Playing Dice

Found this proverb in a book recommended by a co-worker ‘An invisible red thread connects those destined destined to meet, despite the time, the place, and the circumstances. The thread can be tightened or tangled, but will never be broken.’. The book is more useful for a younger person if the reader intends to use some of the learnings from it. 

But the quote gave me some food for thought - its the same idea I was raised on growing, about pre-destination and how there is no such thing as free-will. All the puzzle pieces of your life will come together, you just don't see the end state picture until you put the final piece in place. There is no randomness only a slow, gradual process of discovery. I have thought about this concept many times in my life specially in the context of how two people meet along their separate life journeys an part ways after a while. 

That encounter opens some doors, closes others, and defines what happens next - another puzzle piece falls in place. If you rewind to the past and start moving things by hours or inches you no longer have this encounter - and that goes to prove that nothing could have actually been moved. The things that you have discretion over are more trivial - its a bit like playing with dice before rolling. 

You get to choose how and how long you will play with your set of dice before rolling, that affords a sense of control and agency. Then you roll and next steps are defined immediately, the control ceases. For those we are meant to connect for longer periods of time for more significant reasons such as being a spouse, sibling or parent there must be this invisible red thread that connects. How else can it be explained. 

Bringing Friction

I don't buy a lot of stuff to begin with but this year, I have tried to be even more mindful. Clothing that I have bought this year, I have made it a point to wear as often as possible. It would be great to downsize a lot more and bring it down to basics - only what I truly love and want to wear anytime and not seek excuses to wait until another time. I agree that buying online has become more and more frictionless over time to serve the retailer's interest and not that of the consumer. We are only the accidental beneficiary if we believe that getting stuff delivered to us promptly is a benefit and not being deliberate about our buying decisions is a good thing. 

Convenience, though, tends to be a hollow virtue on its own. Much of the consumer system is constructed to generate retailers’ desired outcomes as frequently as possible. When something is made convenient, it’s because that convenience benefits the company. Sometimes, your interests and those of the retailer can align—it takes me about a minute to reorder a 15-pound bag of my dog’s kibble, for example, and I don’t need a moment longer to be sure I’m making a good decision. Other times, conveniences are put in place in order to short-circuit your ability to act in your own best interests, even if just for a split second. Hence, my pastel-pink spaceship shoes.

I like to force friction into my shopping experience online by abandoning shopping carts at stores where I am not registered - I want to see if I like anything enough to consider registering and love that the answer is no. Where I do have an account, I fill my shopping cart but choose not to push the buy button. Things may accumulate in the cart for months just for me to consider the total amount I will spend versus the real value. 

Each time I return to the cart, I have a chance to reconsider the very same question and each time, one or more items are deleted from the cart. By the time I do push the button it is only essential items that have survived the many rounds of deletions and proven they are required. I find it satisfying to put my self-imposed breaks on my shopping experience, not be beholden to retailers who are keen to press the buy button in my brain by any means possible

Big Event

A young lady in my parents' neighborhood is getting married and its the biggest celebration in their para after Durga Puja and Diwali. I know for a fact that my parents like S a lot. She is a very pleasant, easy to get along with, happy to spend time with the elderly, and is an amazing vocalist. S is only a few years older than J so that is another reason for their affinity for her. I would have expected my mother to be excited for her wedding given her closeness to the family. But she only complained about how out of hand celebrations of all kinds has grown - people just need and excuse for a shindig even while everything around them is falling apart. The ranks of the unemployed and underemployed keeps growing, the elderly are on their own without any safety net, the infrastructure is stressed beyond help and yet people are looking for every excuse to have fun. 

She thinks the world around her has gone crazy. S's wedding party has turned into a week of non-stop entertainment for all. There is a lot of food and music involved at every turn. Somewhere in the middle of all that a young woman is getting married and starting on a journey that should ideally last for life. That does not seem to be on anyone's mind - all this pomp and circumstance for the big event but none whatsoever for the wedded life. The noise and bustle of the wedding party which is on track to overshadow Durga Puja is the main story - it is how everyone will remember it in time to come. My mother says she can only be there for the key milestones that define a traditional Bengali wedding and even then not for the whole time - the level of song, dance and food involved is making her disoriented. 

She says she wishes S the very best but cannot participate in the insanity as she describes it. Next time I speak to her, I have to ask her if she is aware of anyone who is trying to make at least a partial break with tradition and going a different direction with the Bengali wedding instead of turning it into something like a Bollywood production. 

Digital Aferlife

This article about where the digital afterlife industry is headed makes for fascinating reading. We started watching Six Feet Under recently so it was particularly interesting for me to compare where we were some twenty years ago on this topic versus where we are now. The idea that our data is us has obvious merit but a lot depends on how expressive, honest and complete a person's written word is. I have been writing this blog for a very long time but the content was never intended to be a factual journal about me or anyone else who I have written about. There are enough breadcrumbs there for me to reconstruct the memory and relive the events that prompted the post but there is not much beyond that. I have my reasons for writing what I do, the people who feature in it serve as inspiration in some form. But what comes out in the form of a blog post could be quite far removed from facts, the timeline is almost always random and then there are any number of omissions. 

