Handling Metaverse

I sure am glad my kid is an adult now and I don't have to prioritize learning about the new ways Facebook is harming the lives of children. That said, I feel for parents who need to do exactly that. '

What’s unique about the 2021 iteration of the metaverse is that it includes fully immersive 3D VR and AR worlds that transcend screen viewing by putting the user inside the game spatially. This is an entirely new and more personal experience that, according to a 2019 study (pdf) conducted by Facebook, can impact how bullying, harassment, and lewd content, as well as positive content, are experienced by users in the metaverse.

Sadly, many children experience realities in their life that really beg for escapism. Social media and gaming are already offering that and in ways that are more addiction than a temporary escape. Kids are infinitely creative and with the options they will have in a metaverse, opportunities to take it to destructive levels abound. It's like parents don't have enough to be worried about already. 

Healing Oneself

Being desi, it is no surprise that a story written by a highly educated fellow desi containing phrase "green colonialism" would grab my attention. There was a lot to absorb and learn from her relatively short essay. 

The Nordics and other rich countries are betting on achieving their climate ambitions without the need for harder-edged policies at home. It is simply too tempting for leaders of rich countries—including those who produce plenty of oil and gas—to impose restrictions on others. Pursuing climate ambitions on the backs of the poorest people in the world is not just hypocritical—it is immoral, unjust, and green colonialism at its worst.

The global south is large and diverse but there could be some unifying themes about what ails this part of the world including that of vaccine apartheid. India is part of this south and one place I do know something about. There is no culture of personal or collective accountability in that country. The family unit used to a source of strength amid all the societal chaos and dysfunction not to mention the lack of any safety net. The middle class family unit is far from what it used to be and people no longer have benefits they once had; its no surprise that their suffering has been disproportionate during the pandemic. 

As long as balance of power is skewed there will be colonialism in one form or another but the reasons for the erosion of the middle class in India has little do do with rich country politics. Domestic policies that address the feeding and caring of the middle class simply don't earn votes at election time in India and so things continue to fall apart for them with ripple effects to the rest of the population. 

Finding Tastemakers

Interesting move to keep independent book-stores alive in France. Coming from a place and time where scarcity of books was common and buying one was a very intentional process, I find that abundance made me a lazy reader over the years. There is no penalty to skim the first few chapters of the book and decide to stop there and repeat that process twenty times in a month. All books are digital and borrowed from the public library. 

The fact there is so much to just sift through makes the desire to go browse the offerings at an independent book store less attractive. This is not even counting the ease of ordering a book on Amazon. What I have missed over the years is a trusty guide who is there to help you navigate through this excess and connect you to what you will love from start to finish. 

I wish instead of my infinite sampling platter, I could focus on a handful of books that truly enriched my life. Despite the overload of information about everything including books, finding those who can expertly navigate us through the amazing world of reading seems harder than ever. Maybe that is the real reason independent book-stores can and will succeed, Those store-owners can help folks like me learn about books that would change our lives and yet we would have never known about that - that is the value and for that paying a little extra is entirely worthwhile.

Above and Beyond

Such a beautiful story about love and tenacity - this woman is the kind of mother any kid would want theirs to be, 

Wolownick first learned to climb to be closer to her son, a world-famous climber and the first person to scale El Capitan without ropes or safety equipment in 2017. 

"He would talk and talk about where he'd gone, what they'd done, who he did it with, and I didn't know what he was talking about, which is not a good way to relate to anybody," she said. 

Sometimes he used so much climbing jargon, she says couldn't even understand what he was saying. So one day, she asked him to take her to a rock climbing gym. 

As we grow older, it gets harder and harder to relate to what occupies the life and minds of our kids. We may not "get" their music, the way they conduct themselves in relationships, the things they prioritize or don't. If they have an esoteric job or hobby that is yet another layer of separation. This woman is an inspiration in how far she could go to better relate to her son. 

Next Cliffhanger

I read just about every book on Kindle for about a decade now. Love that my local library has a great collection of eBooks which makes this possible. Don't recall ever having read a Kindle self-published book so this New Yorker story was eye-opening : 

 "..The platform pays the author by the number of pages read, which creates a strong incentive for cliffhangers early on, and for generating as many pages as possible as quickly as possible. The writer is exhorted to produce not just one book or a series but something closer to a feed—what McGurl calls a “series of series.” In order to fully harness K.D.P.’s promotional algorithms, McGurl says, an author must publish a new novel every three months."

