Design Or Be Designed

There are three ideas I want to leave you with in this piece...

1. Firstly, everyone is a designer and is constantly designing whether they're aware of it or not.
2. We are designed by the things which we have designed; the things we create turn around and return the favour.
3. Lastly, design apply not only to "things" but also (perhaps more importantly) to ideas.

To start with...

Everyone is always designing!

At it's core, "Design" is just a process of making aesthetic and functional choices. Yes some people go on to specialize, and we call them Designers, but the principles they employ are available to everyone; All you have to do is be sensitive to the way different kinds of people interact with things. Moreover even if someone else has designed your phone (for example), the fact that you ultimately chose to buy it is also a kind of design decision.

In other words, design isn't just about creating products but about shaping your lived experience of the world around you. Even the choice between using one chair or another represents all the possible interactions you might have with one; a chair for work will be very different from one to play video games from.

If nothing else you're designing the parameters of your own life, which you then get to live. What I think this means is that we need to be more aware of the way in which design affects not only us, but the people around us as well.

Being designed by our designs

"Just as you grow into the world, the world grows into you. Not only do you occupy a certain place, but that place in turn occupies you..." - Costica Bradatan [1]

There are innumerable examples of how the things we create end up then changing how we act. Storing people's birthdays in a calendar means you stop needing to remember them. Having a camera built into your phone means you take more pictures. And who can say they don't have atleast one friend who's woken up at 4 AM to water their Farmville crops.

It also goes much much further than that into our architecture and the spaces we design: you become quiet when you enter a religious space and you become louder when you enter a pub; the language you learn as a child ends up shaping your personality, which then continues to reinforce itself as you continue to read and speak. Our tools literally change the way we think about the world which then lead us to create new tools to facilitate that new understanding. We're perpetually in this dance with our creations, around and around forever.

In a way this makes sense because of the way our brains are made. Our brains are probably the most remarkable aspects of our species anyway and one of it's main features is it's Neuroplasticity - basically our brain can rewire itself to remap the environment as it changes. As much as we like to think we're masters of our surroundings, the truth is that we're inseparably connected to the universe and our brains respond as such. 

The key is to recognize that this is happening all the time and be aware of it. If the things we surround ourselves with ultimately end-up shaping who we are then that's a huge motivation to be more conscious of the design decisions we make everyday. There's an entire design philosophy built around this idea and it's called Ontological Design [2] and it will probably become a guiding framework for a whole generation of designers.

What this also introduces is the idea that we can change ourselves by manipulating our surroundings and our tools. If you want to end a habit, change your environment to make it a little harder to do. If you want to be more productive, try getting a standing desk if you think it will help. The possibilities are endless, and with a little bit of introspection there's so many things to experiment with to try and level-up as human beings.

Ideas can be designed too.

We've discussed the effect that design has on us as individuals and the people around us. But in a way, design affects those who come after as well and thinking about future generations is where things get really trippy.

All things have a life-cycle where they are created, mature into prominence and then fade into obscurity. What's amazing is that our ability to create things that different time scales from the ones we occupy. To create a meal is to build something that will last for a few moments. Things like cars or planes or phones live over a few years. Buildings and architecture maintain relevance over a few generations.

Among the things that last the longest though, perhaps our most robust creations are our Ideas. Ideas can survive vast stretches of time, even going beyond their original intent and usefulness and morphing to adapt to the times. But most definitively they have a life-cycle as well. Think about how our notions of the traditional education system are being shaken by the introduction of online education. Think of how traditional models of marriage and family are being challenged by the recognition of the rights of gay people. And on and on, Ideas constantly rise and fall as they battle for our attention.

More long term then, how do our Ideas shape us and what can we do about it? Taking the Education example again, does it make sense that we batch people by their dates of birth and put them through school; is the most important measure of a human really its "production date"? One would think schools were factories that took in children and manufactured employees.

Or take Capitalism, arguably the most all-encompassing Idea we live with. Almost all of economic theory is founded on the notion of people being Rational actors, who act to maximize their self-interest i.e. who are selfish and self-serving. Is it any surprise then to find that the system rewards those who are selfish and self-serving? Several studies show that there are a higher than average number of psychopaths present amongst the CEOs of companies (1 in 25, according to one study). The ideas we create constantly act back on us - casting people into selfish moulds means that over time that's the sort of human being that gets preferentially produced.