If a conversation with someone served an inspiration for a post, it could have been a random sentence in an hour long chat that struck a chord with me for equally random reason. If any of this data was used to construct an avatar of me in afterlife, it would likely say things that people who actually know me would find quite bizarre. I wrote about data poisoning some time ago and I thinking people have the best shot of creating their poison pills that will grant them agency in their afterlife by being the predominant source of data for the bot that seeks to be you in afterlife. I personally believe in the right of a person living or dead to be forgotten. While you are living, you can curate your data and your online presence even if you can't be fully forgotten. Now it seems like we need to start the curation of our digital remains well ahead of time to make sure we have our house in good order before dementia takes over. 

Giving Thanks

On Thanksgiving Day this year, I reached out to thank the many friends who had welcomed J and I to their family dinner tables on this day for the many years that I was a single-mom. We became an extension of their families - aunts, uncles and cousins knew of us and expected us to be there. One person I really wanted to reach out to and could not find her phone number. A few days later, after much searching I was able to find an old email address for her which likely she no longer uses. But I had to take my chances and write to her. She used to be my boss back when I knew her. 

L was working hard to save her own marriage at the time. Her husband worked five states away and they met only few times a year other than for the holidays. L relied on the support of her family to help raise her kids while he worked full-time, so it was not feasible for her to relocate to the husband's town. He had some specialized skills that made it hard for him to find work in ours. I met L's husband once at Thanksgiving dinner and the dynamic between L and him reminded me of my marriage when it was on it's last legs.

Unlike them, I did not have two school age kids and a mortgage at the time, but all decaying marriages smell about the same I think. I did not imagine their marriage would last beyond a year or two. Sadly, I was proven right. L has a different last name now, she's changed jobs a couple of times but that was the last time we met. She replied to my note almost immediately - happy to see my note and the picture of J as a child that was taken in her living room when she was about five years old. 

The act of reconnecting with L helped me hold on to the good and positive from that time - which was overall hard for both of us. I got to choose the memory to connect with - it was a picture I knew she would love. It had been taken by her mother. The kids had been playing all afternoon and her kids has dressed up J and asked grandma to take the picture. J was loving all the attention. It was the culmination of a nice day with our kids having a good time together. Thanks to grandma, we could relax and not need to be in charge. It was a day I felt glad L was in our lives and we could spend such an afternoon together. 

Being Remembered

Thought this was a beautiful way to celebrate a person's life. On our local park there are a few benches with little plaques memorializing the people to whom they are dedicated. One of them lets passersby know about the couple who loved the tree that grows across from the bench and their children set up the bench so others could enjoy the view of that tree from their parents' vantage point. I love that vignette about the bench and came to appreciate the tree whose beauty had moved this couple.

This woman's idea of wiping out the medical debt of those who are still living is such a powerful gesture. It gives the surviving loved one something tangible to hold on to - which is such an amazing gift. How to remember those we loved and lost to old age or untimely illness is not an easy question. You want the one departing to choose the way they want to be remembered and for what reasons. Was it that special tree in the local park that moved two people in a profound way for reasons only they could know. Do they want to leave others like them debt-free or is it something else entirely

Throw Caution

The tech news these days are strange bordering on bizarre. Disbanding the team in charge of responsible AI in the name of efficiency is a choice that is wildly irresponsible but totally okay at some level the way the company spokesperson depicts it

Though RAI employees have now been dispersed throughout the organization, the spokesperson noted that they will continue to support “responsible AI development and use.”

“We continue to prioritize and invest in safe and responsible AI development,” the spokesperson said.

In many organizations ignoring a problem and pretending it does not exist can make it go away or morph into a new and different problem. Its like wild things growing in a forest. You stop dealing with it and you no longer know what comes next. Maybe that is the best answer for now. Who knows what the operational definition of "responsible" is. That needs to be defined first and then everyone can take stock of whether they are meeting the bar or not. This decision taken by Meta fits in nicely a proposal that popped up recently that calls for companies to self-regulate. Maybe not having anyone responsible for responsible AI is one way to self-regulate - have each team make their own judgement call and be done with it. Throw caution to the winds.

Losing Art

It has been a pretty unique year with random stressors that I did not anticipate. Luckily, there were close calls but nothing was lost. Yet, as the year draws to close I feel drained of some inner energy much like one who has suffered a few significant losses. 

Maybe that is what a series of near misses will do to a person. Reading this Elizabeth Bishop poem made me think about loss, impending loss and so on. Perhaps I should go into the new year being better prepared and with more grace- learn the art of losing better and placing things in context:

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

For me that would more than two lovely towns and several rivers and a sub-continent at least. Those losses are quite old now and certainly whatever disaster it may have been it is long gone and forgotten by now. The scene that I do remember is seeing the truck packed with everything in house leaving a plume of dust. We would follow by train later that day. 

Our neighbors had asked us over for lunch - our home was completely bare. People look at you differently when you share a "last meal" with them. I would go on to have such meals with a few other families over the decades when I left a certain town for good. Those people are all lost - some I cannot even remember their names though once we were friends and neighbors. One of them gave me dried chamomile flowers for a bad cold I was suffering from right before the move and a good luck charm that still hang's in J's room. I did recover from the cold quite promptly and the charm has likely served me well over the years because I have been fortunate in more ways than I can count. 

