People [1] always have got something to say, you have got to do what you got to do. People laughed at me when I was hopping jobs, people have laughed at me when I was struggling to make a career in Music—“what next? They would always ask me”. I can easily say that I have got past all that and I can say that I love what I do. I love [2] coming to office everyday, I don’t have to say (who the hell is God anyways) TGIF. There are days when I even work from home; I know I would be hated for saying what I said. Most of us want a comfortable 9 to 5 job for few years, a bitchy girlfriend (a playboy if you’re the opposite), then a “seedhi saadhi” wife (an obedient dog for the opposite), then we want few kids to raise, and list just goes on. Lots of people, I have found, wish they had done that (don’t know what), wish they had just attended that painting class or that guitar class, as we all know, time never comes back. But I can’t really control peoples wants, I am instead trying to cut through all that come up with something that we all want to do—“do what we love”.

I still remember my PL had bought tickets for the Deep Purple concert in Bangalore, she knew that I had worked for 2 continuous days before that–I am not saying that every PL will do that if you work hard, but it is easy to forget that you will be positive only if you want to and you do see positives [3]. That some people are after you all the time has passed the tests, and there is nothing much you can do about, you just have to ignore that fact like a mole on your nose–if not for that, you would have entered the miss India contest and won it too, you see? No? (I really like doing this—see? No? As if I am an eye surgeon and I am slowly, one by one, operating on everybody in this world and asking them “see? No?”).

But, agreed, life sometimes doesn’t give you much choice, neither does it leave you with much courage where you can decide to say “Do hell with it” and do whatever you want to do. But solutions exist because problems arise, and we have to choose if we want to wrestle with the problem or whether we want to be consumed by the problem.

Doing what you love doesn’t mean you can sit on the Californian beach and wonder about the next wave that is going to sweep the sand, thinking, someday the waves will carve out your name on the sands. Trust me, it is time tested—you will be bored, as human beings, we have got to do something.

A typical response to what I am saying can be: “You don’t understand, I have spent a fortune for getting a degree and this rate of earning would require my children to repay the loan” –negative return on investment—as one of my friends likes to call it. But I say again, nature, in spite of all the reversals, has a way about it; it seems to balance things with time, question remains: are you ready to play the game? It all just happens in a split second, if you do not last, you lose.

I think we have to be hard on ourselves for once. We have to break the shells and say that “yes, I don’t like this, I am not going to do this” or say “I am going to do something that will help me reach where I want to”. That said– it is not very easy to know what you want to do, or to know what you love, unless you are a child prodigy good at some art or something that can be pursued and made a career out of–if you are reading this, chances are that you aren’t one (that’s plain arrogance). So the only choice you are left with is to try to know yourself somehow, know what gives you that extra “kick” in life, and see if you can sustain that kick consistently–if yes, then you’ve got it. I also feel it is better to separate yourself from a place where you feel you don’t belong to; you neither do well for yourself nor to the place by not parting ways. You won’t believe the kind of results that can come out if you actually understand that and then implement that. Organized rebellion demands people to be a part of the system, at least if you don’t want to end up being a junkie or you don’t want to end up in a punk-rock band; to change the system, you first need to be in the system–you have to know the rules to break them (that applies to the system you create inside your brain, and when you want to change, you know where the change comes from, no?)

So first, you have to know that you need a change, a change that has to understand why it is happening and what it is going to change into. It will happen that the change will reject you lot of times, and you will want to recede into the old self—where you were at least allowed to be lazy, you were not trying to do something else, trying to be a change—your not so self. Instead, you can still get out of the bed, and say to you, “What is the big deal with life anyways? I know I am a failure, happy?” and you will be ready for the next adventure, still calculating your means, still not forgetting that you will need enough rice to eat in the night and three cups of tea (bhai sahaab (meaning gentleman), log jyaada chai peete honge (meaning there are people who drink more than 3 cups)) — But, no more. You will go out, see that your friends have dressed up well, speaking to their GF/BF on the phones, kissing each other goodbyes, getting into their cars (don’t worry, you will have yours too), and all that will suddenly sweep your brain out of all the things that you had taught yourself the night before. “I can easily live like that, can’t I?” you say to yourself. You also feel a bit proud saying that, but it is of no use, it all comes back to you—“Fuck, I am not doing the right thing, fuck you, no, seriously, fuck you”, you say again. Or, you just end up pretending or saying that you like what you do, that is what most of the people around us do, not because they actually mean it, but because that is what expected of us—kind of a social statement. (How many people will really still continue doing what they do for living without getting paid? If you really love what you are doing, you will still do it. Say if you are painter, you will still paint, difference being, that you might have to work in restaurants in day time in order to feed yourself).

