Isolation. Quarantine. Loneliness.

There are some who are social butterflies because they simply cannot handle being by themselves.  And then there are some who prefer being alone because to them, well, L'enfer, c'est les autres.

I have never been in either camps.  I could even come across as being one camp or another.  But, neither a social butterfly nor an anti-social being am I.

I think and read a lot about solitude, loneliness, and empathy.  As I have often noted here with thoughts borrowed from experts, there is a world of a difference between solitude and loneliness.

Take this post, for instance.  "loneliness is widespread in America, with nearly 50 percent of respondents reporting that they feel alone or left out always or sometimes."  These are people who don't want to feel like they are alone in this vast universe.  Ironically, most of them have plenty of "friends"--but they are in the social media.  Loneliness and social media are highly correlated!  Even worse, “It’s only a matter of time before loneliness turns into depression. And that’s where it gets dangerous.”

Solitude is different.

Solitude is intentional.  It is activity even when being inactive, or inactive even when being active.  It is that wonderful combination of actively doing nothing while being all by oneself.

It is important to cultivate within us a positive taste for solitude.

You end up isolated if you don't cultivate the capacity for solitude, the ability to be separate, to gather yourself. Solitude is where you find yourself so that you can reach out to other people and form real attachments. When we don't have the capacity for solitude, we turn to other people in order to feel less anxious or in order to feel alive. When this happens, we're not able to appreciate who they are. It's as though we're using them as spare parts to support our fragile sense of self. We slip into thinking that always being connected is going to make us feel less alone. But we're at risk, because actually it's the opposite that's true. If we're not able to be alone, we're going to be more lonely.

Tragically, we are all going to be subjects in an extensive study on how we deal with loneliness and solitude.  The novel coronavirus, Covid-19, is requiring us all to learn about social distancing.  And to quarantine oneself if the situation arises.  Bill McKibben writes that "social distancing, quarantine, and isolation go hard against the gregarious instinct that makes us who we are" during a collective crisis.  I hope we will learn from this forced isolation and social distancing, and truly understand that we are in this together.

As McKibben writes:

We should use the quiet of these suddenly uncrowded days to think a little about how much we’ve allowed social isolation to grow in our society, even without illness as an excuse. ...
If we pay attention, we may value more fully the moment we’re released from our detention, and we may even make some changes in our lives as a result. It will be a relief, above all, when we’re allowed to get back to caring for one another, which is what socially evolved primates do best.

Stay healthy--physically and mentally.

All alone in this vast universe that I cannot comprehend

My grandfather left his village (which my mother claims has always been a small town and never a village!) deep in the southern part of India to go study in Varanasi.

This was back in the early 1930s, in an India where most people hadn't even seen a light bulb and where outdoor dry toilets and manual scavenging were the norm.

After days of train journey, grandfather would reach his student quarters.  If he didn't send a telegram informing his parents about reaching Varanasi, he wrote a letter that would take days to reach his parents.  This was the practice through all the years of his undergraduate studies in metallurgy.

Two decades later, my father, an engineering graduate in a newly independent India,  decided that exciting industrial projects were beginning in places far, far away from his village (which was and is a village, he agrees) and went to join the dam construction projects, modeled after the US' TVA.

Typically, it was four to five days of travel time from the village till father reached his bachelor quarters.  Upon reaching, he penned a letter that typically took a week to reach grandma.

My father and grandfather did not even pause to think that these were nightmarish conditions.  After all, had they thought that way, they would not have ventured out at all to places far, far away from their homes.  Often alone by themselves, and in places where the language, foods, and almost every aspect of culture was different from what they were used to.

Yet, they did.

Now, we live in a world that is hyperconnected.  We Facebook where we are, what we eat, what we do, where we travel. We tweet where we are, what we eat, what we do, and where we travel. We Instagram where we are, what ... well, you get my point.

Loneliness is no longer a part of life anymore, it seems.  

