I got this book last year and read it in a month. When I was done reading it, there were entire chapters I could not explain to anyone. So, I decided to read the damn thing again. Though this time I took notes, read the endnotes, went through almost all the thousand references, and even watched YouTube videos when I couldn’t comprehend what I was reading. It took me five months to complete it and there are still things I don’t fully comprehend.
In a nutshell, this book is about Charles Koch and the biggest private company he built. But Kochland is so much more than simple corporate history. It’s about taxation and how to change the laws so that you don’t pay them. It’s about the history of labor unions in America and their gut-wrenching downfall. It’s about products we use every day and yet never think about them twice, as the glue on the sticker on our Amazon delivery box. It’s about oil and fracking and it’s about the environment. It’s about state-sponsored climate change denial. It’s about democrats and republicans and their failure to see beyond their five-year term. It’s about getting away with murder (literally) and having corporate compliance so strong that you are not just complying by the laws of present-day, but legislations that might come four years from now. It about the power that comes when you know the future. It’s about money and poverty.
This book does what every good mentor does. It refuses to spoon-feed you and it lets you know how ignorant you are. Which makes it a rather weak contender for leisurely reading. The requisite of reading this book is to put aside an hour or two every day. It also requires you to keeping referring to the endnotes and references. I ended up reading two separate books in order to understand what was going on in one of the chapters. There will be notes in the margin, most of the questions.
Boredom is uncomfortable. It breads impulsivity. It can also bread creativity. That’s what science tells me. What science doesn’t tell me is that boredom is tough business. I am not alone when I am bored. I am with myself. The self I do not like much. The self that I detest. It has my anxieties, my worries, my ambitions, my failures and my longings. All my vulnerabilities cohered together. This self is too loud and frightening.
Boredom is uncomfortable because I do not get to choose the noise I want in my head. The most boring thing for me is eating by myself. Such a mundane activity. A basic repetitive task. Yet the very idea induces anxiety and there is no escaping it. This anxiety is sharp and piercing. So, I find my escape in my earphones.
I choose my noise. I want this in my head instead of the one that comes without my consent. Once its in, it takes over. My ultimate emancipation from the tyranny of boredom. Yet the noise of my choice comes at a hefty cost: Time. Once it takes over it refuses to give up control. Some say it is engineered that way. Others tell me that it all about the comfort zone. Whatever the reason, I am no longer in the driving seat.
Once the noise of my choice is done with me, it presents me with anxiety. This one is of a different kind though. It’s slow burning. Its perpetual. No matter how much I suffer there is still some left. Hence, I require more noise of my choice to escape this anxiety. The anxiety never ends and the noise never ends either.
I have grown tired of the noise though. I have a longing for boredom in my heart. Eating alone is still a daunting task. Even with all the anxiety that boredom brings, even with the unwanted noise, I still have a chance with it. I had my meals alone today and it was uncomfortable. I reminded me of the fact that I have no one to share my meals with. It reminded me of the times when I had someone to share my meals with. I stayed with it none the less. In return, I had the whole day to myself and a little less anxiety.
I read a lot. Its part of the profession. Its part of the personality. Its an ID Card. Its something I pride myself on. It is my unhealthy escape with unwelcome consequences. Reading gives me clarity like a pond undisturbed by wind or rain. It leaves me confused like muck in the gutter. I read complex things and get them. I look over at the covers of the books I’ve read and cannot recall what they taught me. I am scared when I read a good book. I fear loosing the words and their meanings after I’m through with them.
An addiction: To know more, to be more, to show more and to collect more.
I envy people with bigger libraries than my own. I am accustomed to my own library. Its a constant presence in the background, like the paint on the walls. I wouldn’t notice it unless I really want to. I miss it when I am away from it. Like the relationship that means nothing and everything to me. How did it end up here?
I shuffle through the new titles in the book store. Why am I looking for the ‘new’? Are there answers I am yet to find or do I dislike the answers I’ve already found? How is it that the search for answers has left me with more questions? Like for every point I make my level drops. Why not read the same thing again and again? Why not give it the opportunity to bring a meaningful change? Probably cause reading it again doesn’t count. I doesn’t up my numbers. It’s not the new thing. Some books are just trophies for display. Others are hard to digest. Not cause of their prowess. Words are easy. But change in the sense that matters is hard, uncomfortable and anxiety inducing.
A website asked me, ‘What is your reading goal for 2021?’. My answer, ‘to slow down’. The website wanted a number. It says the average answer is a 100. Will another 100 help? There is the possibility of a watercolor effect. I will learn some new stuff and there are the trophies of course. But will I change in the way that I think I will? The way I think I want to?
I suppose I’ll slow down this year. Take a breather. Read the same thing again and again . Maybe that will give me the courage to change. Maybe that’ll give me the space to change.