For my own reading, Amazon's recommendations are somewhat interesting but it has not lead to the kind of discoveries I would love. However, when J was a younger and a fussy reader, I found recommendations based on what she did like very useful. It opened the world of books I was never familiar with from my childhood. Between Nancy Pearl and Amazon's Products Related to this Item, I was able to find J books she actually enjoyed. The idea of commoditizing literature to produce an endless stream of cliff-hanging content is rather sad. 

Feeding Evil

Interesting essay on why we use Facebook even if we know it's evil and doing way more harm than good in the world. The author identifies a few reasons why:

"...Like eating meat, ordering cheap clothes or buying Chinese products, the use of Facebook also has advantages. Through Facebook people renew ties or maintain contact; through it interest groups can be created that coalesce around a particular subject or cause; people can be made aware of new ideas; shared activities can be coordinated; alternative voices can be heard. Not everyone has access to the massive amplifiers of mass media, and Facebook allows each person to make their voice heard.

There are small businesses that reach a larger and more diverse audience and potential clientele by advertising on Facebook. There are people who specialize in creating and managing online campaigns using the platform – people who do it for a living..."

There is I think another reason - with Facebook people found a way to create meaning out of the most mundane business of their life, it fed their need for self-aggrandization, see and be counted as consequential. Depending on how many are in a person's network, they could with the right kind of effort, attain celebrity status within that group. It gives the ordinary person a  chance to experience (albeit on a microscopic scale) what it is to have paparazzi on their tail 24/7. No one wants to live their life unnoticed, irrelevant and inconsequential. 

Facebook is the platform to remedy all of that and so people stay and engage - it makes them visible. There is a parallel to buying the Chinese luxury brand knock-offs - not low-priced no-brand street fashion. It sells only because people aspire to a lifestyle well out of their reach. An alternative platform if and when it comes about will need to embrace some of the same evilness that makes Facebook work.

Natural Love

Have been reading The Republic when I have the mental capacity left at the end of the work-week to absorb such writing. I am always amazed by how the morsels of wisdom that I can get from even reading a few pages, help me understand the world I live in:

"..the makers of fortunes have a second love of money as a creation of their own, resembling the affection of authors for their own poems, or of parents for their children, besides that natural love of it for the sake of use and profit which is common to them and all men. And hence they are very bad company, for they can talk about nothing but the praises of wealth."

These lines made me think ofcourse of all the sales and business development folks I have been working with for over a decade now. Some of them are star performers and have blown past their targets even in the toughest years. No surprise that they are also very wealthy relative to the peer group they belong to. Most most non-work conversations with any of these people only revolves around money and the type of access or privilege that it gained them. This does not come from a place of boastfulness or vanity even - it is driven by "natural love" as Plato says

Reading this made me think how similar that is to talking to a bunch of parents who have kids of the same age - they spend most of their time together talking about the kids, it is the epicenter of their universe much like money is for the "makers of fortunes"

Good Invention

I like the title of this poem A Pity, We Were Such A Good Invention as much as the rest of it. A relationship or marriage is indeed an invention and sometimes it could so good that it levitates over the ordinary folk who have no such invention to show for or don't have one nearly as stellar. The sum of the parts produces this energy and lift above the mundane until it ceases to.

They dismantle us

Each from the other.

As far as I'm concerned

They are all engineers. All of them.

Depending on your perspective and what mood you are in as you read this, "They" can be very different things. The forces that pull you apart - infidelity, betrayal, loss of love and intimacy, breaking up, divorce lawyers, illness, death, dementia - the list goes on. But those forces do have the same dismantling effect on the "good invention"

Learning Travel

I am reading The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton one of my favorite writers of my younger years. Years ago when he was a relatively a new arrival on the scene and he had just published Essays in Love, I wrote to him about how much I loved that book and his style. He wrote me a short but nice reply. I recall the warm happy feeling of closing the loop. So many years later reading The Art of Travel, it is familiar territory - his style has mellowed with age, but its still recognizably his but as reader and writer it feels like our paths have diverged over time and with age - I was not able to like this book nearly as much as I did Essays in Love. His description of monitors in airports is matches what many of us have experienced or imagined:

The constant calls of the screens, some accompanied by the impatient pulsing of a cursor, suggest with what ease our seemingly entrenched lives might be altered were we simply to walk down a corridor and onto a craft that in a few hours would land us in a place of which we had no memories and where no one knew our name. How pleasant to hold in mind through the crevasses of our moods, at three in the afternoon, when lassitude and despair threaten, that there is always a plane taking off for somewhere, for Baudelaire’s ‘anywhere! anywhere!’: Trieste, Zurich, Paris.

