Hot Zone

The Hot Zone is a great read and I am glad I got to it. During the pandemic and after, I have wondered like many others why Ebola was able to be contained and Covid was not. For the layperson the answer is not obvious:

In any case, the Ebola Sudan virus destroyed a few hundred people in central Africa the way a fire consumes a pile of straw—until the blaze burns out at the center and ends in a heap of ash—rather than smoldering around the planet, as AIDS has done, like a fire in a coal mine, impossible to put out. The Ebola virus, in its Sudan incarnation, retreated to the heart of the bush, where undoubtedly it lives to this day, cycling and cycling in some unknown host, able to shift its shape, able to mutate and become become a new thing, with the potential to enter the human species in a new form.

There apparently no such thing as a virus sensor. So if there is something deadly, species-threatening level even, we would never know. We could breathe it, come into contact through a minor cut in our skin. It does not have to any notable event for a human to get infected by a virus

 There are no instruments that can detect a virus. The best way to find a virus in the wild, at the present time, is to place a sentinel animal at the suspected location of the virus and hope the animal gets sick.

The frightening story of Ebola that book tells, leaves the reader wondering what if any control they can have over their lives. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time (in a sense) can get a person sick to dead in the matter of days. No one will likely step into such a situation of their own volition but mistakes and accidents happen. The fact that we and our loved one are alive seems like the greatest miracle after reading the book.

Free Will

Ofcourse there is no such thing as free will. It just so happened that was reading Robert Sapolsky's Determined when I also tuned into this podcast while driving. I had not particularly sought out the book or the podcast. The later was quite entertaining and it kept be company for the entire trip. The book I found fairly tedious reading. It reads like Sapolsky's notes and rants collated over time processed rather hastily into a book. The number of pages is definitely not warranted. 

The point he is trying to make was clear quite early. The reader will choose to agree or disagree as is their right. So what should an author who is intent on proving free will is a myth do at that point? Cite authorities who share his point of view, dismantle the arguments of those that disagree. He does all that but that is where tedium begins. There is a point to the book, in the pile of raw notes there is content that could have been shaped to make that point with more elan. Maybe Sapolsky lumps his readers in the same bucket as his students who have absorb the material in whatever style he chooses to deliver it. Us readers, unlike his students have a choice - we can move on to other books and other things in life. We are not beholden like they are. I wish Sapolsky had tried a tad harder on behalf of the reader. 

Ironically, a few dozen pages in I recalled a story my mother told told me about the questions Yudhishthira was asked by Yama and how he responded to each of them. The precision of the responses made a lasting impression on me - that is probably why such things are taught to kids when they are still young. When I thought back about the questions and answers in later years, it clarified that whole point was establishing a framework. It does not mater nature or nurture (the simplified version of what Sapolsky is describing the reasons why a person cannot have free will), the framework is universally applicable and it helps people do more right than wrong in their lives no matter their disposition, the impossibility of exercising free-will. This is how things can stay in balance.

Simple Tale

I remember Khushwant Singh from With Malice Towards One and All and that I always looked forward to reading his column. The Company of Women is not the Singh I had been familiar with but it was a book that I read to the end - something that is not often the case with me the last several years. The plot points are uncomplicated, the prose style extremely plain and after a few chapters you see a predictable way the protagonist Mohan Kumar engages with women. He needs them to fill the void in his life - sex is pivotal but there is companionship as well, his need to be the man who makes dreams come true for the the woman in his life, no matter now temporal and transactional the relationship. It is no work of art, literature or hallmark of erudition, this particular book. It is a lazy read at best. 

Yet, there is something to be said for it. What got my attention was his depiction of women as eager, willing and enthusiastic sexual partners. They are diverse in background, culture, and education but are similar in the expression of their primal urge. In that, they find common ground with Mohan Kumar, a man who can make dreams come true for a few or many months but not forever. So we have the moving cast of women that come in and out of his life, mostly without leaving any long-term marks but collectively, they keep him afloat, tend to his physical and mental aloneness. In 1999 when the book was published, Khushwant Singh was still associated with being the former editor of Illustrated Weekly and his eviscerating, no holds-barred political commentary. 

This book would be highly frivolous coming from him and that took courage. India pre-2000 was a very different country than it is now.  To write something this lewd at a time of his life when he would be putting the finishing touches to his legacy is pretty bold. The book on its own is quite unremarkable. Considered in the context of who wrote it, where and when it gives the reader pause.

Scrap Life

The RedBox machines were fun when they first came into existence - a novel and budget entertainment concept that many loved. Times have changed and the machines are now being sold as scarp metal. That is one way to end it for the machines that have serve now purpose as the company is bankrupt. But there could be other options - bring them into maker-spaces or house them with folks who have the time and imagination to repurpose them. 

There is a lot going on inside the machine that would be fun for those who love to tinker to play with. The question to ask is what is the most creative thing anyone could do with a RedBox machine and not what is the cheapest way to dispose of it. Schools could pick them up to give kids a change to take it apart and understand how the whole system works - so many ways this could have ended instead of what is actually going on: 

Taylor, the Alabama mover, said that so far he has been hired to move 44 of the machines from retailers’ sites—outdoor machines already unmoored from the ground, ready to be taken to various recycling centers.

He said he was paid $180 to $200 a machine by the company that hired him, plus roughly $50 to $70 when taking the metal in for scrap recycling.

