Chirping

I spent a good chunk of time recently sitting outdoors and listening to the birds chirping.

Natural sounds have a way of being peaceful. This setting was no exception.

I’ve sat in that same spot so many times over the past couple of years. I’ve rarely heard the birds chirping. That’s because there’s always some internal noise from my own thoughts or external noise from conversation.

A good reminder that peace is always within reach.

It just requires us to pause and pay attention.

A time we never knew

I read a post from a Gen Z writer Freya India that was equal parts thoughtful, poignant, and painful to read. Here are a few excerpts.

There is a beautiful and melancholic word I like called anemoia. It means nostalgia for a time or a place one has never known.

But perhaps the best example of anemoia is the popularity of ‘90s high school videos, like this one trending on TikTok. Or this one on YouTube, with millions of views, captioned “Phones? No. We had each other.”

This video has nearly 30,000 comments, some from Gen Xers nostalgic for their ‘90s youth—but many from Gen Z, aching for a world they never experienced. Older generations might dismiss this as teens wanting to be different and reject modern culture, as they often do. But the comments reveal something deeper:

“The whole concept of a real ‘childhood’ is completely out the window at this point in time and that’s extremely sad to me. Btw I’m 15, born in 2003.”

“I’m 20 years old so I wasn’t even conceived at the time of this video but it leaves me feeling empty. My highschool experience was nothing like this. I remember short bursts of people living in the moment but EVERYTHING revolved around our phones, Snapchat/Instagram status. It almost makes me angry because I’ve never had simple straight forward interaction as shown in this video. Even looking at people in the background, they are completely present and not buried in their phones. Everyone seemed a lot more social. I’m jealous of millennials/gen x, yall experienced a golden time to be young and free.”

“As someone who graduated in 2015 this looks like such a nice time. Not a phone in sight. People actually talking face-to-face. I wish I could have grew up in an era like this.”

There were hard times, of course—the ‘90s weren’t all bliss; no era is. But the world we inhabit now is so markedly different. New technologies cheapen and undermine every basic human value. Friendship, family, love, self-worth—all have been recast and commodified by the new digital world: by constant connectivity, by apps and algorithms, by increasingly solitary platforms and video games. I watch these ‘90s videos, and I have the overwhelming sense that something has been lost. Something communal, something joyous, something simple.

I am grieving simple joys—reading a magazine; playing a board game; hitting a swing-ball for hours—where now even split-screen TikToks, where two videos play at the same time, don’t satisfy our insatiable, miserable need to be entertained. I even have a sense of loss for experiencing tragic news––a moment in world history––without being drenched in endless opinions online. I am homesick for a time when something horrific happened in the world, and instead of immediately opening Twitter, people held each other. A time of more shared feeling, and less frantic analyzing. A time of being both disconnected but supremely connected. 

But I never knew it. Maybe briefly, as a child. But most of us in Gen Z were given phones and tablets so early that we barely remember life before them.  Most of us never knew falling in love without swiping and subscription models. We never knew having a first kiss without having watched PornHub first. We never knew flirting and romance before it became sending DMs or reacting to Snapchat stories with flame emojis. We never knew friendship before it became keeping up a Snapstreak or using each other like props to look popular on Instagram. And the freedom—we never felt the freedom to grow up clumsily; to be young and dumb and make stupid mistakes without fear of it being posted online. Or the freedom to be unavailable, to disconnect for a while without the pressure of Read Receipts and Last Active statuses. We never knew a childhood spent chasing experiences and risks and independence instead of chasing stupid likes on a screen. Never knew life without documenting and marketing and obsessively analyzing it as we went.

Now, the next generation? Gen Alpha? I can only imagine the loss they will feel. They are on track to never know friendship without AI chatbots, or learning without VR classrooms, or  life without looking through a Vision Pro. They are being born into a world already anxious and atomised. My guess is that one day they will find family photo albums and hear stories about how their Millennial parents met and be hit with anemoia. 

But it doesn’t have to be this way. We can give future generations a real-world childhood.  We can prioritize play. We can delay entry to social media platforms until at least 16. We can encourage young people to just hang out with each other, without supervision and without smartphones. We can take elements of childhood from previous eras and re-introduce them in modern life. But we have to remember what has been lost. When we are grieving record stores, mixtapes, old-school romance, and friends goofing around in ‘90s high schools, what are we actually grieving? Delayed gratification. Deeper connection. Play and fun. Risk and thrill. Life with less obsessive self-scrutiny. These are things we can reclaim—if we remember what they are worth and roll back the phone-based world that degraded them.

We have to start somewhere. I suppose what I’m asking for here is some sympathy and a little more grace. It’s easy to mock Gen Z and Gen Alpha for their soaring screen time, to roll your eyes at teenagers wasting their youth in their rooms, ruminating about themselves, and feeling hopeless about the future. But they are trying their best to keep up with a world so agonizingly different from any before it—and it is the only one they have ever known. 

So please. Next time you cringe at Gen Z for not coping, for not feeling cut out for this world, remember how painful it is to think that the good times are over. Then imagine how much more painful it would be to realize you never knew them. 

Paradise and going soft

“We came from Caladan—a paradise world for our form of life. There existed no need on Caladan to build a physical paradise or a paradise of the mind—we could see the actuality all around us. And the price we paid was the price men have always paid for achieving a paradise in this life—we went soft, we lost our edge.” | Dune by Frank Herbert

Once we taste privilege, “stay hungry, stay foolish” is easier said than done.