Warning:

With some calculations, it is easily said of people like me—that we either do very well in life, or our actions seem to be very bipolar in nature, and lots of us end up doing nothing in life. But, again, I am not really saying that you should go against the nature and do that, nature itself has programmed itself to not let something like that happen to itself, but I say it is just those small “tweaks”, which can decide you making a choice for yourself or you being chosen by some choices.
—-
Lots of people do come to a conclusion about what they would like/love to do, but there are again, problems that come in the way that stop them from doing what they would like to do. One common approach of getting around that is thinking that you will do something (like programming) for a while (say till you are 40), and then do what you love after that. But it is sad that most of those plans remain as it is, they never really actualize, by the time you are in a position to do something, you are already staring at a less crispy packet of chips, and a bottle of cola that has lost all its fizz—Yes, that is definitely a very, very weak plan, especially the kind of will power we are endowed with, did we have the will?

So the next option is do both the things (the one that you have to do to make a living + something that you would like to become source of living) at the same time. Although it sounds good, this option is not for the faint hearted. As many people have put it—Job and work are two different things, you separate both the things because you see a difference between them, how can you still do justice to both when you already know that one is more fun?

But in either of the cases, you need persistence, yes, sad I know. Problem with lots of us (especially the quarter-lifers) is that we don’t know what will give us happiness, we think we know it, but we don’t—we would have been happy otherwise. Think about it, you usually are able to take decisions, then you are also able to solve the problems with some effort, but again, only to realize that you solved the wrong problem, isn’t it? So you have to get that right. How? Again, see if the “kicks” are lasting enough time. You have to be able to say “Good yaar”, you have done something really good today, I really think I have done some work, you actually have to be able to admire yourself for what you have done, apart from the admiration people who care about you will shower upon you. You have to be obsessed with yourself, no matter what people say, only listen to those whom you really respect, yes your friends. Ask yourself if you are able to respect your friends, I know that sounds very ruthless, you have to make a choice, Rajma and rice or Vada pav (it’s a really bad comparison, No? hehe, laugh people laugh).

There are so many things connected to this issue that we will need a sitting (you know what I am talking about, don’t you?) to talk about it at length.

Anyways, are you disappointed with what you have got so far? If yes, then it is good. Knowing that you are disappointed is the first step towards being ‘not disappointed’ (it’s a pain typing this word again and again). Ignorance is not always bliss; we have to get that clear first. But if you are failing, but still trying in the direction of what you at least hazily know that you want to become, it is fine. History tells us that many great people have experienced severe disappointments in life at the beginning, may be you are just one of them? Don’t ever say you can’t, you always can, really, I don’t want to sound like Stephen Covey or some shit, I am a failure, yes, I accept, would you at least believe it now? Don’t decide to soon, or don’t come to conclusions based on few sample points, time, yes, but that will be another discussion. Remember, constraints are fantastic; they get less credit than they should, and they are actually making our lives simpler by giving us less to think about. Don’t be fooled into thinking that a million bucks will give you what you want in life: the happiness, the ability to choose what you want to do, etc.

First things first: you first have to know that you can do what you love, you see? No?

The world wants you to do what you love—yes!!

Notes

1. Why should you believe me?  And what credentials do I have to distribute gyaan? It happens to me that I am always looking for various kinds of things which can teach me something, and I always stumble on luminaries, some whom I admire, some not so. But all the great ones have one thing in common—they all have been there and they are doing it. So there were lot of times, I used to think “well this guy is head of science department in MIT, he obviously knows shit, and he’s got things to say, I can’t possibly benefit from them”. I think for a change, if you hear it from somebody who himself is coming to terms with life– then it might strike you more than it otherwise would or could.

2. Like HandyManny. I love watching this animation.

3. I raise this issue first, because most of the audience who read this belong to “office” cultures, where, there is always a boss sitting in front of you.

Hunches are volatile version of intuitions, which I believe are thought to be less potent than they are. I over-pride myself for embodying these intuitions that are always bang-on. I have a hunch about my hunches that they lose their punches when they are out in the open. I don’t know how much can I believe that hunch now, but in the process of relieving myself out of some sin born out of unreasoning, I test my intuitions against tangible evidence—”I am not a superstition, I am not a superstition”–each one of them screams.