While its great someone is making some money in the process, this kind of thoughtless, wastefulness of opportunities to learn and create is very disheartening to watch. 

Renting Friends

 A kid I know was telling me recently that he is running out of time to make friends in his life. In his opinion beyond mid-20s people do not make friendships that are real and last a lifetime. You could have any number of social connections and friendly acquaintances but not that kind of friend. This kid's friends go back to his elementary school but college and beyond they are all dispersing. He has not been able to find his people outside this group that is becoming increasingly disconnected from his life. 

The mid-20s part rung true for me but I had been through multiple upheavals in my life since that point - which is what I attributed my inability to make new friends. But maybe the kid was onto something here - maybe that is the magic number when your friendship luck runs out. If you are wise, you will find your friends before that happens. Reading about rentable friends in Tokyo brought to mind the sparsity of friends in my life - maybe there is a world-wide market for rentable friends, Tokyo is as always leading the trend.

The ones I am closest too live too far away for any ongoing social interaction but they go back to my teens. That is not much different from being best buddies with the kids you went to kindergarten with. S, a guy I work with is one of those. He stays in touch with that group that is now scattered around the world. That is their friend-group for life and they first met in kindergarten. This is a group of seven grown men that have magically remained connected into their early 40s. 

They are in very different professions and getting together takes several months of planning. When they get together, the families do not join. They understand that families have not much to contribute to their relationship and would feel out of place given lack of history. Their week together has an element of time-travel. They never quite return to the swing-set of the kindergarten schoolyard. But they do return to the beginning of manhood, coming into their own and realizing that this group of friends still made sense. That is when time starts for them. They are also incredibly fortunate and know it.

Creating Food

Read this interesting story about roadkill cook-offs. It is like a cooking competition like any other but has a specificity which makes it unlike others, maybe puts it in a league of its own

The Roadkill Cook-Off is Marlinton’s Coachella. Its Mardi Gras or Super Bowl. And Marlinton tries to have its snake and eat it, too: by leaning in to West Virginia’s stereotypes while trying to show there’s something more to the state than hillbilly caricature.

I watched The Menu sometime ago and reading this brought that movie to mind and what it made to caricaturize. The rat dropping themed ratatouille at the Roadkill Cook-off is at the opposite end of the kind of food featured in The Menu. 

There is a level of absurdity in both but ways that maybe the path to reconciliation in these difficult and divisive times. Maybe the two could look at the zaniness of what are each doing and find humor in the other's effort to be special. It may turn out things are not as far apart and impossible to bridge as it would seem at first.

Where the two worlds meet is the amateur cook with a flair for adventure and whimsy. I would call myself one of those. I like making dishes that have an element of surprise, take a staple and give it a little shake-up so it brings a smile on the face of the person tasting it. Small but valuable joys of cooking that always makes it so worthwhile for me.

Screened Out

We definitely live in interesting times. This post was shared by a friend about someone getting interviewed by an AI. I have previously written about candidates who I have interviewed that had AI assist them and how bizarre that experience was for me. In the workplace we have people these days that have managed to bamboozle their leadership who are not nearly as fluent in the use of AI as a productivity tool. So we have people producing tons of content that is purportedly a work deliverable but as you start to read through and god forbid try to take any action, you find yourself in an impossible situation. 

An engineering manager friend of mine who works for a large tech company shared his experience in this regard which is quite telling. P has been managing engineering teams for a good twenty years now and has a well-established track record of success. He is fully capable of rolling up his sleeves and diving into thorny issues his developers are struggling with and they all respect his authority. So if P has an opinion on the quality of product requirements coming to his team, I know he is right.

It turns out some very junior level product manager in the team who has ambitions that are not supported by her skill or level of experience, has made this team's life endlessly miserable. In pre GenAI times, such a person would need weeks and months to work through a product requirements until they reached the quality bar. But one such as her is now able to crank out requirements in minutes, lightly update them so they don't look completely machine generated. Within the day she has produced something she wants to the engineering team to start working on. 

At first blush, it all looks reasonable so the engineers agree to do a review and the whole thing unravels in the first five minutes. Clarifications on one user story can take an hour with this individual demonstrating that she has not through the most fundamental things. In fact, by using Gen AI as a crutch from this early in her career, she has missed time to learn by doing the job, running a normal requirements discovery session and so on - the very basic nuts and bolts of her job. In all fairness she should be junior business analyst and go from there.

But that is not the state of the art. People like her have made product management a bit of a joke - everyone and their grandmother is a product manager these days. We are not even expecting her to do proper market and user research, competitive analysis and so on. The desire to suborn all that to Gen AI would be simply too high for her to attempt doing any of that unassisted. So anyway, this hapless engineering team has been spinning their wheels for a year without any feature delivered to the customer's satisfaction. In the meanwhile, the leadership in the organization is unable to size up why such "well-written" product requirements are considered completely unusable by the engineering team.

I had much sympathy for P but told him what I thought would likely happen next. The junior PM would get promoted based on the volume of output she was producing. His team would be blamed for their inability to deliver results. We joked about getting an AI to convert her spec to code and deploy it in production. While that sounded funny at the time, it may well be his only option if he wants to demonstrate his team can keep up with the product manager's productivity. 

