06/Dec/2023
Two guys are standing in a long line outside the American consulate.
"ఏ కాలేజ్?"
"ఒస్మానియా"
"నేను ఐఐటి బాంబే.. జీఆర్ఈ ఎంత?"
"1200"
"నాది 1500.. బాంక్ బ్యాలెన్స్ ఎంత చుపిస్తున్నావ్?"
"౩౦ లక్షలు"
"నేను రెండు కోట్లు"
"లైట్ తీస్కో"
Cut to them walking out. The IITian looks dejected as our hero taps him on the shoulder and asks, "వచ్చిందా?"
"లేదు స్కోర్ తక్కువని రిజెక్ట్ చేసారు. నీకు?"
"డౌ-ట?"
"అదేంటి, నీకన్నీ నాకంటే తక్కువ కదా?"
At which our hero briefly pauses before landing the punchline, "నీకు వీసా రాకపోతే ఏం చేయాలో తెలీదు నాకు తెలుసు. అది తేడా."1
It is an anecdote that I've used repeatedly over the years, often in a jestful and self-elevating way, but occasionally also as containing a deep truth without being able to truly articulate what that truth is in any other way. I think its finally come to me- Control the Narrative.
A couple of weeks ago I was bitching and moaning to Nathan about not being able to stick to the training plan. Its been a consistent problem with me (the only consistent thing about my training lol) where I'd have a 3 week period where I'm kicking all goals and am super pumped, followed by a 4-5 week period where I'm slacking off- demotivated, sore, lethargic and stressed about not keeping up. So I decided to create a SWOT chart and vowed to address the problem face on. Only, once I expressed my grand intentions and the self-examining I was willing to put myself through, waiting for Nathan to appreciate my appetite for the trurh as painful as it maybe, I got a proper dressing down. He seethingly told me what I was looking for a magic pill overrulling my objections that I was precisely doing the opposite- that I understand there was no magic pill and so was looking to analyse, understand and identify the root problem. His response was that there is no root problem, only the surface level problem of simply waking up everyday and sticking to the training plan. Simple, no need to psychoanalyse the self and read cutting edge research on behavioural science or whatever. The audience in me was disappointed but I didn't dare argue with him then. So for the last two weeks he's changed my plan into waking up at 5 and doing the training first thing in the morning. Don't worry about anything else- Just wake up and do what's written there. Don't worry if you think its too hard or easy, or what the area of focus is, or I'm in the mood to do the other training. Don't try to understand- just do. Obviously, the last two weeks have been amazing (otherwise all this setup wouldn't make sense would it), and for more reasons than one. There is ofcourse the aspect of Discipline being Freedom, and how infinite choice is a prison of sorts, and how what we think of free choice isn't always so, and I suppose all that is obvious. What I've been more amazed by is the positivity (damn, I'm turning middle-aged) brought into my life by gaining agency. Like Nate said last night, when you make a promise to yourself and stick to it, two things happen: Your self-respect increases and that's always good, but also there is a dopamine (or endorphin or whatever) rush that happens thereby improving your morale and making it easier for you to get more done.
I have spent years of my life, either directly or obliquely, looking for the bedrock of principles, or some other non-negotiable maximums, on top of which I can build a robust structure that'll help me live a good (in all senses of the word) life. While I've had epiphanies, which gave the impression that I had deduced some such principle, they have proved transitory. Actually, I don't think they've been transitory. I almost never read older posts on this blog but I believe if I were to, I'm likely to find atleast 10 posts over the years written in a similar tone and with similar conviction. Infact, probably even saying very similar things. What has proved harder is to adhere to those learnings. Maybe it indeed has been the magic pill I've been seeking- that thing which'll change me so fundamentally that I won't have those minutes of self-doubt or lethargy or self-loathing or any such ever again2. And only age and experience3, the relentless cycle of trying, gaining, failing, retrying, that is finally convincing me that there won't be a eureka moment4. That it is everyday for itself.
