The pursuit of happiness

When people ask me how life is in the US, I am always in a state of conflicting opinions. Quite frankly, there is no difference in my state of well being whether I am in a developed, clean, picturesque city of the US with a pleasant weather OR if I am in a crowded, dirty, slow and hot city in India.

But when I think about the experience here, I think immediately about the weather, the clean atmosphere, the infrastructure and easy life which convinces me that this life is better.

Therefore, I was pleased to see this TED video which illustrates that the brain really refers to particular memories it has instead of the whole experience and is therefore not a good judge of whether an experience was good or not.

It turns out that once the basic needs of a person are taken care of, the key determinant to happiness is whether we get to interact with people we like.

Doesn't this turn our whole set of aspirations upside down? A job promotion, bigger house, a fancy car, foreign trips.

Instead, we must spend more time on Facebook :)

The answer to the question

After a certain point in life, it becomes necessary to determine how you want to live your life or the purpose for your time on earth.

Society has come up with a decent solution to occupy ourselves viz. to get married, have kids, support family. The 'responsibility' that it brings lends itself to a purpose for a major portion of life until you retire. And then you begin to ask the old nagging question. Have I really lived my life?

So, we amuse ourselves with friends and relatives, the television and the latest time sink: facebook.

If you believe in evolution, then it is clear that we really do not have any moral purpose in life. The brain is really a bag of chemicals which can be influenced to change one's behavior and the concept of 'free will' itself is being questioned because it turns out that most of the time, we are not rational. We only rationalize the decision we have already made.

On one hand, I really hope there is a larger, spiritual meaning to our existence. Not having any would mean that whatever we do is pointless. Really. It wouldn't make any difference if you are a man of values or not.

But on the other hand, I do not like someone watching over my shoulder. My choices should not be based on the fear of a repercussion by 'God'.

Is that why we do not know the answer to the God question?

For the sake of argument, lets assume that there is no God. What would our ideals be then?

I think the answer is evolution. Or, supporting evolution. To be better, stronger and faster as a species.

To question our situation or the way we do things now and find better ways to do it. To improve the standard of living.

If a person has done that then I think he has lived his life.

"There is never enough time to do all the nothing you want"

An extract from the creator of Calvin & Hobbes cartoons, Bill Watterson's speech:

We're not really taught how to recreate constructively. We need to do more than find diversions; we need to restore and expand ourselves. Our idea of relaxing is all too often to plop down in front of the television set and let its pandering idiocy liquefy our brains. Shutting off the thought process is not rejuvenating; the mind is like a car battery-it recharges by running...

You may be surprised to find how quickly daily routine and the demands of "just getting by: absorb your waking hours. You may be surprised matters of habit rather than thought and inquiry. You may be surprised to find how quickly you start to see your life in terms of other people's expectations rather than issues. You may be surprised to find out how quickly reading a good book sounds like a luxury...

We all have different desires and needs, but if we don't discover what we want from ourselves and what we stand for, we will live passively and unfulfilled. Sooner or later, we are all asked to compromise ourselves and the things we care about. We define ourselves by our actions. With each decision, we tell ourselves and the world who we are. Think about what you want out of this life, and recognize that there are many kinds of success.

Many of you will be going on to law school, business school, medical school, or other graduate work, and you can expect the kind of starting salary that, with luck, will allow you to pay off your own tuition debts within your own lifetime...

But having an enviable career is one thing, and being a happy person is another.

Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it's to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential-as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth.

You'll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you're doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you'll hear about them.

To invent your own life's meaning is not easy, but it's still allowed, and I think you'll be happier for the trouble.

Reading those turgid philosophers here in these remote stone buildings may not get you a job, but if those books have forced you to ask yourself questions about what makes life truthful, purposeful, meaningful, and redeeming, you have the Swiss Army Knife of mental tools, and it's going to come in handy all the time.

- From http://web.mit.edu/jmorzins/www/C-H-speech.html

Fwd:The idea of progress

Interesting article on The Economist on our misguided notions of 'progress' http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=15108593

The Misfits

A couple of movies I saw recently, "Rocket Singh" and "Revolutionary Road", albeit tangentially, make a point about the "Organization Man".