Think of the way we think about Sex Education as another example. Traditionally we think that the "right" way to teach children about sex is to emphasize that it's about love and sacrifice. But might that encourage children to not think of themselves when making a choice about whether to engage in sexual activity? After all, sex has been presented as something sacrificial all along. An excellent exploration of this topic can be found here - Because it feels good : Talking to kids about sex. 

There are so many examples of this but the scary thing is that we aren't really aware of how fluid things really are; societal norms are presented to us as being these unshakable traditions. And it makes sense in a way because the people who run the show are pretty much aware of how the game works. In a very real way, our lifestyles have been designed for us from the time we enter school till we exit the Rat Race and retire. If we are to regain any sense of agency we must first realize that we have immeasurably more power than we are led to believe.

Closing thoughts

The problem is that it can all get a little overwhelming, especially the sheer "vertigo of freedom" that presents itself if you choose to go down the rabbit hole. To that I say that changing reality is really the simplest thing because you need only worry about yourself. Ultimately it is our linguistic and thought choices that decisively shape our realities!

Even the Bible says (John 1:1) "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." In the beginning was the word - in the beginning was Information. Imagine God having a thought, speaking a word and then watching everything come into being.

And Science bears this reality out as well. We think of Life as being something magical but really even the Human Body is a collection of things that are kind of not really alive. It's ultimately just a collection of proteins and chemical reactions that are all just following chemical and psychical laws. But then at the heart of all that non-life is DNA; it's essentially code, it's software that then proceeds to create it's own hardware. Check out The World is made of Language for more on this, or watch the video below.

What this means then is that the act of changing something is quite simply just an honest, whole-hearted choice. We could change our realities in an instant if we really wanted to, it would unfold on it's own pretty much just by the fact that you're still alive and breathing.

 

Further Reading and References

• [1] Shots of Awe - What is ontological design : http://youtu.be/aigR2UU4R20
• [2] http://www.academia.edu/888457/Ontological_designing 
• Shots of Awe - How our creations change us : http://youtu.be/hHCo9U4jxzE
• http://hauntedgeographies.typepad.com/hauntedgeographies/2010/12/ontological-design.html
• https://mehulsangham.wordpress.com/2011/11/26/ontological-design-part-1-cognitive-plasticity

What Women Really Want

As a member of the male variant of our species, I can safely say that after a certain age there's a certain question that comes to haunt most (if not all) of us:

"What do women want?"

It's an innocuous enough little question but it's frustrating enough that the '?' eventually becomes more of a '!' over time. After a while though, the question becomes so bewildering that it starts to become a little ridiculous. The structure of the question itself is a little broken and the cracks reveal the heart of what we've imbibed since we were boys.

Mainly it comes down to the sentiment expressed by the title of "Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus." Screw that stupid book by the way; possibly no other phrase shuts down conversations about gender dynamics as quickly as that f&!@#ng title! And it's not always clear that they've read the book either, it's often just a stand-in for "...but you just don't get it!".

My problem with that sentiment is that it paints Women (with a capital 'W') as this separate species that have different motivations from us Martians Men. Worse still, this perpetuates the image of women as social masterminds who hold hapless men in their sway using the power of their magical lady bits. In a way it casts Women as having a specific Agenda and if we could only decipher it then all would be blissful.

Btw, if these women were having secret meetings to decide the Agenda, I'd like to think Helen Mirren would chair them. :D

Seriously though, the more I think about it the more it seems like the big secret about what women want is that they don't really have much clue! And I mean that inasmuch as basically no-one (man or woman) has any clue. I might even go so far as to say that if you took a man's "soul" (however you imagine it) and put it in a woman's body, he/she/it would eventually be behaviourally indistinguishable from the average woman.

I know a lot of women are probably rolling their eyes at me right now but I think this stuff bears being said. It's one thing to just intellectually know something and quite another for it to actually be a meaningful meme in society. In the 'nature' vs 'nurture' argument, claiming that "women are from Venus" completely denies the possibility that there's any role that society plays in shaping the way women behave on a day to day basis.

Another big issue I have is that these myths are perpetuated and then capitalized on to get us to buy crap to try and barter our way into women's pants hearts. Chief among these insults to reason is the multi-billion dollar diamond industry. I'd rather not go into all of it but suffice it to say that the evidence shows that diamonds (of any shape, size, cut, clarity or heritage) are literally worthless. You could read further here : Diamonds are Bullshit, or you could watch the video below.