Staying Legal

I was not familiar with the stay-or-pay clause in employment contracts. The stories of folks for whom staying was not a viable option are eye-opening. The employer makes your work-conditions completely untenable maybe because they want you to quit and as a bonus pay them for the privilege. The first story is reminiscent of H1-B body-shops from back in the day when those were running fast and lose. 

The right to work in the US came with a big price-tag. The employer paid the hapless visa holder a fraction of their fair market value, gummed up the works as far as processing their Green Card and maintained a crushing degree of control on this person who was free to quit their job and return to India in 60 days, all the time and effort spent in gaining stability in the US upended instantly. For many that was not a choice they could easily make and they had to suffer in ways that are similar to Vidal in this story - but somehow this is legal

Before moving to the United States, Vidal had signed a contract stipulating that, if he quit or got fired within three years, he would owe A.C.S. an unspecified amount of money to compensate the company for damages. Soon enough, Vidal received an email from a law firm representing A.C.S., warning him that if he quit his job, he could owe the company $20,000 or more. The company argued that their damages included the cost of finding a replacement, which the lawyers estimated could mean $9,000 for each year remaining on his three-year contract.

There was a time when people only worked for one company their whole life, sometimes the next generation followed in their foot-steps. They got to live a comfortable life in retirement funded by the employer. It is beyond astounding that a person would need to compensate the employer if they got fired. At-will employees can be fired for no-cause. I guess they wriggled around that one too. So we can have a situation where the employee gets fired because her boss hates for reasons that have nothing to do with work or performance. For having precipitated such displeasure and turning unemployed in the process, she needs to pay a hefty fee- and this is all legal.

Different Trains

My friend B and her husband have become empty nesters recently. Last time we met, it was right after the youngest had left to college. Now it has been a year and they have both had time to process the feeling. B's husband is very ready to move on to the next phase of their lives. He looks relaxed and happy - major responsibilities were executed well and it is time for well-deserved rest. This is the most cheerful I have seen him in the decade that I have known this couple. B is a different story entirely. She looks bereft - there is no other way to describe her affect. She is going through the motions of entertaining friends, socializing and the rest, but her heart is not in it. She is simply not able to join her husband in his desire to move on to the next phase, have their grand adventures together. 

That is the not what the rest of her life is about. She is seeking the community of women of her age and life stage she can commiserate with. The life experiences of B as a mother are the only ones that she wants to center on. It is as if the husband is waiting for her on a different track in the railway station, hoping to board a train at goes to a place she has never been or even wants to go. But they are each waiting for the other, hoping that after enough time passes, they will fall back in sync to meet at a common place, continue moving in the same direction. It was interesting to observe how remarkably they have both changed as the result of the same event but not at all in the same way.

Ignorance Hell

In the introduction to The Upanishads, Swami Paramananda says: 

Upanishad shows that the only hell is absence of knowledge. As long as man is overpowered by the darkness of ignorance, he is the slave of Nature and must accept whatever comes as the fruit of his thoughts and deeds. When he strays into the path of unreality, the Sages declare that he destroys himself;

There is this Alvin Toffler quote about the need to learn and relearn to not descend into illiteracy in the 21st century

“The illiterate of the 21st century,” Toffler wrote, “will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.”

Thinking about the hell begotten by the absence of knowledge and the need to unlearn and relearn to stay even passingly relevant these days, got me feeling concerned about how I would fare in the next decade and more. The learning muscle will grow increasingly weaker even the number of brand new things to learn will increase rapidly.

 The foundational gaps in  core disciplines will hurt more than ever and the brain will refuse to be supple and learn as fast as it once could. It brought to mind scenes from my high school and college years when I was completely checked out of the learning process and focused on doing the least amount of work to get to the finish line - freedom to live the life I wanted to, with no interference or input from others. I did achieve that goal early and looking back can't help wondering if that freedom was worth anything at all.
 

Fall Ending

Walking through the carpet of fallen leaves in my neighborhood recently, I recalled this Stanley Kunitz poem

Blue poured into summer blue,

A hawk broke from his cloudless tower,

The roof of the silo blazed, and I knew

That part of my life was over.

I don't pretend to know what Kunitz had in mind when he wrote these lines. But that afternoon seeing the leaves under my feet and the the cerulean blue of the sky above, I did feel "That part of my life was over". In the sense of what the year has been so far, the near misses and scares I had with the health of both parents. Learning my childhood friend is fighting for her life and going through the full roller-coaster of emotions after that. That afternoon was about feeling grateful that my parents are both still around, my friend is still in the fight and we are planning to meet. The part about being in a state of constant dread is over. I am glad that fall has put a clear division between what has been and what I want to look forward. The golden hued fallen leaves are about second chances and not about lost ones. They are spectacular.