Being a person is not a pat formula, but a quest, a mystery, a leap of faith.
Jaron Lanier in his book You Are Not a Gadget asks an often overlooked but fundamental question: “Have the machines become smart or have we dumbed ourselves to the level that the machine looks smart to us?”
The design of all smartphones and computers has one thing in common: the file system. There are files that came into existence concurrently with the device itself (the OS) and there are files that we as users will into being. Files help us arrange our virtual selves. We have files for documents, photographs, music and even junk. So files are good, but what’s the alternative? What can we replace the files with? Did we explicitly ask for the file system when we bought our computer or have we just come to accept files as the ultimate milestone in virtual curation?
The files have become the default design. Like all passively accepted defaults in life, we choose to forgo the existence of anything better.
Can we truly replace the file system now even if we collectively choose to? A free market proponent would answer in affirmative. Demand will drive the creation. The problem is that everything in the virtual world exists in tandem with the files. So asking for anything better than the default design would be tantamount to asking for the end of everything virtual as we know it. The passive acceptance has leaded us to place of no return.
Coming back to the original question at hand: Are machines smarter or are have dumbed ourselves to the level that the machine looks smart to us? The answer is to me is that we can never know. The smartness of the machine exists in our heads. Intelligence is an experience after all.
In last part of this blog (Link Here), I undertook an imperative and discomforting venture to restrict my reading to a maximum of three books at a time. This ‘block’ was definitive, immutable and uncomplicated. The structure organised my practices and made it a productive exercise without taking away the challenge that reading as an activity offers.
On the onset, the ‘Block’ structure was a tough taskmaster. I had to push through some of the parts and passages of the books. That of course, in retrospect is indispensable in a knowledge environment. However, I was unable to complete all three of the books in the block.
The one that is left unread is Bulfinch’s Mythology. I have made some progress on it, but the word of mythology is too new for me. It has become an undertaking of frustration and disappointment to complete this book. To compensate for this set back, I will finish reading a minimum 150 pages before Block 3’s inception.
That being said, here are the three books I will be reading in my new block:
The Saturday sun drowns in the backdrop. The road, uninhibited and deserted. There is a certain sense of emancipation in these moments. Liberation not from apprehension but from the cognizance of of our own aimlessness. There is such a thing as too much meaning and we need to escape it every once in a while.
When you smash the door shut of the old and dusty buggy you need to register the possibility that the car keys represents more than a mechanical process. At the same time, there can be an absence of spirituality to it as well. Drive long enough and you will be in the back of beyond. There will be wilderness and there will be refinement.
Your thoughts won’t go away, nor will peace elude you. They become one, in the ebb and flow of the mechanical gear shifts and acceleration process. You will witness light, bliss and then some gloominess. That is how it is.
“Absolute freedom, and the road has always lead west.”
It becomes daunting at times. Why did I uninstall YouTube, unsubscribe from iTunes and block Netflix? Why burn down all the boulevards of comfort? Maybe because these boulevards have been humming the tunes of escapism for far too long now. Maybe it is time to reflect internally and embrace the ghastly along with the bloom. A self induced silence, crushing, crushing boredom that lives perpetually in the moment.
The boredom that comes is towering, anomalous and pacifying. It morphs into a pathway for the old, repressed and unwelcome. You live with them. In the beginning it is daunting. You are but an empty inanimate vessel that gets filled with everything that sings true to the tune of chaos and pain. An empty shell that floats without an anchor or a sense of direction in the vast ocean of nugatory.
Scientists studying the ocean and life there in have always eagerly looked forward to silence in the ocean. Ocean can be a noisy . Cargo ships to tourism and a bunch of other human centric activities contribute to these noises in large proportion. At best, the scientist had to make do with a couple of hours of silence in the water. The pandemic changed this. The unprecedented breakdown of the machinery of the world has put a stop to much of the movements on the water bed. In these dark times lies the stub of creativity and exploration. While it is a time of inactivity we have much to learn from these times. Here’s what I’ve learned:
India has 12 of the top 20 cities with bad air quality. Delhi is the poster child air pollution in India. Its not that the government never made an effort to amend the situation. The famous odd-even experiment was commendable (though unproductive) effort. The root of the problem is the finger pointing. Some say its the unchecked and unruly influx of vehicle ownership in the city. Others believe it is the fumes from the old rusty factories. Maybe poverty itself is the culprit. The main contender in the past has been the burning of stubble in the neighboring state of Haryana. This made sense, if the problem was outside the jurisdiction of the city authority there is hardly any blame that can be placed on the government.
These assumptions and speculations came to an end with Central Government induced lockdown across the nation. One of the inadvertent outcome of this was clean air. The research institute named Urban Emissions in the capital city are making the best of this situation. The findings till date points towards the irrefutable fact that if Delhi wants cleaner air, cars will have to go.