So yes, this is my big epiphany for you this Valentine's day. Should make a great topic for awkward conversation if you're on a first date tomorrow. ;)

And if you prefer your revelations in pithy one-liner form, well:

Women are just like men... plus the magic bits.

Imagine that on a t-shirt; Dare I say it, we could change the world!

Writing Resolutions is SO last year

Every year is kind of the same story for me regarding New Year's Resolutions. They get ignored just as easily as they get made and worse, resolution lists start converging to the same three or four staples: Eat healthier, exercise more, be more productive, yadda yadda yadda...

I think we all spend a lot of time thinking about the fact that we've failed at these lists and wondering what our problem is. We also spend a lot of time promising ourselves that "...this year will be different". All I know is that last year I received a video titled "How To Unleash Your Greatness in 2014" that I'm still getting around to watching.

After years of trying to "Be more motivated" with my resolutions, I've started to wonder about the practise itself; Maybe it's not all it's hyped up to be in terms of actually helping us grow as human beings.

Towards the end of 2014 though, I believe I've come across something that might be a bit more productive. But before I get to that, I'd like to talk about Browser Tabs for a minute.

Open tabs are the bane of my existence

At any given point, I might have anywhere from nine to thirty browser tabs open while I'm on my laptop. Also, if you use Firefox, you might be familiar with a function that shows you your previous pages if your browser crashes. What you might not know is that the feature itself allows nesting as well so at one point I probably had close to a hundred tabs open!

In addition to this being generally insane, what you might not get is that tabs are my own special kind of hell. In a way, each one represents some kind of unfinished business; Whether it's an opinion piece or buzzfeed list, the possibility exists that it could lead to something profound or useful. But this also means that now each tab is something that can't be lost lest all that potential greatness be un-unleashed (Leashed?).

And then one day... one fateful day... they were all gone! The restore function dropped every single one of almost a HUNDRED tabs!

Picking up the pieces

Now this kind of thing has happened before but never to this extent. I was absolutely mortified and even went through the five stages of grief:

• Denial
• "There must be some way to recover them, they must be stored somewhere"
• Anger
• "Stupid Firefox, can't even store some freaking tabs"
• Bargaining
• "I swear I won't let so many tabs accumulate next time..."
• Depression
• "Myyy taaabbbss... Whaaiii!"
• Acceptance
• Here's where things got interesting...

For one thing, I realized that nothing really important had been forgotten (and how would I have known even if it did). Additionally, one of the comments put me on to this Browser extension called OneTab which converts all your open tabs into a list and keeps them from getting lost. (Never Again!)

Weirdly though, I initially thought OneTab would just be a more robust version of the Firefox restore function but oddly enough, my productivity started to go waay up after just a few days!

Over the next few weeks, I've come to believe that OneTab offers a completely different way to think about dealing with "Resets" (of which New Year's day is probably the most significant).

Embracing a Fresh Start

While New Years and Birthdays are common resets we don't recognize the amount of people that have to deal with a forced reset like a natural disaster or some other tragedy.

I think the trick is to take lessons from the Forced resets and use them to enrich the naturally occurring resets. My experience with my browser crashing might have completely eliminated my backlog but I wasn't too happy about it. Where OneTab comes in is by dealing with everything super quickly, but in a way that still feels like everything is handled. If I ever need to work, I can just get to it without the open tabs eating at my (very) limited mindspace.

What I've been thinking about for a while now is how to extend the scope of the OneTab approach.  It's a common experience to be unable to focus on any one thing because of all the other stuff crowding in your mind. If there was a way to tangibly clear things away and make a little space, that could potentially be very empowering in a way that writing Resolutions simply don't provide.

OneLife

Dare I say it, you only live once. And it's too tragic to constantly be thrashing just to keep from drowning.

More radical (and braver) people than I talk about something called declaring Task Bankruptcy or ToDo Bankruptcy. Basically the steps are:

1. File everything under 'Pending'.
2. Setup some kind of system to handle new tasks.
3. Follow it in a way that doesn't let you get overwhelmed again, and
4. Make a dent in the 'Pending' folder whenever possible.

If you're able to make do with just that then great, but I've been going years without any kind of cleanup so this sort of radical cleanse is a little intimidating. For me, I'd like to expand on the first step a little more.