Guava Jam

 I would love to see tree-climbing classes for all ages and skill levels at one of the parks in my town. We have several lovely ones and they all have climbable trees - not ones I would attempt at my age but someone younger can easily do it. Recently, I was out to lunch with a former co-worker and one of the dishes features guava jam. 

It immediately triggered memories of the lovely guava tree on our side of the fence with branches going well into our neighbor's garden. This was my favorite tree to climb as a kid and the single greatest attraction for my friends to come over to my place. When guavas were in season there would be a half a dozen of us up on different branches feasting on the fruit until we had had our fill and ready to descend. There are few memories from childhood that can beat the brightness and perfection of those sunny afternoons when I was up on that tree, stuffing myself with guavas. This is not quite like the tree-climbing described in this article but I would take it anyway - just to come close to that memory

After getting suited up, instructors showed them how to tie a rope and connect it to their harness. They were also taught the best method for climbing trees based on factors such as the size or distance from its trunk.

L heard me describe my guava tree climbing and smiled. She could tell it had been a highlight of my childhood. Though there had been no trees to climb in her urban neighborhood when she was that age, she could still relate - there is always something in a kid's life that is similarly picture perfect.

Being Detached

T was my boss in my second job out of college. I was as green as they come but teachable and T was unfailing patient with me. In about six months, I started being useful and reliable for the team but T continued to shepherd me along until he left to America as many did. We stayed in touch off and on over the years. As luck would have we found ourselves working in another company twenty some years later. T had been there over twelve years by then and I had started recently. I noticed that he had been at the same level the whole time and knowing his abilities he was severely underemployed. 

I asked him about that when we connected and he just smiled. I would need to attach myself to the outcomes of my job to get promoted in this company and that will come at a cost I am not willing to pay. T has two boys - one of whom is a rising star in some hot startup. The younger one, still in college, is on track to a great start as well. T tells me that he spent a ton of time with his sons when they were growing up - being a father that was physically and mentally present. His own father was an important government official in India and was largely absent in his life. He had moved through the corridors of power successfully and attained the highest office possible for someone in his line of work. By all accounts a great success. The kids had turned out well. 

According to T, it takes a tremendous amount of attachment to the outcomes a person delivers, managing the level of visibility and maneuvering around endless, non-stop obstacles to get there. Doing a good job has very little to do with it. That is not the life he wanted for himself at the cost of missing out of fatherhood. Reading this essay about the right kind of detachment reminded me of T - I think he had done it right. He had assessed correctly what it would take for him to have career growth and what he'd need to give up and he made a thoughtful choice. That in turn allowed him to do the job he loved and never worry about who was watching and recognizing his performance. 

Bigger Lunch

Recently, it seems the portion size of lunch meals has grown larger - and these are the healthy options like soup, salad and grain bowls. It used to be that a meal like that was just enough or maybe it left you a smidge hungry. It was not common for folks to have a lot of left-overs from eating out at lunch. At first, I thought it might just be me - aging and proportionately reduced appetite. 

But I see that with folks would are a decade or two younger than me as well. All of them are likely not on AOMs. Reading about how the food industry needs to adapt to Ozempic style drugs that successfully make a person feel full and not think about food makes me wonder if this is one of those strategies even if counter-intuitive. A smaller portion size would make better sense if the customer is satiated with less. 

Maybe the idea is that the food was well-prepared even though the customer is on a medication that killed their desire to enjoy food. So if they took it home and there was a moment when the effect of the drug faded out, this person would be able to enjoy the leftovers and that may bring them back. There is a certain logic to that if it happens to work. I only know one person who takes Ozempic and she reports mixed feelings about it - being diabetic and having a number of health complications from it, she is grateful for any drug that improves her situation. This one certainly does. 

While physically it has been a blessing, she seems to struggle with how it changed her relationship with food. B is a good cook and has been careful about preparing meals that are healthy for her condition. But she likes to enjoy the process and the output - both of which seem to have been impacted by the drug. If there is no desire or anticipation for the output, the process becomes pointless and tedious. 

Infinite Unique

It was a Monday evening and I was walking from work to my hotel in mid-town Manhattan. I don't come to this office often enough to remember all the quirks of how to get into the building from door marked with a different number than the actual address of the location where Google Maps navigates me to. So every time I am here, I circle the block a few times before I remember that there is a salad bar right next to the door I am looking for. It had been that kind of morning when I arrived and had felt ridiculous dragging my carryon bag around the streets, trying to find the mystery door. 

But in New York people can be and feel invisible no matter how personally significant their attire or actions might be. It is also common knowledge that by my age women turn invisible though I would argue that is even more true for men of my age but its not talked about as much because women in their youth can often be too visible - even uncomfortably so. So as I walked to the hotel, I paid more than usual attention to my surroundings. I was curious about who the crowds or even a few random passersby might find worthy of a fleeting glance in this city.

Soon enough, I caught sight of a young man who looked like a Greek god - he was likely in his mid 20s. The guy was dressed sharp and carried himself like a model - maybe he was one. The endless stream of people passed by him and not once did anyone look his way. Soon after I lost sight of him, I noticed a very beautiful young woman who also happened to be exceptionally tall and should have been easily visible. She went just about as unheeded as the guy. I found some comfort knowing that my looking lost and confused, unable to find the door of an office is a totally irrelevant data point to the crowds. 