My intuitions somehow can sneak past my reality into the real reality, and they always gather the right information for me. When I second guess, the intuitions almost always falter, but it isn’t their fault, we can’t just make them lose their meaning and expect them to live as if there still run on some meaning, can we? I don’t want them to be right that often, because I don’t want to live on intuitions for some inexplicable reasons, may be I just want to plain-sure, and intuitions don’t allow you to be cocksure, but my misery is such, I don’t know which one to choose, I want reason inside reality to work more than reason inside subjective reality.

No, but you can see the fire in front of you, right?

Not until you just told me so

So you mean to say I am lying? Or you mean to say that I am not using enough mental faculties and information to give you that information?

No, I want to believe that the fire is there, but I don’t want to believe you

Sometimes it happens that we want to get burnt, we want to feel the ashes rising through us, just anticipating the soothing effects of rubbing ashes all over the body. It is not about learning, most of the times we still hope that the fire won’t burn us, thinking that we got to feel the heat to generate the heat, it is very subjective, it may or may not be the case, if you win, you praise your intuitions and your intuitions go stronger until they decide to part ways from the truth. If you lose, your intuitions move away in different directions, like a jelly fish, after a while, they just go with the flow, so there is no clear separation between what you do and what you feel—I feel that is the worst thing, obviously because you have lost, no matter how much you try to not feel—the feeling stays, and it modifies the intuitions in way that would make them (the intuitions) less free, misguided, and useless really.

But the postmortem of previous thoughts always yields “What would you have done anyway”—that is the exact thing that allows us to believe that we are better of trusting our intuition—it isn’t logic, but it isn’t that illogical—that is what we find.  Our intuitions are based on solid reasons—what should not be—but should be if you are not a fan of intuition. Intuitions, technically, have to be crazy, for e.g. you feeling the sign of an impending accident at a signal before the accident site—and it really happens—that’s intuition, something like space and time, aren’t they intuitions? I cannot prove to myself that space and time are entities, I fear space and time, and I fear what they without reason and logic, and still make believe that everything happens for a reason—thoughts like these make me believe that I am better of working with intuitions.

What should we do? Should we choose the stable reality? Or should we give uncertainty a chance? We always do that—but should we still do that when stability seems to keep you warm? I don’t know if these are intuitions that are keeping me late up in the night, or is it just that I have over eaten (which is simple logic). Since I have not uttered the four letter word in this post till now—Fuck you intuitions—I don’t want you to be true so often.

“Yes, but what about the rivers and oceans?”

“What about them?”

“They all have a way about them”

“True”

“So, I say, lung cancer might not necessarily be cured”

“But still can be cured on days without being dependent on truth, isn’t it?”

“You can put it that way”

“So truth still remains true?”

“Doesn’t have to be  exquisitely tight I assume”

“But how do you know where to go and where not to?”

“It shouldn’t be that difficult, you can just go for a walk outside the luxurious hotels of pica chiccu, if you reach a mountain-edge and walk past it”

“But it hasn’t been proved that it exists”

“You got to try it”

“Whatever, I still would like to believe that if you truly believe in something….”

“Isn’t it just obvious? Doesn’t necessarily mean it is true all the times, but sometimes it is, your beliefs probably aren’t used to living on earth”

“What a golly”

“It doesn’t have to be one”

“Is it approximately 9.8ms^-2?”

“Doesn’t matter”

“What if it is a false calculation?”

“Doesn’t matter”

“May be it is harmless,

“I know the burden of modern drudgery, but your exclamations and pitch differences won’t change it”

“You are getting metaphorical”

“Try taking everything as it is–literally”

“I am almost there, but this is really difficult; trying to scour that last shredded piece of evidence to support my belief”

“As I said, on occasions, life doesn’t need to complicated”

“Do you mean I should stop seeking it?”

“I didn’t say it; I just mean that you don’t need some divine shit or clairvoyance to see that sun doesn’t hide itself everyday in the east”

“But I can at least try to be creative”

“Anything that might help” ……He takes a heavy shield which is worn by the warriors, and wraps himself with that. He is made to believe by his clan that there is a Magic, which other people cannot just see, simply because people don’t believe in it. He (I keep saying he because I just don’t want to raise a debate about it, but if I seem to be doing that, then let me be clear—I am not a chauvinist) fights his little instincts, thinking that is necessary to do so to do get results in this experiment. He plummets, and people who wait outside, ready to praise him for his belief, people, waiting there for some divine intervention, hear a lonely splat.