To-Do : Wipe the Slate Clean

This is a list of some things I currently think would be a full reset of my life right now. Lemme know if any other items come to you:

1. First off, slow down you crazy child. You're no use to anyone if you're stressed out.
• Accept that your productivity is going to dip in the short term while this list gets done. 
• See if you can give yourself the time you need, or else get it done in the time you have.
2. Get every idea and pending project out of your head and written down somewhere.
• Personally I highly recommend using Evernote in combination with the GTD system.
• Btw, sign up here if you don't have Evernote yet pretty please? Evernote Referral.
3. Save all passwords somewhere safe and password-protected.
• (I'm still looking for a trustworthy solution, let me know if you find something useful)
4. Setup Gmail Inactive Account Manager so you can designate nominees for your mail account.
• This is super important because your email account is a pretty important part of your Estate.
• If you're incapacitated for any reason it should be available for someone to handle.
• I know it's a morbid thought but yea, it's just one of those things.
5. Get a Last Will & Testament made.
• Apparently as soon as you get your first job you should get a will made up.
6. Make sure that the master passwords are included wherever someone will find them.

Once these things are done, enjoy the peace of mind it brings you for as long as possible. That feeling of open space might trigger some new ideas of their own, but those should be filed back right away into step 2; now's not the time to dive back in.

Rinse-n-Repeat step 2 until you're completely dry of pending tasks and half-formed ideas and mostly everything is written down. The mind is made for thinking, it isn't so great at the storage and retrieval bit.

Some thoughts on getting back into the groove

After putting in all this effort to extricate yourself from your commitments, it'd be madness to find yourself right back in the thick of things. Unfortunately old habits die hard and your brain was rather comfortable with the way things were till you decided to shake things up.

This is the crucial point, you will need some kind of strategy to deal with the new things that are bound to come up. The easiest thing would be to handle new tasks as they arrive or dip into your archives to search for the really important stuff.

One key thing to keep in mind is that "How" you work is not nearly as crucial as "What" you choose to work on.

• Choose your tasks for maximum impact, 
• Don't let the urgent crowd out the important, and
• Remember to have fun with it.

Eventually though, once you've gotten a sense of your priorities, a good system can help improve efficiency. One system I would recommend is the "Agile Results" system - Getting Started with Agile Results.

• For the next day, week, month, year (whatever timescales you want to use), pick three things you want to accomplish.
• Every Monday sit and review your tasks for the week, and 
• Every Friday review your learning from the week.

And if there's one thing I would impose onto your daily schedule, make a little time everyday for meditation. Your mind needs time to de-stress just as much as your body does and sadly, getting drunk doesn't count.

Please don't burn out.

Imagine for a moment that you're put in charge of about ten people temporarily and you really don't like these chaps, they're just horrible to work with. Let's say you decide to mess with them - how would you go about breaking their spirits? Personally, I think the most effective way would be to just relentlessly pile on with near-impossible deadlines, all the while raising expectations by showering them with praise. It'd only be a matter of time till they cracked and broke down crying.

If you think that's f**ked up, then what about the fact that most of us are exactly as cruel on a yearly basis... except that the mistreated employees here are the various bits of you that work to keep you healthy.

Loyal to a Fault

Sometimes I imagine my body like a dangerously loyal friend.

• Need to stay awake all night to study for that exam tomorrow? No problem!
• He's hungry and needs a sandwich but you just can't drag yourself away from your laptop? That's okay, he'll wait.
• You're both really drunk but you need to ride home safely? No worries, he'll take responsibility; he's just always so confident!

But despite this weird selflessness, it's almost become fashionable nowadays to be mean to our bodies; think of the number of workaholics who wear sleep deprivation like a badge of honour! "I'm working so hard, look at me!"

Of course the problem is that nothing comes free. Sure, you can survive with only 5 hours of sleep a night, but you'll be measurably dumber the next day. Technically you could survive without exercise but you'll become progressively unhealthier and more susceptible to mental and physical illness. What we've lost sight of is the difference between mere surviving and actually thriving! Everyone seems to be walking around in this constant mental fog, with all those little aches and pains everywhere and we think it's normal when that's not how it's supposed to be! If you need proof, you find me a healthy child who needs to warm up for 20 minutes before playing for fear of pulling his hamstring.

