Category: Society & Culture

  • I Would Prefer Not To

    I would prefer not to

    This is one of my favourite t-shirts. It is based on Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street”. Set in the 1800s, it’s Bartleby’s response to the world, and has a tragic ending. I have to admit, I bought it intuitively because of a mindset, before I went around figuring out the origin story.

    What mindset? I am hardly the first person in middle age to come to the realisation that one should spend more time on things that actually matter to one’s life, rather than what the world dictates. That is, of course, easier said than done. But that, I think, is also how one loses character.

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  • The paradox of choice

    I read Tara Isabella Burton’s Strange Rites in 2023 – a book about the decline of religion and what’s replacing it. Since then, I have been connecting a few dots. This is the pattern I see.

    For most of human history, we lived in communities of circumstance. We were born into a home, a town, a religion, a trade. We didn’t have much of a choice, we just inherited it. And while it had its flaws, many people made it work. 

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  • Reflections on my OS – 3

    Part 1 was on the OS of my life, Part 2 the professional version, both written in 2022. This one is a little more ambitious – civilisational!

    The thought stream started thanks to one of my favourite newsletters, which gave me an insightful metaphor – “Religion is the operating system of a civilisation” – attributed to Rudyard Lynch.

    One of the other insights that has taken up quite a lot of space in my mind is courtesy Ernest Becker (via The Worm at the Core) – that the awareness of our own mortality is the hidden engine of human thought, emotion, and culture. Humans apparently invented symbolic systems – everything from soul to religion to nation to art to legacy as a means of managing the terror of death.

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  • The D&G way to Hindu Rashtra

    I think this angst really hit me at the beginning of the decade when a colleague F, in a sombre moment far removed from his otherwise jovial, chill nature, confessed that he was moving abroad because he feared staying here.

    Since that time, real life comments by friends and acquaintances referring to the ‘others’ have bothered me, and I have questioned them on that. More recently, when I read Anjum Hasan’s “History’s Angel”, I despaired what the life of a Muslim in India is.

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  • Rose-tinted wearables

    (a version of something I wrote on LinkedIn)

    Now that I think of it, there are at least four ‘spiritual predecessors’ for this post on the blog. It began with ‘In a world of abstractions‘ (2017), followed by Peak Abstraction (2018), The Presentation of Selfie in Everyday Life (2020), and A Proxy Life (2022). Each of them are continuing explorations of how we have abstracted a bunch of real things, and created proxies by which we measure them.

    Going by the story so far, it’d be fair to say that the more things we consume, the less time we have to get into details, and the more we rely on proxies. And across time, our consumption has only increased. And so our proxies have also multiplied.

    Material accumulations as a proxy for wealth

    Stock price/funding for a company’s health

    Popularity for excellence

    Price for quality

    Fitness for health

    Books Read (including that 5 min YouTube video) for intellect

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