I am just a middle-aged out of towner, one of thousands in that area. It matters nothing whether I wear understated clothes or decide to pair hot pink slacks with a leopard print top like the woman about my age who was waiting at the traffic light near my hotel. I thought she looked great and was able to pull off that look quite effortlessly. But this is one of those special places in the world where everyone is a adds their bit into the infinite cauldron of unique so no one and nothing sticks out. I have always loved that about New York City and it does not get old.

Beginning Decline

I have been reading recently that websites are being penalized for backlinks if they are deemed "unnatural" by Google. As always, its the small businesses that get hid hardest by the capriciousness of the algorithm. They don't have the resources to even discover what they are doing wrong let alone pay for those wrongdoings to be corrected. Then I ran into this article about the broader problem of backlinks not being the backbone of the internet anymore - a far more problematic thing.

If you degrade hyperlinks, and you degrade this idea of the internet as something that refers you to other things, you instead have this stationary internet where a generative AI agent will hoover up and summarize all the information that’s out there, and place it right in front of you so that you never have to leave the portal

Lot of folks say they never go beyond the AI generated response to their search query because the organic search results in Google are garbage anyway (and finally they did something about it, thought might be a case of too little too late) and you have to scroll through a lot of ads to even get there. If the AI can get it mostly right then why bother. And that is exactly the slippery-slope we need to avoid. If the question was what day is Thanksgiving in 2024 and AI provides the right answer, there is no reason to believe that it will come even within striking distance your query was about the recent port strike, what caused it and where things are headed from here. 

The AI may decide to offer up spin that it's corporate overlords and the political handlers have decided is aligned with "responsible AI" behavior. If the person who asked the question has no reliable way to get "real" answers to their query then they will need to go on without knowing. The more things that people collectively don't know the easier it is to manipulate them all.

Shoe Tech

Love the idea of shoes that can grow as kids do but also accommodates variations in adult feet. This sounds all around sensible: 

..the sneakers are a smart footwear solution for people who know the pains of inconsistent shoe sizing. They’re also a forgiving solution for short in-store try-on sessions, which might have you convinced that your new pair of shoes fits well—until you spend an hour in them at home and realize they’re tight around the toes. Adjustable shoes accommodate growing feet as well as feet that are slightly different sizes, and they’re more forgiving if you pick the wrong size.

Shoes and innovation have come together before - get them to vacuum the floor. Sounds interesting but not nearly as useful as a shoe that can adjust a bit to fit better

The shoe is a concept product that emerged from an internal company contest that is held every other year. Started in 1991, the Denso contest lets employees pitch new ideas to "foster their creative and innovative design concepts" and chooses 12 finalists to present in Japan.

One of the finalist projects is the Ecology Shoe, which has a small vacuum inside its very large, outer sole. At the heel is a small pedal, which is connected to gears. Every step you take powers the vacuum motor, allowing it to suck up small pieces of debris at a time.

Sneakers have a new avatar thanks to Sara Blakley. The looks and the price point of the thing are not yet what it would take to see every other woman come to work wearing this. Some other heel styles could start making this more interesting to the larger population of women. Then knock-offs will follow until there is a Sneex variant for every budget and taste. 

Seeking Help

When J was in college, it was hard for me to resist the urge to jump in and rescue her from her little troubles. Fortunately for both of us, she was too far away for me to actually act on such urges. I definitely recognize that feeling but if a parent actually helps every time the kid hits a speed bump, it likely won't be a good idea: 

Nicki Jenkins, president of AHEPPP, and director of parent and family engagement at the University of Kentucky, described this as a “cultural shift.” Parents are “becoming friends with their students,” she says, and are inclined to do things for them instead of teaching them how to be independent.

“So worried for my child,” a mother posted recently on another parent-support Facebook group with 24,000 members. Her kid had texted from college about a humid room, broken laundry card and other small inconveniences. 

J learned to sort things out on her own. In time, the number of issues that needed my input reduced quite dramatically. I wonder if the kids are victims of a friendless era where their best hope is their parent because they are not particularly close to anyone 

Americans have an average of four or five friends (a number that has held steady since the 70s) but now only spend three hours per week with them, compared to six hours a decade ago. In other words, the growing loneliness epidemic is not about people having fewer friends (less than four per cent of respondents reported having no friends at all), it’s more just a byproduct of “having no time” to foster deeper connections.

Post college, working and living independently as J has for a couple of years, I hear almost nothing about tactical, day to day problems where my help is sought. Youth and lack of experience bring about issues time to time but those are not crises that need to resolved right away. I do believe that not having recused her (not by my choice but due to circumstances), has been a good thing in balance.

Seeing End

A long time ago, I worked for a company much like this one that is now going out of business. When I was hired, they sold me a vision of a leadership team that was chomping at the bit to become a modern company and go toe to toe with the competition. That too was a family-owned business with many tenured folks. A lovely place to be as far as how comfortable they made me feel as a new hire but that is where the loveliness ended. There were a couple of IT leaders who had built the systems that ran the business they had today - these were systems that had served them well decades ago and were long in need of complete overhaul if not outright replacement. 

That was exactly the recommendation that had heard from the consulting firm they had hired to help them create a modernization strategy. It was the recommendation I wholeheartedly agreed with. As it turned out it was impossible to execute in that environment. The old guard refused to let go of what they had built and refused to what it took to modernize it. So management found themselves in a situation where if they had to build a company that was relevant to the times, they would need to build from the ground up with a team that knew nothing about their heritage, their customers and what made them successful. 