So you had taught me how to recover from a spin when the earth beneath me seemed to spin out of control. While I lay in the crotch of my folly, trying to see beyond my what-I-believe-to-be-true-encrusted-wall, I wish the person speaking to my male lead—the alpha—would have crossed the barrier, somehow, just to know that everybody in this world is with him, and he didn’t need a private universe to know that interstate highways too have got speed limits. Really? You ask. Yes, I say if it is not for that, we still might be sitting on the trees and flinging crap at each other. It’s not so much an algorithm for taking out a bucket from a well, as a “life is too short to do that” defense. Not selecting hypotheses and scrutinizing them is one way of not doing that.

“But you were not even listening to national anthem, were you?”

“No, I wasn’t”

“What caused you action action what you action-ed?”

“Thought of equaling that which I had never equaled”

“Was it necessary?”

“Not, as telegraphic as you put it now, had crossed my mind, I mean the thought”

“I ask again, was it necessary?”

“I ran deep into myself, I can’t necessarily say it was necessary”

“So you dangled over the waters and thought that your feet are clean?”

“Now you talk about water, let us be clear about what we are talking here”

“Yes I have to create truth, then another, and I must continue to do so”

“Why should I believe you?”

“Because the truth doesn’t change even when you don’t believe me”

“You just told me that there is no truth”

“I never said that”

“Wait, you just say something and the next moment you come up with a smirky-refutation”

“Yes, that is ‘true’, as you say, the key is to do it selectively, and you will master that with some time and practice”

So, he races—we are unable to see the light in his eyes, he thinks, but, he didn’t know that he was festooning reality with another reality, another world within another world. Pardon me, but don’t you sense an emotionless rational human being there? And what about intentions, don’t they count? You ask. It hardly waits for you, which is what he had to understand. You don’t necessarily have to fall because you want to be saved—like wanting your wants—you have to know whether you want it or not, you want that feeling, but the feeling is very different from what-it-is. It is born outside sometimes, but lot of times, if you know it—the falling star remains the same—you have to make your own whisper, a wish perhaps, but the star, still, remains the same.

The Chevy Nova never sold well in Spanish speaking countries. “Nova” means “it doesn’t go” in Spanish.

So what is the magic? Does it exist? Is it some special power? Postulating ‘I-believe” as magic hasn’t worked; we have already seen that, been there and done that. Is it just that we come up with postulates just because we don’t know it? We don’t have to know it, I say. You have a model, you work with it, you keep working with it as long as it is working (whatever that might be for you), and you start working with something else after that. Do you still think that the question needs to any more difficult now? Yes, it isn’t that difficult, but it is hard to undo the beliefs, when we have held them for so long, it is painful, you want to enjoy the truth, but it can’t be so to start with. The best advice you will ever get will hurt, because it has to? Not really, I think it has to do with you giving up something, something you were holding on to for a long time—like not believing in a belief, or believing the wrong one.

Are we obsessed with too many maps? We don’t travel that far really—forget about going in different directions—now that will need lot of time in your hands, lots of balls perhaps? What is the fun? You ask—of trying to get a kick just for the heck, traveling to places where you shouldn’t? There are just too many territories to cover everything, we cannot do that. Altering from inside to outside? It still remains the same—sun doesn’t go down in the east because you observe it. It would still be the same even if you don’t. Kick—get it—or just kick it, it still doesn’t remove the impressions of what-should-be from what-it-is; we cannot be deceived because we cannot be persuaded. No, you don’t even have to believe this, I am not a know-it-all, I am just saying it was important that you read Bible in the schools, why not Ramayana or Mahabharata? There you go again, it doesn’t really matter.

So what gives? “I am not particularly sure about that”, you say. I don’t know if people really mean that all the times or sometimes or selectively choose it for themselves, not sure, that is all it gives, but how sure are our beliefs about what we believe or what we do not. Can we genuinely be unsure about our own beliefs? Yes, may be we can attach a probability to it, and recalculate it all the times the event changes. But how is that possible? The information about lot of things won’t ever change, and so won’t the probabilities which are functions of information and not dependent on your or my beliefs. The core temperature of the Sun is still the same, the boiling point of pure water? Or the impure water—does it really come down to 50C in some part of the world, can you still say, well, it is “subjective”, it depends?

There there was, he was, my friend, he waited until reaching the gates of heaven (damn my obsession with heaven and hell), just to know whether he can enter the same or not. He maintained his way, his way of right, his right of way, but, in the end, he died as if he was plain wrong. Why not give the at least the idea a chance, if not beliefs. Are you engaged in war of beliefs? Engaged in war of ideas? Which one should you participate in? Can we regenerate something substantial rotten? May be we can, may be we can’t, but, one thing is for sure, we would again be asked to give up our long loved propensities. No, on both the counts, whether relativity holds good or not, we have stop saying “what is true” unless we totally believe in the belief behind the truth. We need to assert the correspondence between what is inside and what is out there. We should not confuse inability to conceive the truth with ‘can a belief ever be wrong’.

