges with their consuming boredom, with their bitter and humiliating sense of uselessness, and their loneliness in the midst of a world that has nothing but indifference for them.” The loss of standing, the fear of illnesses and injury, jealousy, and the resulting seeming selfishness, the grief of losing others whom they considered part of their future, are all poignantly captured in the book. They thus turn back to themes that are emotionally valuable to them, and replay them constantly, they ‘escape from the present and dream of former happiness, exorcise past misfortunes.’ 

    What is in our hands is how we prepare for it – mentally, physically, emotionally, and financially. Uma Shashikant sums that up quite well in her recent article.

    There is really no freedom from old age, and I acutely realise that at some point, we will all end up saying “in my time” – about the time we looked upon ourselves as first-class individuals, doing our best work, feeling like we belonged in this world. It is indeed a great time, but that window is bound to close, and those who live long will ‘have that melancholy privilege of remaining alone in a new world‘. (Ninon de Lenclos) 

  • Moral Signs 2

    “It’s these times. Morality is a moving target”

    Robert Folger, Snowpiercer

    A ‘grandchild’ at work wants to move to an edtech. She is convinced it’s an ‘opportunity that she won’t get later’. I contest on both counts. She is immensely talented, and given her work ethic, it is easy to see that she will be an absolute star. I would like her to do well, but it is an organisation I have actively talked against – IRL and on Twitter – and there is enough proof of its misdeeds. She wasn’t aware of this, and is nonplussed, but doesn’t want to turn back now. I bring up our debates on how she felt Seagram’s “Men will be men” was legitimising misogyny, and furthering a regressive world view. That got us on to morality. I remembered the ‘professional’ version I had written a while ago and sent it to her. I also remembered that I had meant to write this personal version earlier.

    Morality and self image

    (from the previous version)

    “We’re living in an era of ‘woke’ capitalism, right? I’m Nike, I pretend to care about black people. You pretend to hate capitalism and buy my trainers.”

    “Industry” (BBC/HBO)

    This pretension helps us retain our self image while consuming the things and experiences. There is narrative cohesion while avoiding uncomfortable truths. And sometimes, even some virtue signalling. 

    In general, the world is hyper competitive, and the choices we make might not sit well with self image, especially when morality is also at play. In the post, I had brought up the point that having a moral compass means saying goodbye to what would be considered lucrative opportunities. Even more so in the last few years. Crypto, real money gaming, fintech, edtech – the big pillars of the recent startup boom – all have moral loopholes (generalising). Same goes for Big Tech. But now regulation and external factors are catching up.

    The self image is gloating with “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” (Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.) But everything is a cycle.

    Let’s go beyond work and take say, entertainment. Recently, I tweeted

    You can catch many discussions on Saudi blood money around the web. If one were absolutely moral, one should immediately stop watching these sports. I don’t watch any of these, but that’s largely because I am uninterested.

    And anyway, I can make similar cases against movies and every other general consumption – apparel, on-demand deliveries, house help, and practically every daily touchpoint. It isn’t easy for me to slither out of everything.

    As you can see, being very objective about one’s own morality is dangerous for self image, and thus sanity. Maybe that compromise is the origin story of cancel culture (canceling on Twitter only, not in life). While I can see how that helps self image, I also do believe there is a limit to not being objective about oneself.

    Morality is plastic

    The Activa is being sold to the husband of one of the housekeeping staff at the apartment. He comes by on a Saturday evening, after his daily labours, and shows me his Aadhar card on a taped-up plastic-covered mobile phone. He doesn’t know how to forward it, so he’d give me a photocopy, he says. He also insists that I count the cash. He seems very particular that I treat the entire transaction with the dignity it deserves, including our price negotiation. It furthers my own narrative about why I shouldn’t give it to him for free, but hey, I am watching me. I know that an equal reason is that this amount is part payment for something I have been eyeing. Something I don’t need but would like to have. I tell myself that he and his family will be rid of a few commute problems at a lower cost. That it’s a net positive.

    There is an intense discussion happening in the apartment WhatsApp group – a couple of street hawkers (no, not fancy bikers) have set up shop on the pavement and the residents are worried about the area becoming a hub, and thus creating bigger problems. I see the case for shooing them away though I won’t voice it. I also won’t voice the contrarian view – D and I didn’t want to trigger a WhatsApp war. I see one of the hawkers when D and I go for a stroll after dinner. He is selling plastic items, and is using one of his buckets as the seat. It is around 9PM on a Saturday night. He is older than I am, and I begin to think about my conversation in office about how our chairs aren’t ergonomic enough.

    A moral operating system

    I used to judge myself by the only morality is action, but I couldn’t handle all the trade-off. I also realise that this entire conversation is from a position of privilege. And that my estimation of how easy that makes it, is woefully lowballing it. I remind myself that there is no morality in nature, only causality (Jonathan Haidt). Maybe we need to evolve a lot more if we need morality and practicality to co-exist. And maybe that won’t happen.

    So what can I do? I can stretch myself and do the right thing even if it takes me away from my comforts. I can recognise the limits, and stop being judgmental of self and others.

    Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.

    Rumi

  • A proxy life

    I have forgotten where I first came across Goodhart’s Law. It was probably Farnam Street. It states that “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” An illustration should help.

    https://sketchplanations.com/goodharts-law

    In the organisational context, it serves as a great lens to evaluate strategy and progress. As the illustration above shows, the entire direction of a desired goal can be changed when measures become targets. But, and maybe it’s a Baader -Meinhof phenomenon, I am now seeing different versions of it everywhere.

    To set some context, as more and more things have been digitised, the volume of information has just exploded. For instance, before the advent of social media, there were limits to one’s “people like me” canvas, because even an awareness of them was constrained by physical distances and the limits of one’s social circle. It had to be in real life, and public spaces like a cinema or even a vacation spot were probably an extreme. Social media changed that scale massively. Many factors including this volume of information, the lack of a granular understanding of the lives of this new set of people whom you’d never meet, and the innate human desire to do better than neighbours meant that appearances became the norm. Since we are not wired to process such large volumes of information, we dug deeper into ‘measurement by proxy.’ Not that this mode of measurement is new. For instance, we have used material manifestations (apparel, cars etc) as a measure of wealth. The stock price is a single-number measure of everything about the company. But with abundance of choice and the limits of processing power, we started developing heuristics and measuring what was easy. Meta photos (FB/Insta/WhatsApp) became a measure of everything from the quality of life to the strength of relationships. Popularity as a measure of excellence, price as a measure of quality, fitness as a measure of health, #booksread as a measure of erudition and so on.

    How does this connect to Goodhart’s Law? We end up optimising our resources for the measure, not the end goal. Which means that though the goal is say, happiness and a good quality of life, we end up aiming for the measure. From the kind of photo that will get more likes to buying that thing/experience that will surely make us happy. And as we feed this more, the mind keeps on wanting. The happiness fades in a short span of time. And as the Buddha has wisely pointed out, that loss of happiness is what becomes suffering.

    In the AI risk narrative, there is the story of the paperclip maximiser, a seemingly trivial task of maximising paperclips that might lead to “first all of earth and then increasing portions of space into paperclip manufacturing facilities”. The corresponding human version that I wrote in Peak Abstraction was that maybe we will get to a state where, if we get enough likes on the couple photo on Insta, there would be relationship bliss! What a wonderful world.