There was simply no way to make that happen with the team they had it place for decades. I preserved for almost a year to get the holdouts in the technology team to see the writing on the wall - that they would either adapt to the times or not have a business left. That did not work out, I moved on as did many others who were more recent hires. The consulting company continued to produced lovely strategy decks full of  "actionable recommendations". The brass perused the decks with great interest and used some of the content to promote their agendas. 

But none of that made any dent on the technology team that was backbone of the company. A few years after I left, news very similar to this came through my LinkedIn feed. I could claim clairvoyance and say I saw this coming many years ago - it was a matter of when not if. But this was so very obvious that just about everyone there could tell how the story  would end even if some chose to be in denial to the end.

Main Stage

My friend T shared a short video of her performing Bharat Natyam on stage for some big celebration at her work. The last time I have seen her dressed for dance and on stage was in college. Other than being physically a bit slower than she was then, it was all the same - like time had not moved at all.  T had a decade of training before college and continued to learn once she started working for maybe another decade. A very large part of her life has been about dance and other things came to exist around it. 

I remember being in awe of her ability to express herself so wonderfully. She was one of those that innately loved dance, had a lot of natural talent which the training helped perfect. It was not hard for her find time to practice for an hour each day - she looked forward to it. It was T's time to escape into her zone. I love dance but have absolutely no talent for it. For people like T, they have that gift and can create a world with it they can escape to. For me, that has to be pieced together painstakingly with different things that I enjoy and am somewhat decent at. In her pictures and that video, T is beaming, She has escaped into her perfect world. 

This is not the same T you would see off-stage going about the mundane business or her life, working, running errands, doing domestic chores like the rest of us. She too can be tired, irritated, aggravated, sad and upset. Once she had her dancing bells on and the music comes on, she had achieves escape velocity. It was so wonderful and inspiring to see that it is all still there, that perfect unblemished world.

Testing Love

 Reading this article made me wonder if the next step would be to scan your loved ones brains to check if they love you as much you love them. Maybe grandma is just faking her affection and really can't stand the clingy grandkid and wishes to be left alone to enjoy her retirement. Maybe the boyfriend is going through the motions in the relationship and will even propose but his heart is not in it. 

..brain scans of close friends doing the same activities are actually much more similar than those of less connected people. You literally are on the same wavelength as your besties. 

All of which means that when it comes to human-to-human connection, you can gauge the extent of a pair's attachment by looking at a brain scan. Can the same be said of human-dog pairs? 

A trust but verify love idea is fraught with dangers. Sometimes, you have to make peace with whatever love you can get from a person you care about - specially if that relationship is immutable. If you have a complicated relationship with your sibling but believe there is real love at the core of it, that is an article of faith to hold on to, not dissect and destroy upon finding contraindications. Sometimes a lie that you want to overlook is the best way to cope with a truth you do not want to face. 

Feeling Connection

 Read this great essay in Wired about climate change involving a waterfall deep down in the ocean:

When a system approaches a tipping point, though, the character of the fluctuations changes. With the AMOC, you might see the flow rate increasingly struggle to regain its equilibrium. The rate might wander farther and farther away from the comfy baseline. And the system might take longer to settle back into its routine state. These features— the greater meandering, the slower return to home base—are an obsession of tipping-point mathematicians. If you were to plot the data for a system that’s about to tip, you’d see the data points first follow a nice, predictable path; then the path gets jittery, and then it goes off on wide, whiplashing swings. The system is becoming less stable, taking longer to recover. You can almost feel sorry for it. You can sense a sort of sickness

As the story goes, the brother and sister team published a paper on this patient's sickness and predicted the the time around which it would no longer recover. That got them a lot of heat and scrutiny from the climate science community. The system being studied is highly complex and the data is too scarce to make confident predictions. For every outcome humans can think of nature can come up with a surprise. So to conclude, the author writes: 

Besides, there’s another possibility. A remote one, sure, but one that also can’t be ruled out: The AMOC might have already tipped. And we wouldn’t know it for years

This all reminded me of a two partners in a relationship that is being put to test by one of the two. The other side, adjusts, tolerates, and adapts almost infinitely and they are rewarded for their efforts by bigger more novel challenges. It seems as if nothing can break this person's will to make the relationship work - there is no realistic tipping point. One day, the person who was creating all this trouble comes home to find half of everything gone, the person disappears so perfectly it is as if they had never existed. It turns out that they had planned their picture perfect exit for a decade while making it look like all was well. Nature is atleast letting us know all is not well infact. 

Keeping Up

I am definitely not in the company of teenage girls driving the future of language. I thought middle-schoolers said Ick and Lit was still in circulation - wrong on both counts. Not sure if staying current with the trends will actually help me other than being able to understand conversations between young women that I am not a part of

The discovery that young women drive linguistic change is not new.

More than two decades ago, William Labov, the founder of modern sociolinguistics studies, observed that women lead 90 per cent of linguistic change.

Then in 2003, linguists surveyed 6,000 letters, written between 1417 to 1681. 

The study found there was a quicker uptake of new language contained within the letters written by women compared to those written by men.

By the time it becomes acceptable for someone my age to use the vocabulary invented by such young trailblazers, that is old, dated and unfashionable language anyway. Speaking like kids would only make everyone feel awkward and weirded out. We like the generations in their lanes.