What if I got on the wrong plane by accident or design and somehow landed in a strange city in a foreign country and just continued to live there atleast until the next unplanned adventure. Ofcourse, my own life would not support such "flights of fancy" but there are those who can actually do that. I knew someone a long time ago who liked to pick a place to travel by throwing darts on a map. I found the concept so thrilling and so out of reach for me. I can't say I was envious but just a bit in awe of what is possible. 

Wobbly Math

Interesting set of partnerships for Hertz - Uber, Tesla and Carvana. The Uber scenario is particularly interesting - the would be driver would rent a Tesla from Hertz for week (for instance) and return it. The benefit is that they could get into the business of being an Uber driver even if they don't own a car or the one they do own is not road-worthy. For this to work, the said driver has to make more than they owe Hertz and Uber. If this reduces the barrier to enter the rideshare driver business, there will be a glut and prices will go down. Consequently none of these drivers might turn a profit. 

Currently in the best case scenario if an Uber driver is making trips 8 hours a day they would make about $1100 per week.  In a same market a Hertz rental costs around $1000 per considering liability insurance and such which the driver will need because they presumably have no auto insurance. So the driver would clear $100 in a week. Unless the rental cost drops to $100 a week, this is not tenable for the driver living in California. Once the math on the rental starts to work for the driver the the over abundance of Ubers would start to work against them. The Carvana business is even less clear but someone in Hertz clearly took the messaging of being an eco-system driver to heart and went all in. 

Oppressive Pity

I spent the majority of my adult life single and can relative to this notion of oppressive pity this Atlantic article talks about

And many single people, whether they live alone or with others, constantly face the stigma associated with not being partnered. “It’s oppressive, always getting pitied,” DePaulo said. “People have bought into the ideology that having someone is better—[that] the more natural, normal, superior way of being is being coupled or having a family.”

The pity can take many forms but it exists as an under-current. Well meaning people are on the constant lookout to match-make, they check in to see how your most recent date went - to see you back on track would be their dream come true. I went through such a transition in my status and there was a burst of euphoria in the community that had been rooting for me. 

Finally they said as they heaved a sigh of relief. But having been single for long, the stigma takes even longer to wash that stain. It becomes part of your identity so even when paired you are never quite as normal as those who were "normal" the whole time. I learned to make uneasy peace with not being object of pity to someone worthy of tentative acceptance. The fact is that people who have been single for a long time fundamentally diverge from those who have not lived in that state, just because they acquire new status does not change that fact.

Wrong Metrics

The last few weeks, I have been in the zone working with a client helping them re-imagine customer experience. Its one of those time when you feel you are helping make meaningful change using skills learned over a long time. In a metrics driven organization, collaboration between the well-intentioned and like-minded is not a given. The person whose advise I need may not at all be goaled for advising me at all even though that's what they would love to do. 

So while the pieces of work people are goaled for come through beautifully, the collective effort can be far from stellar because the metrics of all those who need to come together don't quite line up as they should. Reading this story brought to mind my own experiences being measured by formulas that are not rooted in reality. They do not reflect how people work, thrive and excel and so also with clients who are measuring things that don't yield the right outcomes. 

 the logic driving newsroom metrics aims to maximize profits by extracting greater productivity from news workers and greater commercial value from the content they produce.

The idea that something like journalism could be measured in so many units of labor is already a bad situation. But metrics to measure makes it that much worse

news metrics serve as a “form of labor discipline that shapes both the organization and lived experience of journalistic work under capitalism.”

Form and Function

Form and function come together beautifully in this wind turbine wall. 