You see? Beliefs don’t change reality. Yes, they change our personal-worlds, our beliefs about belief in what we believe– a personal reality.

I wish the question had been simpler than that.

Whenever we talk about it, it is always projected as if it is the single biggest meaning we are looking to spend our lives for. Is inducing desire satisfaction the only purpose of life? Would you gamble life for happiness? (Please don’t be crazy), What about sadness? You certainly don’t think it is something beautiful—do you? Nobody likes it; as lonely as it is already, never tries to populate (loners know that), but even the loners seem to want to get away from it! Trading off sadness for something called as happiness? — The same happiness that teases us in the sporadic moments throughout the life, and deludes us to the death. That is what we want? –Spare a thought for the sadness that brings us closer, the sadness, which is root of most of the art form present in this world, the thing that gives you company when you are alone, the unconditionally loving sadness that even permits you to call it bygone, the same sadness that allows you to forsake itself.

Thanks to evolution that we are not wired to pursue things that will always make us soma-coma—I am happy mama. And now we name it satisfaction. How can one want to be satisfied in the future, and not be totally in touch with what is happening at present? Sadness is beautiful, it is free of anguish and anger, and I guess people are not able to distinguish between sadness and non-sadness; we mistake happiness for absence of sadness. Oh poor boy—how can you attain something, when you don’t know that something, it is not the clichéd “truth”, you just don’t know it that’s all.

Happiness is separate from pleasure, you would know it if you have won a lottery or you walked into a bar and picked up a beautiful girl/ intelligent guy (assumed for avoiding flare up). So many times we read but fail to capture the logic behind the advice of constructing your life in a way that matches what’s most important to you. It’s eudemonic changes that center our lives on our values that are capable of raising our hedonic set points. And when Indian philosophies always talk about “Happiness always comes from within” –We always shrug them away as some pedantic aphorisms from people who don’t know what we are going through.

So seeking happiness should not be a Holy Grail quest I say. Doing that is as grave a mistake as supposing “skin-deep” beauty to be “beautifulness” and ones age to be factor of how “old” one is, aren’t we very clear on those things at least? When one orients himself/herself around the things that one wants, the process so to say, then, we would be easily able to stare happiness on the face and say, “Fuck you darling, but I don’t want you right now, I am spending some quality time with sadness here, let me see when I can see you”.

One of the biggest problems we face is that happiness is already assumed (by most of us) to be something almighty. We do not know how much happiness we can sink in; do we know that we will not run out of happiness? May be, if our life span would have been 500years, then we would have given sadness a chance to prove itself, even though it means that you are asking air to prove its existence. May be already obsessed human civilization will take this concept to such levels of optimization that we will have a “food-drive” to make us feel that we have eaten plenty, fork some taste sensors inside the body, which will react positively to the food-drive, at the same time, some emotional modules will be inserted into the brain that will give us pleasure equivalent to pleasure experienced while having sex, yeah, it might even become a one-player game. And what will happen to all the problems, you will ask? They will be just confined to ever-expanding space of what is called as “we don’t want”, they will be simply reduced to a garbage-collection activity, something that happens to us inside the sleep all the time.

So if I ask you a simple question—What would you choose? — Something that stays desirable, or something that will never exhaust? You have chosen sadness, because you did not use intuition here, you see, we can never choose happiness using intuition. So, would you want to be as happy as possible? If someone tells you there are places called “orgasmic-ethers”, would you go there? Even if someone tells you that everything will be incomprehensible there? Would you still over-ride your preference for once, and give sadness a chance? Even if one tells you that you are not sad enough to read this? Are you going to get out of the bed tomorrow and say “I am really going to do something that makes me sad today”? I really need to stop writing now, because it gets me closer and closer to you know what, do u still….

What if we hadn’t chosen such and such thing? Will our lives be the same? Would the necessary conditions that were fulfilled to reach the present state been different? “Oh, I am really liking the present consequential events, every thing happens for the good, thank god it is like that more often than what I think would might be or might have been”.

