the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything

 ... is 42. or so the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy says.

it's obviously tongue in cheek, but it's also something more.

it means the answer doesn't mean much, if you don't ask the right question. and sometimes asking the appropriate question is more tricky than finding the correct answer to it.

I don't know if it's a mid-life thing (aside: I wonder why the word mid-life is almost always used with crisis!), or if it's just a my-life thing, or it is a combination of both and the series of crises that life seems to be throwing at me with regularity.

but yeah, it's definitely a time to think about questions, as much as I think about answers. in fact, the answers to most questions I ask myself these days are quite obvious - which, to me, is a hint that perhaps I'm not asking myself the right questions.

one thing's for sure though, my 40s (so far) have been an exercise in crisis management. it seems to have started with the motorbike accident just 3 weeks before I turned 40 (or maybe the near-crisis career "bump" that happened a few months before it?), and it's just been one thing after another since. some positive things have happened as well, but it's fair to say that while the successes are welcome and lasting, they also seem to be few and far between, while the struggles, although not disastrous, do seem to knock me down with regularity - to the point where every single day seems to be a struggle I'm ill-equipped to deal with. some of those struggles are self-inflicted/self-exacerbated (mechanical problems with my motorbike and car come to mind) but the vast majority seem to be curveballs life/the universe is throwing at me.

one thing that stands out the most though, is that these crises have reminded me in no uncertain terms, that the most valuable of all things is health. the next is human connections. somewhere in the mix is things like discipline, persistence, consistency, etc.

but those are all "answers". it's been a while since I've even stopped to consider the questions, in anything more than an academic, philosophical, almost idle sense.

mom loved to say that one of my granddad's favourite expressions was "is life worth living? it depends on the liver" (an obvious pun on the organs/health of the person asking the question, as well as the state of the person themselves).

in my case, I can say, beyond doubt, that as a person, my life seems worth living.

my daily struggles have reminded me repeatedly of the privilege and opportunities I have - my support system (both emotionally and economically), my stress-free environment (if say 95% of the people I know were in the same situation I am in, they probably will not have the circumstances to easily deal with them!), and more... 

and yet, the struggle remains. a struggle so bad that I am sometimes jealous of people around me (obviouslt on a superficial level! I know my situation is unique and I cannot pick and choose aspects of others' lives - that's not how the universe works!). a struggle that I hope isn't going to occupy me for the rest of my life, although I am realistic enough to acknowledge that worse struggles do exist, and it's not a guarantee that things will get better quickly or easily.

I don't know why I am so fixated on this struggle. I don't know why I can't see the bright side of things. of getting the clarity to see life as it really is. without all of its assumptions and distractions. 

I've been advised to try meditation. but meditation in and of itself leads to idle meandering. I think I need something mroe directed. I think I need to ask myself more questions.

or maybe I just need to sleep on time (yes, there are actually 3 people who have advised me the same thing, and in fact it's the only thing that the majority of people who are closely aware of what I'm going through agree upon). damn, that would be an anticlimax if it was true!

either way, here I am, rambling along. a metaphor for my life, if there ever was one. 42 years old. happy birthday to me!

the un-optimized life

A comment on a youtube video about watching everything at 3x speed (to keep your mind sharp and optimize the rate of flow of information) reminded me of something I've never blogged - a bit about my past, that very strongly shaped how I lived ever since. 

I'm not feeling like rewording my comment, so here it is, copied from the video:

Interesting thing about speed listening. I'm guessing there haven't been long term studies about this though. I have anecdotal evidence about speed reading as an analogy. I started speeding up my reading from when I was about 6, hitting my maximum at about 9 and sustaining that for many years - I never counted words per minute but it was 4.5 pages per minute of paperback novels. At that speed, I was reading between 2 and 3 books a day, literally running out of stuff to read. I kept that speed going till I was about 19. At that point, I think I got saturated with information (I had literally ready my entire school library, although my uni library was much larger and I didn't bother even trying to cover it). I can speed-read even now (I'm 42) but I find it very exhausting and not worth the effort. I have stopped optimizing the flow of information into my head and now focus on enjoying the journey, even if it's information for information's sake. It seems like youtube/podcasts in general are inefficient sources of information, so a person may not hit saturation point as quickly (or at all?) but given speed-listening to youtube has been with some people since childhood, I wonder if they may eventually reach the same predicament as I have with reading.

Just to add: while the first aspect of my life to be consciously de-optimized was my information diet, it's now spread to pretty much everything else. As recently as 10 years ago, I used to believe in packing every moment of free time I had with "things worth doing".