Loneliness makes us think about life and our own place in this universe.  In the old country, those bent on this inquiry went into the forests so that they could be alone to contemplate about existence.  Of course, such meditation was in the contexts of god and prayers, but there was a conviction that loneliness helps.

If we are hyper-connected, then when do we have the time to think about our own existence?  After all, even when we are "alone", we are no longer alone, it seems.

There is something seriously wrong, don't you think, when all these decades of "progress" has only led us to how we are afraid to be alone because, if alone we might have to think about important questions like who we are and why we exist?

My grandfather and father used their alone time to reflect on life.  They read, listened to music, and communed with their gods.  This atheist believes that was a far better existence than the current way of being afraid of inquiring about the human condition itself.

Whether or not one believes in any god, surely there is more to life than posting a Facebook status update, right?!

Source: seriously, you can't recognize this as from the New Yorker? ;)

A killer app!

A couple of months ago, my father commented that I am the only one who is not on WhatsApp.  Which is true.  I have never had a WhatsApp account.  I have blogged a lot about it though ;)

A few years ago, Tunku Varadarajan, who used to write for the Wall Street Journal when it was a respectable publication before it became a Faux-News-wannabe trash wrote what I thought was a tongue-in-cheek commentary on why Indians love Facebook.

Social media was invented for Indians, says Sree Sreenivasan, a digital media professor at Columbia and co-founder of SAJA, the South Asian Journalists Association. "They take to it naturally and with great passion. It allows them to do two things they love: Tell everyone what they are doing; and stick their noses into other people's business."

As one can imagine, Varadarajan's commentary was not well received by Indians.

The spread of Facebook in India is nothing compared to how passionately people use WhatsApp there.  Messages bouncing off other's phones seemingly faster than the speed of light.  People don't even bother with regular cellphone or landline calling--they WhatsApp call each other.  "Social media was invented for Indians" indeed!

And sticking noses into other people's business has taken on dangerous--yes, literally dangerous--scales.  A couple of months ago, NPR even did a story on this!

In India, fake news can be deadly. About 20 people have been lynched by mobs, amid social media messages of kidnappers on the loose. Police are trying to teach first time smartphone users how to discern fact from fiction online.

This is a real hazard in India, where the beat-first-question-later approach is one that I have been scared about right from a young age.  As a kid, I had barely learnt to ride a bicycle, when I crashed into a kid on the street, a few hundred feet from home.  The kid's mother thrashed me--without asking even one question about what had happened!  A friend from Bombay used to joke (no haha for me though) about this beat-first-question-later MO--he said that in Hindi and then translated it for me!

With WhatsApp, made up news travels fast and wide.  It has gotten out of control.

As smartphone use spread in India, so did WhatsApp: It has over 200 million users in the country, according to a company spokesman. Soon, it became more than just a simple peer-to-peer communications tool. Indians now use it to disseminate political campaign platforms, distribute news and public announcements, and promote businesses, turning it into something resembling a broadcasting and publishing platform. According to WhatsApp, users in India forward more messages, photos, and videos than in any other country in the world—making it the perfect breeding ground for disinformation.

Last December, when my father showed me a video that somebody had sent him through WhatsApp, I told him it was fake, and warned him to be careful.  I am not sure if he understood how serious I was.

Life gets more and more challenging!

If you call, who will come running?

Of the gazillion social media that one can now spend time on, the only one that I use is Twitter.  The best part of twitter is this--I don't have to be friends with anybody. I don't have to follow anybody. I can be my own, and yet keep track of whatever it is that interests me.

I used to be on Facebook.  Throughout the years that I used Facebook, I had a difficult love-hate relationship with that medium.  Not only because I was worried about the technology snooping into our lives and making money out of it, but also because I couldn't relate to the artificial "friendship" there with "friends" commenting about every damn thing, even though I knew very little about them in the real world.  Almost all of them were not really anywhere close to being my "friend."

Even back in high school, I didn't have many friends--according to the way I defined what friendship was.  If I didn't share anything close to my innermost feelings, they weren't friends but were merely classmates.  There were a couple of them who were friends.  Like this guy, when we were really young. And later this friend.

