Some notes on “conspicuous consumption” and “people are stupid”

Thorstein Veblen, an economist-cum-sociologist working around 1890-1920, was responsible for coming up with the notion of “conspicuous consumption” — spending on goods and services with the purpose of establishing one’s income and wealth, conveying social status, impressing others, or causing envy. His work, The Theory of the Leisure Class, can be downloaded from Project Gutenberg.

In more recent times, economist Robert H. Frank, a New York Times columnist and professor at Cornell University, has argued strongly that a lot of goods are positional goods, whose value is determined primarily by what position one is in. Such goods lead to what are called “arms races” — people rush to stockpile more and more of these goods, thus leading to a waste of precious resources.

Similar ideas are found in the theory that education serves primarily a “screening” function — people go in for expensive higher education to prove to potential employers how smart they are to have managed to enter a higher educational institution and survive it, rather than for any intrinsic value such higher education is providing.

“Conspicuous consumption”, “positional good”, and “screening” are different but related ideas. They all share a common theme — a lot of wasteful and destructive expenditure is undertaken simply in order for people to establish their status or rank. Some might argue that this wasteful expenditure shows that “people are stupid” while others may argue that while individuals are making the best decisions given their circumstances, the system as a whole is stupid and wasteful.

Here is just a small sample of things that can be explained through this spectrum of theories:

• People eating too many unhealthy foods? Conspicuous consumption of food. Eating more food may be an indicator of higher status and societal position.

• People eating too little food? An arms race of getting thin in order to appear the most healthy and attractive person around.

• People getting bigger and bigger houses? Conspicuous consumption of housing. One’s house is an indicator of one’s social status, and a bigger house means a bigger social status.

• People traveling in private jets and private cars instead of planes and public transit? Conspicuous consumption of transportation.

• Poor people sending their kids to private schools instead of “free” public schools? Conspicuous consumption of schooling.

While I think there is some truth to both conspicuous consumption and arms race theories, there are a lot of caveats we need to keep in mind before readily applying such an explanation to any phenomenon we do not understand.

Another look at inequality

In a prior blog post on privileges and incentives, I argued that thinking about “privileges” as a source of unfairness in society is not a very helpful construct. This is part of a more basic belief I have: namely, that inequality is not that important.

I’ve always believed that, from a public choice perspective, making everybody better off is better even if it comes at the cost of increased inequality. Surprisingly, I have found that many intellectuals and scholars have often taken opposing views. So, it was a pleasure for me to spot, earlier this week, a policy analysis by Will Wilkinson at the Cato Institute that looked at some aspects of income inequality and came to conclusions somewhat similar to my intuitions.

What do people want?

It’s always good to ask whether people prefer a more unequal, richer society to a more equal, poorer society. One philosophical framework I’m aware of that addresses this is as follows: if a worker agrees to an increase in her income with a simultaneous increase in somebody else’s income of a much greater amount, would she accept? In other words, would a worker trade higher income for more inequality? If she would, then she cares more about equality than about her absolute wealth. If she wouldn’t, then she cares more about her absolute wealth than about her inequality.

Do people make these kinds of choices? At the atomic level, in the marketplace, we see such choices being made every day. A poor person buys a product from a rich corporation, making the corporation and its major shareholders richer and making herself “poorer” in financial terms (though presumably richer in material terms because of possession of the product). Such a purchase may result in an increase in inequality. People often choose to work for richer employers who offer better wages than poorer employers, thus increasing profits for the richer employers and possibly widening the gulf between the rich employers and the poor employer.

As Wilkinson’s Cato Institute paper points out, people’s viewpoint on progressive taxation often runs counter to their own financial interest. Wilkinson points out that people earning over $200,000 were more likely to vote for the “increase-taxes-on-the-rich” candidate Barack Obama in 2008 than they were to vote for John Kerry in 2004. This suggests an interesting possibility (not suggested by Wilkinson):

Poor people may prefer more inequality if it allows them to improve their absolute standard of living. Rich people may prefer more equality even to the detriment of absolute standards of living, because they are rich enough to have time to worry about social issues like inequality.

I’m not claiming that this possibility is true or that there is strong evidence for it, but it may well have a partial ring of truth. So-called “intellectuals” I have encountered both in India and in the United States (most of them reasonably well-off) denounce the significant inequalities in wealth and income, and the hypocrisy of the rich. But other poorer people seem much less concerned about the huge wealth of people like Bill Gates, since they are more keen on improving their financial position. This anecdotal evidence makes me suggest, tongue-in-cheek, that the best way of eradicating inequality is to ensure that there are enough rich people, or perhaps a few super-rich people, who have the luxury to think about issues of inequality.

Wired for equality?

There has been much recent literature on prosocial behavior. Prosociality is the trait by which people often deprive themselves in order to uphold some moral principle rooted in social welfare and justice.

A typical example of prosociality is the “ultimatum game” with two players. One player is given some money and is asked to decide how to distribute it among the two players. The other player can then either agree to the distribution or disagree. If the second person agrees, the money is distributed. If the second person disagrees, neither player receives money.

On migration

I’ve recently been reading The Logic of Life by Tim Harford (personal website and see the page on the book on his website). Harford is an economist in the UK who currently works for the Financial Times. Chapter seven of this book goes into great detail on the question of cities and their economies.

Harford begins by observing that prices for basic goods (food, rent) are higher in cities than in rural areas, and even though wages are higher in cities, the difference in wages is less than the difference in prices. In other words, doing the same join in a city allows one to earn more, but the cost of living rises by even more. So why, asks Harford, do people migrate to cities?

Harford’s basic explanation is simple, and dates back to the time of Alfred Marshall, one of the founding fathers of modern economics. Marshall observed that the main value of cities is close contact with other people. When many people live in close proximity, they can work more efficiently with each other, leading to a better quality of life. But more importantly, cities are great for the creation of new knowledge, as people learn by observing each other.

Harford also blasts the myth of cities being “bad news” for the environment. According to Harford, while cities no doubt pollute more per unit area, they populate much less per person. Apart form the obvious efficiencies entailed by volume, such as mass transportation systems (of which the most efficient, according to Harford, is the elevator) there is efficiency due to higher prices.

In conclusion, Harford complains about the fact that despite cities being efficient and important, politicians in the United States and Europe often stunt the growth of cities by subsidizing and pandering to vote banks in rural areas. Thus, he argues, these subsidies often go to the relatively richer people in the rural areas rather than the urban poor.

Reading this chapter led me to reflect a bit on my (extremely limited) knowledge about rural-urban migration.

Why do people migrate?