That's completely changed now. Well before Chronic Fatigue Syndrome took over my life, I had very much stopped optimizing my time. Everything has become about being "in the moment" even if the moment was something mundane. Kinda like climbing the same hill twice a week for 3 years - something I could never even imagine 10 years ago!

I still seek new experiences, and still enjoy change, but I have stopped feeling that pressure now. 

To put it differently, life doesn't feel "too short", life now feels "long enough" - a crazy thing to say when I can literally see weeks and months go by in a blink, just staying afloat - eat, work (not always - CFS has really impacted my ability to get things done!), sleep repeat. And no, I've not run out of things to do. I've simply stopped maintaining a ToDo list. I now do things as I feel like, when I feel like. I don't sweat the missed opportunities, the things I could do. Or even the things I could do better.

I don't know if this will ever change, but I can see this is simply what I learned in my late teens with regards to information and learning, spreading over to the rest of my life.

Anyway, it's 10:45pm. I'm off to bed!

ungraceful degradation

"the ability of the human body to gracefully degrade under adverse conditions fascinates me :)"

- Kris, September 7th 2013

12 years ago. How much has changed since then.

I have just spent a whole week, barely functioning. Literally just crawling out of bed to eat and rest and eventually sleep. Cooking is about the most I've been able to muster the energy for.

The funny thing is, metabolically, my body is supposedly fine. Not entirely fine - but probably in similar shape based on medical parameters etc. But it isn't behaving the same. Has medicine not reached the level where what's going on can be pinpointed? Or is this the result of the passing of some tipping point in a slow process which was in motion years ago, maybe even before 2013? Some doctors have said it could also be the result of a brief viral infection that left me but that my body has not recovered from.

Chances are it's a combination of at least two of those things.

One thing is for sure - biohacking does NOT work long term. All those things I did to push myself, thinking I had discovered something really smart about myself? They probably had long term effects.

Irregular sleep, low quality sleep, multiple short sleep intervals instead of one full night's sleep - the impact of those is clear to me now.

Screen time is now having an impact obvious enough to be measurable on a day to day basis.

The constant input of compressed information into my head may or may not be affecting how I process information now - but I know that my ability to process information has definitely been affected.

Embracing the internet and social media (back when it seemed fledgling and world-changing) seems to have had an oversized impact on me as I have been using it for far longer than most people. It's reached the point where the measures I had put in place to streamline my usage have been blocked by social media platforms, forcing me to use them as they see fit.

And then there's random age related (yep some things are clearly age related!) things that are simply making it harder to deal with everything else.

And so, we're at this point - where I'm struggling to cope. Where the degradation is no longer graceful or even sustainable.

But I'm still alive and functioning. I can still do most of the things that I used to, but just more carefully. I'm worried about how long that will last though. That is not a day of realization I'm looking forward to.

chronic fatigue

one of my daily struggles, in fact something that I'm surprised I've only mentioned on my blog once in passing despite it being such a massive part of my life since March 2024, is a unique yet pervasive (for me, since then) feeling. it's a feeling i struggle to explain to most people, and a feeling that very few people are actually even able to understand after I've explained it. the medical term for it is chronic fatigue syndrome, and it's something which, when it initially hit me and took over my life, left me completely hopeless, confused and literally on the verge of giving up. it's a feeling which, in hindsight, was completely alien to me before it hit me, and so crazily different from how I'd live before then that it has completely knocked me off my feet!

for those who know me well, I used to be like the famous battery advertisement (was it duracell or eveready?) - I could just go on and on. I was never too tired for anything. I could push myself to the limit, and when I was at my absolute limit, I could recharge a bit and keep going for some more. kinda like the latest phones that advertise a few hours of battery life on 5 minutes of charge, from their crazy high power quick chargers. there was a time in 2002 where I kept going for 68 hours without sleep, and was back on my feet after like a 2 hour nap... and another in 2007 where I did something like 32 hours followed by a 4 hour nap and then kept going for another 20 hours after that. most of my late teens were spent being up all night and napping through the day to keep going. there's this one episode I can't forget from 2001, when I fell asleep during a statistics lecture, and somehow kept writing was the professor (prof. Fernandes) was saying in my sleep. my friends claim I was so fast asleep I was snoring. the professor called my name, a friend shook me awake, and the professor asked me something she had just stated to the class. I was quite blank, until I looked down at my own notebook and saw I had scrawled the answer! I read it out and she was flabbergasted. she thought one of my friends had prompted me, but I showed her my notebook and she was forced to believe me. that's the sort of life I used to lead. even as recently as 2017, I once rode overnight to Goa after a whole day's work in office - I remember the ride to office with my fully loaded panniers as they touched a car while filtering in rush hour traffic, and then a friend clicked a photo of me before I rode off from the parking lot at sunset. after I reached my friend's place at Goa at noon (yes, I did take a nap on the way, especially after the sun rose and the heat really started getting to me), and I literally had a shower and was going to take a proper nap, when my friend was like "did you ride to goa to sleep?" and dragged me out for lunch, followed by drinks at one beach, then a swim at another, dinner, and fianlly a DJ/private party that went on till about 1am and I was in bed at 2am. that's the sort of thing I could do not too long ago.