The straw that broke the camel's back

But then, what happens if you end up pushing too far? In a way, the immense adaptability of the body is also it's biggest weakness. The body doesn't complain proportional to the amount of stress it's taking on. Which is kind of stupid also; if it was a proportional reaction then most of us would make lifestyle corrections waaaayy sooner than we usually do.

So what happens is that your body endures and endures and endures (with the situation deteriorating all the while) until something small finally tips the scale. It's around this stage that you get people in their 30's with heart attacks and the like. For example, cancerous cells occur naturally even in healthy people but are kept from flourishing if the immune system is functioning well. There's already a strong link established between lifestyle factors and cancer, maybe someday we'll be able to prevent cancer altogether with proper lifestyle adjustments.

Recalibrating

So what can we do? How are we to reclaim a higher standard of existence where we actually start to flourish! Personally, I think that it might be a good strategy to just start with the basic, simple joys of life... get enough sleep, eat decently (whatever that means to you) and see what happens.

Also, and this is something I struggle with, but find a way to start at soon as possible without worrying about doing it perfectly.

Eventually just start some kind of movement / mindfulness practice - something like yoga that flexes both your body and mind. If you really really want to get into it you can also look into something called the "Quantified Self" movement, which might herald the next stage of human evolution; but that's a subject for another post.

Really though it's just shocking how much of a difference the little things make, like getting a decent amount of sleep; it'd be nice to finally actually wake up for once.

Handling anxiety

There's this illustration I saw online some time ago; something about what it would look like if people talked about say, heart attacks the way we sometimes discuss depression. So there's a scene where the wife is complaining to her friend like "He just collapsed in the morning and then lay around all day, and then I had to run all the errands myself." or something similar.

Then the other day I happened to find out what Trichotillomania is. It's this obsessive disorder where the person compulsively pulls out his/her own hair; usually off the head, eyebrows or eye-lashes.  

(Check out video below, it's the one that introduced me to the condition. I think it shares the first-person feel of it quite brilliantly)

Everyone worries.

Now depression and other mental health issues only get noticed once they get diagnosed but generally speaking I think it wouldn't be a stretch to say that everyone has some amount of shit to deal with. Considering that this sort of pain seems so central to being human, I think we could all use a slightly healthier way to think about dealing with it. Not just a mechanism to help people to cope better, but something to actively aid in recovery.

Now as far as society is concerned, there are always people who will misunderstand so there's not much to be done about them. (And then there are people who do understand and for those you should be truly grateful...) But when you find yourself going through crap, the way in which you choose to think about the experience can make a tremendous difference.

Anxiety is neither created nor destroyed...

What I've been thinking a lot about lately is something that could be called a "Law of Conservation of Anxiety". The laws that conserve energy or momentum have sound mathematical backing but here my proofs are slightly more empirical, if not completely anecdotal. Basically we seem to have a talent for accepting anxiety from situations or other people. Once accepted though, the anxiety doesn't go away until it's deliberately released through some form of expression; through either a creative or destructive impulse.

Now this would all be fine, but the unexpressed anxiety tends to sit around and fester and eventually leak out in other (seemingly unrelated) areas of life and cause mental-health symptoms. It's natural that this happens but the problem is that sometimes these symptoms are the only things that are tangible enough to discuss with anyone. That can then lead to people trying to help fix the symptom since only you (may) know the actual issue.

How nots to thinks

 

Why this is difficult to discuss meaningfully is because we're not talking about anything tangible here, it's all ultimately just a collection of thoughts. Thoughts in and thoughts out. Sometimes the inward-bound thoughts come accompanied by a situation but the anxiety is almost always a thought about the thing, not the thing itself. Similarly the outbound thought might be accompanied by poetry or art or whatever but... well you get the idea.

What's particularly tricky is if the thing causing worry and the area of life experiencing symptoms are externally connected because then it feeds back on itself. So for example, let's say you worry about your health. In fact you worry so much that you end up worsening your health. So then you worry that you're worried too much about your health. Which then leads to you worrying that you really shouldn't be worrying about your worry, you should be trying to worry less. Then eventually you're just worrying that you're worried that you're worried that you're... yea.

One helpful short-term thing might be to just arbitrarily limit your meta-worrying... (Bro, it's like Inception bro... wooaahhh) But basically at some point you have to just stop thinking or else, as Alan Watts said, you "won't have anything to think about but thoughts..."