Logical End

Wonderful essay about how information was gathered and shared in the 1980s. Having such access to information would be completely magical for me back in that time. My local library was small and limited and yet offered me access to the world for which I was grateful. 

From 1984 to 1988, I worked in the Telephone Reference Division of the Brooklyn Public Library. My seven or eight colleagues and I spent the days (and nights) answering exactly such questions. Our callers were as various as New York City itself: copyeditors, fact checkers, game show aspirants, journalists, bill collectors, bet settlers, police detectives, students and teachers, the idly curious, the lonely and loquacious, the park bench crazies, the nervously apprehensive. (This last category comprised many anxious patients about to undergo surgery who called us for background checks on their doctors.) There were telephone reference divisions in libraries all over the country, but this being New York City, we were an unusually large one with an unusually heavy volume of calls. And if I may say so, we were one of the best. More than one caller told me that we were a legend in the world of New York magazine publishing.

I would be in the idly curious category like a lot of kids. When there is no way to indulge the curiosity, the spark can die out - and I am sure it did with me. But conversely, has having infinite access to all the information in the world made modern kids pursue idle curiosity to any logical, useful end ? The value of knowing things has been diminished by ease of access and there are so many shiny objects for the idly curious to pursue that they don't have the desire to stay the course with any particular question.

In Purgatory

I had deeply emotional response to this essay even though I never played tennis in my life and have only a passing interest in the sport. The purgatory of having potential but never reaching it is extremely relatable. Conor Niland speaks eloquently to what that feels like for a professional tennis player who can't quite float up to the top hundred. It seems ludicrously unfair that players with the caliber to rank in the top thousand in the world would be treated with as much regard as someone who plays "great" tennis at their small-town tennis club tournament. 

There is a universe that separates the ability and accomplishments of the two but they are lumped in the same category of unremarkable tennis players. I am definitely one of those that never achieved my potential academically or professionally for any number of reasons. Had it not been for the things in my personal life I was so very fortunate to receive, I would feel a lot like Niland did. 

A lot of futile toiling in the ranks with nothing to show for it. In business, a person has to move to a certain level at a certain clip to be able to execute on their ideas, drive organizations to fulfill their vision, earn their stripes to do bigger and better things. If that position is not attained in time, it almost does not matter if it is ever is. Most likely it will not come to pass and if it does - like by some miracle a tennis-pro ranked 889 by some miraculous happenstance shoots up to 89, chances are they will not last there long enough for it to matter at all.

 All the extraordinary effort to get there would be for nothing. I came to that assessment about my own professional prospects about two decades ago and decided I should accept that I will remain approximately where I was then - I could improve some aspects of it which I did but in balance nothing has changed for in at least twenty years. That fundamental stasis has to be dressed up as story of career progression to remain professionally viable. I believe this is exactly why there is such a strong demand for professional resume writing services - way too many people out there end up like me and need a helping hand to remain afloat. 

I wasn’t schlepping my way through the lower ranks of the professional tour for the money or the prestige, both of which were in short supply. I, like everyone else, was there to remove myself from the clutches of the lower tiers. The Futures tour sometimes felt like a circle of hell, but in practical terms it’s better understood as purgatory: a liminal space that exists only to be got out of as quickly as possible.

In a sense I made peace with living in the lower tiers so that purgatory became more tolerable. It also made me gain a stronger, keener appreciation of all things in my life beyond work.

Defining Self

 There is a logic in children suing governments for their climate rights  though many of their other rights are being lost too. There used to be an expectation that a hard-working young person could hope to settle down and start their own family by their mid-20s. 

That is now a dream far out of reach for many people that age. They work hard enough and often have the education that was supposed to lead them to the road to financial stability if not prosperity but reality is that many are joining the the NEET ranks instead. Governments are culpable to this turn of events too as much as they are are responsible for climate crisis and borrowing from future generations. 

Around the world, both innovative and old-school legal arguments are being used to go after companies and governments to seek redress or forestall future harms. At the same time, the fossil fuel industry and its allies have powerful new legal grounds at their disposal to challenge climate rules. A number of cases could be taken up by the highest courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court and The Hague.

The NEET phenomenon is disproportionately male and theories abound for why that is. Makes you wonder if there is also the larger question of what it takes to be a man in this day and age. If the man cannot earn enough to be sole-provider for this family then what must he do to bridge the gap. Add to that such a man is a relationship with a woman who is not interested in being a mother then the family unit as it was traditionally defined does not come together. These are two people in a temporal situation and the while the woman can enjoy her freedom, time motherhood to when it suits her, it leaves the man in the equation somewhat lost. 

 that’s in part due to declining opportunities in traditionally male occupations, such as construction and manufacturing, while “women’s enrollment in schooling, education outcomes, and employment outcomes have mostly trended upwards.”

The traditionally defined concept of what it means to be male is probably more to blame here than occupations.

Assigning Value

Tracking the cost per wear of every article of clothing for several months sounds like a great way to understand if you are spending wisely and getting value. Most things I own have been around in my closet for a very long time. They speak to a significant evolution in my taste and also how I view age-appropriate attire. The clothes that are a good two decades old were great for that time in my life but they do not make sense now. Even if they fit me physically, they bear no relationship to the person I am now and if I put them on, I appear to be wearing clothes that were loaned to me by someone who I have little in common with. 