 

Reductive Seduction

Nice essay on the concept of reductive seduction which in summary is the fallacy of the first world that they can wave a magic wand and solve basic third world problems like access to clean water and toilets. I can speak to problems in India having been in the midst of them for decades. The first thing to understand is that if a problem were easy to solve it would have been solved already. There is no lack of smart people with ingenious ideas and the desire to roll up their sleeves and do the work. It might not be enough to eradicate the problem but good enough to make a visible impact. 

With that being said, if the problem continues to exist, suffice it to say that is hard and bordering on impossible to solve. The best efforts will yield marginal results, it will be a case of two steps forward and one step behind for decades until some visible signs of change can be seen. If anyone home or abroad comes with the desire to take on a big problem without the right mindset, their failure is just about guaranteed. India can humble the best of the best by size, scale and complexity of what needs to be dealt with. The author has the right advisory for the young social entrepreneurs who want to take on challenges in Mumbai or Kampala

But don’t go because you’ve fallen in love with solvability. Go because you’ve fallen in love with complexity.

Don’t go because you want to do something virtuous. Go because you want to do something difficult.

Don’t go because you want to talk. Go because you want to listen.

I would add to the list, be prepared to fail big and have your ego right-sized so you return with a better sense of self and calibration of what you can really do for the world. Reading this essay brings to mind B, the daughter of a distant relative who spent time in Dhaka and Kolkata after graduating from an elite college in America, followed by graduate work in very fancy European university. B's resume was top-notch by any measure. After spending close to a decade pursuing her goal to save women in the third world, she returned home to a regular corporate job. 

At a human level I am sure B has been a source of hope and inspiration to the poor, uneducated Bengali women who would look up to her as a role model, the art of the possible. For B herself, her time in that part of the world was a learning experience but if she had hoped to bring about real and lasting change that never happened. I am sure there was a lot reductive seduction involved in her decision to go there.

Snail Girl

Throughout my career I have seen women cope with burnout very differently than men. Women are impacted a lot more as the numbers in the story suggest and the decisions they make are more extreme. Leaving a high-pressure job in a large, well-recognized company to take on a role in a small obscure company no one ever heard of is a move I have seen a few times. Some have switched careers entirely to find a pace that fits their needs. Long hiatuses to raise children is not uncommon either. My friend W calls this phase "left to be Mamma". He has been in HR all his life and has seen any number of talented women simply leave when the pressures of raising children and keeping their marriage functional was too much to fit alongside the job. 

W sees these women returning once the kids are older and more self-sufficient and having to prove themselves all over again. All the gains from their last time around having disappeared by the time they return. I know of a few young women who are going full-throttle in their careers because they have the opportunity to do so before other life-events occur. My friend L is in her mid-30s and single. She is going at top-speed but lately she pauses to ask herself if the speed is warranted and what is is getting out of her career is worth postponing marriage and kids - things she does want for herself. 

Then there is R who in the midst of the pandemic finally found the courage to quit her insane job cold-turkey and join a few virtual book-clubs to clear her mind from the accumulated clutter. She works for the National Park Service now in a capacity that is a far cry from her glitzy corporate job but R has found the peace she did not have her whole adult life going as she did from feeder high-school to elite university to fancy job and burning out bit by bit until there was only "ashes of R" left as she described it. She was in her mid 40s finally had enough of it all. For many women the secret to lasting is to go somewhere between crawl and walk pace the whole time - prepare for a laborious marathon from day one, never think of sprinting. 

Settling Debt

A few months ago, some words my father said to me made me cry uncontrollably. Having put time space between the event allowing time to heal, I would say the words themselves were not material. They served to trigger memories I want to leave forgotten. He forced to me re-examine them and deal with the full cycle of pain. I am certain that was not his intent and he does not know how badly I reacted. We did not discuss and moved on to other things after I had calmed down. I felt foolish to begin with having the hysterical reaction that I had - it was like my mental age had been reset of under twelve with a few magic words. It took some effort to claw my way out to the here and now, where I am seen as a stable and dependable person by those who love me. My problem statement that had brought on the episode is well-described in this article:

As a psychological phenomenon, guilt can be frustratingly thorny. For if you’re afflicted with a tyrannical superego—one that feels compelled to come after you for the slightest perceived infraction—you’ll be haunted by such feelings even when you haven’t done anything that would generally be regarded as culpable.

The infraction in question is related to me falling substantially short of my own moral and ethical bar. No harm was done to anyone in the process. At the time of the event, I was about twelve years old and not particularly prescient. But it stayed with me forever. All it took was to share with my mother - which is the good that came out of this episode. In less than five minutes I had the closure that had evaded me until that afternoon I called her to tell her how my father's word made my cry for hours. One could argue that I could have had that conversation with my mother at any time and put myself out of my misery but I think there is a certain karmic debt that a person must settle before the universe gives them the opportunity.

Reading Watching

It was fun reading this book excerpt by an author I had never heard of. Crime fiction is a reading genre for me but it is definitely one of the movie genres I like. If they made this book into a movie, I would gladly watch but reading the book is harder. After having watched The Fall of the House of Usher, I tried reading the Edgar Allan Poe - starting with the eponymous book. I struggled just as much as I had as kid trying to read Poe, inspired by my cousin who was older, wiser and a fan of Poe's works. I did not want to miss out and applied my best effort to understand what the fuss was all about. It did not work and it was my loss. There will always be some exceptional writing out there that some readers simply cannot latch on to. As such, they cannot get the value from that that the devotees of the writer get from it (my cousin was nothing short of a Poe devotee). 