How to thinks

 

So yea, all of this gets a little complicated but I don't think it necessarily has to be. Also, I don't think we need to re-invent the wheel in terms of how to think about non-physical pain. 

As such, we've all gotten cuts and bruises and various kinds of physical injury and we have an excellent and extensive vocabulary to deal with these situations. By and large if you fall down and scrape your knee all you have to do is clean it off, attend to it and then let it heal. The initial pain is an extremely useful thing in this scenario because it lets you know that you're hurt to begin with; without the pain you might just carry on what you were doing and not giving the injury whatever attention is necessary.

The big shift in thinking is really just realizing that emotional wounds are really not so different from physical wounds. That initial emotional pain doesn't mean that something's wrong with you - it's what's supposed to happen! Do whatever you can to tend to the wound and then just leave it alone, definitely don't spend any more time poking at it and worrying about it. Worrying that you might not be healing, or that you might not be healing fast enough is pretty pointless; sometimes things just need a certain amount of time to happen.

So yea, that was just my two cents on the subject. I'll leave you to extend the metaphor in whatever direction you find helpful. Depending on how badly you feel you've been hurt, it might totally make sense to just go get a professional to help you with the it.

Be well everyone. :)

Don't worry if you couldn't vote this year...

For the past few days my Feed has been inundated with photos of people's inked thumbs. Like all Big Events, the Lok Sabha 2014 elections caused all manner of sharing across the various media, and it's always a sight to see. But amidst all the hopeful, proud photos of people there was a saddened set of people. A fair number wanted to vote but weren't able to for some reason. Either they were traveling or they weren't registered or their names were not to be found or whatever.

To be fair, I can't even begin to imagine the sheer logistical nightmare it must be to organize an election across more than a billion people! But still it kinda sucks when these things happen. But there's hope yet, assuming that the you really wanted to "make a difference". 

Just do something. 

Do anything for that matter, anything at all!

Educate yourself about nationally important topics, read up on a little economic theory, make a video about an issue or a charity that's important to you, volunteer at your old school, mentor someone who you think you might have something to teach, volunteer on a local clean-up drive, help out at an NGO, check out your company's CSR division, do anything! If you're really into it you might even build the next social enterprise that ends up bringing clean drinking water to a whole bunch of people.

And yes, of course these things are hard. Of course these actions take time. Even to donate money to someone like a Range.org requires more time than it takes to walk to the polling station and vote. But then again, whoever said that all it took to be a good citizen was to press a little blue button once every five years. The truth is that while voting is quite important, it's really only the least you can do as a good citizen.

The truth is...

 

The truth is that you are so much more capable than you've been led to believe. 

Think of all the skills that you've acquired over all these years. Think of how much difference it would make if even one of those skills was something that could bring joy to someone else. And don't worry about "Changing the World" and all that nonsense, just tend to your little corner of the universe as best as you can.

Think of what would happen if your efforts were to start accumulating. What if others started following suit, tending to their own little corners as best as they can. 55% voter turnout in Bangalore is low? Nonsense, think of what even 55% of that 55% could do if they all started looking outward a little bit.

The truth is that you are so. much. more. capable than you've been led to believe. Some quick pointers though:

1. Don't try to do it all at once.
2. Don't assume that you always know what's best for everyone, and
3. Don't worry that your efforts aren't big enough.

Don't try to do it all at once

I think the biggest hurdle is always the first step, which is to get out of the chair and actually do something. Then last year I watched this interview with a very young entrepreneur who had her own social enterprise helping underpriveleged children, and she said something that was a real kick in the pants for me.

I think... something that they do a lot is they want their NGO's to be really large immediately, which is not going to happen... But if they start small and are practical, then it's really not that hard.

I'm paraphrasing, but you get the idea. You should really check out the rest of the interview if you can, it's quite cool.

Don't assume that you always know what's best

This should be self explanatory. Generally just try and have a good handle on all the assumptions you're making about a particular problem and then keep your eyes and ears open to see if those assumptions pan out in the real world.

Don't be self-absorbed about your service to the the public, that's just the worst.

Don't worry that your efforts aren't big enough

Lastly, and this is a tough one, don't worry that the issues are just too large to make any kind of dent. You'd be surprised at the number of movements that have started from just a small dedicated team of like two or three people. 

Hey and if it's really getting you down, just think of the lesson of the 'Dancing Guy'.