Filled with spinning blades, the kinetic machine is more like a sculpture than a power generator, but that’s what makes it so fascinating. This aesthetically pleasing design means that homeowners could capture clean power while keeping the look of their home’s uncluttered and beautiful.

Kinetic sculpture is mesmerizing to watch. The process of building a sculpture seems long and painstaking so I was very surprised to see how affordable they are to buy and no surprise to learn they were fakes. The price on the artist's own website make more sense given what it takes to make them. 

Kindala is a made up word I created by combining Mandala and kinetic. I thought this series needed a distinctive moniker. Every design has a circular design like a mandala and they all move but each has visual distinctions in the wheel design or power structure.

Living History

 Love the idea of being able to recreate objects of art and history at home.

For those looking to turn their desk, bookshelf, or dashboard into a gallery of Grecco-Roman masterpieces, Sketchfab user DL (@leinadien) has created a wonderous collection of statues throughout art history, rendered for 3D printing. The collection holds nearly 500 individual models by different Sketchfab contributors, and the possibilities are endless. 

It would be interesting to be able put some of this objects to daily use. Serve orange juice out of this 17th century pitcher and so on. Such deep integration of life with things that until now have only been museum exhibits could open up doors we did not even know existed. 

Creating Space

Found this a fascinating and heart-warming story about the power of forgiveness. As the story unfolds you see the profound effects on both the forgiver and the forgiven. It is hardly an easy feat to accomplish but for those who are able to truly forgive, the turn the person who caused them so much pain into a force of good. 

“It wasn’t violence, it was extreme violence,” he said of killing Julio Jimenez. “None of it was necessary, but that’s what my frame of mind was.”

After six hours of talking, the two men embraced. Carroll was later smiling so hard that he was asked if he had been found suitable for parole.

“Being forgiven for the hurt you caused a family, that took so much weight off my shoulders, like I was soaring on my way back,” he said. “They said, ‘You got found suitable?’ I said, ‘Hey, I got something better than that.’”

On a much smaller scale, at home and at work we have reason to be sore, angry and even furious at others. The reasons could range from trivial to important. The same idea of reaching out to forgive and learn why they did what they did might provide very similar benefits. When a child is out of line, it often helps if they know that they are loved no matter what but the infraction will be addressed. That creates the safe space to talk it over, understand the drivers of the behavior and often the child realizes the error of their way on the owm.

Distilling Perfection

This Margaret Atwood poem distills why, achieving milestones associated with achieving ownership of material things always feels underwhelming. Either the feeling is not what you imagined it would be or the goal-posts move further so you still don't have reason to celebrate. There is never that wholesome feeling of having achieved perfection.

I can count five times in my life so far when I had accomplished a milestone that meant a lot to me and came after many struggles. I had imagined that moment of crossing the finish line many times and how wonderful it would feel; how life would fundamentally change after that event. Every single time that rush if it came at all, was extremely short-lived. The day after or the week after it is like Atwood describes " the air moves back from you like a wave and you can't breathe"

The moment when, after many years

of hard work and a long voyage

you stand in the center of your room,

house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,

knowing at last how you got there,

and say, I own this,

is the same moment when the trees unloose

 

their soft arms from around you,

the birds take back their language,

the cliffs fissure and collapse,

the air moves back from you like a wave

and you can’t breathe.

 

No, they whisper. You own nothing.

You were a visitor, time after time

climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.

We never belonged to you.

You never found us.

It was always the other way round.

 

Slippery Slope

 I experienced a sudden emotional outburst on a recent visit to the dermatologist for a skin issue that has been bothering me for a while. The physician's assistant collected the information and any background, history I wanted to share. I assumed there was interest in understanding the big picture so I spent time describing all that. Once the doctor came in, it was evident that he was going to recommend the standard regimen all typed up and ready to go for anyone like me no matter what caused us to arrive at that point. He told me with a straight face that he will need to put me on a medicine for life that even very cursory research will show has a battery of side effects. Just with this one medicine a person can go from being normal to sick needing a dozen more to manage the burgeoning side effects. 