A classic quarter-life-crisis case: “That girl is really hot!! It seems there’s something more to her than just the “hotness”, she might be the angel that I am searching for all this while, or is she? Am I? What if she already is hooked up, what about her past? What does she think? What if she embarrasses me in front of “real” audience? Oh , but I ain’t doing anything “Non-Jesus”, I am 22, liking a girl for what she looks like and asking her out shouldn’t be a crime. No!! What if…”

Those what-if scenarios are in-fact good; they make us choose something which we think is better. That is how the elimination happens, isn’t it? But how good those eliminations are? How often do they prove to be right out-of-the-mind? Mere exposure effects? More often there are so many questions and if one game-plan is to answer all the what-ifs, we all know what happens in the end. Point is if we lose touch with what is really happening and screw the things around us in the process of obsession with what-ifs—unreached-yet-strongly stated!!

Real world examples are around us; it is no wonder that most guys who do well with women play sports and spend less time with books (don’t stop me from generalizing), because they actually step out. Going no further than myself, I recall my patterns, and I have no qualms in admitting that I read only 15 books in the time when you know..

Not to say that nobody who is good with women reads or writes, but it just is something that we can see around us. Another one—think about the time when you really used to be good in sports or atleast tried to be so, what do u remember? The movie “Goal” where people think a lot? Doesn’t work for sure.

How many times do we people telling us—“don’t think too much”. It’s unfair to say that people who think too much should not do so. People who think more will succeed more in the fields of science, mostly, if they pursue science that is. But the number of what-ifs will always be more for people who think more, and the number of things that have not reached result stage will always be more, basically leaving room for more in the mind. The average line of happiness requires less number of what-ifs, and that is something that some people do in a matter-of-fact ways.

So the point is to cut-down the noise, and to do without all the million predictions about something, 90% of which is mostly crap. How to avoid “if only things had been different”? Well, they are again results of what-ifs. I don’t think meditation will do the trick for you, it’s about going for it, thinking about the next day instead of next year, about pleasing your woman/man than dreaming about the “one”, talking about the subject instead of sub; I mean just go man/woman!!

EDIT: There’s a flip side to think about, there is a little evidence in E.P, which say that we are in-fact doing it right. May be asking a girl right is not our thing, which we compensate somewhere else by doing something else better. Forgive me for my solecisms, Argh!

PC-person (peculiar country): starts with Hehe, haha

We: Is there anything funny about me?

PC: funny? Oh you’re so funny, please stop it.

We: But I haven’t even said anything.

PC: anything? Anything, dude, whatever, haha.

An exact opposite exact scenario: A country where men and women are cranky, cranky as when one gets when he/she becomes a “captain-backfire”. The above conversation in such a country can get you into trouble.

PC: (grunts at you) huh!! Huff!!

We: Is there anything funny about me?

PC: funny? (Hits you on the nose) Oh you’re so funny (slaps you), please stop it (that’ll be you)

We: But I haven’t even said anything.

PC: anything? (His expression says you ruined his life), anything, dude, whatever!! Huh!! (Grunts again)

Such a thing will happen if people are never taught to control the emotions. When we’re born, we usually either cry, laugh or are really curious; basically on the extreme ends of human emotions. But as time passes by, we are taught to develop hooks, on which we can hang our reactions.

Thinking about it, it seems that we lose lot of our spontaneity because of the toning down. The levels of loss obviously vary from person to person, but the loss is usually big. Even if  someone decides to be more spontaneous, it will come only after constant conscious internalization. Being creative is related a lot to being spontaneous.

Everybody likes spontaneity, that is what gives us more joy more times than not. But, one of the above hypothetical countries is not a solution. That is why we are always taught moderation. Yet, what-has-happened will tell us that the most creative people did belong to one or both of the above hypothetical countries (at least when people were at their creative best, do hell with it!!). In the above story, laughter can be substituted by hysteria, and I may start making sense a bit more.

Can we moderate the levels of emotions to a degree that we retain more spontaneity? It will mean less thinking, more doing, thinking will be spontaneous, works or doesn’t-work will be split second decision, lots of heuristics, so much of it that the scope of general rules people will know will be very-very large. Creativity no longer will be a thing which will be taught. I think the art-instinct quotient which is thought to be hardwired into us, will definitely grow.

Spontaneity may also mean less calculations based on past, less biases if I can say that.

It seems I have mistaken extreme emotions for spontaneity, does being spontaneous means we present extreme emotions? Does “being extreme” means we are spontaneous? One can argue about that, but definitely smells like some concoction happening there.

Would like to touch more on controlled environments here, but my spontaneity is giving way to lack of solid knowledge—plain truth is never discovered, but failed attempt at discovery is a step closer to actual discovery.

