Tag: comfort zone

  • 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”.

  • Comfort Zoned

    I think it was in a Taleb book that I read that writing was born because of accounting. In my case, as I have chronicled here earlier (2010, 2017), my account books pretty much tell the story of our life. Towards the end of the second post, I wrote “the days of our lives have found a rhythm, a familiarity….Wild zigzags giving way to smooth curves and then straight lines.” This is because our routines, and therefore, expenses were predictable. The last few months have obviously meant a few changes, but the ballpark is the same. This stability has also meant that the usage of xls/sheets have increased at the expense of the book. I suspect this change is permanent, and it does make me sad.

    What it has also made me think about is the subject of the “comfort zone”. My work domain is marketing, and there’s no way I am getting into any comfort zone there. But for all practical purposes,  in my personal life, my perception is that I have hit a comfort zone. Many of my posts in the Flawsophy section have been about my own approach on living one’s life – happiness, success, signalling, the idea of freedom in daily life – and learnings and changes. I think it’ll show that I have a fair idea of our needs and wants, what it takes to get there, and a plan. It has helped that we have avoided lifestyle creep quite a bit, and kids completely, and disproportionate spends are on things we actually enjoy. Self image on that last bit was a challenge until recently, but I think that’s over now. None of these are things that happened overnight, and obviously a work in progress but we’re comfortable with where we are, and where we want to be. (more…)

  • Act of Life

    Prithviraj (for those who might not know) is God’s Own Controversy’s Child, though the title has other strong contenders like Kochi Tuskers, and its star Sreesanth, and Ranjini Haridas, the compere who defies comparison. Prithviraj also stars in movies while he’s not busy adding credentials to the title. As you must have noticed from the last line, he’s a person who manages to polarise public opinion. šŸ™‚

    Since any further commentary in this direction would have the potential to ignite a troll war, let’s get to the point of the post. Hailing from a family that can’t get moreĀ filmiĀ (late father was a popular actor and Kerala’s own angry young man in his era, mother is an actress, brother is an actor and sister-in-law is an actress too), Prithviraj can usually be found within a few metres of the spotlight, if not in it.Ā His interviews are a lot of fun. Reasonably well read, from what I can gather, highly opinionated, and oblivious of tact as a concept (something he himself acknowledges), he either makes intelligent conversation or tries to play footsie with his running mouth. (most recent example) Entertaining either way, and so I make it a point to watch his interviews.

    Thanks to our original underworld hero Mahabali almost being forgotten at Onam, and Prithviraj playing an underworld don in his Onam release, all the channels queued up to interview him. As always, they provided lots of fodder for hilarity. But the one on Kairali TV (I think) happened to be an interesting conversation, also thanks to the interviewer. Something that the actor said about working with Mani Ratnam in ‘Ravanan‘ caught my attention.

    Apparently, Mani Ratnam manages to identify and understand an actor’s comfort zones within a couple of days. He then proceeds to put them in situations they would find uncomfortable. His reasoning is that he doesn’t want their acting to be affected by their conditioning or them to fall back on the learning from earlier characters they have essayed. I thought that was a really smart way to bring some freshness to even the most veteran of actors. Wonder if Prithviraj gained this insight himself, or the director told him.

    But it leads back to a life lesson on conditioning. The routines, the benchmarks, peer pressure and the other daily grind machinations force us back to our conditioning. I know (subjective) from experience how difficult it is to look past the attitudes and responses that smack of conditioning. I have found it difficult to sustain whatever levels of objectivity I might have built up over a period of time. Even when I disrupted a routine, the disruption became a routine. It is as though the equilibrium is always a comfort zone.

    What is a measure of the mettle of an actor? Is it the way he manages to make a done-to-death character come alive or is it how he handles a completely new character convincingly? I guess you’d say both. Unfortunately, I don’t think ‘both’ is an option when you apply this measure to how one lives a life. You’d have to choose one role and play it really well, isn’t it? Life is the movie, there are no re-takes, and getting out of the character is a really difficult thing to do.

    until next time, roled into one.

  • Creature Comforts

    By sheer coincidence, the only two Stephen King books I’ve read are “Under the Dome” and Needful Things. They’re separated by a decade and a half (publication) and so, I was surprised to see a massive similarity in the themes – strange things happening in a town and then the focus shifts to human transactions, motivations and the good/evil within us. In the earlier book, it was a new shop and its proprietorĀ  that played havoc, in the later one, it’s an indestructible dome.

    When I discussed this with a few friends, I was told that this was not surprising and there were more books with that broad theme, and many authors repeated their themes regularly. These authors and their books are bestsellers too, which means a lot of people like this arrangement?

    I have vaguely sensed this in music too – from MLTR to Bon Jovi to Bryan Adams to (even sometimes) Rahman, there seems to be a basic tune which is rendered differently at different times and released as a new track, and it sells. Which does make me wonder if even in these so-called hobbies, many of us have become creatures of habit, just like most other spheres of life – including food, people and so on. Comforts are easy that way, keeps the mind away from thinking. Of course, it could be subjective, and you could be on autopilot on some things, and not on others.

    Meanwhile, all this is not to say that others, who are always pushing themselves out of the zone, can get all judgmental about it, but I do wonder whether its a conscious decision to stick to a comfort zone, an inability to break out of it, or not even realising you’re in one. Etymologically, ‘comfort’ means ‘make someone stronger’, but by building that fort around the self, do we become stronger or weaker in the face of life?

    until next time, comfort knocks