Careers
I daresay that we never really settle down in life even if outwardly seeming to. The reason is perhaps not hard to fathom. Most of us never figure out what we really want to do with our lives. The lucky few that do also seem to get disillusioned over time. Its hard to know what you want when you're young. Not that growing older makes things any better. You grow even more confused and less sure than before. Wisdom has the unfortunate side effect of making you feel more inadequate than your worst personal estimate. I think that over time man gets better at figuring out what he should desire as defined by his circumstances and the people around him. But what he really desires is something that I don't think he figures out, ever.
No wonder that most people tend to be unhappy about their lives and careers. You are probably working on the wrong thing or seemingly important things that you are probably lousy at anyway. If anything came close to your sphere of innate talents and interests you would excel at it without any real effort (or at least the effort would not seem tedious). You would be happy if you could work at something that came close to what you were good at. It is easy to make up for minor deficiencies through a reasonable amount of perseverance. But if you do not have an ear for music and want to play musical instruments for a career you are heading for self-destruction (which could actually be quite painfully systematic). I know that I seem to be heading towards that inevitable and rather commonplace conclusion that one must do what one likes/loves and what one is good at. If it were not so hard to find what one really likes, that might just make it so much easier.
Pearls of Wisdom
These are observations or statements that I keep making every now and then in my correspondence and some of them seem good enough to stand alone as a quote. This list will keep growing as I add to it over time.
"Rationality has this way of being an impediment to optimism. I would not go so far as to say that it induces pessimism or cynicism. It does, however, prevent you from being foolishly hopeful about positive outcomes that exist only in your imagination."
"Yes, things could be a lot better and in equal measure they could be a lot worse. Since that mathematically makes things even, I should be happy and content to languish in the averages as long as I am not a victim of the law of averages."
"Life is far too short to waste on petty strife and unpleasantness. Frayed tempers make bad advocates."
Writing?
I find it odd that though I normally have several thoughts during any normal day, some of which would make good topics for an essay, when I sit down to write one, I run out of steam very easily.
Perhaps there is something in this that is worth exploring.
What is so different about a chain of thoughts that seem so fluid and well connected when they are floating around in your head but become so disjointed and insubstantial when you try to pen them down? Somewhere the test of putting something on paper (or in print if you prefer) makes it hard for the survival of any thought that has insufficient substance. You cannot elaborate on an ill-concieved idea. The best illustration of this is when you're forced to expound, impromptu, on something you do not know well. As you fumble through what you're saying you realize how little you have actually thought about it and how difficult it is to articulate something that has no data, no links and no references in your brain. Perhaps this is what writers also face when they move to that part of the plot where they are still undecided in their own minds.
Even as I write this I realize that a pattern begins to emerge. An idea that you have not thought about sufficiently is not something you can expound on. Conversely it should also be true that you should be able to hold forth at length on a topic that you have spent time thinking about. While a lack of articulation ability may hold you back from public speaking, writing however, needs a lot less preparation and is a lot more forgiving to mistakes. You can reword and rewrite a line that you are not satisfied with, until you are.
It seems to follow that writing can serve as a tool to crystallize your thoughts into something with form and substance. Having to explain them out in print automatically makes you define them a lot more clearly in your own head first. Even as you complete one sentence and begin the next, the test of having to sound rational and connected forces you to strengthen the links between your thoughts and imposes the test of coherence. Reading what you have just written makes you realize the inherent correlation, or lack therof, between the thoughts that are coming out of your brain.
If a single, well thought idea could form the basis for an essay/article, why is it that many, including me, frequently run out of steam midway? How many times have I started writing on an idea that seemed promising, but eventually lost its charm halfway and resulted in a unfinished (and unposted) essay? I think I post only half of what I write mainly because the other half remain unfinished, forever perhaps.
I think the reason there are so many unfinished works is intimately connected to the reason behind some essays being more appealing than others. It has to do with the quality of the idea. If the idea is well thought out and has sufficient substance in itself, it leads you to the end. If the idea is weak in substance, all the thought that you put into it only serves to increase the amount of rambling text you will produce before you realize that you cannot go any further because you are getting nowhere.
As with all things I'm sure there is some middle ground. An idea that has less merit in itself, but an overdose of thought injected into it, will perhaps result in an essay that is atleast engaging in parts. An idea that has merit but very little thought will probably still do enough to kindle the reader's interest.
I was not sure where I would end up when I started this, but there is enough here to go on, so I shall post this for the moment and add to it when I get back to this train of thought.
(Un)Happiness
What is joy, what is sorrow, what is happiness and what is sadness?
I have often wondered about how one should actually define these. One way of attempting to do so would be to take a statistical approach. If one were to qualify life as a vector of data points proceeding to termination with time as its scalar value, the direction of variation would be indicated by the primary emotions of joy and sorrow. To keep things simple one would fix an axis that indicates a lack of either, in other words a neutral point of no emotion.
Joy represents those data points along time that rise significantly above the neutral axis and sorrow would naturally represent data points that fall significantly below the axis. This definition seems to fit fairly well even from a metaphorical point of view where the high points in life are those of joy and sorrow has always been taken to mean the lows of one's life.