Closing Thoughts

There was a version of this poem in our school diaries. Must've read this thing about a million times without really getting it, but I've gotten a new perspective on it over time:

When I was a young man, I wanted to change the world.

I found it was difficult to change the world, so I tried to change my nation.

When I found I couldn't change the nation, I began to focus on my town. I couldn't change the town and as an older man, I tried to change my family.

Now, as an old man, I realize the only thing I can change is myself, and suddenly I realize that if long ago I had changed myself, I could have made an impact on my family. My family and I could have made an impact on our town. Their impact could have changed the nation and I could indeed have changed the world.

~by Unknown Monk, 1100 A.D.

Edit (20/04/2013) : 

• I should clarify that the elections as such are still on-going, it's just the Karnataka phase got done very recently.
• Also, I added some more links to some projects I'm aware of. There are doubtless many more that're as deserving. 
• Minor other changes.

Putting the cart before the horse

Our bodies are funny things really. We'd like to think that they're rational, easy to understand things but they're really not. Or maybe they rhythms they obey are still a whole level of understanding beyond our current reach. Either way, it's continually fascinating how certain processes work. 

Maybe our minds are too enslaved to the concept of causality. For example, if a person is smiling, you'd naturally assume that they were feeling particularly joyous at that moment. In other words smiling is just an external symptom that is simply expresses an internal state :

Happiness ----> Smiling

So naturally  the concept of Laughter Clubs sounded ludicrous to me initially. Like why would you randomly start laughing if you really didn't feel like it? And even more confusing, how could this forced, "artificial" laughter succeed in triggering actual happiness? But then you read about laughter clubs and not only do the participants report leaving the events feeling elated, but then you have lists of studies that suggests there might actually be benefits to the practice.

It would appear that the reaction goes both ways :

Happiness <----> Smiling

This then got me thinking about the process of trying to consciously improve oneself. Mostly everyone is on this journey, in some form or another, but this process is fraught with frustration, whether you're trying to give up smoking, lose weight or be more productive.

For me, the most irritating part of the whole thing is that generally, the different aspects of your life kind of tie into one another. So maybe you want to eat more healthily but your job is really demanding and you don't get time to cook properly. Or maybe you want to sleep more but you also have to a lot of work in your spare time for a hobby. Either way, the problems can begin to seem intractable because it looks like you'd have to overhaul your entire life in a one massive swoop.

In a sense, you wind up stuck in a phase of constantly "trying" to change instead of actually making progress and "being" that new thing. And after a while the "trying" phase itself can become entrenched which means it's now comfortable to be uncomfortable, if that makes sense.

Anyway, it strikes me that there might be another way to approach the problem. Instead of only planning out the steps between you and your goal, it might be possible to also pick out some marker that describes your future self and then start doing that thing immediately. Nevermind that you've not achieved the new state yet, this should work exactly like the laughter club thing. By doing the new, symbolic behaviour, you're no longer "trying" to change and instead you've already kind of changed, in a sense. 

And it doesn't really matter how arbitrary the marker is, it's more important that it's something physical and tangible and externally visible. These are important because if the marker is something intagible like "in the future i will always be happy", then that's just a thought. And thoughts have a way of feeding in on themselves and chasing their own tails and not getting you anywhere. Having something physical is easier because our bodies are physical and because an external thing would be easier to evaluate to know for yourself if you're doing that thing or not.

So here's my plan, I've been trying several things over the months to be more productive so for the next month I'm planning to change it up a bit. For the next month, I will endeavor to be clean shaven for the entire 30 days. I think shaving will be a good, yet sufficiently arbitrary marker for several reasons. Firstly it's a nice, physical thing that is easy to evaluate. Also, from personal experience over the past few months, it's generally the easiest thing to let slip if things start getting hectic which then has me roaming around like Mr. Crusoe. 

Also there's no need to get fanatical about it, as such I think it's okay if i don't go more than three days without a shave. The marker is chosen more for how integrated it is into the rest of your life and how much of a change it will cause if habits surrounding the marker are altered in any way. Not to mention that my particular shaving habits require almost half an hour to get a good shave.

I'll count this as my first official experiment on this blog, in the style of David Cain of the Raptitude blog. The experiment will commence on the 1st of November and I'll post the results after the end of the month. 

Lemme know if this makes sense to anyone and if you're trying your own versions of the experiment then leave me a comment. :)