Another day, i was talking to this woman– A very familiar sight of people mourning about how much less they are earning. She was a fresher in fact, I didn’t want to sound like a guy who is advising about unimportance of money just because he ain’t earning any big. So I told her something which deals with the topic in a roundabout way– “Don’t try to find mistakes in something which you’re doing, because chances are that you have ended up in something already, and like most of the “bad” things that happen to us in life, you ain’t going to get rid of them very quickly, so you either do it by just letting it be, or just get out of the thing”, I said. A cat in a glove catches no mice felt true, but I also told her that she won’t understand what I just said for just the reason that there is no reason for what I said. It just ain’t about reasons when you let yourself just be.

Just let it be doesn’t need to be The beatles, neither does it have  to be something like:

“Every now and then I’m able to break out, shout ooo hoooooooo, out and loud, clear and able to veer, I just feel free, suddenly at peace, so ecstatic inside, there are no differences, all just seems one, the Indian western classical carnatic fusion if you like it. It just touches my soul, I become one, there’s clear blue sky, white road, lush green grass on one side, brownish green on the other with trees starting right next to that grass, trees really don’t have many leaves, but they are beautiful, they are calm, they don’t move at all, but fit so wonderfully across the blue sky. The smell and touch of air, makes me feel like riding a bicycle, through the autumn grass, a small pond with beautiful clear water, wave of birds sweeping across me , nothing more needed really , just autotrophic is what I feel , I need it, dont care really, I just have it, I told you, im in that mood right now as I sit in front of the laptop, don’t really need a reason, just one of those days when reasons don’t need any reason, carpe diem baby.”

What stops us from just let it be is usually fear, lack of courage to see things on the face. It’s as if you will more ashamed of yourself when you will find out why were you ashamed in the first place. I know it ain’t that simple to establish the connection here, but that is just submittal, I feel, by a thought not so good to a thought which ain’t better either. Many a times, how to feel good requires asking the question why does one feel bad? It’s as if one has to go lengths and ask why is bad bad? Why is bad not good? Why is feeling ashamed bad? May be it might be good on some other planet, why should we just have to think about it the way we think it to be? You might come up with, Well, “this really isn’t that bad”.

If we consider Life to be a network of road which we will be walking upon, we can think of let it be as a pond or a lake besides the road on which we take to drive to office everyday. At first, we will feel the terrible smell of the lake as we take the road everyday, the smell will deter us from taking that path, but as days pass by, we get used to smell. During the course, we also take various other roads which take us to our destination, the old road as I call it, is still there, we are just liking the other routes more and increasing the traffics on other routes, that is what I had told her, in a more blunt manner of course, Whats the fun in letting it be if you won’t let me be!

Will there be less bias if we do evaluation/comparison without any external inputs(i assume that we reach a decision after comparing among all the best possibilities, always), No, not always, we do need data, what kind of data is already in the system will influence the decision making a lot. We insist on generating copies of data we had, we don’t usually believe that people can figure out better on there own, that is where most of the biases are born.

We do have propensity towards mysterious and secret things, we always want to unveil the mysteries and secrets. Into youth, we are always intrigued by sex, and then it gets regular stuff for all of us. But there’s so much of forbidden quality attached to it that we want to know it and we want to do it. It seems to be a mix of natural as well situational bias. But most of the other biases will be situational and will be learned more than already known. We always care less about knowing things which are accessible to everybody, isn’t it? Science is accessible to everybody, information is freely available, atleast now with the advent of internet, but i don’t think many people find science to be interesting and mysterious, because it is freely available. One wouldn’t probably want to study business and apply science to it, one would rather prefer to go to a top B school, because one thinks there’s something taught there which will change their lives, isn’t the case, we probably lose out, because of bias. From where do such biases arise?– Information, data, standards, simply put- Biases.

Will being selective lead to better choices? Asking the obvious, aint I? Less is more, usually used in the field of design, now that’s a good place to start according to me. Less, i.e. simple, and closer to less will mean closer to accurate and more later. We can be as selective as we want to, but if we are open to selection, chances are that we will ready to drop our choices even after being convinced to chose them. Simply put, we will will filtering more often than we usually do, leaving lot of biases on the way, no longer giving value to expensive things, just because they are expensive, we will not become totally utilitarian also, cause we know that itself is a bias sometimes which doesn’t work in emotional situations.