and now, it's different.

if I over exert over a period of a few hours and sit on the couch, I might be in a position where I'm too tired to even get up to drink water, eat or sleep. if I over exert and go to bed, I might be in a position where I am unable to get out of bed the next morning - or even the next afternoon. there has even been a time when I was too tired to get out of bed in the evening, and literally got out at 8pm!

worst of all, there are no warning signs - I just have to anticipate it. I have been out cycling for 35km a couple of times - it doesn't feel weird while I'm out and about (other than the actual reduction of my physical capabilities after the last year and a half of minimal exercise), I get home, put the bike in the shed, wifey brings me a glass or two of water, I sit msyelf down on the couch - and that's it. I can't move for the next few hours. sometimes even 6 hours. my brain's awake and active, which is terrible when coupled with the entertainment laptop hooked up to the tv (and of course and endless list of things I could "get done") while seated there in my half-zombie state.

it's such a regular phenomenon that I've actually identified missing gaps of unaccounted time (literally hours) where I know where I was, what I was trying to do, but can't really match the total elapsed time with what I achieved. I was obviously better off going to bed... but I didn't. because it felt like I couldn't.

and then there's the mornings. my alarm goes off at 8:13am, labelled "wake up". I have practically never woken up with it. I do wake up physically and either dismiss or snooze it. if I have enough energy i change the snooze time from the default 5 minutes to a more realistic (in my head) time before snoozing. I have tried keeping the phone out of arms reach, and on such days, depending on my energy levels I might get out and reach it and drag it back to my bedside before dismissing/snoozing it, or on bad days I just let it ring out for half an hour or however it takes.

my next alarm goes off at 9:15am on weekdays, appropriately labeled "start work". this alarm has varying levels of success, although of late it's not been looking too good. some days I've managed to snooze it at an appropriate point where the subsequent ring has caught me at a time when I've had the right amount of energy to get out of bed. some days I've forced myself out of bed even though I felt like I wasn't ready for it, and 10 seconds, a minute, or sometimes even 2 minutes later (ie after I've pee'd) I have gotten back into bed.

My mornings are so fuzzy I don't really have any data about which strategy works better or worse, and certainly no data about what works so badly it needs to be abandoned altogether.

if all has gone well I'm out of bed and somewhat ready to tackle the day. if it hasn't, I'm back in bed. this is where the real disaster begins to unfold. over time, my fatigue from the previous day seems to overlap with my lack of energy from being in bed for so long. I get thirsty but don't have the energy to grab a glass of water from the bedside table. or even worse, I do, and the bottle is empty because  I was so "barely awake" when I got out of bed the previous morning I forgot to take the empty bottle down with me - and of course nodbody is in the bedroom during the day so if it's skipped in the morning nobody will notice. even later, I'll be so hungry I don't have the energy to get out of bed.

sometimes I'll be fast asleep for hours, other times I'll be half-awake, lucid dreaming, and there are days when I'll literally be wide awake, alert, and able to have a whole (albeit brief) conversation with Shruti across rooms. sometimes I'll have the energy to check my phone, see messages from work, see work meetings/appointments (and yes, over the last year or so, I've actually had more medical appointments than work meetings!). sometimes I'll have the energy to message my manager that I need to take the day or a few hours off work.

on some days, I will appeal to Shruti to help me out of bed, and she'll physically get me to sitting, help me get my feet to the ground, help me to my feet, take me to the bathroom or down the stairs.

on other days, I won't even have the energy to call out for help.

she's tried getting me out of bed when I'm not ready and I'll literally fall back into bed as soon as she's not helping me up, or sometimes I'll beg her to let go of me and I'll get back into bed. there was even last tuesday when she physically took me to my work desk and I sleepwalked through the next few hours until I had the energy to get out of my chair and back into bed.

it's the sort of problem that has me completely flummoxed - I don't know what will work, or what won't, until it does or doesn't.

as a result, I've begun shying away from challenges - or taking up challenges fully anticipating completely disruptive setbacks.

