"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