Tag: 40s

  • 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”.

  • A converging life

    The year was 1993, and at least for the next 4-5 years during which I actively played the game, I was hard at work trying to replicate it every time I bowled. Such was the magic of The Ball of the Century. I don’t even watch cricket now, and yet, I could sense my own excitement when I showed the clip to D.

    No wonder it came up in an evening with friends soon after. 40-something year olds who are still at war with the phrase ‘middle age’. We talked about Warne and how everyone was shocked – after all he was only 52. In the context of cardiovascular diseases, I think 40s are the new 60s, mostly courtesy a drastic shift in lifestyles. And that’s when it also struck me that all our celebrity crushes and role models are entering the second half, if not already well into it. In them, we see our own epochs. They are a part of us, and their age or agelessness have started defining us by holding up a now uncomfortable mirror for us. When health events happen to them, or when they pass on, or they retire (like Shahid Afridi at 18), we feel the spectre of old age. And along with that, the grip of our own mortality tightening. We’re watching the clock and conscious of time.* Or maybe it’s just me.

    But let’s not get morbid. While Simone de Beauvoir called ‘elderhood’ the ‘crusher’ of humankind – with our own biology and expectations of ourselves, and society’s different manifestations of ageism, she also believed that it is an opportunity to turn to ourselves, to be more responsive to our own needs, and less obliged to other people.** And hey, we still have mid-life crises, and the thrashing around for relevance and meaning. Also, apparently, in a happiness vs age graph, the 50s are when the curve begins its upward journey towards making a smile.

    But yes, the series of undulating hills that I wrote about in a post a while ago are certainly coming up. And while The Lincoln Highway is not my favourite Amor Towles book, two pages in it, when Abacus Abernathy weighs his life, were magic to me. I see no way to top that, so I’ll just leave you with it.

    What an extraordinary passage were those first years in Manhattan! When Abacus experienced firsthand the omnivalent, omnipresent, omnifarious widening that is life.

    Or rather, that is the first half of life.

    When did the change come? When did the outer limits of his world turn their corner and begin moving inexorably toward their terminal convergence?

    Abacus had no idea.

    Not long after his children had grown and moved on, perhaps. Certainly, before Polly died. Yes, it was likely at some point during those years when, without their knowing it, her time had begun to run out while he, in the so-called prime of life, went blithely on about his business.

    The manner in which the convergence takes you by surprise, that is the cruelest part. And yet it’s almost unavoidable. For at the moment when the turning begins, the two opposing rays of your life are so far from each other you could never discern the change in their trajectory. And in those first years, as the rays begin to angle inward, the world still seems so open, you have no reason to suspect its diminishment.

    But one day, one day years after the convergence has begun, you cannot only sense the inward trajectory of the walls, you can begin to see the terminal point in the offing even as the terrain that remains â€‹before you​ begins to shrink at an accelerating pace.

    In those golden years of his late twenties, shortly after arriving in New York, Abacus had made three great friends. Two men and a woman, they were the hardiest of companions, fellow adventurers of the mind and spirit. Side by side, they had navigated the waters of life​ ​with a reasonable diligence and their fair share of aplomb. But in just these last five years, the first had been stricken with blindness, the second with emphysema, and the third with dementia. How varied their lot, you might be tempted to observe: the loss of sight, of lung capacity, of cognition.

    When in reality, the three infirmities amount to the same sentence: the narrowing of life at the far tip of the diamond. Step by step, the stomping grounds of these friends had shrunk from the world itself, to their country, to their county, to their home, and finally to a single room where, blinded, breathless, forgetful, they are destined to end their days.Though Abacus had no infirmities to speak of yet, his world too was shrinking. He too had watched as the outer limits of his life had narrowed from the world at large, to the island of Manhattan, to that book-lined office in which he awaited with a philosophical resignation the closing of the finger and thumb. 

    *Trivia: It has been a decade since Gangnam Style became a phenomenon, two decades since Sourav briefly became Salman at Lord’s, 25 years since Diana died, Arundhati Roy got a Booker, the release of Hanson’s mmBop, Aqua’s Barbie Girl, and Titanic, and 30 years since Basic Instinct released, and Babri Masjid was demolished.

    ** Simone de Beauvoir recommends we fight for ourselves as we age

  • The half of it

    It’s that time of life, when there are a bunch of reunion invites – school(s), engineering, MBA. The sudden influx makes me realise that it’s halftime. We are pausing – to collect our thoughts, to take a deep breath. I wonder aloud to D if the journey is like a mountain, and halftime puts you closer to the peak. The way is downhill and you can read that in more ways than one. Maybe that prompts folks to look back at the journey and savour the moments – the significance and insignificance, the hits and misses, the gains and losses. Or maybe it’s just a moment taken to catch our balance in a world that’s changing at a dizzying pace, and to seek the anchor of certainty that the unchanging past provides.

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