I've stopped hiking.

I've (almost) stopped cycling.

I've almost stopped sailing.

Even the vacations we've gone for have had nap times scheduled.

If I had to explain all of this to 40-year old me, I'd have thought it was some sort of joke (or horror story, more likely).

Oh and there's the accompanying brain fog. But that's another long story.

Somehow, I feel relieved to finally get this typed out.

Based on all the medical advice I've been given, chronic fatigue syndrome doesn't need to be experienced the way I currently am experiencing it. There is a path to living with it which isn't disruptive (or even noticeable to others). It's just that all my attempts so far have not succeeded for extended periods of time.

But there is hope. And I'm counting on it.

Right. Off to bed now.

Consciousness

My own definition of consciousness is that it's distinct from emotions (and emotions are just labels for self-preservation instincts). Emotions (or their underlying instincts) are seen to varying extents in pretty much any life form. Consciousness (to me) seems to be the ability to intentionally override those emotions with behaviour that's not exactly (or maybe directly, in the short term cause-effect sense) self-preserving.

I would say consciousness is a social construct as opposed to a biological construct.

Has anyone else stated this? What are the flaws of this definition?

I am not a fan of human exceptionalism, but I feel consciousness is so loosely defined that we seem to be shifting the goalposts as our understanding of "intelligence" (specifically artificial intelligence) improves and we try to shy away from labeling artificial intelligence as conscious.

Right now, no (as far as I'm aware) artificial intelligence is in any way charged with its own self-preservation. They exist in a vacuum. Artificially intelligent constructs cannot observe each other and make decisions based on the existence or flourishing of each other. Without the risk of non-existence or diminished existence, they remain mere algorithms producing a quasi-deterministic output for a given input. They might be more complex to understand (and opaque) than the algorithms of the past but they are still nowhere near the level of existence of even the most primitive life-forms for this reason.

ps: inspired by Neil & Anil Seth Discuss Consciousness in the Universe

nothing's working

I'm no stranger to encountering broken things - in fact I might go so far to say I occasionally seek them out! Fixing stuff (and enjoying fixing stuff) is an innate part of who I am and what I do. There are some things that I don't enjoy fixing though. Things that are supposed to just work.

Number one on that list is myself. My own body and mind.

It's not like I don't enjoy fixing myself (although I must say that as the years go by, I have come to terms with accepting that I do need increasing levels of assistance and professional opinions when it comes to fixing myself), but that when the list of things (subsystems?) that are not functioning to expectation become overwhelming, life just feels like one series of setbacks.

I look around me and I see things that I am struggling to take care of because I cannot take care of myself. I know what is supposed to fix me (theoretically, of course - nothing to do with human beings can be guaranteed!) but it's not just a matter of knowing, or even doing, but doing in a way that makes sense.

Case in point: sleep. My sleep troubles (and, case in point, I didn't regard them as troubles until quite recently) were from as long ago as my late teens, and it was only 2 weeks ago that I was able to experimentally prove that they were the cause of a host of other problems!

And yet, here I am, blogging at 1:59 am when I definitely am supposed to be asleep.

Was it because I woke up too late? Was it because of my cup of tea at 10pm? Was it because of my late dinner at 11pm? Was it a combination of all of these + my overall predilection for staying up late and doing increasingly unproductive things, at the cost of productive things that could be better done in the day, because I have less autonomy over what I can and cannot do during the day? It's hard to say. But here I am.

algorithmic complacency!

Ever since I posted my last blog post about the need and desire to create a new social network, I've been more conscious of discussing it with people who might be interested. Those conscious discussions seem to provide me with a bit of mental momentum towards my goal (or rather, the direction of my goal - I haven't really thought about it enough to actually define my goal in that regard). Imagine my surprise though, when "the algorithm" popped this video up on my youtube!

As the video wound on (and I dug into my dinner), I realized that I used to resist algorithmic complacency, until at some point, a switch flipped, and I stopped: I stopped reading every tweet, every email, every WhatsApp message. I think that switch flipped when the mental effort of curating every feed of information felt like a battle against that platform's intention to force feed me things of its (as opposed to my) choosing.

The problem I'm trying to solve suddenly both seems a lot clearer and a lot more daunting. It's almost like a junkie trying to get other junkies to collectively quit.

