Strange fears

 I write a lot on my notebooks - call it whatever you want journaling, venting, taking notes, morning pages.. I dont typically go back and read them but I have stumbled upon various entries randomly and found myself reading them. 

A lot of times I feel some amount of fondness and admiration for the past me who has written something interesting. But a lot of other times I am embarassed-what was past me thinking? One of my weird fears is that someone will read it after I am dead and think " wow she certainly had the same problems over so many years". My problems have a theme- Too much time spent on phone, didnt do what I was planning to do the previous day, not sure where I want to be in life etc. They can look insightful if you read just one of the entries, but man I have wasted a lot of ink on the same problems. With almost zero resolutions. 

I suppose I could burn my journals and resolve these problems, rather than trying to solve the problems 

A series of easy steps

 Motivational speakers and similar trainers online try to tell you to start things easy. Want to become a copywriter? Just copy some great works - your brain will start thinking in the same direction. Want to start an exercise habit? Just walk for 10 minutes once. They make it seem like once you do an easy thing, you can pile up another easy thing on it, and  this combined  thing remains easy for you. 

It may not be entirely true. 

If it was just piling up one easy thing on another, everyone would be doing it. The fact is that in any path that is rewarding, you may start easy but at some point you ahve to do the difficult bits. Starting easy is only for you to get the initial motivation, maybe see some early results so you stay excited even for the difficult bits. 

Motivational speakers may know it, but they never tell us. 

The medium is the message

I think the medium modifies the message- this is true even for people. Take for example politicians- when a leader makes a racist or a discriminatory statement even in a personal capacity, it is taken by followers as a command that they should act upon. In the case of India, the message is modified. haha. 

But its true across all levels. If a CEO believes in coming in early and keeping his office uncluttered and he speaks about it occasionally, even if he didnt mean it as a direct order, it is taken as one. A breakthrough idea in an obscure blog will be viewed with more skepticism than a breakthrough idea in a peer reviewed magazine. 

The message is actually the message + a bit of the medium 

Troublesome Sitcom portrayals

They show them eating pizza and cookies all the time and never gaining weight. They dont show any exercise routine or anything yet they all have brilliant figures. I understand that they cant be fully realistic but they cant all be opening bottles of wine all the time, baking brownies and having icecreams. It just is unrealistic. 

Also this whole dealing with breakups with icecream, dealing with sadness with chocolate has come to India from watching US sitcoms. Sugar should be a celebration not something to fill the absence of joy. Its a cherry on the cake, if you dont have cake you cant make one with cherries. Inappropriate cake analogy, but what to do.

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?