I told him that is not the path I will go down because someone I once used to love was destroyed just this way. He went from being someone who had almost achieved full control of his condition through diet and exercise but for one straggling issue. He went from four or five different medications to the lightest dose of one. Life was turning around and it look entirely possible that he would become medication free one day soon. And then life happened, more stress than he could handle coming from different directions at the same time. It upset the balance that had taken years to create - and he slipped. First one medication then another and then the third. At the lowest point he was on about fourteen and completely unrecognizable physically and emotionally. I saw this destruction of a human being happen in under five years. I told the doctor this story and he flat out did not care, the physician's assistant was staring at me like I was an alien. I was that close to tearing up when I left. I may not have solved my problem but I am just about certain I did not make it worse and over time unsolvable. 

Poetry Pharmacy

Such an amazing concept to treat your existential woes with a dose of poetry. 

The whole impetus for that project was to be a vehicle (pun intended) for poetry to be delivered to people who don’t usually encounter it;  to be inviting and not intimidating, to counter the widely held perception that poetry is “difficult, obscure and not for the likes of me”

Thanks to reading about the poetry pharmacy, I felt motivated to find a poem I had never read that spoke to my current state of mind and found Keep The Rage Tender by Nayyriah Waheed. It soothed the spirit and made me reconsider and re-evaluate. 

Could not help comparing this to the times I have been to a doctor's office during the pandemic - it seems that the designated healers have completely lost the desire to connect to the human that they intend to heal. The interactions were more sterile, soul-less and unempathetic than ever before. After each of these encounters I felt no one cared about the body or soul of me. The doctors were not interested in what would be best for me long term - which in my age bracket is a very different time horizon than for someone in their teens and twenties. 

Maybe this is how pandemic fatigue is manifesting itself in the healthcare community - none of these folks got to shelter in place, work remotely and ride out the crisis. They had to be present every day at great personal cost and risk to help others and it does appear they are collectively worn out and at the brink. Medice, cura te ipsum could not need a more literal interpretation in these times we live in. 

Unrequested Advice

Reading the part about unrequested advice in the article gave me new perspective about folks I have encountered in my life who came across and micro-managing. 

They tell others what to do… even when advice isn’t welcome. Aren’t these people just control freaks?

Advice is sometimes regret in disguise. Perhaps a past experience has left them with a longing to have acted differently, and this is their chance to put things right and help you avoid the pain they felt.

When you notice someone giving unrequested advice, ask if they’ve been in a similar situation before — and how it went.

Since unrequested advice makes me uncomfortable, I am very mindful of providing any to others. But the impulse to help others so they don't repeat our mistakes makes sense. This explanation of the driver got me thinking of a particular colleague in new light. T is constantly issuing words of caution and homilies on what he would recommend in a situation, what he has seen working or not. He makes every effort to not come across as over-bearing but his well-intentioned words have a deeply alienating effect on others. Everyone around learns to work around him instead of learning from his experience.

If only T could deliver unrequested advice in a way that is less off-putting to would be recipients. Maybe he could put together a set of stories of how failures happened and what lessons he learned from it. Instead of talking about these things when folks are already stressed about things T has no ability to help with, he could point them his Catalog of Errors, Omissions, Snafus and More - The Story of T's Life in Corporate America. He could even encourage others to contribute so it would become the story of our collected lives. I have reason to believe if T came across as authentic and introspective, he could lead by example and help us create a repository of unrequested advice that would benefit one and all,

Growth Engine

There is a toxic mix of infantilism and desperation in Facebook seeking playdates as a growth lever.

..Messenger Kids in person, according to a presentation the WSJ viewed called “Exploring playdates as a growth lever.” Facebook researchers have also tried to introduce a more holistic understanding of childhood by breaking things down into six age brackets: “adults, late teens ages 16 to maturity, teens ages 13 to 15, tweens ages 10 to 12, children ages 5 to 9 and young kids ages zero to four,” a slide mentioned in the report reads. One presentation set a goal of transitioning younger users from Instagram to the original Facebook, or the “Life Coach for Adulting.”

Facebook in a child's life is has no redeeming value - it only serves as a habit forming time sink while the mind idles. Those are best years of a person's life being wasted away. This is not even counting the mental health toll specially for tweens and teens. An article I read a while back, did a great job of summarizing Facebook's dilemma. 

Your business model determines most of the decisions you take as a company. And when your business model depends on collecting more and more data from your users, and selling that to advertisers; and when your investors have made their bets that this will go on and on, you end up taking the decisions that Facebook has. In short, you can’t serve two masters. And the person who doesn’t pay you, can’t be your master.