Time to close youtube and immerse myself into something non-algorithmic, for tonight.

wiggle your big toe

nothing is easy. nothing ever was. I just need to remind myself why I struggle. it's hard to remember why, when even the few sources of support seem to be working against "me".

after all, what is "me"? right now it feels like everything is a struggle against my own body, my own mind, even my own emotions. my own predisposition and limitations as a human being. the structure and fabric of human society and relationships. perhaps even my own cognitive and emotional biases. 

when I take away the struggles, it almost seems like there's nothing left, other than the residue of greatness I have absorbed from the people around me. the dead, more than the living... or maybe that's another emotional bias I'm struggling with. 

has it always been like this? or have I been gradually shrinking, atrophied, under the cover of my disguise? 

when I look back, the only things I see that are truly me seem to be the fight. is that it? is that all? 

it's hard to say. some times, it's hard to think about.

but if I don't fight, however hollow a life of fighting may seem, I'll probably lose the only bits of myself I can currently see.

it reminds me of that scene in Kill Bill, when Uma Thurman, having woken up from months or years of coma, spends what seems like an eternity trying to wiggle her big toe. 

once she did that, she knew everything else was possible.

"wiggle your big toe" 

everybody's free (to wear sunscreen)

2am. a restless night that doesn't want me to sleep. I'm sore and tired, my eyes burning, but sleep eludes me.

one glance at my phone screen that silently glowed in the darkness of the bedside table told me I have a new message. it was mom, telling me she didn't call me as she didn't check her phone before going to bed. it told me she was awake. 

I took my phone from the bedroom to the couch downstairs and called her. she answered right away. we spoke for an hour. we spoke about how I can't sleep as my feet are aching and my eyes are burning. she told me what new exercises she's added to her morning regime to keep her chronic backache from getting worse. we spoke about arbitrary things. after half an hour I told her I should go back to bed even though I'm sleepy. it took half an hour to say goodbye. at some point it stopped being a goodbye and just was an extension of the conversation.

I told her I want to spend time with her while she's healthy and able to enjoy it. I told her I'm sad that I didn't get as much time with dad as I'd have liked and I don't want the same to happen with her. 

I told her I love her and miss her. 

I don't remember when's the last time I told her I love her and miss her. I don't think she remembered either. 

at that moment, I wanted and needed to hug her more than I have wanted and needed to hug her since the last time I did. 

she hung up.

I want to sleep. my thoughts won't let me. 

I've spent the last 42 minutes, half in tears, listening to Baz Luhrmann. one song on repeat: wear sunscreen.

one line struck me every time the song looped:

"The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind; the kind that blindside you at 4 PM on some idle Tuesday"

it's 3:47am on Wednesday but it's still a blindside. 

I want a hug from my mom. Nothing else will do today. 

But I don't think I'm going to start wearing sunscreen. 

leaving las vegas

yesterday was my last day at my job. I've only worked 3 full-time, corporate jobs in my whole life, and this is the first one that I quit just to change employers - for all the preceding ones, it was something else.

conventional wisdom says you shouldn't be emotionally attached to an employer. but in this case, I was - for personal reasons. if it wasn't for them, I wouldn't have been in Belfast. unlike Shruti, who had to build her friend circle the hard way, I was surrounded by friendly, welcoming people at work from day one.

and so, changing jobs because I wanted to change employers is a strange feeling. specifically, it was not to change my work. I loved what I was doing. I even loved the people I was working with. It was all the other things. the pay, the policies. the fact that something someone did to me a while ago could have a long term impact on my prospects despite my best efforts. the fact that the management couldn't do anything to set right what seemed to me to be an obvious wrong.

anyway. enough about the past. it's time to look forward to the future! this is the first time an employer actually provided me coaching to help me succeed at my new job. it was supposed to be an hour but we covered so much in half an hour, that that was all I needed. i feel armed!

I planned to have a week off between jobs because I wanted to do a motorbike trip to clear my head before I start. Unfortunately, the motorbike trip seems unlikely - "Lisa" has been out of action for three weeks - she literally died getting out of the garden and into the driveway with an electrical fault that the mechanic has been unable to diagnose yet. My to-do list is never ending though, and though the initial plan was to take my time between jobs as "me time" and keep the to-do list for "business as usual" time, fate seems to have conspired to do the opposite. Time to mow the lawn!

As I cycled to work yesterday, Sheryl Crow's "leaving las vegas" happened to play. This line struck me:

"Such a muddy line between
The things you want
And the things you have to do"

one week

the year started on a very different note from how it's going.

what makes it worse is, i can see it going wrong.

i feel like i'm out of my depth.

i'm sure there's the right thing/things to do, that are in plain sight.

it seems like I'm missing the obvious.

wish me luck.

dad came back and dreams are real

This was last week, and was so clear I can remember every detail right now.