There are some differences between underdeveloped countries like India and developed countries like the United States. In the United States, rural people are not in general substantially poorer than their urban counterparts. Farmers in the United States, for instance, are often fairly rich. In India, on the other hand, rural areas are substantially less developed, and the rural poor are substantially poorer.

Influx of people from rural to urban areas is fairly common in India. Construction workers in Chennai and Bangalore often come from rural Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, and Orissa. Barbers and other small-scale entrepreneurs from rural areas in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar often come to cities like Mumbai and Bangalore. Waiters in many city restaurants are people with families in the villages.

At the lower end of the economic scale, I suspect there are two broad reasons for people coming to the cities. The first is to exploit the wage differential. The same kind of job pays more in the cities. A single earner may come to the city, earn the higher wage, and send money back to his (or, more rarely, her) family back in the village, where costs are low. Sometimes, an entire family may move to the city in the hope of saving enough money to return to the village.

The other reason is to enter the city economy on a more permanent basis. Here, a person or family may enter the city and accept the higher cost of living in exchange for greater opportunities to rise up the economic ladder. This is particularly the case, I suspect, for people in families that are not just poor but come from castes and backgrounds that are systemically discriminated against in the villages. In a larger and more cosmopolitan city, where commerce often takes precedence over prejudice, these people have more of a chance to earn well from their skills.

This second reason is, in some sense, a rephrasing of Harford’s own explanation of why people migrate to cities. True, people at the low end of the educational and economic ladder, when migrating to cities, may not be thinking in terms of the externalities and knowledge spillovers that cities routinely provide. But such calculation may well be implicit. After all, it is the density of population in cities that provides more job opportunities, more scope for enterprise, more learning opportunities, and less blatant bigotry and prejudice.

The urban poor

Despite the existence of huge numbers of urban poor, migration is still generally from rural areas to urban areas. There are two reasons to this. First, whatever the conditions of the urban poor, the rural poor are often substantially worse off. Second, as I pointed out earlier, even those urban poor who have sacrificed a lot to come to the city hope to be compensated with a chance to rise up the economic ladder.

Given the strong attractions that cities have to offer, migration is natural. In the absence of rapidly expanding good-quality cheap housing, there will be slums and haphazard settlement. The squalid living conditions in slums may lead one to naively condemn urban life and the “inequalities” it creates. I suspect that much of this inequality existed earlier — people would not migrate to the cities if it made them worse off. The rapid influx of people into cities, even where it leads to the growth of slums, may well be seen as a vote by the people for the opportunities that cities have to offer, in as much as rising stock market prices as seen as a vote for the company’s performance.

Further, it’s important to remember that some people may choose the slum simply because it is cheaper, and given the huge demand for cities, constructing fresh housing will not, in the short run, remove the slum. I’ve heard anecdotal stories about how, when slum-dwellers were given cheap housing to replace the slums, many of them sold the cheap housing to other people and went back to the slums. Others, who moved to the cheap and legal housing, were quickly replaced by new migrants.

Pride and prejudice

In his doctoral thesis at the University of Chicago, Gary Becker (homepage and blog) studied the economics of discrimination. He later published his research in a book titled The Economics of Discrimination. Becker’s key idea was that markets reduce discrimination. Simply speaking, competitive forces make it harder for firms to be able to make economically unprofitable decisions due to prejudice. Becker also showed, using simple mathematical models, that the larger the proportion of the underprivileged group, the faster the discrimination is destroyed. He later argued, in BusinessWeek columns later republished in his book The Economics of Life, that South Africa’s apartheid regime was supported by white trade unions, and disliked by white employers, since it reduced the size of the labor market and forced them to pay higher wages. Since a large fraction of South Africa’s population was black, this constituted a significant competitive disadvantage, and employers were thus, by and larger, supportive of ending apartheid legislation.

That cities are, in general, less prejudiced than villages in the same country, seems to be at least pratly explainable by the greater strength of market forces. Suppose, to take a hypothetical (but not entirely implausible) example, there are a bunch of Hindu shopkeepers serving customers in an area, and they are generally averse to hiring Muslim assistants. If there are many Muslims willing to work, and none of the shopkeepers are hiring them, the Muslims would be willing to work for relatively lower wages. A shopkeeper may then decide that at this low wage, the benefits she gets from hiring the assistant are well worth the discomfort it brings her. So, she hires a Muslim assistant. Since her Muslim assistant is paid a lot less than the Hindu assistants in other shops, she has a competitive advantage. Other competitors then decide that they could fire their Hindu assistants and get Muslim assistants. As Muslim workers are more in demand, their wages go up, and the Hindu workers bid their wages down to stay abreast of the competition.

In villages, these things happen more rarely. Why? There are many possible reasons. First, in villages where the rule of law runs less than in villages, certain groups can use violence to “enforce” their prejudices. Thus, if a Hindu shopkeeper hires a Muslim assistant, other shopkeepers, rather than reacting to competitive pressures, may hire hooligans to beat up the shopkeeper and assistant. Of course, this happens in cities too. But the better the enforcement of law and order, the more it is imperative that people respond to competition by performing better rather than by suppressing their competitors.

For instance, religious competition is routinely suppressed in villages. In many parts of Orissa, certain activists who call themselves the “Hindu right” have attacked Christian missionaries whose goal was to convert people to Christianity, as well as the Hindus they converted (most of these Hindus are Dalits — people from oppressed castes). In the presence of a good rule of law in these areas, the “Hindu religion” would have to compete in the marketplace with Christianity by removing or at least reducing the oppression suffered by the Dalits.

Second, a typical village may not have a sufficiently large and diverse market for competitive forces to be powerful enough. With just one person in each trade, it is hard for competitive pressure to build up.

Third, distinct communities may live separate from each other, with efforts to minimize commerce and other interaction between them. Such separation may be enforced by recourse to real or made-up religious teaching, false stories told about the “other”, and violence or the threat of it. In such circumstances, people in one community may not have enough knowledge about the other community to locate people they might work with or have dealings with.

Cities in danger?

If cities help people escape prejudice, they can also foster new ones. Or at any rate, they can help concentrate prejudices that were earlier present but diluted across large areas. And given the density and mixed nature of the population of the cities, these can lead to violence. If Hindus in a Hindu village have very negative views of Muslims in a Muslim village, this is bad news, but given the limited opportnuities for them to interact, it is unlikely to lead to direct violence. In a densely populated shantytown with both Hindus and Muslims, such views create riot-prone conditions.