The writing of Poe was only one of many examples of the how two kids from the same family, cultural background and similar age can start to diverge early and by a lot. By the time we were in our twenties, there was was very little we had left in common. It's like our vocabulary of words and the ideas were completely different. We could look at the same thing and arrive at completely different conclusions, suffer through the same set of tribulations and be transformed in opposite ways. Poe was almost a bellwether of what was to come. Today we are as far apart as two people can be despite the fact that we don't bear any ill-will towards each other. It's as if we were creatures of two different species that have no common language. I thought of our childhood together many times while watching the show and then trying yet again to read the works of Poe. 

Deep Fakes

This election cycle, I received a ton of flyers from both parties in my mailbox. Some of the content came in envelopes and was marked as sensitive or triggering. I opened them out curiosity. They contained salacious pictures of one of the candidates with a lot of quotes from various dubious sources that were meant to vouch for the images. The woman was depicted as immoral and having sexual interests that did not conform to family values one seeking public office should uphold. My first instinct was to think of the whole thing as AI generated and fake. Just not worth wasting any time over. I threw it in trash where it properly belonged. 

Given the high likelihood that information that seeks to influence election outcomes is false, my strategy has been to filter out all information with no exception. The average person will not have the time or resources to sift real from fake news. If there is a significant probability of the news being fake, seems like a good enough strategy to discard it all. That leaves voter in an information void - not the worst thing given the alternatives. They need to work out for themselves how they want to research the candidates and make up their minds. 

If a candidate has a voting record, that would be a good place to start. If they are a new entrant in the field, learning about their life before politics is useful - preferably looking at stories that are 5-10 years old. It is a time-consuming process but probably the best bet if you don't want to be manipulated by deep-fakes of all kinds. I have started to apply the same standard to most content these days. If there is any way that piece of content could influence anyone's thinking on any important issue, its worth being skeptical and treating it as fake until a person can (if they care enough or have the time) independently verify the facts. 

Over Employed

I can understand what drives people to be "over-employed" having done a simpler variant of it when J was growing up. I picked up contract work that jobs that I was way over-qualified for. While the money was far from great, it gave me the gift of time that I so badly needed as a single-mother. Work was not an overhang in my life - the job was simple, transactional and only took a small fraction of my billable hours. Given that it was so easy, I always exceeded expectations and built a good reputation for myself - known to be very reliable, delivers on time and with high bar. For me the hours in the day that the strategy freed up to do things for J was far more valuable than the money. 

Having done this for a decade and half until J was in high school, taught me a few important lessons that folks who are trying to maximize financial security instead of free time, will learn along the way. Over time, you become a lesser version of who could have been professionally and that bleeds into your personal life in a bad way. People who are working traditional jobs, making the moves needed for raises and promotions are living in a parallel universe. Someone like me would struggle a great deal to get into that lane and thrive. 

So if you ever grow tired of this way of living, you would find your options rather limited. You may find yourself never wanting to take on a big, challenging, and interesting problem which you can solve given your skills and experience. You would be concerned about having to work the hours that would require and the level of pre-occupation with the problem that would bring. It would no longer be possible to mentally check-out as soon as a thing was done. This means, you will never see yourself do things you believe you have innate potential to do. 

Instead, you will see others rise to the challenge and thrive. Some of them will do well enough to hire you for the kind of undemanding work that you like doing - they know you will knock it out of the park and will gladly pay you for it. You will find yourself working for any number of talent-less hacks and feel stifled by their lack of imagination. There is no such thing as a free lunch no matter how hard you work towards achieving autonomy while working for someone. You play by their rules and are limited by them. I never thought I was doing something particularly clever back in the day - it was about giving my kid the best shot within the constraints of my situation. In an another life, I would have done very different.

Boxed Doctor

I like the idea of a doctor-in-a-box instead of a PCP given that I have not found one in the last two decades that I like or trust. It's been an unending series of bad first-dates trying to find one that is right for me. While not everyone is like me, I do believe there is enough of us to have such a box concept even worth bringing to market. 

the CarePod is an attempt to fully automate a check-up: A patient approaches the metallic, square 8x8 foot box, which is eight feet by eight feet, and unlocks it with their phone. Once inside, they find a chair and a large screen, where a robotic voice walks them through a body scan or blood pressure reading or finger prick blood draws — all of which they do on their own.

I know the risks I have based on my family history and try to do what I can to manage and minimize them. I also know that I do not want to go on medications unless that is last and only resort. What would help me most is to have a set of performance metrics determined for me that I can monitor on my own and get help if things are out of threshold. The box-doc seems to be a good solution for me. 

“Primary care is very tough to get for many people,” said Arthur Caplan, a professor of bioethics at New York University. But he was skeptical of Forward’s approach.