Rebranding Toxic

Happened to read this post about Moderna recently and had to wonder what a piece about the company would read like in 2021. Did not have to look too far - a properly fawning interview of the same CEO. History is written by winners as they say and these days by SEO. I guess lessons were learned and from being super-secretive they went to being super-collaborative

"..And we designed the vaccine and we got the two teams at NIH and Moderna because we were so worried about making a mistake in the vaccine design, as you can imagine. So we were super happy when the team literally compared notes after two days with exactly the same design for our vaccine."

Maybe now there is a case for the kind of culture Bancel promoted. While exuding all the signs of being the next Theranos, they came out with a huge win. Maybe toxic will get rebranded as demanding where only excellence is welcome. 

“It is a demanding culture,” Mr. Bancel says. “It is not an unfair culture.” He says he made his share of mistakes, such as not being more upfront with new hires about how difficult the work would be. “I was trying not to kill the company,” he says.

Musical Healing

I heard this Atanu Sanyal album for the first time when I was in college and was completely entranced. It was a love that did not fade with time and cassette tape was worn out by the the time I came to America. Somewhere between the multiple moves and significant life events, I lost track of my beloved tape. 

This year, during Puja I felt an acute longing to listen to it again and bought the album online. As the music filled my living room, I felt the broken pieces of my life symbolically turn whole again. Long forgotten memories lit up and brightened the evening. I remained in a blissful state long after the last track had played and it was an amazing experience. This is the closest I have come to experiencing the healing power of music

Research findings have supported a wide range of music therapy benefits from changing brain waves to lowering heart rate and blood pressure.  While clinical trials, to date, have been small, the results are promising.   Music therapy has been shown to boost the effects of anti-nausea medications in patients receiving chemotherapy and reduce pain perception.

Saying Less

After watching the Minus promo video, I had to sign-up to see what the experience felt like. Would I be inclined to post at all or just join conversations that are happening there. What kind of crowd would such a platform gather, what might they want out of it beyond participating in an interesting experiment. Once I was in and started to read other posts, my first thought was frugality - if I had only 100 chances to say something useful, I need to think each on through. This was not the place to keep my writing muscle active like my blog is. There is not part of my life that allows writing with no end in mind, for writing without pre-defined structure or tenets. So the blog is my scratch pad to write and move on. If some thought crossed my mind, a place to keep notes. Frugality is not the driver here. 

At Minus I would assume as the older joiners get zeroed out, they would be able to influence the overall shape of the conversations by replying to what newer joiners are writing. The more well thought out the posts, the greater their staying power to stimulate conversations. It would be great to have subject matter experts post about the top hundred things that get them excited in their area of expertise - which should be a plenty of great content and cover a lot of useful ground. Then the conversations would follow and enrich the community. Love the concept and am curious to see how this morphs over time. 

Having Range

I have been reading Range by David Epstein and got the many plot points by end of Chapter 1. It is generally how things go with books of this ilk. The author posits a provocative theory to grab your attention and tells you just about everything they are going to tell you in the prologue. In Chapter 1 you get a sense of how the rest of the book will flow - how topics will be introduced, analyzed and closed. By the end of Chapter 1 you should have enough information to decide if you want to commit or not. In this instance the answer for me was - not. 

However, as is often the case, that means you as a reader may miss little nuggets of information you might have found insightful or entertaining. Sometimes these are few and far between so one has to make a choice. I decided to abandon the reading and go find something else. But this nice summary has me and other readers like me covered. In my life experience, I have found people with range more interesting, entertaining and insightful. They are also not always goal-oriented and results focused. Being a dabbler frees up a person from need to deliver results, prove anything in particular - they are exploring, sampling and discovering. 

A boss I had in the early years of my career give me some sound advice that I use and recall to this day. His formula was to go wide for a period of time and dive deep into one area for an equal amount of time and then repeat the process. Each round of going wide ends up being different because you have achieved depth in certain areas - that makes you see what you had seen before in new light. At the time of speaking, L had done two rounds of this process and was on his third. Coming from a privileged background and a top ranking business school, it was easy for him to structure his career in this manner. I understood the value of what he was saying but did not have nearly the same opportunities to act on it. But that random piece of wisdom shared in the breakroom stuck with me always.