Unfortunately, politicians are not immune from using the vibrant economies of cities for their own political ends, and sometimes these ends conflict with the values of catholicism, harmony, and tolerance. Mumbai (formerly Bombay) is considered India’s business capital, as New York is to the United States. It is also the seat of Bollywood, India’s film industry. It is the prime example of a city that people often travel to in order to fulfill their dreams. It has migrants from all over India, and includes, in addition to Hindus and Muslims, many Christians, Jews, Sikhs, Parsis.

In 1992-93, around the time of the Babri Masjid demolition, the Shiv Sena, a political party claiming to represent the “Hindu right”, made a a number of provocative statements that led to Hindu-Muslim riots in Mumbai. These were certainly not the worst riots in India — but it was bad news in a city as cosmopolitan as Mumbai. Following that, there were serial bomb blasts in 1993, believed to have been sponsored by underworld (Muslim) dons based in Dubai, in “revenge” for the crimes inflicted on their co-religionists. Since then, Mumbai has been witness to many blasts and terror attacks, most notably the bomb blasts in July 2006 in local trains, and the November 26-29 infiltration from sea by terrorists who attacked six different parts of the city.

Now, it’s true that people of a city cannot vote out terrorists, but it is easy to vote out politicians who stoke fires of hatred. In fact, I’d personally say that while terrorism in cities is bad news for them, the use of inter-group prejudice by politicians is also very bad news. The Shiv Sena began as a party strongly against migrants from South India to Mumbai. When it failed to gain popular support with the anti-south vitriol, it switched tracks to attacking Muslims, or, more euphemistically, to emphasizing a “Hindu-first” approach.

Politicians in other areas have used their control over the political and economic machinery of cities to make their own points too. Even in cases where there are no riots against a community, this use, in my view, goes against the spirit of a diverse city. Notable among this is a one-day shutdown of the city of Chennai called by the then Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Karunanidhi (this was on 31st March 2007). This shutdown, coming on a Saturday, involved closing down all bus routes, all trains plying in the day time, all domestic flights, and all shops and restaurants (I didn’t go around the markets that day, but a friend told me that people in the pay of the ruling party were roaming around with sticks trying to ensure compliance — some shopkeepers managed to keep their shops open arguing that they sold medicines and hence should be open to serve the people in case of an emergency). The cause? Karunanidhi wanted to show his party’s solidarity for a legislation favoring quotas for certain groups (the legislation had, at the time, been challenged in court). It is unclear whether he felt that the strike would influence the court’s decision on whether to uphold the legislation. I suspect it more likely that he was trying to indicate his commitment to the cause to his vote banks. Since Karunanidhi didn’t have to pay for the economic cost of the shutdown from his own pocket, this was a fairly cheap way of indicating his commitment.

Positive moves

Politicians occasionally succumb to the temptation of exploiting the city to score political points, but in general they also recognize that the less they come in the way of the city’s growth, the better. The recent growth of the IT industry in cities like Bangalore (now Bengaluru), Mumbai, Chennai and Delhi, seems promising. Governments have also been partnering with private parties and individuals to improve infrastructure facilities in cities. True, privatization creates new opportunities for graft (particularly in the absence of open bidding and with exclusive contracts). Still, there has been general progress. Delhi now has a world-class local metro system, while other cities like Bangalore and Mumbai are in the process of building theirs.

With an improvement in infrastructure must come a basic realization that cities are by their very nature places that people from different parts move to, and a realization that people moving into cities will invariably mean that as long as there are rural poor, there will be urban poor. Assuming that all people, whether rural or urban, have equal rights, we should make no efforts to block people from entering cities. Arguments that try to protect certain people in cities at the expense of others (often cloaked in terms of regional, communal, or other sectarian terms) should be seen for what they are — politicians exploiting people’s tendency to look for self-interest in order to divide the electorate and reap gains. It is important to invest in providing basic opportunities and living facilities to all who choose to come to the cities and are willing to work, while realizing that this alone cannot remove urban poverty as long as there continue to be poor people in villages.

More on choice

In an earlier post, titled Choice: start at low cost, I talked about the potential of simple, low-cost choices, to make the small improvements we need in our day-to-day life. People who read the blog have pointed out to me that coming up with low-cost choices isn’t always easy. For one, it requires a knowledge and awareness of what choices exist. In this post, I’ll discuss some of the techniques for exploring the choices available.

Let me recount a story. A traveler once met an old lady, and wanted some food. The lady had a lot of raw materials for food in her house, but she was stingy and reluctant to offer him food. So, the traveler took out a stone from his pocket, and told the lady he’d prepare soup for both of them using that stone. The lady offered a pot, and the traveler started cooking the stone. He asked the lady for some foodstuffs to be added to the stone soup to make it better, and gradually, got the lady to add flour, potatoes, barley and milk. As the soup stewed, the lady grew more and more excited and pleased. Finally, while the lady wasn’t looking, the traveler threw out the stone. (Read the story in greater detail here.

This is an old folk tale, and at first it isn’t clear what it illustrates. Does it tell us we shouldn’t be stingy in preparing grand soups? Probably, but I think the more powerful lesson is that we often need the stone to make the soup — but finally, the stone can be thrown out. This is the classic if only — if only so-and-so were available, I’d be able to do so-and-so.

In a number of situations, the things we feel are necessary for something, are in fact only helpful in facilitating it. For instance, traveling a lot may facilitate keeping in touch with a large number of people. So one might say: if only I had the time and money to travel across the world. But travel isn’t the only way to keep in touch with people. There is the telephone, there is email, there is instant messaging, and there’s even video conferencing. Having one’s article appear in the editorial page of a newspaper is certainly a cool way to be read by loads of people. But one can also write a blog and have a lot of people read the blog. Doubtless, fewer people read a specific blog than the editorial page of a newspaper. But it’s still possible.

In all these situations, there’s a high-cost alternative: like travel, having one’s article published in an editorial page; and a low-cost solution: like keeping in touch electronically, or writing a blog. Certainly, there are advantages and aspects to the high-cost solution that aren’t available in the low-cost solution. But to think of these as permanent defects or shortcomings of the low-cost solution, is a mistake. It assumes that resources, technology, and the way we use them are severely limited. This, as I’ll argue shortly, is a fallacy, because it puts too much emphasis on things that arise by accident and conditioning rather than through intrinsic differences.

For instance, there are strong differences between face-to-face communication and online communication. In face-to-face communication, there are strong cues of tone and voice, and there are strong physical cues of facial expressions. Smileys in an instant messaging chat cannot convey the same richness of emotion as the slight changes in facial expression. More importantly, smileys can be controlled with deliberation, while facial expressions are valuable precisely because they are, in part, spontaneous and uncontrollable. Thus, a lot can be achieved with face-to-face communication that, as of now, cannot be achieved by instant messaging or email.