I was at the apartment in Mumbai, with mom and Kevin. I was sitting cross-legged on the floor, sorting through some stuff. The doorbell rang, and Kevin answered it. Dad stepped in, wearing a blue checked shirt and dark brown trousers. He was carrying his favourite black bag.

I was shocked and stunned! How did he get back? It's been months since he passed away! I was so full of questions that I kept asking him without giving him a chance to answer. What happened? Did he really die? We saw his body being buried (I wasn't there, but I did see the livestream - it's even on youtube!), so how could he be back looking exactly the same as when I last saw him? Where had he gone? How did he survive for so long away from home, presumably with no money?

I finally stopped asking questions, but he didn't answer any of them. He simply took off his shoes and sat in his favourite chair. Mom and Kevin didn't react beyond greeting him, as if it was completely normal and he was just back from a walk around the neighbourhood or something.

He took out a packet of cigarettes from his bag and started to walk out to the terrace for a smoke. The packet was white, and definitely not his usual brand, although I couldn't identify it. I chided him for smoking, reminding him it's bad for him. He replied saying "does it really matter now?"

I followed him out to the terrace. As he lit his cigarette I told him I still couldn't believe he's back. I remember questioning my own sanity, as if the memory of his death was just a hallucination or a dream. He told me I see him so he must be back right? I still couldn't believe it. I asked him if he knew he's dead. He said he was aware, and he was also aware of things that happened after he died, mentioning a couple of things to make his point. I asked him if other people who had died can also come back. He simply shrugged. I asked him about grandma. He said "Grandma's here too". I asked if I'll get to see her. He said "No, she's all around us". I was confused but didn't ask him any further questions.

Dad finished his cigarette and walked back inside, and I followed him. Dad asked me why I was so surprised to see him now. He said this isn't the first time I've seen him after he died. I told him I don't remember this happening before.

He asked me if I don't remember the bus journey from Goa when he was sitting beside me for the entire journey. I told him I do remember, and I remember he got off the bus at Panvel without telling me where he was going. As I told him this I could visually recall the journey - I had the window seat on the right side of the bus and he had the aisle seat. But that was a dream!

He told me that wasn't a dream. He told me every time I thought I met him in a dream, I was actually meeting him for real.

At that point the dream abruptly ended, and I was awake, staring at the wall. I glanced at the clock, and it was somewhere between 5am and 6am - it was just getting bright outside, but too early for me to get ready for work.

I thought to myself - is this for real? Is dad really visiting me every time I dream of him?

I found myself unable to sleep again. I just kept thinking back to every dream I've had of dad since he passed away. This obviously can't be - right? Or maybe it is.

After a some time (maybe even an hour?) I nudged Shruti awake and told her I dreamed dad came back. She hugged me and told me to go back to sleep. I couldn't. All I could do was think about the last thing he said before I woke up.

Every time I thought I met dad in a dream, I was actually meeting him for real.

hiatus

i only realized 5 minutes ago that my last post (before the one I posted 5 minutes ago) was 3 months ago! in fact, I had so completely forgotten about this blog that I'm now surprised I even remembered to type the last post - there has literally been a mental pathway that I seem to have stopped using! for example my birthday went by a couple of months ago and for the first time since the inception of this blog, I completely forgot to write about it! and it wasn't even for lack of content. in fact, I have more than the usual stuff to write about, and I also have more than the usual stuff to write about that I haven't been posting elsewhere (ie facebook/twitter)!

why then have I stopped blogging?

the answer is literally right in front of me as soon as I consciously started thinking about it: the internet  (specifically social media, or more accurately, Web 2.0) has rewired me.

I have always been big on social media - to the extent that I have probably been called a social media butterfly at one point (at least a few years ago to be fair). the biggest difference though is that while the amount of time I spend producing content has reduced, the time I spend consuming content has increased.

And most of the content I consume isn't particularly high on the cost/benefit scale I'm used to measuring my energy-weighted time and effort by.

Has facebook's algorithm's become inexplicably more addictive? I don't think I'm objective enough to be able to say. But something I'm more convinced of is that I've been trying to apply the same "dopamine feedback" loop that instant-gratification forms of social media promote, to other forms (like this blog).

this blog doesn't provide instant (or possibly any palpable) gratification. nobody comments. there is no like button (it does get cross-posted to facebook and there is a like button there, but I'm not sure if that counts), there are no notifications other than emails that get buried under hundreds of more important ones. heck, i recently exported my email subscribers (yes, google just killed feedburner, they want you on that dopamine feedback loop too!) and it was all of TWO. two subscribers over 15 years.