Reading Mediocre

Reading Mediocre out of curiosity. The notion that you already won because you are male and white is not that far removed from what I have seen growing up in India where white is not a factor. Being a male is already being ahead all other factors being equal. Given a smattering of money, power or intelligence, this idea of being ahead can go into over-drive mode. 

This study about white males in the work place will likely map exactly to the males of the majority demographic in any country. Depending on what that majority looks like the minority groups will be displaced and victimized in different ways but the key tenets hold - its based on numbers and not color. Mediocrity is also about numbers - the vast majority of any population anywhere in the world is mediocre by definition. If the people with talent and intelligence to make a real difference don't care enough to engage, mediocre folks will naturally feel self-assured despite their limitations and fill the leadership gap.

Expecting a high degree of self-awareness from someone who has been classed mediocre is not smart. Authors like Ijeoma Oluo disappoint by taking a very parochial view of a large, universal problem. For every so-called mediocre man that is being raised to be such, there is at least one woman involved (the mother) maybe more. What about teaching women to do a better job raising children so there is qualitative improvement in society overall. I am sure in this day and age, that would be the most regressive view to hold.

Stress Test

Reading this article about pandemic triggered dissolution of marriage, reminded me of this other one about gray divorce that I had read a while back. Both are about the effect of certain life events people are not prepared for. It shakes up the status quo, the problems buried beneath the din and bustle of getting through each day, come to take centerstage. They want to be seen and counted, cannot and will not be ignored. Becoming empty nesters is not something people have experience with dealing from practice much like dealing with a pandemic. These events are stress-tests for a relationship and not everyone survives. Those who do are stronger than ever. 

Recently, I met a former client who I have not seen in years. He was in town and we decided to grab lunch. His oldest went to college this year and the young one has four more years left to go. B mentioned how much he valued the time at home being able to bond with the younger one and being able to be the kind of father he had always wanted to be. With him being at home and playing a more hands-on parenting role, the wife was able to catch a much needed break. She quit her dead-end job and started her own business. 

According to B, she has not been this happy in years. Without needing to commute, she has freed up time to take care of her health and fitness; serving as a role model for B who is now on a mission to lose his extra pounds to keep up with her. They are both counting down the days until they will have an empty nest and can start checking things off their travel bucket list. B and his wife are a counter example of the gray and pandemic divorce trends. They are the happy stress test survivors.

Vicious Cycle

Listening to Daring Greatly these days on my walks. I have to say the book did not get off to a promising start when the author expresses great astonishment that what she wrote six years ago is still true of the human condition. At that point, I was not sure if I wanted to invest the next several hours on this - one would hope a life time of research on a topic would last much longer than six years. But I did continue listening out of curiosity and learned a lot in the process. 

That shame or fear of being ordinary and presumably invisible is rooted in the culture of scarcity which she describes thusly:

When I look at narcissism through the vulnerability lens, I see the shame-based fear of being ordinary. I see the fear of never feeling extraordinary enough to be noticed, to be lovable, to belong, or to cultivate a sense of purpose.

Scarcity thrives in a culture where everyone is hyperaware of lack. Everything from safety and love to money and resources feels restricted or lacking. We spend inordinate amounts of time calculating how much we have, want, and don’t have, and how much everyone else has, needs, and wants. The greatest casualties of a scarcity culture are our willingness to own our vulnerabilities and our ability to engage with the world from a place of worthiness.

A few days ago, I was talking to high-school junior about Instagram and his views of what the about its deleterious effects on the mental health of young girls that has been the subject of hews yet again. This kid was of the opinion that the problem is high-school culture and it always has been, social media is only an amplifier of what is bad and wrong with it. This somewhat echoes the sentiments of a former Facebook algorithm developer who was being interviewed by NPR. 

Brene Brown's book seem to connect the dots a bit better for me. If we go with her theory that there is a culture of shame being fed by one of scarcity, it creates the perfect conditions for the likes of Facebook to gain power and control over our lives. It makes everybody who shares and overshares on social media appear narcissistic and as Brown says the desire to name and shame them for it is exactly the worst thing to do, it would turn into a vicious cycle. 