In both movies, the lead characters get disillusioned by the companies they work for, either because of the corruption or the banality of their jobs and seek something better.

When you look back on the last 10 years, you think how much 'life' has been wasted doing trivial things, things that you are not really proud off or didn't really enjoy doing, but was necessary nevertheless for your own livelihood and to the society to a lesser extent. Living the rat race so that maybe a couple of decades later you could be a 'VP' or something in the company.

“So maybe we are running… We’re running from the hopeless emptiness of the whole life here.” -from Revolutionary Road when the lead character decides to move to Paris to seek a better life.

At my office, I find my project mate and myself often lamenting about the deteriorating 'quality' of work. But what we find interesting is that the majority of the people at work are happy with what they do. They come in promptly at 8:00 AM and leave at 5:00 PM with a misplaced feeling of having accomplished something, while all they did was something that was really boring and mundane.

Are they delusional? Or do they think that the 9hrs they spend at work doesn't need to be fun. Or that they would do anything as long as they get the money? Or are they so terrible that they find whatever they are doing challenging?

Either case, if they are they majority, then we must be the misfits.

Thats why, this post on the Wall Street Journal, on why people become entrepreneurs resonated with me:

What made it happen? What makes one give up the cushy life and pick the spiky-pointed one? I don’t think it’s any romantic love for risk. Entrepreneurs aren’t wild risk-lovers. I think we’re calculated risk-takers. In a perverse sort of a way, it might be in the genes.

I do believe all humans are different, DNA-wise at least, at the core. (If not, then forensic sciences are in bit of a jam.) And I believe that for every individual mental make-up, there’s a particular job that’s particularly perfectly suited. Some people are just born to be Bank Officer, Grade 4. Some others to be one-down right-handed batsman. And if these people are lucky, they get the jobs that are right for them. They don’t ever have to go through the trouble of being an entrepreneur.

But there are perhaps a few million types of jobs out there. And there are seven billion of us. So there’s obviously a lot of us who are not in jobs tailor-made for us. Look around you – know anyone who isn’t deliriously happy in their current job? Know anyone who is?

The rest of us just can’t find a job that suits us. And we really don’t like ‘adjusting’. So we make a job for ourselves. Where we like our bosses - ourselves, the business - our own, the working hours – whenever we feel like, and the location – wherever we are. We don’t do it to take a risk – we do it to be safe.

And the world calls us entrepreneurs, heroes of some sort. But really, we’re just folks who didn’t find a job that suited us well enough.

Tabula rasa

Tabula Rasa or "a blank slate", a fresh start is what everyone hopes on New Year eve. With New Year resolutions and what not.

But a friend clearly had things in perspective when he tweeted:

A misconception people entertain about new year is that they think they can start everything on a new slate...but its never that way

Its nice to know that I am not the only cynic around :)

Dystopia

Avatar is a great movie. Read this interview to see what it took James Cameron to make this movie. The tenacity of the film maker is unbelievable. All that effort to just make a movie? But I will tell you that it was worth it. Of course, its already profitable despite its astronomical $430 million budget but the movie also represents the brilliance, the same kind for which you admire something like the Taj Mahal.

The premise behind Avatar is about Humans trying to plunder an alien inhabited moon of its natural resources. The concept is not new. Colonialism bears a striking resemblance. Heck, its happening even now.

The alien species while not technically advanced are portrayed as highly spiritual beings who live in sync with the nature around them, respecting its elements and other living beings.

Somehow, their 'quality' of life seems to be better than human's in spite of our modern ways of living. In that sense, it seems we are headed towards "Dystopia". And this begs the question:

Are we any better off now than we were some thousands of years back, when we were still hunter-gatherers?

Maybe in a myopic view, its tempting to believe that we have come far along. But in the big picture, our species are like a virus. Except, viruses are smarter. (viruses tend not to kill their hosts, for good reasons.)

As some great man said: "Civilization has less to do with advancements in how we do things and more to do with how we think."

“I don’t know which is the greater task: to decentralize a top-heavy civilization or to prevent an ancient civilization from becoming centralized and top-heavy. In both cases the core of the problem is to discover what constitutes a good civilization, then proclaim it to the people and help them to erect it.”

—Gandhi