But here’s the interesting thing. Once one becomes aware of the shortcomings and defects of electronic communication, it is possible to rectify them. In fact, I often do this kind of dumb thought-experiment: I take a person with whom I haven’t met face to face, and I imagine a setting where I’m meeting the person face-to-face. Then I extrapolate: what all would I say to that person, and what all would that person say to me, if we couldn’t hide behind electronic communication tools? Some of my thoughts take me in wild directions, but I often come up with a few things that I realize can be said electronically; it is just that they wouldn’t occur to me to say them electronically. And I do this quite often. Why? Because I realize that having face-to-face communication with a large number of people just isn’t feasible for me in my current circumstances. But I don’t want to be limited to the kind of topics and styles of conversation that one might associate with online conversation.

What I’ve noticed is that with a few iterations of these dumb thought-experiments, I manage to become more expressive in online communication, bringing to it some (though probably not all) of the features that I cherish in face-to-face communication.

I do a similar thing with money. I’m not a millionaire, so I cannot spend all the money I want ruthlessly in every possible way I want. But I still think sometimes of all the things I’d do if I had unlimited time, or unlimited money, or some resource in unlimited quantity (which, in point of fact, I don’t). Of the many ideas that come to my mind, I then realize that a few of them can be implemented within my current constraints of time and money, and some of them, often the very best ones, can be implemented at practically no cost and very little time investment!

In other words, to come up with the low-cost solutions, it often makes sense to look at the high-cost solutions and get ideas, and then notice which of those ideas transfer to the low-cost setting. At the core of it is the idea that often the difference lies in how easily a resource facilitates something. But once we’re aware of exactly how that resource facilitates that something, we may be able to facilitate that something without having access to the resource.

Why don’t they get it?

I’ve often felt like this: Why don’t they get it? It’s so obvious; why are they being so dense?

It could be about somebody who’s making a decision that I consider clearly detrimental to that person; it could be about somebody not accepting what I consider a simple point of logic; it’s basically one or more people acting in a way that I believe defies motivation and justification.

Have you felt that way? I think a lot of people do feel that way. Things that seem obvious to me (or you) just don’t seem to make their impression on the other person.

What differs from person to person is how we take this Why don’t they understand? feeling further. I have seen that a number of my acquaintances come to conclusions like they’re idiots or they’re evil or they’re just being stubborn or they’re kids. In other words, it’s solution by contempt.

There are other people who throw up their hands and say: I don’t know, I’m not in a position to judge. Let me not bother. I often do this myself, particularly in situations where it’s not really in my interests to “show the light” to the other person. For instance, if somebody is spending money in a way that doesn’t make sense to me from the viewpoint of that person’s long term goals, but that person isn’t financially dependent on me, then I might ask a couple of polite questions or make some casual observations but beyond that I can just say to myself it’s their life; not my concern. So I can go on interacting normally with the other person while not comprehending, or trying to comprehend, this feature of their personality. It’s solution by avoidance.

These are the two standard sanity approaches but there’s a third approach I take, ever so occasionally, which is to actually try to understand. It’s an approach I take in situations where I feel that understanding the rationale behind that person’s behaviour may yield dividends to me in the future, in situations where I have to deal with similar people. If, for instance, I plan to enter into the mathematics profession, and I find that mathematics professors have a way of behaving and interacting that I don’t completely understand, then it’s worth my while to take the pains to understand, even if the particular mathematicians whose behaviour I don’t comprehend doesn’t affect my future.

But as I’m growing up and seeing things more and more, I’m coming to appreciate that the ways in which other people affect one’s life are too diverse to predict. The toddler whose behaviour I don’t understand, can provide me insight that can help me take care of my own kids (if and when I have them), it can help me better understand the concerns of parents, it can help if I’m creating goods and services that target little kids and their parents. But there are stranger connections. Understanding the way the toddler perceives mathematics can help me understand what things are more primitive, and it can closely relate with the way axioms are built. I’m not speaking in thin air here; experiences with some young kids has highlighted to me some aspects of mathematical cognition, and made me appreciate how a little intuition in mathematics can save a lot of tedious mental jugglery with simple counting.

In the increasingly connected world that we are entering, more and more people become important; people whom we neither had the chance to nor the need to communicate with. So the ability to figure out why people are behaving the way they are, is a crucial asset.

Now it’s important to realize that it’s often extremely hard, even impossible, to figure out why somebody else doesn’t get it. For one, even if you were so motivated to just ask the other person for their reasons, the other person may not be able to explain, or may feel offended, or may feel you’re trying to reform him or her, or may just think you’re being funny. After all, it may be very obvious to the other person why he/she is acting that way, or it may seem something that he/she doesn’t want to consider. So this approach of just asking may not work.

Questions of why people do things may not even be answerable by experts; these are subjects of big experiments in economics, sociology, psychology and what-not. But what matters is an honest attempt to ask this question, because it puts you in the role of observer and input-seeker rather than judge or dismisser. So, you collect more tidbits that explain the other person’s actions and put them in context, and this may help you predict better how similar people may behave at a later stage. Even if you don’t understand why, you may at the very least be able to establish better patterns of what else to avoid in the future.

Another interesting side-effect is that sometimes, trying to seek a genuine answer to the Why don’t they they it? question may lead you to the realization that one of your assumptions about human behaviour was wrong. This could be embarassing at first to realize (for instance, if you’ve always placed a great value to certain kinds of things, realizing that there are people for whom those things aren’t important may not be easy). A knee-jerk response to this would be to label the other person as an idiot or crazy or kiddish.

Now I do not mean that the other person is actually being very logical or rational or responsible. But a knee-jerk contempt of another person is very different from a realization that the other person is immature, or wrong, in certain respects, and appreciating that. The former might create a sense of contempt, and may even cause one to feel unhappy and frustrated (particularly if there are regular interactions with the other person). In the latter, when you actually accept that there is a fundamental weakness in the other person, that may engender some sadness but it means less resentment and frustration.

This has happened for me many times. There were situations where I thought another person was behaving stupidly, and I resented it, disliked it, avoided that person. Then, when I thought about it, in some cases I was able to understand a rationale, and in some cases I just realized that the person lacked an important ingredient or input that would prevent the “stupid” behaviour, and that it was not in my capacity to provide that input. But when I looked at it that way, I didn’t feel any resentment. I just felt that this person lacked something, may be like the house next door that lacks a glass pane for one of its windows. Something to be sad about, but not something to resent.