“The solution then isn't to go to jukebox medicine,” said Caplan. Part of the problem, he said, is what gets lost when you take human interaction out of the equation. “Very few people are going to show up at primary care and say, ‘My sex life is crummy, I'm drinking too much, and my marriage is falling apart,” said Caplan. It takes a doctor picking up on cues and going through a “sophisticated interview” to tease out things that patients don’t want to divulge, he said.

That sounds all dandy to have a doctor who has the time and incentive to do what Caplan is talking about. I have not found a PCP in the last couple of decades that was any better than a bot. I have always felt invisible and irrelevant to the doctor who arrives 15-30 minutes late to the appointment and leaves early because they are truly uninterested in me at a human level. A "sophisticated interview" sounds like an absolute fantasy. 

Changing Lanes

Tech talent going to work for the government starts to make sense seeing how disposable they have become in the tech industry. If the person has a valuable skill and they are being treated disrespectfully despite doing good work, comes a time when they no longer want to put up with it. 

“This has been a moment where folks have started pausing and started thinking about where they can make the most difference.”

Maybe the tide with rise for the government and the tech worker will have the sense of stability they have long missed. A win-win situation if all goes well

people may be realizing that tech companies are treating them as replaceable, pushing them to reconsider roles in tech. 

I know a few folks who came from government to tech and after a short stint returned to the world they are more familiar with. I can only imagine, the tech industry detour gave them a taste for how the other side lives but it did not impress them enough to consider a long-term career option. My friends from tech who went to work for the government generally did it closer to retirement age and they just exited the workforce. The perception that a government job is somehow slow, uninspiring, stagnating, and lacking potential would need to go away from the minds of those who have never worked for the government, is a barrier to entry. If enough people migrate from tech to government, that is likely to change. 

Selling Hope

This post was met with a lot of enthusiasm in my network and made me smile when I saw it. It is the unvarnished truth about a product manager's life. What you want to make possible versus what you actually can is so far apart that they are two different things entirely. You start with one vision and narrative about what the product will do and be. Reality strikes and you start paring back one feature at a time until you have the infamous MVP that is horrible outcome of several dozen compromises in none of which the product manager or their vision prevailed. Now, all this has to be dressed up as something worth for the engineers to rally around an build. 

You cannot motivate a team to do their best work if they know they will be delivering something ugly, deficient and unlovable destined to hobble along for very many releases until it has a better life. That does not get people energized. And so this lovely bit of wisdom from the trenches on what purpose a product roadmap is meant to serve. Anyone in the line of work will feel better reading this just to know that they are not alone in the world dealing with shit for infrastructure where absolutely nothing is easy or simple. Rookies make the mistake of thinking that something is and pay dearly for their naiveté. They learn in time to assume nothing, question everything and test to death just to be sure. 

Making Lemonade

Watched The Fall of the House of Usher and it was very entertaining. The one bit that really impressed me was Roderick Usher's monologue about lemons in the middle of Episode 3. Every word in his exposition is sadly true and is drawn from real life. Not everyone feels the same way about the lemon speech: 

Taken in the context of the entire show, this whole business with the lemons completely undercuts much of what Flanagan is trying to say about wealth or the greed of corporations. Making a healthcare CEO who got rich on opioids into a caricature of evil because of the way he’d sell lemons is easy, but it also obscures the insidious and more straightforward ways corporations actually do exploit markets, or even the way Roderick himself knowingly pushed an addictive painkiller in order to sell more of it.

The way I see it, sometimes it is cathartic to create extreme caricatures to draw attention to a complex problem. We have to credit the viewer with a modicum of intelligence and believe that they will not treat the words coming out of Usher's mouth as if they were the handbook for running a successful business. But the hyperbole gets people's attention and hopefully they continue to think about how they can avoid getting suckered into the making of lemonade for a the mega rich to enjoy after working their lemon through its paces. I would look at it as a good public service announcement embedded into a nice show and not berate the thing on artistic merits as this author does. 

Lamp Washing

I spent a good hour cleaning up the earthen lamps I lit for Diwali. They have been around for a few years now and by any standard would be considered quite ordinary - I had bought them at the local Indian grocery store. Every year when I light them, my thoughts turn to children in India who likely labored over these lamps. To make them look less mass manufactured (as they are) someone had to paint and embellish them by hand - that would be the kind of job a relative young child could do. 

There are some many intertwined layers of wrong here that a person would always be in error no matter what they did. Cleaning the lamps is my way of showing gratitude and contrition at the same time. Some child somewhere in the country where I was born made this thing  and it did not bring any joy to them. It is likely they spent Diwali without light and food. People like me around the world, enjoyed the fruit of their labor, celebrated the festival of lights. We talked to our kids about the significance of the rituals. 

We likely did not spend nearly as much time talking to them about child labor involved in making Diwali happen - lamps, firecrackers and more. We gloss over these things - save that somber talk for another time. I make it a point to think about the provenance of these lamps every year when I light them. Even if they are just my thoughts, not spoken out loud to anyone, they help me atone in my small limited way. Washing and reusing them is some more atonement. There is some value to take pause and consider such things even for a few minutes once a year. There is no clear and well-defined path to saving these children even for large global companies who are in a position to help at meaningful scale. 