I have always firmly believed that it is impossible to be friends with many.  Again, a reminder that I am not using a loose definition of friendship.  We now have more and more scientific evidence to back me up:

Study after study confirms that most people have about five intimate friends, 15 close friends, 50 general friends and 150 acquaintances (green bars).

To me, a friend is what that previous sentence refers to as "intimate friend."  The rest are acquaintances.

Yes, we humans are social animals.  But, that social behavior is not the same as friendship.  Why?

This threshold is imposed by brain size and chemistry, as well as the time it takes to maintain meaningful relationships, Dunbar says. “The time you spend,” he adds, “is crucial.”

We have limited time, and there is only so much that we can spend on anything including friendship.

Which means, you, too, have an easy metric that you can honestly use in the privacy of your home.  Ask yourself how much time you have spent over the last year or two with people who are not related to you.  And rank them by the time you have spent with them. Right?

I did it!

After years of a love-hate relationship, and asking myself whether I should stay or go, I did it.  It took some thinking. It was calculated. It was well-planned.

I quit Facebook ;)

It was a lengthy relationship, to which I dragged myself back in the summer of 2008.

But, two years is all it took for me to start worrying about Facebook.  I suspended my account.  As I noted in a post back in 2011, "There are moments when I worry about all this social media network and the internet ..."

That was the first of a few times when I suspended my account and then got back to Facebook after a while. It was a love-hate relationship.   I joked about that:

I feel like the heroine in the formulaic Bollywood movies who alternates between yelling "I hate you" to the hero and "I love you" a few minutes after that!

There are a gazillion posts with the label Facebook, which will demonstrate my worries not only about Facebook but about social media, technology, and artificial intelligence.

Technology, the internet, and social media all had good intentions in the beginning, of course.  But, it did not take long for them to become the evil forces of darkness.  As one of my go-to tech thinkers, Tristan Harris, puts it:

There was pressure from venture capital to grow really, really quickly. There’s a graph showing how many years it took different companies to get to 100 million users. It used to take ten years, but now you can do it in six months. So if you’re competing with other start-ups for funding, it depends on your ability to grow usage very quickly. Everyone in the tech industry is in denial. We think we’re making the world more open and connected, when in fact the game is just: How do I drive lots of engagement?

When it became all about the numbers, soon it was hell on earth:

Social media was supposed to be about, “Hey, Grandma. How are you?” Now it’s like, “Oh my God, did you see what she wore yesterday? What a fucking cow that bitch is.” Everything is toxic — and that has to do with the internet itself. It was founded to connect people all over the world. But now you can meet people all over the world and then murder them in virtual reality and rape their pets.

What drives this all?  The ability of the tech in social media to tap into our primal feelings of anger, rage, hate, and more.

They’re basically trying to trigger fear and anger to get the outrage cycle going, because outrage is what makes you be more deeply engaged. You spend more time on the site and you share more stuff. Therefore, you’re going to be exposed to more ads, and that makes you more valuable. In 2008, when they put their first app on the iPhone, the whole ballgame changed. Suddenly Bernays’s dream of the universal platform reaching everybody through every medium at the same time was achieved by a single device. You marry the social triggers to personalized content on a device that most people check on their way to pee in the morning and as the last thing they do before they turn the light out at night. You literally have a persuasion engine unlike any created in history.

As I wrote in one of my recent posts, We are fucked, folks. But, there is no going back either.  Well, I know that I am not going back to Facebook.

We didn't start the fire? Yes, we did!

I don't make friends. And I piss off friends that I manage to make.  All because I want honest conversations, and it turns out that how much ever people are educated and worldly and sophisticated, well, unlike me most are good at making unprincipled tradeoffs as long as their objectives are met.  What an awful loser I am!

I would love to talk with rabid Barack Obama fans about his use of social media, given all the brouhaha over trump and bannon dealing with cambridge analytica.

Keep in mind that I am no trump sympathzier--I have not only been anti-trump from the day he announced his candidacy, I have banished from my social life trump voters, including friends and neighbors.