Of course, it’s possible that my understanding of the situation was wrong, or itself limited. It’s not absolutely essential to come to the right understanding, as long as one is open to, and actively seeking and integrating, new input. Mistakes can be readily corrected, if one isn’t resorting to contempt or dismissal or rudeness.

Choice: start at low cost

The line that we have a lot of choice in our life is commonly parroted, yet it’s not a line that many of us truly understand and appreciate. Part of the reason for this, I believe, is that much of the current literature on the choice we exercise in our life is aimed at two kinds of audiences: people who’re trying to overcome certain kinds of problems, and people who’re keen on attaining goals. This severely limits the potential audience for the idea behind the theory of choice, because in the real world most people don’t have any compelling need to either solve problems or achieve goals (of course, everybody wants their problems solved and their goals achieved, but few have compelling need or desire for it).

This is unfortunate because there are many aspects for the choice model that are applicable to people who aren’t interested in rooting for sea change in their lives. In fact, most of the benefits of the choice model can be had with a lot of fun and very little effort, and I’m going to describe some of my experiences and experiments in this regard. What I’m really talking of is micro-choice; the choices we have in all the little things in life and how these choices govern to some extent the amount of excitement and liveliness we feel.

There are times when (like many others) I feel in a rut, a bit bored. Not deeply dissatisfied or unhappy, but just that things are too mundane. So on these occasions, I ask myself the question: what are the things I could do, with zero cost, time and effort, that’d make life more exciting? The zero cost, time, effort part may evoke skepticism because we’ve been all told that everything requires effort and hardwork. Yes, sea change requires hardwork, but there are usually a lot of little things that one could do for practically no effort.

Sometimes, it’s pretty silly stuff. For instance, sometimes, even when I’m not feeling bored, I just think, what are the tunes that I haven’t sung to myself, or played on the machine, for the last one month? And then some tune comes back to me that I used to enjoy singing long ago but have somehow just forgotten, and when I sing that, some part of myself that’s been dormant wakes up. Because somehow the tune is associated with certain past experiences and memories of places and people, and when I sing it, I can feel those memories come up. (The association’s usually based on the feeble premise that I used to sing the tune when I was there or around the time I met those people).

Tunes may not excite everybody, for some it could be the decor of the room. What triggers things isn’t the point. The point is the low-cost, low-time, low-effort aspect of it. Singing a tune costs me nothing, takes none of my time (proceeds subconsciously) and hardly requires effort. It doesn’t require ounces of determination or courage. It just requires me to say Hey, what’s been missing?

Food could have similar effect. I greatly enjoy the food I eat, and yet sometimes I feel that there’s some kind of food I used to have earlier that I’m not having now; so I just change the pattern that little bit to have that piece of food and life seems more exciting. What I’m saying is that that slight change with practically no cost, time and effort could have a quantum effect on one’s level of excitement in life.

Another area is staying in touch with friends. Sometimes, I feel that life’s getting into a rut, I don’t get much social or talking opportunities. Now, there are many parts of this I don’t want to or can’t immediately change. I’m not fond of going to late night shows, I don’t have enough time for a number of socializing opportunities, and I’m in a country and culture where I haven’t yet fully adjusted to the system of activities. But there are plenty of solutions that are zero on cost, time and effort. Like, I can just decide to chat with some person whom I haven’t chatted with for a long time. Or send an email. Or visit a discussion forum that I used to enjoy.

The notion of zero cost, time and effort is subjective. Spending a dollar or two may not be any cost worth considering for me, it may be a huge cost for somebody else. Also, the way one spends the money may matter. Similarly, five minutes spent in making a phone call may be significantly more time for a person than twenty minutes spent writing a letter. And the “effort” component also varies from person to person. A safe bet is that for something to be genuinely low on effort, it should just require a one-time action, without any followup, and should not draw upon any skills or resources that put a strain on the person.

In many cases, I come up with these ideas, and there’s really no reason for me not to implement them, I just go ahead and do it. On some occasions, solutions that seem to be zero on cost, time and effort, surprisingly don’t actually reach the stage of implementation, and at that stage it’s really a question of (a) whether the activity really is low on cost, time and effort; and (b) whether the reason I’m doing it for really does matter to me. If on balance I realize that the activity is worth more effort than the fun I’ll get out of it, then I don’t do it, and things are still going on.

It’s on some very rare situations that I realize that although the reason is good and the effort is very low, I’m still for some reason unwilling to do the activity, which indicates to me that there are some hidden reasons which aren’t surfacing. Now, I have the choice of whether to put in the effort to figure out what’s going on, or to say Okay, let’s find something else which doesn’t invoke any hidden resistance. The first approach is good and worthy but I don’t often feel up to it, so I just switch out and look for another solution. The cool thing about life is that there are always so many choices of ways to do things that are low on cost, time and effort, that one thing being blocked doesn’t mean I am forced to resolve it
there and then.

This may seem a somewhat cowardly approach to life, because great things come through cost, time and effort, as we all know. And people who are willing to put in their time, their money and their effort towards stuff are certainly of great value to themselves and society, and they often spearhead change and innovation. But the “find a low-cost, low-time, low-effort” solution isn’t being offered as an alternative in situations where people are already willing to invest and commit. It’s an alternative to doing nothing, to falling in a rut, and it’s a way of making the little things in life shine more.

Moreover, even people who are willing to invest and commit heavily in some areas may not have the same willingness in others; so it’s appropriate to look for the low-cost solutions in other areas rather than just do nothing in those. I may be willing to invest a lot into learning mathematics but not that much into improving my general knowledge, so while for the former I may buy books, spend hours studying and discuss and seek advice, for the latter I might do occasional websurfing and read Wikipedia articles. That’s not because websurfing and reading Wikipedia articles is the best way to improve general knowledge, it’s because it’s low on cost, time and effort for me and I can fill it in the itnerstices.

Another interesting aspect of this is the free demo aspect. By first attempting low-cost and low-effort activities, we can gauge the potential of something better, and for those things that yield more returns, we can then choose to invest more heavily. A number of the low-cost activities may be duds; okay, I sang the new tune and felt better, but it’s not really something that important to me. But I might find that eating a certain kind of food makes me really happy, and then I can invest on a more regular basis on stocking and eating the food.

Religion — guide or chore?

It is commonly believed in Western lands that India is a religious and mystic land; yet surprisingly it seems to me that in a way, people in the United States (where I have been staying for the past four months) may actually be more religious than people in India. India has often touted itself as a land of culture, religion and values, but is it really such? How does religion contribute to the lives of people in India, as compared with in Europe, America and Africa?