Armed with these simple definitions, one could define happiness as the outcome ( or trend-line) that emerges when there are a significantly higher proportion of joys in life as compared to the lows. Sadness would conversely represent a higher proportion of sorrows. A truly simplistic representation. Perhaps the one thing that we are ignoring here is a definition for how far above the neutral axis does one have to be to be considered happy. It is quite obvious that a few high points of joy in an otherwise neutral existence would not quite qualify a person as happy. Whereas a few data points south of the axis with an otherwise neutral existence would be enough to bracket a person as unhappy. This exercise seems to yield one interesting result - you have to fairly high above the axis on average to be happy, but if you are even slightly south of the axis you are fairly unhappy. The scale for the vector quantity in this trend does not seem to be linear.
It would be interesting to consider the case where there are an equal number of highs and lows in a sample life. The net outcome perhaps would actually be neutral on a linear scale, but I suspect that in reality it tends to be an unhappy existence. Maybe what we should be looking at is the moving average. If there are more instances of sharp downward movements below the axis and only gradual upward movements, the net outcome is mostly an unhappy individual.
With this theory one could safely come to the conclusion that one needs prolonged periods of gradually increasing joys with a few high points thrown in for good measure to be a truly happy individual overall. On average, I think most people have an equal measure of joys and sorrows as could be expected in any normal distribution of data points. The nature of the sorrow scale, however, makes the net average fall below the axis and perhaps that is why there are (and have been) more unhappy people on this planet throughout human existence. Perhaps it is fitting that this prince of human emotion (sorrow) is also the most widespread and in some ways has been responsible for some of the greatest human achievements.
Friends
15-May-2000
The sands of time and tide,
wait for none,not you, not me,
life can be a long ride,
along the highway of destiny...
We grow older every day,
we drift apart slowly but helpless we are,
coz we do not know the way,
the way is tough and our destinations far...
Our old friends are lost along the highway,
and even as you try to catch up with yesterday,
the memories become blurred and foggy,
those crisp moments have become soggy...
Our dreams change every day,
what i have become today,
is not what i wanted to be yesterday,
what tomorrow will bring i cannot say..
so hold on firmly to those you love,
they are your real treasure trove,
years hence when you look back to see,
the minutes of your life, glad you'll be...
To discover that the people who started the journey of life with you, Are still with you speeding along on the highway of life....
Old writings from 2000
It occurred to me that I have hardly been writing anything into this blog. I've decided to put in some stuff I wrote way back in 2000. Perhaps its time I put this up somewhere.
Philosophical - 12-Apr-2000
There's so much in this world,
that we dont have time to appreciate,
so its time we woke up and unfurled,
nature's wonders before its too late...
We spend time doing the same things everyday,
we get bored, we complain in every possible way,
that our lives lack spice and we all say,
that the fun in our lives has faded away...
Are we responsible for this sorry state of affairs,
i guess if we dont admit it we'd be liars,
so lets rediscover ourselves ,
lets do the unusual and ignore the stares...
You're great if you envy none but yourself,
but that's our greatest misfortune,
we prefer to rue what we lack,
and envy anothers good fortune...
Beautiful?
Our definition of beauty can be strange at times. I have heard the cliched statement - beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder - several times from several different people and have had the opportunity to witness this statement in action on quite a few occassions. I cannot say that I enjoyed a demonstration of the fact that beauty can be interpreted so differently by different people.
A simple way of witnessing this phenomenon is to ask your peers to name the actor and actress that they consider most beautiful (or perfectly made). You had better be prepared for the diverse set of names that you might get to hear. Unless your peer group is rather homogeneous, meaning that they consist of the same ethnicity and are mostly from the same part of the planet, the variation in the definition of beauty can be astounding. Variations in what is c0nsidered to be a sign of true beauty varies with demographic distributions to such an amazing extent that the aspired physical characteristics of people in different geographies tends to be very diverse indeed.
Slim was not always considered beautiful. There was a time when a little chubbiness, which indicated material affluence in countries where food was not as plentiful, was preferred as a sign of beauty. One could argue that living among a starved populace automatically made anyone with enough food to overeat an object of envy and a sign of beauty.
Conversely, if you were to consider things as they are today, the obsession with health and fitness seems to place a great deal of emphasis on low body fat as a test of beauty. Slim and toned is beautiful today.
I cannot help but wonder about the definition of beauty a hundred years from now.
Advice for soon-to-be-wedded couples
In a short time the two of you will be united. Your new life will commence in no uncertain terms and I pray that it will be one of matrimonial bliss. The commitments made so far will have to be lived up to and the promises kept. What lays ahead in your future no one knows! However, from what I know of such matters this is the advice I have to offer.
For the road that lies ahead remember that it is the journey that shall eventually matter more than the destination. Life is far too short and precious to waste on petty strife and unpleasantness. No doubt there will be differences in opinion, in choice or in taste in lifestyle, prospects and other such worldly and familial considerations. Difference in opinion, however, is not an end in itself. It is a compelling reason for intellectual involvement in the unavoidable process of decision making that governs day to day life. Engage in meaningful conversation, learn to listen and engage in constructive dialogue with your partner. All conflicts may be resolved with a degree of success that depends on the strength and openness of your communication channels. Beware of open ended accusations that come from frustration. Frayed tempers make bad advocates. History is not meant to be used for emotional blackmail, but rather as a lesson to learn from. Harboring negative thoughts from past experiences is not only fruitless; it is also highly destructive to the intellect and the soul. Forgive and forget the other’s misadventures and errors in judgment – such magnanimity is as rare as happy marriages. I believe that one leads to another – one cannot be happy while harboring anxieties and misgivings about one’s spouse.
