Month: April 2021

So why have we been swallowing these notions about work and value that were nonsense to begin with, and just getting sillier? We have known that the “higher mission” idea … was just fake, just another way of getting people to work 24 hours a day.

But a lot of status came with feeling so indispensable. Unemployment is a famous driver of misery, and overemployment, to be so needed, can feel very bolstering. Many people describe having been anxious about the loss of status before they left their jobs; more anxious than about the money, where you can at least count what you are likely to have and plan around it.

– “Is the exhausting cult of productivity finally over?”, The Guardian, Apr 2021

I don’t disagree with the writer. Certainly the prospect or threat of unemployment causes disproportionate stress to the person whose work is her identity.

I also think think this is only part of the reason why people are taking another look at their participation in hustle culture. I think it’s that the overhead of the constant ambient stress of the pandemic has left little room for rejuvenation of the minds of us people already working ourselves to the limit.

Whether we peep into Twitter or Facebook or the websites we have bookmarked for quick between-meetings distraction, or catch the evening news, or scroll through our Whatsapp groups, distress is rife. We cannot relax. And therefore, there is no slack in our systems.

No wonder so many of us are re-evaluating our relationship with work and its rewards – we have to make room in our minds somewhere.

It being me joy that children today have the Internet to explore and inquire freely, and to supplement their learning at school.

There are well known destinations like Khan Academy of course, but you can also find the odd gem in the wild.

Just a couple of days ago, I ran into this comment on Reddit, to the question “I genuinely don’t understand how light is both a particle and a wave”:

It’s neither. It’s something that we don’t have a word for and that doesn’t exist in a way that we can sense directly. But this unnamed thing happens to acts in a way similar to a wave in some situations and like a particle in others. A cylinder will role like a sphere in one direction but not roll like a cube in the other. That doesn’t make it a sphere and a cube at the same time. It makes it something different.

– /u/willingly-ignorant

Rather than criticise this answer for its lack of depth, for flaws in its analogy, imagine the spark it’ll kindle in minds both young and adult. We need more popular science.

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London has this to say of Rabindranath Tagore’s paintings.

[they were] unplanned and shaped by accidents and intuitive decisions but often seem to carry memories of ‘primitive’ art objects he should have seen in books and museums.

Something of this spilled into his early paintings. Many of them represent animals, but they are seldom of the real ones we know of; more often they represent what he has described as ‘a probable animal that had unaccountably missed its chance of existence’ or ‘a bird that only can soar in our dreams’.

I am most interested in artists that imagine and express something that does not yet exist in the world:

New perspectives, like that of M C Escher’s Hand With Reflecting Sphere

Or new worlds that deal with new issues, like Neal Stephenson’s books Anathem, REAMDE and (although I read it much too late to have the impact it could have had), Snow Crash.

Or fevered visualisations of otherworldly concepts like Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, and – in principle – Tagore’s early paintings.

Finally, I’m reminded of Salman Rushdie’s answer to what his book The Satanic Verses was about:

[it] celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Mélange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and bit of that is how newness enters the world.

I read this years ago (the answer is from 1991) and it made an instant impact on me.

I live in a noisy neighbourhood with road traffic and trains honking. It’s bad enough, made worse by my tinnitus and associated noise sensitivity. And recently major road maintenance and a nearby apartment renovation project had made it near-unbearable for months. I resorted to a combination of earplugs, noise-cancelling headphones and piping white noise though them. It didn’t shut out everything but it made me functional.

The immediate noise spike has passed, but I’m now dealing with a new double whammy: a serious crisis within the family and the second coronavirus wave outside. As I spend a lot of time simply waiting (the crisis has sapped my ability to think, consult, advise, even write meaningfully), I spend a lot more time scrolling through news websites, reddit and twitter – hours on end. Relatives I’m staying with watch local news that operates in perennial breaking news mode, sensationalising the simple and optimising for outrage.

Twitter’s algorithms themselves undermine my experience – my deliberately curated follower list and keyword filters amount to nought as I’m suggested topics I have no interest in or am actively trying to avoid, and alerted to actions by people related to the people I follow – people who discuss the very subjects I’m keeping away from. Reddit is full of outrage from the United States. I can no longer rely on news, whether TV or online, for perspective. The constant optimization for eyeballs and clicks is beyond disheartening (right now: oxygen tank leak kills 22 followed a few dozen pixels below by katrina kaif tests negative for covid).

All in all, I will have to apply the same damping techniques to information noise that I did to real-world noise: specifically, training myself to run off reddit, twitter and news websites. Limit how often I read though my whatsapp groups. Catch up on my reading on the kindle. It’s only been twenty four hours. I hope it helps.

A lament about the concentration of the internet in the hands of a few mega corporations that will last well beyond your lifetime and mine. About their often malign influence, their lack of consideration for us as individuals and our utter lack of influence over them:

Sometimes it feels like the paradigm has inverted. Technology was the mold growing across human systems. Software was eating the world. Now it feels like humans are the mold growing on technology.

By and large the writer is right. Participating in today online-offline urban society means accepting monopolies (Facebook, Gmail) or duopolies (Amazon/Flipkart, iOS/Android, Uber/Ola, Zomato/Swiggy, MakeMyTrip/Cleartrip).

In theory, you can resist. You can think carefully about data custody and use open source software wherever possible. You can minimise software and data lock in, for instance by avoiding smart devices that require an internet connection to work or unlock features. You can support local businesses.

But being largely free of the influence of tech giants? That requires a major change in the way you live. Even homesteading isn’t going to be a solution.