Let me take the example of Hinduism, the “dominant” “religion” in India. More than 80% of the population of India is Hindus, and many Hindus pray to God every day, go to the temple regularly, and even go on pilgrimages. This would suggest that Hinduism has a crucial impact on the way people live and make decisions. Yet, in my experience, Hindu religious activity constitutes yet another chore in many people’s lives, a chore that they believe is important to be “good”, but a chore that is done and forgotten.

Religion can be viewed in two ways: one, as a system of beliefs about the universe, and the other, as a guiding system of values and beliefs that helps one cope with and make decisions in life. For religion to function effectively in the latter way, and to make an impact on the life of people, religious leaders and activists need to play the role of problem-solvers and guides: people to whom individuals can go, share their problems, and get strength and courage to proceed further in life. Further, religious leaders should tackle issues about daily life that concern people the most. This tackling issues could be in many ways: it could be through taking rigid positions, it could be through offering perspectives, it could be through explaining to people how to make sense of the situations. Religion should, in this respect, offer a sense of community and solidarity.

In the traditional Church system, the local priests and vicars play the role of guides; they make statements about current issues, they explain how to interpret current events and the role of such events in their lives. True, some of these views may not be agreeable to all followers of the religion; some of them may be considered oppressive or exploitative, and some of them may be based on an erroneous understanding of recent developments. Nonetheless, the religion makes an attempt to provide a framework relevant to one’s current life. The rabbi plays a similar role for the Jews.

Hinduism has no such canonical reference point. While it’s hard to say whether this is good or bad, what is probably more notable is that there is hardly any reference point for Hinduism. There are some modern-age gurus who try to address problems of modern-day life, yet the typical image when one thinks of a Hindu priest is as somebody who arranges ceremonies, leads processions, and chants mantras. I do not know anybody who would consider going to the local Hindu priest to make a confession. Hindu temples are rarely places where a lot of people get together to discuss matters of day-to-day importance, or to pray together. There is no equivalent of the namaz that Muslims do every Friday.

This is also seen in the interplay of religion and politics in India. Politics in India is hardly affected by actual religion; the effect is more in terms of “religious politics”. In a number of more modern countries, churches and religious organizations have an active set of demands regarding prominent issues that affect the people; often these demands get voiced. In India, most demands of religious politicians center around the building and re-building of religious monuments, the declaration of religious holidays, and playing one religious subsection against the other.

In fact, I have a strong feeling, contrary to popular wisdom, that it is the very irrelevance of religion in the life of many Hindu Indians that has led Indians to adapt so quickly to the world; not influenced by too many religious beliefs, and not really believing strongly in any approach to living, Indian Hindus have readily taken to Western habits. This is not so much the case with people from other communities, particularly Muslims. Having a greater sense of community and closer direction and guidance from religious precepts may actually have encumbered Muslism from adapting.

It is possible that the irrelevance of religion in the lives of people in India, apart from the occasional ritual here and there, is a recent phenomenon. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is debatable. What is unfortunate is that though the guiding value of religion in daily life is low, the effect on superstitions, prejudices, and inter-community separation continues to remain high.

Prejudice, yet again

What are the roots of prejudice and discrimination and why do these continue to haunt society today? These are big questions, and the typical answer — that prejudice is a tool for oppression, is only half the truth. In this post I’ll try to explore some of these.

The University of Chicago area has had serious law and order problems over the past few decades; mugging and looting are very common here, and whenver one is walking on the streets here, one needs to be on the lookout for suspicious individuals. Unfortunately, thieves and burglars do not carry a unique identifying mark by which one can recognize and avoid them; hence it is important to develop a sense of who is more likely to be a thief. Some of the heuristics I have developed in this regard border on prejudices, for instance:

The crime statistics indicate that most crimes are perpetrated by locals, rather than University students, and moreover, by young teenagers among the locals. Males are more likely to undulge in mugging. Thus, if I know that a person is a university student, I am less apt to suspect the person. Unfortunately, it’s not even clear, looking at a person, whether he or she is a university student. If the person across the street is female, I don’t feel so scared. Then again, the age group matters: if a person looks the age of 20-25, the chances of that person being a university student are higher, so I’m more relaxed; on the other hand, a person aged around 15 makes me suspicious.

But even age is not obvious, so I use other cues. For instance, I know that a large fraction of the local population comprises Blacks, whereas the fraction among university students, though not zero, is considerably lower. Thus, a person being Black increases the chance that that person is not a University student. On the other hand, if I see somebody who looks Chinese or Japanese or Indian, I surmise that the probability of this person being a university student is high.

This can qualify as prejudice, because I appear to be making an implicit statement that Blacks are more likely to commit crime than Indians or Chinese or Japanese. Actually, that’s not the statement I am making; if I were in India, I would probably be more suspicious of a native Indian than a Black, since I’d consider it unlikely that a person would come from another country to mug me. The point is that certain heuristics which I hav edeveloped for self-protection (of course, these heuristics may be wrong) effectively cause me to be prejudiced against certain people.

However, this level of prejudice differs from what people usually call prejudice because it is only prejudice pending further information. It is prejudice based on conditional probability under limited information, and even a little more information I have about the person can immediately change the amount of “danger” I perceive in him or her.

As in this example, prejudice involves association of certain characteristics with certain others, even though there may or may not be any logical implication from one to the other. A person’s skin colour or religion may be no indicator of that person’s honesty or criminal tendencies.

Prejudice pending further information is the mildest form of prejudice, and the one that is most open to correction, if one is willing to receive further information. Most prejudices run deeper than that; we typically call a person prejudiced if the prejudice survives strong information or evidence to the contrary. Moreover, a number of prejudiced people do not even realize that the information they have is far from sufficient to draw the conclusions they are drawing.

Why do people acquire such prejudices? The hint is in the notion of association; if an association is strengthened a lot in one’s mind, then that association proves itself and no further proof is required. To give an illustration, even in today’s modern India, where crores of Hindus and Muslims co-exist, a number of my Hindu friends, and more so people a couple of generations older, have strong anti-Muslim prejudices. The interesting thing is that although India has a large number of Hindus and Muslims, and there is no open friction or hostility among the communities in most areas, the Muslim community remains largely separated from the Hindu community, and interaction is very little; much of mainstream Indian cinema has all its lead characters as Hindus, despite a sixth of the population being Muslim. Thus, a number of Hindus have had hardly any interactions with Muslims, and yet some of them harbour strong prejudices against Muslims. While these prejudices may not result in active war or fighting, it could have lots of other effects: fewer interaction with people from Muslim families, discriminating against working for a Muslim employer’s shop, or discriminating against hiring a Muslim employee, and many other things.