This insight matters. Not just for the formulation of future pollution control policies in the country, but because this gives a choice to the people in no ambiguous terms. Beijing was one of the most polluted countries in world. Then it hosted the Olympics games. The air quality was now more than a health problem, it was an embarrassment to the nation. So the government imposed strict sanctions against fume emission and made the air cleaner for the games. These sanctions were subsequently lifted and the air quality deteriorated. However, this time the residents knew what was possible if the government showed enough will. Outrage followed, so did some much needed changes.
Will we something similar in India? Well, hope is non-negotiable especially when it comes to environmental justice.
I have already written about boredom and why it is indispensable in our lives. Most people eludes this emotion (and yes it is an emotion). In one experiment, people had the opportunity to either sit with their thoughts or shock themselves. One fourth of the women and two third of the men choose to shock themselves. Its important to know that boredom as an emotion is not good or bad in itself but a signal from the body to us.
Boredom is studies in two fashions. The attention model which states that we get bored when we do not have something intriguing to put our attention on. The meaning model in contrast illustrate boredom as an absence on meaning in the activity we are engaged in. In my opinion, it is mostly a combination of the two.
On an average people get bored 30 minutes per day. These 30 minutes are not consecutive but rather spread far and wide throughout the day. That was till the pandemic took over. Now the numbers are high. How high? We do not know yet. There is a positive correlation between boredom and novelty seeking. This phenomenon is being studies by a professor Erin Westgate. People are voluntarily putting in the inputs of their day and the data is pouring in fast. If you want, you can participate in her experiment at erinwestgate.com.
Well of course everyone wants to know when the vaccine for COVID 19 will materialize. There will be one that’s for sure. As a thought experiment though, the world we are living in, locked up in our own homes, is an illustration of what normal would be had there been no vaccinations.
I do not know much about the ideology of anti-vaxxers but in light of the judgment of US Supreme Court in Jacobson v Massachusetts, there will probably a great debate of public health and private liberty.
Exhausted from my day’s work I taped open my Google Podcasts app. I went to last played. It was Work Life, a podcast about work and life balance. I scrolled down and found an episode on loneliness. Sat down on my table with a pen and paper and this is what I’ve learned:
Relationships are like safety nets. Its a safe place you can go back to and recover after a set back whether big or small. Loneliness hence is the antithesis of relationship’s safety net. It’s a state of physiological stress in the short term which inevitably morphs into psychological damage in the long term. It makes our health suffer, it takes a toll on productivity and ruthlessly deprives work and life of any inherit meaning. How bad is it? Loneliness is equivalent to smoking around 15 cigarettes a day. It so bad that in the UK they now have minister for loneliness. Which is good considering they at least acknowledge the problem. Rest of the world is still at the denial stage.
A downward spiral of negativity and it was here before COVID was and probably stick around longer. Its a natural tendency to look at being lonely as a personal failure, when really its the failure of the culture of the day. In the west, work is increasing acting as the fertile ground where the seeds of sadness sprouts out as loneliness. Happy hours won’t rescue us. That is just an excuse for getting drunk.
What can help is talking to people on a one on one basis. A show and tell. To begin this, we need to first segregate the people whose company energizes us from those who presence leaves us neutral or exhausted. Spending more time with the high energy group becomes a priority. Helping other people also reduces the feeling of being lonely. Science also tells us that all we need is one such friend and the friendship need not be a lasting one.
If you are more interested about this topic, I highly suggest reading Lost Connections.
I discovered them pretty late. The first one was a gift . Halfway through it, I quit. There were many others that I never go around to complete. The books on their part never judged me for it. There have been years when I’ve spent more time with them than with any living person. Other times they remain stacked on the shelves collecting dust. Its all good though, for they never complain.
It’s not far fetched to say that they have shaped me. They have shaped my thoughts, my demeanor and my passions. There are people in my life who are there because I read. I have spend countless hours discussing ideas with these people. Most of these ideas come from books.
It’s funny to see how reading them is promoted as a skill these days. They are being rated, as if they were a shower head that did not serve it’s purpose fully. They’re really not. They carry their existence not as inanimate objects but living beings. They have a soul. Reading is nothing more than being in someone’s company. They tell you about their experiences, their regrets, their struggles and triumphs. Some have give you advice that becomes indispensable in retrospect while the notorious ones, true to their nature, may misguide you.
I remember being mocked, scolded almost, for my habit of writing in books with pen. But I believe that the writing on the page tells a different story. A story of the bond that the reader share with the book. It’s the point where reading ceases to be a monologue and become a beautiful dialogue. Books carry this tale of dialogue with them wherever they go, long after we are gone.
I am grateful that books found me. They have made life beautiful.
What Shivam Says 