Being Mother

This will be the third year J has been away from home and in college. Overall, I have learned to live in my empty nest and made peace with seeing her only occasionally. My dear friend L who passed away this spring used to tell me about the time her only son immigrated and how the pain of separation took decades to fully wear out. This was over thirty years ago, they wrote letters back and forth, life got busier as the son's family and responsibilities grew. They also went through a period of estrangement but thankfully the last decade before she passed there was peace and they stayed in regular touch. L's point was that one's only child becoming an adult and leaving home can involve greater distances than you are prepared for. This stage of a parent's life has many joys and rewards - I recognize them. 

When I observe other parents in the same situation as me, it seems like some of us were better prepared for the reality of our children's adulthood than others. I might be one of those that was not as ready as I should have been. One of my friends with kids in their 20s tells me that the job of parenting is never done, it just morphs over the years. Sometimes her 26 year old needs to be coached and mentored but what she does not need is control and protection. When in doubt, I ask my friends who have been through this phase, see if I can learn from their example. Notwithstanding all the efforts to do right by J and be the kind of mother she enjoys having in her life, there are days I slip. Reading this article about estrangement between parent and child got me thinking about my life experience as a parent and as a child. 

However they arrive at estrangement, parents and adult children seem to be looking at the past and present through very different eyes. Estranged parents often tell me that their adult child is rewriting the history of their childhood, accusing them of things they didn’t do, and/or failing to acknowledge the ways in which the parent demonstrated their love and commitment. Adult children frequently say the parent is gaslighting them by not acknowledging the harm they caused or are still causing, failing to respect their boundaries, and/or being unwilling to accept the adult child’s requirements for a healthy relationship.

Different Lives

We met an old friend recently. T has had a complicated life and is one of those well-intentioned people who end up breaking a lot of glass. He retains the sense of wonderment about life in his 60s and is young and hopeful in spirit. For those of us who have known him for a while, he reminds us of our naïve and foolish youth and we can only aspire to have some of what he has by when we are his age. We traded stories as we cooked and then had dinner. 

Our lives are incomparably pedestrian compared to his so his stories are way more entertaining than ours - some could be tinged with a hint of tragedy but many are not. He seems to have expanded his circle of friends to include folks like himself who fell off the mainstream rails at some point and deviated so far that there was no path back to "normal". In a sense, I disappointed him by becoming way more boring than I had been a while back - settling for the tried and true, lacking daring and imagination. 

Chatting with T late into the night, made me think of a movie I had watched a while back Same Kind of Different as Me. People are different in their own unique ways and we could be so wrapped up in the idea that we are somehow so different that we might as well be deviant from what is acceptable and normal, that it might become our reality. Once it does, we manage to put distance between ourselves and others who may feel different in their own ways. To T's great credit, he does not allow his being off the beaten track get in the way of staying in touch with people and cultivating new relationships. We are all better off for it - we learn from hin and perhaps he learns from us in return.

Disproportionate Impact

Marry the right person. This one decision will determine 90% of your happiness or misery.

Ran into this quote by H. Jackson Brown Jr. after over  couple of decades of first seeing it in the most unlikely of places - on the wall of my apartment's gym room. 

I was married by then and wanted to believe he was the right person for me. Where reality did not match up to my imagination, I compensated by attributing qualities to our marriage that simply did not exist, believed if I strove a bit harder, made some more adjustments it could become a thing of perfection. I wanted to believe with very molecule of my being that I was with the right man for me and after the hiccups of my then new marriage had subsided, it would be smooth sailing because all I had to do is apply effort. There was no end to how much effort I was willing to apply and no end to my self-assurance that I could make it right.

When I read this on the wall while working out, I remember experience this sense of dread - 90% seemed like an awfully large number. So if infact it turned out that the person was not right for me, he would drive that percent of my sum total of misery. Not only was Brown correct in his assessment, but from what I have observed since that time, he was understating how disproportionate the impact of the wrong choice in marriage can be. People I know very well who have needed to dis-entangle themselves from bad marriages had over 95% of their lives upended. My own experience is similar. Some days it felt like there was nothing that had remain untouched - maybe 100% of my misery was somehow traceable to it. 

When we finally get it right in whatever form that happens to take, we start to understand the other part of this quote about the 90% of happiness - this is just as true.