With shoes, the situation is much worse because I don't wear anything that is remotely uncomfortable. Most of the older shoes that look as good as new are more fashionable than sensible - that phase of my life is long gone. The are a couple of shoes I have worn only three or four times so there is a long way to go before I achieve single-digit cost per wear numbers. But the concept has motivated me to work through my closet to get to the point of the number being so low that giving the item way is the only logical next step - I got more than enough value out if it.  Like the author, I too can gain clarity on what I really use and should buy versus what I imagine I will but don't really

One immediate impact from this analysis was that I came into Christmas 2021 prepared. I had some easy answers to the questions of what I wanted. More medium t-shirts and long sleeve shirts from Everlane and Buck Mason as well as some additions to my sweatpants collection. Knowing how often I wore them made me feel better about buying higher quality items that I normally would never buy.  I am now the proud owner of 3 pairs of Vuori sweatpants/athletic pants/joggers.

Reading Quotes

Sometimes you come across a quote that seems like God was sending wisdom your way because how badly you need it. For me a few days ago it was “Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting — Sun Tzu

While I am neither dealing with a specific enemy's resistance nor seeking to achieve supreme excellence, these are the words that I still needed to process. The equivalent of the enemy in my situation are a set of circumstances I have going on - some of my own choice and making, others not as much. Since they make me quite restless and uncomfortable, they could be construed as adversarial or inimical. 

My initial instinct is to run away from things that make me feel this way and when that is not an option the situation becomes hard to tolerate - much like if were an enemy putting up a strong resistance and thwarting my desired action. So there is the question of how to cope instead of what my natural tendencies dictate. That is where the idea of supreme excellence as an aspirational goal is very helpful. Reading this made me think of all the ways I could break down that resistance and it turns out that I can make some headway. It will not solve all issues but I would have still progressed towards excellence. 

The only other way I have come across random pieces of well-timed wisdom is by chatting with young kids whenever I meet them. It seems like they see more than they can explain, are wise in ways that we forget as we get older. Often they will say things that brings me a lot of clarity.

Time Frozen

A few months ago. I was new entrant in this group and a woman, F was assigned to on-board me. We started off on a bad note. My efforts to be friendly were rebuffed - she made it clear she was doing her job and not interested in anything further. I learn things by asking questions and have always been fearless about it. This was simply not the right plan with F. She made it a point to be outright rude if I asked anything at all with answers ranging from I don't know, I don't care to that should be no concern of yours. I was absolutely gob-smacked by the level of unprofessionalism. 

This is a person with multiple degrees from top universities in America. The first meeting I chalked it up to F was having a bad day, she had a couple of kids returning to school after summer break and things were off to a rough start as they tend to be. In our second meeting, I asked her a clarifying question on something she had started to explain was promptly accused of being litigious. I don't recall that word ever being used by anyone in the context of work I do - such vocabulary was likely the enduring benefit of F's elite over-education. 

F poses an interesting challenge for me. I don't need to or aim to befriend her but I do require her to respect my authority even though my background is nowhere as privileged as hers. She had her fun hazing me like it was back to undergrad freshman days but that will need to give way to acting her age and learning to be professional even if the other party is a plebian. Time will tell how I will fare in my goals. I am hoping to do that without condescension and sarcasm that comes to me a bit too easily when dealing with people like F - this is my opportunity to improve myself too, not remain frozen in time.

Seeking Unique

This job posting for an IT support technician made me wonder if it would matter at all that the person would a tech support for a Champagne company - presumably not. Imagine a person always dreamed of working at Lego but their qualifications land them several degrees removed from the action - where the dream came from. Then it matters little Lego or small, boring, and old-fashioned insurance company. To that person both jobs are just about the same. It made me think about the most interesting clients I have worked for. When those very interesting consulting opportunities came about, I was eager to learn all I could about their business, the market, and the competitors. There would be a few charismatic people who had history with the company and represented the culture. 

Beyond that once the discussions turned to problems that needed a technology solution, it was more of the same. The wonderful novelty of the experience faded out pretty quickly - it was just business as usual. When I look back, those experiences were no more or less valuable than any I have gained from traditional businesses that failed to fire the imagination. There could be a data scientist there that I had to work with who was a medieval war re-enactment aficionado and could talk endlessly about why he loved it so much and where he has traveled to participate. This person would be the reason to remember the otherwise mundane engagement. Sometimes the things they are passionate about in personal life brings about interesting problem solving approaches that I could learn from. 

Eating Alone

The first timed I dined alone at a restaurant would be over twenty years ago now and it felt a bit awkward. The waitress had graciously seated me in a booth - it was a not a busy time but also a thoughtful gesture on her part. Since that first time, eating out alone specially while traveling for work has become easier to the point of effortless now. I used to think it was a matter of practice over time that made the experience less fraught. It turns out that eating solo is becoming more common and I am just a happy beneficiary of the trend. Many factors have contributed to this: 

“The social norms have changed. People don’t look at solo diners anymore and think, ‘You must be a loner,'” Mattila said.

The growth comes as more people are living alone. In 2019, the Pew Research Center found that 38% of U.S. adults ages 25 to 54 were living without a partner, up from 29% in 1990. In Japan, single households now make up one-third of the total; that’s expected to climb to 40% by 2040, according to government data.