If you put a two-year-old boy in a room with two toys, one toy in the open and the other behind a Plexiglas wall, the two-year-old will ignore the easily accessible toy and go after the apparently forbidden one.  If the wall is low enough to be easily climbable, the toddler is no more likely to go after one toy than the other.  (Brehm and Weintraub 1977.)

There was time in history when distinction between life and death was very blurred, people believed that something immediately follows life, or there is something after death(heaven or hell), must have been a tremendous mystery which must have got lot of people going for unraveling the mystery. It seems biases will be less if we assume less and think more about everything as a mystery/unknown thing.

So neuroplasticity  is a process already happening. It certainly would get boring if and when we will reach the near full optimization. There are traits that we can measure in the people who fall near the average line of happiness, and we will try to inculcate that into everyone. Isn’t it already happening, difference is that there are no set measures right now, it seems everybody has his/her idea of that and everybody tries to follow the path that seems plausible. Our parents tell us- “look, this how you do it, you should work hard like john and you will get all the good things life”. Nonsense the sentence will be if we rip out good intentions out of them. But they may be totally sense for few, it may work for few, so point being that there are no fixed points which can get us “there”. Through the same, that is how we reach norms, average, or acceptable, and we operate in groups trying to define what will be get us “there”.

Its a weird make up that we cannot perceive happiness as well as we perceive pain or stress, we are very good in describing and measuring the levels of pain or stress that we undergo, isn’t it? We always seem to be able to say that “that” time was very bad, “i had gone through terrible shit”, or we are able to say, “i am going through terrible shit”, we don’t usually hear people say “This is the happiest time of my life” (except for the first romance i guess).

The measurements again are subject of possible assumptions, every field has them- science, politics, morality, every human endeavor so to speak, has got some assumptions, so no matter how well defined we may be, it is possible that we started at the wrong place or we fumbled. Really, to set up some levels, as a benchmark seems to be one of the ways of going about measuring happiness. Will come day, there will be happiness meters, imagine, you would walk into the office and won’t talk to your boss because the reading on his meter is low, will you be happy then?

Ok, so lets get this straight, what is average level of happiness? Brain image scan studies, are trying to get a hold on that, but we want something simple in the mean while. If you’re sure that is what you want (yeah, the damn average level of happiness), i think the answer is simple, inspite of what i have said and what vast uncertainty that lies around, just look around yourself. Just look at one person who you think is a good case of person who is above or near the perceived average line, dont think about what one has, what one hasn’t got, you will most probably get the answer. Well it isn’t that easy, we may face difficulty in chosing sample point, and then verifying the veracity of the sample point, etc etc. Hell, haven’t i just told you what parents always tell us!!! - i feel sad that i reached here.

Little Johny thought he was very bright,
But the schoolkids did not — they would laugh when he came in sight.
He could count, sing, and guess the weather.
Then one day, Big Bill said “Real bright boys will grow a feather.”

“Ach!” he cried, “Could it be true?”
“Then I’m not bright, which makes me blue.”
So he went home, and searched all over.
And then found growth on his head, clear as a clover.

“It is true, feathers are sprouting!”
“It’s proof that I’m bright!” So he stopped pouting.
He ran to show his mom, nearly tripping over some eggs,
When he saw on TV “Bright boys will grow long legs.”

So he waited for weeks and weeks for to find proof,
Worried over his brightness, and staying quite aloof,
Until one day, feeling in a pinch,
He grabbed a tape measure, and found his legs had grown a whole inch!

So he leaped off to school, but a scientist walked by,
And Johny overheard him say, that real bright boys could fly.
“The hair, the legs, from these I know
Of my brightness. The flying thus follows, so…”

Little Johny plotted of his grand display,
Standing high on a wall, he would proudly say
“Behold, I have proof that I’m bright!”
And he would deftly leap off, and soar into flight.

So he climbed up the wall, and made his speech,
But there his plan stopped with a screech,
For he hit the ground hard with a smack,
Leaving his leg all bloody and black.

As the other children laughed, he tried to explain,
Of the things that he heard, and why he had taken it to his brain,
“They came from on high, from people who knew
I looked at myself, and saw they were true.”

They laughed, “You’re too eager to believe, you fool.
Your feathers are just hair, all boys grow long legs as a rule.
Yes, if all you heard were true, you’d fly, but you’ll find out,
That if you do logic with garbage, then you’ll get garbage out.”

So Johny thought wrongly, and got his leg in a cast,
He had sought fame in the schoolyard, but now that’s all past.
He’s taken the lesson to heart, no longer believes all he hears.
So he doesn’t believe them when they say he’s not bright — brightness doesn’t come from peers

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