Its easy for a consumer to feel guilty and try to buy things that are child-labor free. We could all do that and end up hurting those children we desire to save even more. Though our over-zealous actions we could rob them of their only livelihood, make things so much worse. I recognize the futility of it all but still can't bear the thought of throwing these lamps out, buying myself some new ones. 

Early Music

I had never heard of such a thing as a Mikiphone and thought it was a very clever invention. To think that the idea of bringing portability to music was implemented that long ago is fascinating.  It is not super-simple to use and takes more than pushing a button but there is a certain charm to the process of setting it up. Was reading another article about how our taste in music is created and what it means. 

..the music people listened to at an early age becomes their native home comfort music. When they grow up, that music will be part of who they are, tied in with memories and growing up. All of these powers are why music is so important to us.

For me the music I listened to at an early age had two very distinct tracks. The music I listened to at home and I want to listened to at school. My school had a public address system and the principal enjoyed Western classical music, often waltzes and marches. I was too young to know what any of it was but loved what I heard anyway. At home, my father sang Bangla and Hindi songs all the time. Both my parents loved Hindustani classical music so we had a collection of LPs that they played. It was understood that you listened to such music in reverential silence because the maestros deserved nothing less. 

I was taken to many concerts from a young age and coached heavily on proper manners. It took decades of perseverance for a very talented person to perform on stage and have a nationally or even internationally recognized name. Getting to hear them live was a great privilege and adequate respect was to be shown at all times. 

Back at school, I could horse around in the play area with my friends while Berlioz Hungarian March played in the background. We weren't being told that was bad manners or showing disrespect to those who made the music. I came to have a more casual relationship with music that was further from my culture but likeable all the same. The early habits have stayed with me and also defines how I engage with all the kinds of music I enjoy. 

Never List

J's college freshman year is well behind her but this funny list of things a freshman would never say on their weekly call home made me chuckle. Towards the end of her college years, J did ask "How are you?" Post college she wants to know in greater depth what is going on in my life. But back then it was impossible to imagine. 

The self-absorption of a child who has recently turned adult can be range from absurd, irritating and hurtful but in reality it is just them trying to become their own person, learn who they are and what they are meant to do with their life. Once some of the goals start to trend green, they have more capacity for parents, family and the like. I loved this particular one from the list 

 “I already bought my airline ticket home, because I know prices go up if you wait until the last minute.”

I have yet to see that come to pass with J. The travel plans are up in the air till the very end and suddenly I will have flight details by text. I am too overjoyed to know I will see her soon to worry about anything else. 

Earlier I had read this other story about how post-pandemic a lot of young people are experiencing persistent cognitive fog. That would seriously interfere with a person's desire to think for themselves and become independent. 

Fake Guru

 The author of this highly pointless article calls himself "the office whisperer". What he calls the trend of the future was available quite ubiquitously even twenty years ago. The right to work from home (telecommute) part-time or even full-time as reward for strong performance was common in mundane organizations like banks and health insurance companies. Even as a consultant, I got to enjoy those privileges, the full-time employees had a much better deal and rightly so. The closing of this writing so clueless that I have to wonder if the wisdom that author is spewing out sprung from the trusty ChatGPT

By anchoring flexibility as a merit-based privilege, you invite a culture of self-motivation and responsibility–one that values results over routine, innovation over presence, and autonomy over micromanagement. It’s a cultural shift that can redefine what it means to be productive in the modern world.

People had reasonable expectation of quality and originality if stuff was published in Fortune magazine. That was before people started to call themselves whisperers of various sorts. Such a tragedy that this stuff gets written and promoted all around as some kind of genius revelation. I wish I had the contact information of N so I could send this this piece of nonsense to her. She could opine based on her direct experience. 

This woman made dozens of telecommute decisions for her staff every year at performance review time. She was tough but fair, close to retirement age and this was already a couple of decades ago. It had been the norm in this health insurance company for a while - a system that worked well and people liked. Underperformers felt like they were being named and shamed because they had to badge in everyday, supervised more heavily than the stars. But it gave them a tangible goal to work towards for the whole year and develop the work ethic that automatically qualified them for remote work.

Telling Lies

Someone I know (we will call her L) has been telling little lies about work she is doing for almost a year now. At first it appeared that she sincerely wished to do the things she was representing she would or already was. There was every appearance that such was indeed the case - there was a lot of action that an outsider could genuinely mistake for work. Then at some point, it started to appear as if the volume of work was greatly exaggerated. In order to cover for the foundational lie on top of which the whole edifice of lies was built, L had to manufacture things do to that tangentially connected to work that needed to be done. It hardly matters what the work was because the way this unfolded over time is pretty universal. 

Say a person was tasked with cleaning my yard and they came in with the full set of tools and represented to me that the work would take 8-10 hours. If I have never done any yardwork myself, chances are I don't know how far off the mark that estimate is. In reality that is already a 5x of the real number of hours. Now say this person tells me that it is not possible to progress until the tree line is considerably thinned because the equipment would not be able to move around properly until that was done. After the tree issue is done, the person tells me that they need to level the ground in one portion of the yard because it is a trip hazard. Then they discover some buried sprinkler system that needs to be taken care of and so on. We arrive at the 10th hour and the yard clean is yet to begin. That would be in the style of L. 