Increasing interest in solo travel—particularly among travelers ages 55 and over—is also leading to more meals alone.

I think I get a lot more attention and better service if I am eating alone - maybe the wait staff want to make sure I enjoy the experience and don't feel alone and left out. I have conversations that would likely not happen if I was with others. 

Being Alive

Houdsen in his book Ten Poems to Change Your Life Again and Again says "A friend just told me that he has known for the last two weeks that he has prostate cancer. These two weeks, he said, have been the most alive in his life. Far from feeling fear or grief (perhaps these are still to come), every moment has had a clarity and sharpness he has hardly ever known. It’s as if some deeper vision has been switched on, which enables him to see with great intensity the fullness of each moment.".

This made me wonder about how culture and social conditioning play into a person's response to knowing they are dying. Not in an abstract way but more concretely because the life remaining can be counted in weeks and months only. Does it matter what others expect of the dying person - are they supposed to act fearless and ready to live what is left of their life, pretending what they know about imminent death is irrelevant. What if those close to them were inclined to feel sorry and act as it they are already dead, it just a matter of wrapping up last rites.

What might it take to have the experience Houdsen's friend had - feeling unprecedented sharpness and clarity. Further along in the book are lines from another poem that speaks to the miracle of still being alive after the beloved one has died:

… and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and

     unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless: I am living, I remember you.

I see that astounded look on the face on a old man I know. He took several years to make sense of losing his wife of seventy years. Now at last he is able to marvel at the shade of a tree on a hot summer afternoon, the waves of the ocean lapping at his feet and just being able to eat a simple meal family that still remains. I am sure in those moments he remembers her.

 

Redefining Happy

It was amusing to read this interview on happiness - the old variety that needs to be tossed and the new one embraced. The central thesis hinges on this:

Due to Old Happy, Americans are struggling with unprecedented levels of unhappiness, illness, burnout, and loneliness, with no idea what’s wrong or what they need to do to feel better again. The evidence I’ve amassed about the harms of Old Happy is astounding. 

I am not so sure people have no idea what’s wrong or what they need to do to feel better again. Sometimes those things they need to do to feel better are not attainable. A parent who is running on fumes because they have school-age kids, a demanding job that is needed to pay the bills, a marriage fraying from lack of care and attention and lack of mobility due to family being rooted to their current place of work. 

This person knows exactly what would make them feel better - if they could have the gift of time without being stressed about how the bills will get paid, they would feel better instantly - the kids would be happier, the marriage will start to thrive and they will have the luxury of pursuing their hobby. This individual is not even super-ambitious or chasing after social status - they just want a comfortable life for their family. But there is no path to any of that. They are ill, burnt-out and lonely for good reason. 

The new happiness mantra  is that " you need to start seeing that you are worthy exactly as you are". Our parent here simply cannot do that. They are failing their kids every day by lack of attention and dearth of quality time with them. They are failing their spouse by not being able to them the chance to pursue a cherished dream of studying music because that second job is sorely needed. They are not thriving at work because the culture is toxic and they cannot recharge at home. 

"you need to focus on expressing yourself and growing as a person in whatever way feels authentic to you. You are not defined by your successes or failures." Indeed you are defined by successes and failures. The parent gets that big promotion and the raise that comes with it and all at once, their spouse can catch a breath. They can divide their time between raising kids and taking classes. The parent is still dealing with a toxic workplace and even more politics but they can find some reprieve at work. It would be a fairly defining thing to be able to improve the quality of your loved ones' lives. So that success does matter in very measurable ways.

"you need to see that you are connected to others and that no one does anything alone. We are social creatures who are wired to need support. You are inextricably connected to others." This one makes perfect sense but change cannot come about by individuals making their own efforts. The parent in our example can reduce their individual stress by partnering with others in the same situation, barter help with kids and errands to begin. Some people are very good at this and are able to alleviate their stress. I am not certain there is a stigma attached to seeking a support system. Some luck into it and others don't. Those that don't suffer.

What is amusing that a person can spend a decade to come up with insights are that are naive at worst and commonsense at best. 

Childhood Restoration

A lot of schools are implementing no homework policies and while some of the reasoning it valid. implementation of such policy feels like bathwaterism. There is completely pointless, aggravating and tedious homework that frustrates student and parent alike - it make sense to root those out entirely. 

But homework which encourages a kid to step outside their comfort zone, try things they wouldn't on their own, read books and work on interesting projects are very far from useless. They can make or break the kid's school experience and outcomes from there on. 

Preparing at home to have a good debate and discussion on a topic in the classroom is also one of those things that should stay. That said, all recommendations on how to restore childhood for kids, make very good sense

• Let children spend time with their families. The single strongest predictor of academic success and fewer behavioral problems for a child, 3-12 years old, is eating as a family. Make planned time during the day to catch up with children, talking to them about what they’re learning, and encouraging them to achieve.
• Give children time to play outside or create something, preferably not always with a screen. Let them dive into their passions and plan a trip to a library, park, or museum. Explore free online resources to discover new skills and interests.
• Give children opportunities to read by themselves or with their family. One of the best ways to learn about the world is developing a lifelong love of reading. Children who prioritize reading are more motivated to learn and see drastically improved academic outcomes.
• Let children sleep! Elementary students should sleep at least 10 hours each night and adolescents, 9 hours. Being awake and ready to tackle each day keeps us energized and healthy.