This brings up yet another point: it is often said that prejudice is a tool for exploitative oppression. This is true to a large extent: the people who kickstart a prejudice may use it to justify the oppression of a certain community, and hence greater gains for another community. However, it would not be correct to say that everybody who suffers from a prejudice is using it to exploitatively oppress, or benefit from it. A number of prejudiced people just inherit the prejudice as a passive legacy from others, through constant reinforcement. They do not gain from the prejudice, but they have nothing to gain (as faras they can see) from the painful process of introspection and openness by which they can get rid of the prejudice, so they see no reason to put in an effort (even if they realize they have a prejudice).

The fight against discrimination and towards greater equality certainly must address prejudice, but it must do so in novel ways; in ways which take into account the rational roots of prejudice, which take into account that among the people who are prejudiced, there are those who benefit exploitatively from it and there are others who passively move along; that there are some prejudiced people who will shed their prejudices given further information, while there are others for whom shedding the prejudice means questioning what they have always believed in.

Judgement 24 X 7

When Jesus talked of the Day of Judgement, he sketched an image of how God would partition people into two sides — the “nice” lot, the ones who are sent to heaven, are the ones who’ve always helped their fellow human beings. In contrast, the “bad” lot, the ones who are sent to hell, are the ones who’ve been harming their fellow human beings, or have been indifferent to those in need.

So, Jesus cautions, your actions every day are being watched over by God, so better be honest to yourself, obecause you have to pay the price for all your wrongs on the Day of Judgement.

Unfortunately, most people treat every day as a Day of Judgement. The reason why this is “unfortunate” is because often, people don’t even know what they are to be judged against, how they are to be judged, and how to juggle the many different judges who have conflicting expectations from them. From day one, we are judged by our parents, our friends, by our school teachers, by our colleagues, by spouses, children. Good judgement like “shaabash!” or “well done” makes us feel good and bad judgement like “shoddy work” or “how could you do this?” or “why are you like this?” makes us feel bad.

What we may rationally realize, but often emotionally don’t, is that all the people whose judgements we are accepting, all have their own problems, their own prejudices, their own axes to grind, their own manipulative tendencies. So their judgement or evaluation is twisted, or flavoured, by all these. Moreover, in many cases, they are really powerless over our future, not all of them are as powerful as the God who will put us on one side or the other depending on how we’ve been all our life. So our concern about their opinion is neither based on the value of their thoughts nor so much as the control they have on our lives. So what is it?

For instance, a lot of us have this desire to be “liked”. We manifest it in different ways. Some of us may try being “helpful” to others (whatever that means) such as by doing their homework assignments, or by treating them to chocolate ice-cream or whatever. Some of us do it by “following” or “agreeing”. For instance, everybody around me is having a pizza, and okay, I don’t like pizzas, but I don’t want to be thought of as a non-cool person, so let me also have a pizza. Or, everybody around me is watching so-and-so movie, and I want to watch another one, but why risk being split from the crowd? I’ll go along.

Thus, we not only seek the judgement of others, but we also seek to be “in” the group, viz we seek the stamp of approval of the mass of people. We seek to be liked by the mass of people even if we know that no individual person in that mass really will change his or her opinion. This desire to be liked often results in so-called “peer pressure”. So peer pressure and the desire to help others are often linked to the same root — the root of wanting to be liked, and of doing things so that one is liked. While peer pressure has come to be seen as a weakness in certain contexts (for instance, getting pressurized into antisocial activities), helpfulness is still seen as a noble virtue. In fact, both are signs of the same tendency, and both are just as “helpful” or “harmful” to the individual.

The point that all these judgement things miss out is that ultimately others don’t exist. The so-called group doesn’t exist, there’s nothing like a group mind which accepts or rejects you. Or rather, the group and others do exist, but they aren’t an absolute scale of reality against which to judge yourself — they are peripheral, ephemeral, they move on, they change. If you make certain specific other people, or even worse, certain loose conglomerations of people, your definition of life or happiness, and you feel good about being in the “in” group, then you have given those people and that group control of your self-worth. And other people have their own problems, their own self-worth to tackle. They’ll move on in life — they won’t stick by you. And groups — groups may not even exist ten days from now. Would you put your money into a company that will go bust any day? If not, then why put your self-worth and your evaluation of yourself into what certain poorly defined groups think of you?

In fact, the only person or thing that sticks by you (or rather, has to stick by you) is yourself. The only person who’ll be with me every moment of my life is myself, so the only thing I should be concerned about is what I think of myself. If my goal in life is to serve others, then may be serving others and seeing them happy makes me happy. But if others aren’t happy with the quality of work I put in, that shouldn’t make me put myself in Hell (or go through a mental hell) with the “nobody values my work, so what I am useless” loop.

If I want to chill out with a group of people because I think they’re cool, then of course being “in” matters and counts, but again, the fact that I am not in should not be a matter of poor self-worth — it’s more a matter of restrategizing to get back in. In other words, there’s a lot of difference between relinquishing control of one’s self-worth to somebody or something else, and trying to do well in that other. In the former, one gets hit emotionally by every setback. In the latter, it’s more like one uses every new “rejection” as an input.

An interesting aspect about the whole mess of judging and getting judged by others, is that those people who most fear getting judged by others, are also the ones who tend to judge, and manipulate others through judgement, most. In other words, it’s not the “perpetrator of judgement” versus the “victims of judgement” — often the biggest perpetrators are the biggest victims. The only way perpetrator can make a judgement and not be at the receiving end of it is if the judgement is about a class of people to which he or she doesn’t belong (e.g. judgements about people of the opposite sex, or about people of a different age or “social class” or region). Those who stay away from the whole mess neither pereptrate nor become victims, yet even they need to understand the mechanism of judgement given its widespread implications.

For instance, those who judge that “women should keep the house clean” or that “kids should be neither seen nor heard” or that “one should work hard” are also the ones who feel more pressurized to keep the house clean (if they are women) or to not be seen nor heard (if they are kids) or to work hard. People who judge others on how “cool” they are also feel the heat to appear cool. Which is why Jesus, when confronted with the case of a woman who was being stoned for adultery, asked only those to throw stones at the woman who felt their own life was impeccable.

Unfortunately, in real life, people freely throw stones at each other, even if they know that the same stones can be thrown at them, even if they know that throwing stones at others actually makes them more scared and vulnerable to being at the receiving end of stones. Nor do people seem to mind being sitting ducks for stones thrown at them, and the only thing they do is huddle into a ball where they are, rather than walk out of the place.