Back when Senator Obama launched his candidacy, he and his campaign worked the social media, which was a new thing at that time.  A couple of days after his historic election, the NY Times reported:

For Mr. Kennedy, it was television. For Mr. Obama, it is the Internet.
“Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not be president. Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not have been the nominee,” said Arianna Huffington, editor in chief of The Huffington Post.

We set out on a new election campaign approach--the internet and the social media.

The highly organized Obama team correctly figured that "the electorate could be seen as a collection of individual citizens who could each be measured and assessed on their own terms."

After the voters returned Obama to office for a second term, his campaign became celebrated for its use of technology—much of it developed by an unusual team of coders and engineers—that redefined how individuals could use the Web, social media, and smartphones to participate in the political process. A mobile app allowed a canvasser to download and return walk sheets without ever entering a campaign office; a Web platform called Dashboard gamified volunteer activity by ranking the most active supporters; and “targeted sharing” protocols mined an Obama backer’s Facebook network in search of friends the campaign wanted to register, mobilize, or persuade.
But underneath all that were scores describing particular voters: a new political currency that predicted the behavior of individual humans. The campaign didn’t just know who you were; it knew exactly how it could turn you into the type of person it wanted you to be.

"Turn you into the type of person it wanted you to be."  That is from a 2012 essay in MIT Technology Review.  Political advertising had been successfully weaponized. PhDs were writing algorithms to microtarget voters.

Few events in American life other than a presidential election touch 126 million adults, or even a significant fraction that many, on a single day. Certainly no corporation, no civic institution, and very few government agencies ever do. Obama did so by reducing every American to a series of numbers. Yet those numbers somehow captured the individuality of each voter, and they were not demographic classifications. The scores measured the ability of people to change politics—and to be changed by it.

Yep, every American was reduced to a series of numbers, who could be influenced by well-targeted ads.

We had started down a slope that was soon bound to end up in the hands of evil.  JFK mastered the television medium, yes.  But then it was also the same television through which another election was swung with the notorious Willie Horton ad. 

Yes, the trump team committed flagrant fouls. Egregious ones.  But, most people are sports nutcases and they will easily understand the following comparison: It is not uncommon in team sports for coaches and players to intentionally commit fouls in order to win games.  I find it deplorable. But, that is how it is done in sports and in politics.  And, often, fans cheer when their team commits those fouls and win games, but jeer when the opponent does that and wins.  As Michael Kinsley put it in the context of John Kerry being swift-boated: "People tell pollsters they are sick of nasty politics, then they respond to it every time."

The problem is not that fouls are committed, but that people--even the religious ones--have bought into the bottom-line:  "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing."

Beware: Drug dealers all around

Remember that powerful line from The Bridge on the River Kwai?  "What have I done!"

That's the sentiment that slowly some of the technology folks are beginning to express.Like some early Facebook employees, who now worry "about the monster they have created."

As one early Facebook employee told me, “I lay awake at night thinking about all the things we built in the early days and what we could have done to avoid the product being used this way.”

It is not merely with Facebook.  It is the same with Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, ... the list is endless.

Why?  The reason is a simple one, which I have discussed a lot in this blog.  But, we need to be reminded over and over again:

One of the problems is that these platforms act, in many ways, like drugs. Facebook, and every other social-media outlet, knows that all too well. Your phone vibrates a dozen times an hour with alerts about likes and comments and retweets and faves. The combined effect is one of just trying to suck you back in, so their numbers look better for their next quarterly earnings report. Sean Parker, one of Facebook’s earliest investors and the company’s first president, came right out and said what we all know: the whole intention of Facebook is to act like a drug, by “[giving] you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever.” That, Parker said, was by design. These companies are “exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.” Former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya has echoed this, too. “Do I feel guilty?” he asked rhetorically on CNN about the role Facebook is playing in society. “Absolutely I feel guilt.”