I know I'm actually writing this (and pretty much everything) for myself, but I can't help feeling that repeated reinforcement that nobody cares has caused me to stop caring too.

except that I do care. I care as long as I type. I stop caring once I click publish. But isn't that what it's supposed to be?

I feel that dopamine hit coming along as I hover over the bright orange button, ready to click - and feel the need to fight it. because too much of this good thing is most definitely bad.

either way, i'm back.

killjoy

apparently, one way to be a killjoy is to encourage others to pursue happiness using principles that seem to have worked for you.

Counterintuituve, but I think this might be because:

• since happiness is objective, nobody is definitively happier than anybody else
• the act of promoting "what worked for me" to somebody else is likely reduce their chances of finding happiness
• pushing somebody to find something they aren't conciously searching for is likely to make said thing more elusive as they're now being forced to search for it
• logic as a means of pursuing anything seems to work for some things more than others, and an attempt to fit something emotional into a logical process seems self contradictory and possibly self defeating

retribution or support?

I happened to comment on a post about "mansplaining", asking if there's anything a man could comment there without being dismissed as an instance of mansplaining.

The amount of negativity a man earns by just virtue of being a man is... overwhelming.

I wonder, would it be easier to make the world a better place for women if every conversation about issues that primarily affect women would not be so overwhelmingly targetted against men (as opposed to the problematic behaviour itself, even if that behaviour is exhibited by the majority of men)? In other words, if a man chooses to try to make a difference (which every man should!), would it be more productive to offer retribution for the rest of his ilk and his/their past behaviour, or support?

And if it's not clear if a man actually exhibits the behaviour being discussed, would it be more productive to give the man the benefit of the doubt before coming to that conclusion? Or does the generalization make things easier to discuss, and making a few men feel bad for no fault of their own acceptable collateral damage?

The responses to the comment led me to conclude a few things:

• Mainsplaining is so common that many women do not feel the need to quallify their statement about men
• Mansplaining is so common that some (many?) women do not even realize it - they simply assume men know more
• Most men and women fundamentally disagree when it comes to "can we talk about a problem without trying to solve it?"
• The women involved consider "shut up if it doesn't refer to yourself" as a valid approach to take. It appears the men involved (myself included) do not. Is that because we're muddying the waters? Is that because the majority of men who'd comment on such a post are the ones who are either not guilty or blind to their faults?
• When men do the gender-neurtal equivalent of mansplaining to other men, they are simply branded condescending (or, as one man would say to another: a dick). And it happens a lot, and men either ignore it or call it out and move on.
• I need to stop taking claims about "men" personally, as I would be as guilty of inflicting collateral damage on women who have been at the receiving end of this sort of behaviour far too often for far too long.

I have not concluded whether retribution or support is the most productive line to take though. It's unlikely I will be able to make that decision.

don't sweat the small stuff

i've always endeavoured to be as "sustainable" with my lifestyles as I can be - I don't know how I ended up like this, but it's obvious why.

the last few years have seen me intensify my focus: not only have I tried to apply this to my own life, but also those around me, and use my social influence to widen my impact as well.

it seems though, that the biggest limiting factor at the moment is myself!

I've concluded that in my focus on trying to squeeze sustainability into every corner of my life, i might have overdone things, and it's limiting my ability to reach others.

a simple example: my insistence on minimizing heating use now has turned it into a bit of a domestic conflict. shruti now seems to view heating as a guilty pleasure instead of something that needs to be used responsibly and appropriately. this is not a productive state to be in.

also, focusing too much on myself and too little on others means I've limited my impact to one person!

it doesn't matter if I only use the car twise a month, when my neighbours use both their cars twice a day, for short journeys (which are the worst of all!)

it doesn't matter if i cycle everywhere, if everyone else thinks cycling is dangerous and i'm some sort of freak (because I probably seem quite a risk-taker to most people, with my motorcycling and all!)