In Capital and Time, a staggeringly dense book that nevertheless builds deep, interesting ideas beautifully and is written with panache, Martijn Konings explains how Money is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is a post-modern construct of the highest order, self-reflexive and recursive, immaterial yet truly real, capable of bringing change in the world by literally betting on some things over others. The self, it seems to me, is like that; Only more so. We can't run entire on will or whims or some abstract innate moral code or maybe even the soul. At the same time, we do have agency, a unique perspective, and desires and feelings that are part-inculcated and part-intrinsic. The world decides a lot of things for us, not least the circumstances of when, where, how we are born. It gives us our station in life, and an incredible amount of biases, hacks, koans, concepts to use and abuse. Yet, that too isn't the whole story. Our self is, in a sense, manufactured. The brilliant conceit though is that there is no inert lab in which this happens. The partially created self keeps building, breaking, transforming, snapping back, drifting listlessly sometimes, capable of bending the world to its will at others.
None of this is new or interesting, even for me. The one difference seems to be is an understanding and appreciation of the nature of habit. After all the kicking and screaming, wishing and delusioning(!), I'm coming to an experiential understanding of the staggering power of habit. No deep, worthy change can happen in a short span of time. Not just because intertia and social mores are so strong, but also because motivation is a limited resource and runs out quite quickly.
1From Deva Katta's Vennela. Its probably not verbatim but I didn't want to go back and check.
2In an old talk, I remember Anand Gandhi asking, "Why do we expect that 26 letters in the alphabet will rearrange themselves in such a way one day that the answers to all our questions about the universe will be revealed?" I see his point but I think I'm too much of a language romantic to lose that hope- if not for truth, then atleast for beauty.
3Amma, I think you're right!
4Prof. Alison Gopnik says that humans have the Explore/ Exploit function built into them. Kids prefer explore while adults adjust for exploit. Maybe that is all there is to growing up really, a giving up on fantasising about elsewhere.
--
Things have changed somewhat since I wrote the above words a fortnight ago. After having important, kick-up-the-ass converstations with Amma, Sravani and others, I've had to modify the above hypothesis to handle relationships. While autonomy, accountability, repetition, planning and design, a certain kind of engineering mindset is required for achieving long-term goals, relationships can't thrive just on those precepts. I know it sounds ridiculously young-adulty5 but what can I do- I seem to need the constant reminders. Like I wrote in my Roam6 notes last night, relationships can't be solved or hacked in the cold waters of rationality, they need the grace and comfort of warm waters to blossom. Good faith, generosity, humour, a little self-deprecation and, yes damn it, love are what are required to navigate these waters. But it isn't just instrumental as navigation, it is more akin to sailing or swimming, the act itself being a major source of pleasure. Now, again, I don't want to give the impression that its been solved. Maybe reality will bring these assumptions into question, these tenets have to be modified/ abandoned/ held even more dearly. It does seem that there is no bedrock of principles, that while I must and will go deeper into my investigations, justifications, rationalisations, getting more and more nuanced, there will be no Platonic ideal that'll open a portal. It's a constant evolution.
Years pass and I seem to keep coming back to similar conclusions, if not the same ones. I don't know if that's a good thing or bad, and even if it were bad if I can do something about it. I don't think I'll be able to hack my way out of this jungle. I can't find this particular essay, and I'm kicking myself for not taking note of it when I read it, I read a couple of weeks ago that said something to the effect of, "Relentless self-reflection7 is not just useless but infact detrimental. Permuting and combining the same set of impressions, ideas, memories etc. (data points) over and over again does not necessarily lead to understanding or epiphany. But they can be done inexhuastibly and let one escape from having to look out into the world." I think Amit Varma's quote, "the more data points you have of the world, the more high-def your picture is", is also pertinent here.
Anyway, I don't really know what's the point of all this exertion but that abandoned post was bothering me so I came here to take it to some conclusion and get rid of it from my head. I suppose that's not an innoble purpose of writing- not to use it as an avenue to think through or even to reflect on this at a later point in time, but simply to not have to think about a certain thing now. Make room and move on.
5Having the same preoccupations since late teens used to seem endearing, now its just annoying and exasperating.
6My new plaything/ habit I'm trying to inculcate thanks to glowing reviews from two of my idols- Amit Varma and Venkatesh Rao.
7But what’s interesting about Herzog’s book is not so much what he might be refusing to think about as his refusal of a particular way of thinking. -From Mark O'Connell's review of Werner Herzog's Every Man for Himself and God Against All (which in a Freudian slip, I first wrote as All Against God).
No comments:
Post a Comment