It is easy for the likes of Sean Parker to say that now, right?  After all, he has made his gazillions; Wikipedia notes that he is worth $2.4 billion!  Our addiction is their dollars.  If only users paused to question why they are getting these services for free.  No free lunch, as economists always remind us.

People who know me sometimes even make fun of my regimented life.  I stick to my eating regimen, my sleeping regimen, and ... Even when playing bridge, I commit myself to ending the playing by typing to other players that I will play one final game and after that game, well, I sign off.  It is all because I know well how delightful it is to have that extra chocolate. That extra cookie. More time in bed. One more ... We humans are wired for such addictions.  And technology is now explicitly and intentionally tapping into our addictive personalities.

So, what can be done?

[A]  rigorous technology of the mind is really what we need now as a civilization because the thing that’s killing people nowadays is too much Facebook and cheeseburgers. We solved the problems of the biological age by vaccines and antibiotics and discovering all these things, and stopping the things that were killing people, and we’re not going to find the technologies to fix these behavioral problems of addiction, technology overuse, overconsumption of everything by walking away from the technologies of the mind. We’re going to solve them by getting rigorous and having a complete science and technology so that people can reprogram themselves into the people they want to be.

We need to "reprogram" ourselves?  Ain't gonna happen!

These are the best of times ... but also the worst of times?

With all the women's liberation and advances in feminism, could it be possible that young girls of today feel the pressure of their gender as much as--or perhaps even more than--young girls of the bad old days?

I have been thinking about this for a long time.  On the one hand, boys and young men are falling behind so rapidly that I have been blogging about "save the males."  On the other hand, I have also been blogging about how heterosexuality, which is the overwhelming sexual identity and behavior, then translates into even the loser guys having an easier time in contrast to young women--who have to now fiercely compete for their man.

Girl power seems to be increasingly measured in terms of sexuality.

American girls may appear to be “among the most privileged and successful girls in the world,” she writes, but thanks to the many hours they spend each day in an online culture that treats them—and teaches them to treat themselves—as sexual objects, they are no more, and perhaps rather less, “empowered” in their personal lives than their mothers were thirty years ago.

This has been my worry too.  Even on campuses and in public social spaces, young women seem to be hypersexualized than ever before.  The weather warms up and the skimpiest of hotpants are de rigueur, it seems.

Even in the Olympics, which I did not watch--of course--I did notice in the sports pages that while male track and field athletes wear shorts and vests that are tight and long covering most of their bodies that we relate to sexuality, many of the female athletes are covered with gear that is only a little more than a two-piece bikini.  Apparently the female beach volleyball team even voted to wear only the skimpiest minimum--even though the bikini is not a requirement!

If everywhere we turn it is the sexualized image of women, then?

The unsparing gaze that social media train on girls’ sexuality—the supreme value that they place on being sexually appealing—engenders a widespread female anxiety about physical appearance that is highly conducive to “self-objectification,” Sales claims. All of her interview subjects agree that on sites like Instagram and Facebook, female popularity (as quantified by the number of “likes” a girl’s photos receive) depends on being deemed “hot.” “You have to have a perfect body and big butt,” a fifteen-year-old from the Bronx observes grimly. “For a girl, you have to be that certain way to get the boys’ attention.”

Teenage biology points to the direction of sex.  In this, I am not sure whether young women today are better off than those in the past:

Some of the misery of teenage girls’ sexual experiences is attributable, Orenstein contends, to the “hookup culture” in which sex, “rather than being a product of intimacy…has become its precursor, or sometimes its replacement.” (Rates of female orgasm are much lower for casual encounters, she notes, than for sex that takes place within committed relationships.) Another contributing factor, she suggests, is the part that pornography now plays in determining normative standards of teenage sexual behavior.

The pressure that girls and young women must feel to look good 24x7, day after day means that they are continuing to respond to the male-defined world even though boys and young men are rapidly falling behind when it comes to successful schooling and other responsibilities of that age?  Will the young women really feel confident to say no when the situation warrants it, or will they say yes only because of the intensity of the pressure and the competition?