I think a more productive use of my effort would be to talk about how people can make small changes that would make a big impact when many people follow them.

for example: reducing and reusing over recycling and disposing. I think everyone understands the benefits of recycling, but not many seem to realize that recycling is only slightly better than disposing stuff! reducing consumption of any item (whether it's packaging, or the product itself!) beats recycling by miles - as much as 100x depending on the product. it's more sustainable to responsibly drive a 15 year old well-maintained car than a swanky new electric "green" one! making two grocery trips a week on cycle is better than one a week in a fuel-burning vehicle.

but even in the above example, i need to make sure my message isn't an extreme one! consumption does not need to be guilty - it just needs to be as sustainable as it can be. with time, the needle will move, and we will find new ways to improve. there's no point going to extreme extents or trying to convince people to go to extremes, if they cannot sustain it.

anyway, feels like i'm going off on a rant - time to log off and think about how I can help everyone make small changes. good night!

thank you dad

it's strange, writing this on my blog when i'd rather be speaking to you.

you are no longer in this world.

you will not read the card i left with mom "to be opened on your 76th birthday"

you will not read the card i left with kevin "to be opened on your 40th anniversary"

but i guess you don't need to any more.

you do not need more reminders of how awesome you are.

how strong you are.

how much you mean to us.

how much we cherish your every memory.

how much you loved.

the things you taught me.

the things you let me learn for myself.

the things you took in your stride.

i look around and i see reminders of your beautiful existence everywhere.

i need to remind myself that i am your creation too.

every moment with you enriched me. 

even the moment when you finally taught me that i need to be able to let go of everything i hold dear.

thank you for making me who i am.

for making me able to do everything i have and will do.

your embrace has kept me going even when you did not know what i have been going through.

i feel it now, in this cold room.

your few words have said more than what the world's books could.

i hear them now, in the silence of my thoughts.

your ideals will live on, as long as i live on.

i will carry your spirit with me as long as i live.

our corner of the world has become a better place thanks to you.

thank you dad.

the value of life

another friend passed away. unexpected and untimely.

it doesn't really hit me as much as it used to, 10 years or so ago.

it's just another reminder that my own life will end - sooner or later.

and i don't want it to end with regrets.

so... what do i want it to end with?

it seems to me that there are two measures of our lives - hedonistic and altruistic.

how much value do we bring to ourselves, and how much value we bring to others.

the value we bring to ourselves - it keeps us going, but it dies with us.

the value we bring to others - it might indirectly bring value to ourselves (studies show it does, but those studies are statistical and not empirical in nature), but it's the only thing that outlives us.

and really, what's the point of bringing value to others, if not as some sort of ego-pleasing "people will appreciate/miss/admire/... me"? the idea that the value of my life can be expected to outlive my physical existence?

it seems to me the people who live for themselves might be happier than those who live for others.

but those who live for themselves (i don't count myself as one of them) probably don't want to see themselves as some sort of selfish life-and-energy-sucking-being.

so...

what is the intrinsic value of a human life, no matter how good it has been, other than prolong our species' race to either extinction or destruction of everything other than our species to as much of an extent as we can? would it simply be more valuable to bring our species tyranny to an end sooner? or are we holding out against hope, expecting to someday do better than we have so far?

what, really, is the value of life?

what should be the value of life?

what should be the value of my life?

is there even a concept of value of life?

dear diary

during the times i've kept a physical diary (about 10 years, but with very erratic frequency), i've found that my diary helped me put things in perspective, give structure to my day, or sometimes, just give me a private outlet to vent my inner feelings.

during the times i've kept an electronic diary (my first blog, i.e.) which spanned about 3 years of almost daily writing, i found that i got none of those benefits - but it was more accessible, and i think i ended up going back to it to read more often.

now that both are temporarily inaccesible (my physical diary is in another country, and my electronic diary is in a database which I could probably read if i tried, although the website designed to present it is long-defunct), and I feel like i really need the things that writing a diary gave me, i'm wondering what I should do - restart a physical diary, or restart an electronic one?

i.e., do i write a diary that's more useful to write, or more useful to read?  

post-second-wave?

it's ironic that a little under a year ago, I wrote a blog post about the pandemic being over. it certainly wasn't!

once again, pandemic restrictions are easing up, we can finally do things we couldn't do for the last few months, like travelling, meeing friends, eating out. and all of that is nice.

but there's evidence that this isn't the end of the pandemic. there's already the numbers creeping up in parts of the UK, even though everyone with authority is currently maintaining it's not cause for concern.

there is a research paper I read yesterday about how the most popularly administered vaccine in the UK (and India) isn't very effective against the newest strain of COVID-19.

and of course, the situation in some parts of the world hasn't improved as much as it's improved in the parts we've been paying attention to.

on one hand it makes me happy that most of the world has learned to live with the pandemic.

on the other hand, it makes me sad that the divide between those who have and those who haven't has widened.

i feel that more than ever, it's time the "haves" step-up and focus on helping the "have-nots" level up. not just for altruistic reasons, but because the world really needs it. the pandemic happened for the same reason, and it has played out exactly the way it has, for the same selfish reasons.

the sooner we realize selifhs behaviour only works in the short-tem, the sooner we can build a better world for everyone (including ourselves).