Category: Society & Culture

  • The illegibility of freedom

    I often blame evolution for my compulsive planning. “Blame” is probably the wrong word, since I think of it as one of only two factors that gave our species an edge. The ability to project – think about the future and come up with ideas on how to navigate it had, and continues to play, a role in survival. (The second is language, which gives us the ability to communicate and organise people around ideas). Projection leads to some level of planning that does at least two things. One, by charting out the knowns and unknowns, make the entire journey more efficient and predictable. And two, by seemingly knowing the path ahead, one can create a narrative, that makes the past, present, and future legible.1

    I also console myself that both of these are phenomena in the world at large. An earlier era was complicated but offered opportunities for planning to increase efficiency. Starting from agriculture to the printing press to the first and second industrial revolution, we have progressed and systematically improved human lives with increasingly efficient systems and processes. That is probably what led to our techno-capitalist hubris that we could know and solve everything. But we now live in a far more complex world. We can project, but the variables in planning have exponentially increased. That doesn’t stop us from expecting though, and we use everything from astrology to machine learning to rid us of uncertainty. It manifests in everything from company projections to predictions & trends to even daily apps. We trust Amazon, Uber and any of the food delivery apps, because they are predictable.

    But in our efforts to maximise predictability and make the system of the world legible, we have created increasingly connected and correlated structures, so that the risk of one epoch-changing event is now magnified. It has also led to an attitude of zero-wastage, in terms of time, thoughts, processes etc. That, in turn, has reduced our exposure to unknowns and the potential to create low-risk scenarios from which we could learn how to handle larger crises. There are other side effects too.2

    And these themes also reflect in individual lives. In my own life, I have relied on planning to make life as risk-free as possible and craft a legible self-narrative for ourselves by focusing on income and investments. Correlated. This also means that there is a desire for predictability, and an urge for efficiency. Which further means that the exposure to anything that doesn’t provide this is reduced. All of this, to achieve the freedom I seek. In The Impulsive Path to Freedom, I wrote about how I was trying to move beyond efficiency and into an abundance mindset by creating money and time slack. In If it makes me happy…, I pointed out the realisation that more than a narrative and meaning, what I probably seek is the feeling of “being alive”. The idea is that the slack will enable me to have a more visceral experience of life as opposed to one that is mechanised and optimised for efficiency. Time, for the mind to play.

    Intuitively, one would think that it’s the control (predictability, efficiency) that would automatically provide the freedom, but to me, that control is a never-ending quest. In fact, it’s the opposite – giving up the need for control – that allows me to free. But this also brings in unpredictability and the possibility of things not being planned or going according to plan. Not a comfort zone for me at this point. I now realise that I won’t be able to approach it in a binary fashion. It’s a continuum I have started on, and I have no idea where it will take me. And that, is the illegibility of freedom.

    1 A big little idea called legibility

    2 The loss of life skills and memory that I brought up in Regression Planning, the increasing inability to have an informed opinion – In Other Fake News, what gets lost in the race for efficiency – An efficient existence, and the attempted conversion of whatever agency/free will we have into predictable behaviour, as I wrote in Default in our stars.

  • $ocial Validation

    The presentation of selfie in everyday life is all around us, and the words I always refer to paraphrase this are

    When everything becomes image rather than action, you can’t judge the value of any act. You can only judge what it “looks like”. But when all of society is doing that, it means that you’re being judged on everything. After all, you may not always be acting, but you are always appearing. When it’s your appearance that determines worth, there is no moment to rest. There’s a social invasion.

    The Uruk Machine
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  • If it makes me happy…

    In a workshop I attended recently, the trainer made an interesting point that being a little selfish and taking care of our own needs first will actually enable us to help others better. Around the same time, I also read this very interesting post on the conversational gambit. Extremely helpful for those of us who aren’t good at going from zero to conversations quickly. Put simply, ask a question. The one that stuck with me was “When were you happiest?” I directed the question inwards and got some answers. Then I upped it to “What will make me happy?” That was complex, but something I heard recently gave me some direction.

    People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. … I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.

    Joseph Campbell
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  • Image and identity

    “You can either be judged because you created something or ignored because you left your greatness inside of you. Your call.”

    James Clear

    In an earlier post – An impulsive path to freedom – I had identified my own self image as a barrier to the freedom I desire. I wonder if it’s because it’s something I constantly think about, but I saw interpretations of it across a couple of pop culture phenomena I consumed recently.

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  • An efficient existence

    The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem is a book I recently read, and loved. It was written in Polish in 1965, and translated to English in 1974. Lem wasn’t an author I had heard of, despite having read many science fiction anthologies. An online post that extolled him at the cost of my favourites like Asimov was what led me to this book. (I would have linked it, but I’ve forgotten how I found it!) Lem has been translated into 41 languages and has sold 30 million copies. But he was rebuffed by quite a few American writers including Philip K. Dick, multiple times, because he was perceived as being annoying, and had commented that American writing was “ill thought out, poorly written…” Also, his belief was that the only true motive for writing was to contribute to literature.1

    It made me think of a post in one of the newsletters I often recommend to folks – Taylor Pearson‘s The Interesting Times. As I tweeted sometime back, his writing is centrifugal – pointing to books, posts and ideas, and centripetal – goes deep into an idea and provides food for thought (the latter is different from what Austin Kleon meant in the original framing 2). The specific post I am referring to – 4 minute songs, which was about certain rules that a creators need to follow if they want their work to be consumed and appreciated, was the latter, and made me reflect. I wondered whether, even at an individual level, we are increasingly optimising for others’ consumption over our own expression.

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