In such a context, it does not help when the presidential candidate of the "family values" party loudly says things that are outrightly misogynistic but which get him loud applause and cheers from his adoring millions of supporters.  After all, if the overwhelming majority do not think for themselves, then they will only imitate the behavior and thinking of "leaders," right?

I suppose I should be relieved that I do not have a young girl to raise and worry about!

Source

Life is some serious shit. So, joke around, dammit!

"I have been saving two jokes for you" she said as she started scanning my groceries at the checkout counter.

"Why does a doctor always carry a red pen?"

I repeated the question.  I asked for the answer.

"Anytime he might have to draw blood" she said.

"Cool.  What's the next one?"

"Have I told you the one about the roof?"

"No."

"That's ok. It is way over your head."

Even before I could respond, a female customer who was right behind me in the line chuckled and said "good one."  I looked at her and said "I pay for the jokes. They throw in the groceries for free."

Apparently such playfulness helps:

People who exhibit high levels of playfulness—those who are predisposed to being spontaneous, outgoing, creative, fun-loving, and lighthearted—appear to be better at coping with stress, more likely to report leading active lifestyles, and more likely to succeed academically.

Wait, there is more:

As British researchers Patrick Bateson and Paul Martin argue in their 2013 book, “Play, Playfulness, Creativity and Innovation,” it’s crucial to distinguish between engaging in behavior that is technically play—battling it out in an intense game of tennis, for instance, or wasting time on an addictive iPhone game—and doing it in a way that is actually playful, which for Bateson and Martin means “cheerful, frisky, frolicsome, good-natured, joyous, merry, rollicking, spirited, sprightly [and/or] vivacious.” An important challenge facing researchers in this field is figuring out how to isolate and define playfulness as an internal state of mind rather than a mere description of how someone is acting.

 I ain't acting. I swear. If you don't believe me, I will knock your teeth off ;)

Growing up, in other words, doesn’t have to mean cutting fun and lightheartedness out of our lives. On the contrary, it may mean realizing that engaging in such childishness is an excellent use of our time.

I now have more reasons to use those groaners in my classes; I feel sorry for the students.  But then they need to understand that being playful helps with academic success too! ;)

So, why blog about all these, right?  Is it some kind of a thumping of my chest to expound to the world how awesome my mind works?  To take off from a Woody Allen line, I was born into the Hindu persuasion and now I am into narcissism? Is this part of that playfulness? Does it help with deal with the stresses of life?  Or, will blogging make me unhappy?

Today, each of us can build a personal little fan base, thanks to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and the like. We can broadcast the details of our lives to friends and strangers in an astonishingly efficient way. That’s good for staying in touch with friends, but it also puts a minor form of fame-seeking within each person’s reach. And several studies show that it can make us unhappy.

Phew! I am safe, for fame is not what I am seeking here.  I blog and you treat me to free dinners, right Ramesh? ;)

We look for these things to fill an inner emptiness. They may bring a brief satisfaction, but it never lasts, and it is never enough. And so we crave more. This paradox has a word in Sanskrit: upadana, which refers to the cycle of craving and grasping. As the Dhammapada (the Buddha’s path of wisdom) puts it: “The craving of one given to heedless living grows like a creeper. Like the monkey seeking fruits in the forest, he leaps from life to life... Whoever is overcome by this wretched and sticky craving, his sorrows grow like grass after the rains.” ...
it requires a deep skepticism of our own basic desires. Of course you are driven to seek admiration, splendor and physical license. But giving in to these impulses will bring unhappiness. You have a responsibility to yourself to stay in the battle. The day you declare a truce is the day you become unhappier. Declaring war on these destructive impulses is not about asceticism or Puritanism. It is about being a prudent person who seeks to avoid unnecessary suffering.

In other words, being playful is how I deal with the unpleasant aspects of life, like that favorite topic of mine.  No wonder that my blood pressure was a calm 125/73.  But, that means that I will be that much more stress-free and will end up living until I am 120?  Damn!  I better start drinkin' and smokin' and cussin' ;)