Reading this essay about the average number of lies people tell each day brought L to mind. She tells her lies for a reason and I almost certain she is not a horrible, ill-intentioned person at her core. There is a reason why she does what she does as is the case with the person failing to complete yardwork - their driver may not be greed or incompetence. Maybe they see a target state vision and a path to getting there that simply flies in the face of commonsense. Seen in that light L is not lying at all and neither is the person who 10 hours into the yard cleanup job leaves the homeowner with a bigger mess than they started out with. 

Finding Peace

I had not heard of the anti-bride movement but it sounds quite sad - all the pomp and circumstance of a wedding without any anchoring tradition that people (including the bride) maybe familiar with. It would make more sense if the whole business was frugal and simple but that is clearly not the objective. It is as if not dressing like a bride and skipping the rituals of marriage will de-risk from bad outcomes. The bridal and wedding industry is making just as much money and the bride best have a very good prenup no matter now truly, deeply and madly she is in love. My friend T who is in her 60s now said something the other day that resonated with me. Historically and until quite recently, marriage and love were not meant, required or expected to intersect. 

Marriage was a family and social obligation - the true nature of the union most evident in royal alliances but the same construct applied for the rest of the population - the stakes were much lower but the union had to bring some tangible, material value to each side. The success of the union was not measured by how deeply the two loved each other getting in or along the way. They figured it out. All this pressure centering marriage in T's opinion comes from overloading the institution and asking to deliver all kind of things its not meant to. Imagine you accept a job offer and expect to find God by working that job and when you don't you feel like your whole life a big mistake and failure. That would sound a bit ridiculous. Maybe the anti-bride folks need to think  more like T about marriage and find peace.

Team Play

Nice post on why bias for action is not always the best idea. The example of a goal keeper taking action just to not be hated by fans for losing the game when in fact staying put could be the better play is something we can relate to in everyday life. Say a child comes crying to their parent saying they got hurt in their head and are in a lot of pain. The parent would likely bias for action and it that probably the right thing to do no matter if the child is exaggerating a bit to get attention - neglecting the situation could have bad consequences.  The same child when they push their parent to yes to something they are reluctant to allow, will likely meet some stalling tactic - no action basically. It would not be a good move to say yes (and lose  authority) or say no (be intractable where the facts may prove that to be a bad decision in the end). At work similar things apply. 

When dealing with a person who is not a good team player, sometimes it's best to ignore them while everyone else is brought in to collaborate. Once the team starts getting wins, getting recognized and such, the person who refused to participate may want in - chances are they will work harder to make up for lost time. You will get the outcomes you need and want without having done anything. Pushing this person ahead of time to be part of the team will only be met with resistance and likely demoralize those who are already on-board. This scenario has played out in my experience so many times that I no longer worry about the one or two difficult players - its all a matter of time and patience. 

Seeking Meaning

Watching my aging parents and others of similar age, it seems that the idea of irrelevance starts to set in well before people are close of dying. Not everyone is able to have a healthy self-esteem when it comes to their understanding of their relevance to the world and even immediate family. What are they contributing and why they would be missed when they are gone. Those who are able to add intrinsic value to the lives of the younger generations in their families and communities feel much better about their relevance. 

They have something to contribute and are infact doing so. The "contribution" can take a myriad of forms - being a judgment-free sounding board, being a mentor, older and wiser friend, lending professional expertise in a pro bono capacity and so on. When a person is not able to see their contribution quite clearly, they need their loved ones to help shore up their flagging confidence - convince them that they are indeed wanted, loved and valued. I can see how this could dovetail into terminalism this article talks about.

If all humans have rights, the dying have rights, too. They are valuable in themselves, not for some abstract, unknown “contribution” they might make. As Reed puts it, “The reason that terminalism matters is that dying persons matter.”

I wonder if a person's lack of conviction about their value in the world promotes terminalism in some way. 

Writing Machine

What prominent writers have to say about AI and the future of writing brought to mind a story about Flaubert and Maupassant I had read in essay a while back. The essay quote what Maupassant had to say about what he had learned from Flaubert

“Whatever you want to say,” he would later quote from Flaubert’s teachings, “there is only one word to express it, only one verb to give it a movement, only one adjective to qualify it. You must search for that word, that verb, that adjective, and never be content with an approximation, never resort to tricks, even clever ones, and never have recourse to verbal sleight-of-hand to avoid a difficulty.”

In theory, AI could find that perfect verb, adjective and adverb to say what needs to be said. Presumably it is trained on this notion of perfection as defined by masters of the craft. But even that is only part of what makes Maupassant's short-stories so compelling and unforgettable. The language is polished to perfection but there is a lot more that cannot be quantified and that is where the creative genius resides. 

Most of writers in the interview seem to have hope for that unquantifiable thing that makes a great writer - if it cannot be properly expressed, documented and encoded it is potentially safe from the all-devouring writing machine that seeks to make writers redundant.