And people often justify throwing stones at (viz, judging) each other by the fact that others throw stones at them, that everybody throws stones at everybody, or that throwing stones is the only way to keep people in check. “How would houses remain clean if women weren’t judged on it?” or “How would kids learn discipline if the message isn’t made explicit to them?” In fact, there are people who go as far as saying “How would I study/work if I didn’t fear being judged negatively by others?” or “Why would I refrain from killing people if I didn’t fear the judgement of being a killer?”

No wonder people stay unhappy and feel oppressed and misunderstood by society, if they let others determine their self-worth!

The solution, in my opinion, is only through self-reliance, and through using oneself as the only true determinant of one’s self-worth. To set out what one will feel good and bad about, and to have all these choices based on factors within one’s control. Factors like what one chooses to do, what one’s goals are, what work one puts in, rather than factors like what others think of you, what others say to your face, and what they talk about you behind your back.

After all it’s your life, ultimately. You enjoy or suffer it. Then why let others run it?

Multi-dimensionality

Multi-dimensionality seems to be the new catch phrase these days. Everywhere people are exhorted to “expand their personality” in different directions, to not stay “confined” to one “area”, to “explore” more and more and to have accomplishments in a variety of fields. The mantra today is not “master of one’s trade” but “jack of all trades”.

For instance, school children, after being scolded for spending too little time on their hoemwork, are then told, by the same people, “Life is not all about homework and exams. There’s life beyond school. Go out and see the world.”

Or a person who is seriously trying to prearep for a test in order to secure a good admission, or for some other reasons, is told — “Life is not all about doing well in exams. you should take it easy, chill out. May be explore things a bit. Try dating somebody, watching a film, or just wasting time”.

Actually, multi-dimensionality, used as a tool for manipulation, is really complex, because it can be used by so many different people with so many different ulterior motives, that it can be confusing.

One common use of multi-dimensionality is to justify and pull people towards mediocrity. This is the “jack of all trades” mentality. Working on any one thing for a long time, with dedication, sincerity and concentration, is tough, challenging, dangerous, scary, whatever, and multi-dimensionality is a way of adding respect to what can more aptly be termed “doing nothing”. This is closely related to what I had called “flagellation” in my first post on this blog, wherein people flagellate themselves flagellate others, and flagellate those who are doing well.

More precisely, I should say that multi-dimensionality does nnot itself cause people to be mediocre, but rather, helps them feel better about being so. It’s sily to believe that if people weren’t told the virtues of being multi-dimensional, they would do better quality work. They probably wouldn’t. But multi-dimensionality now actually makes people feel better about not putting in that special effort towards anything.

Another way in which multi-dimensionality is used as a tool is by people to get other people to do work they otherwise wouldn’t do, as a sort of compromise. For instance, a school teacher wants students to contribute towards something like decorating bulletin boards or taking prefectorial responsibilities, or helping out with a school function. So the school teacher extols the virtues of how this will add more dimensions to the student’s personality, and how life is not just academics. Often the same school teachers may go back to the one-dimensional view of “life is just academics” when exam hour approaches.

Or for instance, if A wants company for a movie, and her friend B says she’s got lots to study, or is practising for some important competition, then A can say, “Come on, don’t sbe so one-minded. Learn to chill out. Take a break. Expand yourself in other directions/dimensions”. So the selfish need of wanting company for a movie (which is perfectly respectable then gets translated to a “reform my friend into watching movies” project.

Unfortunately, these simple one-on-one manipulations are given the stamp of legitimacy by the word “multi-dimensionality” which is also encoded in other catchphrases like “expand your horizons” or “broaden your mindset” or “don’t be too narrow in your thinking”. And even more unfortunately there are people who get trapped and pressurized by these, and these are also the same people who get pressurized by a whole lot of other things like “study harder” and “work harder” and “don’t spend so much time over the phone” — rather confusing.

So what really is multi-dimensionality and is there any legitimate basis for it? It is true that the more things one knows, understands, can do and can handle, the better one is equipped for dealing with life. And it’s also often true that there are lot of things that help in unexpected ways. For instance, it may be true that watching a movie may actually refresh one so that one can better concentrate on studies, or that studying history may help one understand the historical context of a movie, or that watching a television serial may awaken one to social problems and realities. (Most of these are not statistically likely, but they do happen)

And it is true, for instance, that skills in debating and skills in presentation and convincing can come useful even in professions that don’t apparently involve selling or convincing — things like the pure sciences, athletics or being a homemaker.

On the other hand, it’s also probably true that there are many skills and hobbies and side-interests that one diligently acquires and that may be completely useless for anything else. For instance, learning how to play a certain card game, or smoke a certain kind of cigarette, may be absolutely no use outside of the immediate enjoyment (or equivalent) that these activities give (they may be of some use somewhere, but it’s highly unlikely in my opinion).

What the “you never know what might be of use where, so might as well do everything” logic misses out is the fact that doing lots of things, desultorily moving from one area to another, may hinder understanding and learning something to a sufficient depth to be able to use it, to make a career out of it, to encash it, or to have it as a “life-companion activity”. Further, being a “jack of all trades” may not get you anywhere with any of them, where anywhere is a level where one can actually encash, or get some good amount of enjoyment out of it.

At the end of the day, it’s the person himself/herself who has to decide what approach is suitable, given his or her immediate goals and where that person wants to go or be. There are people for whom “diversity of experience” itself counts for a lot, there are people who may want to find “something specific” to do. There are people to whom getting a particular job or admission might matter at a certain stage of life, for whom the other things don’t count much at that time.

Even “multi-dimensional” people could be the relaxed multi-dimensional types, who want to casually move around from one thing to the other, and the all-hectic multi-dimensional people who arrange for a complicated way of juggling across multiple activities to “achieve” something in each of them.

The sad thing is that people who are already under a lot of pressure (their own, and that from the others) to perform and achieve, are now subjected to this additional pressure to be multi-dimensional. Of course, it’s usually true that those who offer pressure to be multi-dimensional, don’t give any guarantees alongside. For instance, a person who tells a friend to stop studying and chill out and join him for (some activity) doesn’t take any guarantee that not studying at that time will not adversely affect the other person’s knowledge gained, or marks scored in an exam, or future career opportunities. Ultimately, a person’s successes or failures are his or her own, and they are for him or her to face up to, so others who act as reformists and “multi-dimensionalizers” are talking in the air, not risking anything, letting this person take the risk.

this brings us to the more basic issue of why people let themselves be judged by those around them, and why they let some selfish manipulations by others in the name of multi-dimensionality get to them. I’ll get back to this in the next blog post.