In their heads

 I would love to get into somebody's head to understand how they think, what goes in their minds as they hear something or their thought process as they make a decision. 

If I get into their head as myself I wont get a 100% understanding of what its like to be them. If I somehow manage to become them 100%, I wont get an understanding, because I have become them. 

So we are doomed to live with incomplete understanding and the consequent befuddlement as others choose something that makes zero sense to us. So our inability to understand someone is usually not a lack of  communication or misunderstanding. A close analogy I can think of is lets say you are describing furniture in a house- however accurately you describe the furniture, if you and I are imagining different empty houses to put them in, our end results will be that different.

So we should cut ourselves some slack for the inevitable miscommunication that happens.

Worst analogy

Weight loss journey is like a maze. You think you are going forward you may be completely going backward. You think the end is near, but you are so far off its not funny. 

What matters is that everyone eventually exits the maze. Whether you give up and exit the same way you came or you bluster your way to the end, you are not stuck in the maze forever. 
So the only thing to do is to have faith that you will exit.

Complexity

 Given how complicated everything is and how inefficient the people who are running it, its a big surprise that we havent collapsed under the weight of our own incompetence. 

How do airplanes fly everyday in a country like India where everything gets delayed, no supplier keeps their promises, everyone is prone to some bribing, most of us are skimping on work and doing the just the bare minimum to coast along. 

Not denying there are some sincere people who do every job as if it was the most critical one on earth but a majority of people coast.  

Then why is everything not collapsing? is it that the systems are so strong that they have mechanisms to catch failure? Is it that the weakest links/ most critical ones are heavily monitored? Or is it that since the systems are so pliable, we usually get our way and the real impact of this complicated inefficient system is felt by someone who has no power over it? 

Short term

 Everyone here is gasping for Oxgen and as a response the affluent Indians world over donated.  Startups in India bought so many oxygen cylinders, NRIs donated to non profits buying oxygen cylinders, and students gathered to buy oxygen cylinders. 

At the end of the wave, whats going to happen to these oxygen cylinders? Will they be redeployed into hospitals? Will they be given to ambulances? Those of us who bought them just to be safe- are we going to let them languish in our store rooms to be thrown away in the next few years? 

It feels like everyone buying oxygen isnt a very smart idea longterm. But how could the donations have been used to improve the foundation on India's healthcare? Do those cylinders in some way make our healthcare system a little more reliable? I know its easy to pontificate on it after the fact, and the need then was oxygen. So people were right in overbuying those. 

Who should ahve guided non profits on whats the right thing to do? 

The amount of waste

 Throwing our own garbage has brought to my attention how much waste we generate as a household. We order too much on Amazon, order more than we should from Swiggy than can be healthy for us and in general have too much stuff. 

For a minimalist-aspirant like me, that sucks. 

I gave up my minimalist home expectation after seeing how much my husband loves stuff. And for those who are going to say " Stuff doesnt make you happy" really havent seen him after he has received a well-designed product. And I think his happiness from good products far exceeds many people's happiness from experiences. He hits all the marks of anticipation, during use and post-purchase. So it doesnt bother me. 

This brings me to an interesting digression- Does stuff really not make you happy? The answer isnt straightforward. Stuff or experience can make you happy if you like it for what it is. The general understanding about stuff usually was that you bought things to impress others/ raise your status but experiences were for yourself. That statement isnt true in the age of social media, so maybe in this decade we shouldnt rattle " experiences make you happy, stuff doesnt"  as if it is the gospel. 

Anyhow, the flipside of stuff is that it comes in packaging. So much packaging. Sigh. 

The world post covid

 Assuming there is a post covid that is. 

Which looks difficult from where we are. Would it become like a common cold? Or would it be like smallpox before it was eradicated? 

A constant threat, taking away your loved ones. 

I had always believed that the end of mankind will be from viruses. The same way we have made so many species extinct because they couldnt evolve fast enough compared to our destruction of their habitat. So scientifically it makes sense that our extinction from a virus will follow the same pattern. Abundant population, the virus mercilessly keeps killing, until the population becomes too less for the virus to happily propogate. Then it may do some half assed measures to save humankind? But in the end will watch in horror as the last of the once-abundant species dies. 

I also head a contrary belief in my head that when the end comes it will be swift. Apocalypse, asteroid hits that kind of thing. I hadnt imagined a slow drawn out match where we are losing a few at a time. Its certainly far more painful and far more likely. 

I guess its the same concept with an individual's death too. Mostly slow and drawn out until it is over one day. Its in a few cases that its swift/instant. 

Wow not where I expected this post to go but here we are. The end. Slow, drawn out and unsatisfying.

Even if no one reads it..

 Ill still blog everyday, says Seth Godin, someone who has millions of readers on his blog. 

I have followed his blog sometime back, and for some reason got annoyed with it and unsubscribed. But the idea of writing something short everyday, that has stuck. 

Today's short post is on Observation. 

Almost everything interesting comes from observing. Artists pick out something that stands out from a scenery, stand up comedians tell us what we already know, but they observe and pick it apart in a way that makes it funny. Companies can observe what people say about them in their emails and reviews and learn a lot, spouses can observe their partners reactions and figure out something is wrong. There is nothing original anymore but the same old thing can be packaged in an interesting way, and your perspective is the packaging that makes it interesting. 

While we lament the loss of thinking time in our life, we should also include its close friend observation, which has always been in the background and seems to have disappeared quietly, in the age of distraction and information consumption.