The ordeal paradox

Disneynature released another great documentary about a family of tigers recently. We’ve enjoyed all their previous ones (special shout-out to the polar bear and Dolphin reef) and this was another masterclass in storytelling.

This story was about a tigress raising four kids in the forests of Central India. In the middle of the story, she loses two of her kids as she’s forced to be away from them for a few days. After frenzied searching, she sees vultures around tiger carcasses and assumes both to be dead.

While one of them did sadly die, the other, a tigress named Charm, survived the ordeal against the odds. The scene where she reunites with her family after the ordeal is heartwarming. Her joy and relief is palpable.

Until that ordeal, Charm was consistently the most careful and shy of the four siblings. However, she comes back transformed. The ordeal helped her develop character and get in touch with her resilience. When it was time for the kids to finally leave their mother, it is Charm who leads the way.

That’s the paradox bad experiences present. We’d never want to wish them on us or anyone we care about. But, on the flip side, they help us build resilience and character.

So, if we aren’t going through an ordeal, there’s a lot to be grateful for.

And if we are, there’s a lot to learn.

Win-win. Just not in the way we expect.

Swinging at every pitch

A few years ago, a wise colleague shared some sage career advice – “Don’t swing at every pitch.” Career choices have high switching costs and it helps to be discerning as we consider new opportunities.

However, this post isn’t about career choices.

I’ve been thinking about this advice in the context of work more broadly. In any given day or week, we might experience many triggers for frustration or annoyance. It could be indirect – an inaccurate insight being shared widely, a document with false assertions, or some other perceived injustice. It could also be direct – someone saying something unfair directly to us or about us.

If we work with enough humans or in large enough organizations, we’re likely to experience such triggers often. And it can be easy to get caught in a reactionary cycle.

I think of these triggers as pitches. We can swing at every one of them that comes our way – but we’ll tire ourselves out needlessly.

Every action doesn’t deserve an equal and opposite reaction. Few are worth the effort.

It pays to focus on the signal while ignoring the noise.

Don’t swing at every pitch.

Buying a home – 3 notes

For most folks who decide to do so, buying a home is the among the most significant transactions they’ll make in their lifetime. As a result, it is a high-pressure transaction. Ahead of our search, we emailed a few friends who’d bought recently and asked them to share their advice. Over time, I’ve since dispensed said advice and refined my own. My current synthesis has 3 notes –

(1) Picking a budget is a critical decision – pick an amount of debt that doesn’t add too much pressure for too long: Unless you’re wealthy and have no need for financial advice, your mortgage will change how you approach the next few years of your life. Some change is par for the course. But if it constrains your freedom and optionality (e.g., by making you feel too tied to your current job) for too long, it can become problematic quickly.

Buying a home is a lovely thing. It helps to budget for it in a way that it doesn’t become the only lovely thing you can afford in your life for the foreseeable future.

(2) There are things that can be easily changed and things that can’t – pay attention to the latter: There’s a lot about the look-and-feel of the house that can be changed. Floors can be changed, rooms can be redone, and bathrooms can be remodeled. These are problems that can solved with money.

On the flip side, problems that aren’t easily solved with money are structural issues in the home (especially those involving mold), a problematic homeowner’s association, and those involving the neighborhood – e.g., bad neighborhood schools or crime. Buying an okay home in a great neighborhood typically trumps buying a great home in a bad neighborhood.

(3) There is no such thing as a perfect home – instead, there is a great choice out there for you at this time with trade-offs you’re happy to live with. Assuming money is a constraint (see (1)), the home-buying decision is an exercise in trade-offs. You can’t have everything – you’ll have to just choose among the inventory available at any given time anyway.

If you want location, you’ll have to give up space. If you want space, you’ll have to do the work to maintain it. If you want a lot of space at a great price, you’ll likely have to make peace with a commute. Or if you decide you don’t want to deal with these trade-offs, you’ll have to wait a while before you buy – that’s a trade-off too.

There’s no right or wrong answer here. The reason to buy a home is because we believe it will increase the joy in our lives. Joy doesn’t come without pain. We just get to choose the kind of pain we want to deal with.

Choose thoughtfully, then act decisively.

Others

We met a teenager in our neighborhood the other day. He’d come home for a quick paid side-project. We learnt that he was saving up ahead of college in the fall.

He shared that this was his second attempt at college. He went to a college in Montana last year and he experienced so much hate because he was from California. So much so that he decided to not go back after the first semester.

We wished him all the best with this second attempt.

While it is hard to know the full picture in stories like this, it got me reflecting about how we’re so wired to think in terms of “us” and “them.” And that’s without any notion of typical dividers like skin color or religion or political affiliation (which just amplify differences). He was a gentle Caucasian kid who likely looked no different than those who drove him away.

I remember thinking about this when I was in college as well. I was part of a cohort of 100 Indian kids out of 1000 “international students” out of an incoming cohort of 6000. You’d think the relatively small group of Indian kids would stick together. But, no.. 100 is plenty for all sorts of “others.” The primary excuses for division among us was language.

If it wasn’t that, it was something else. There’s always something.

We are social creatures and it is in our nature to seek affiliation. Being tribal and exclusionary is the dark side of that propensity.

It is a reminder of just how hard it is to be inclusive and open to differences.

We won’t always succeed but it is important to try – both for the well-being of those “others” and ourselves. Our ability to make peace with those differences outside of us is generally indicative of the peace within.

On anger, trust, criticism

I came across a summary of Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power in a newsletter recently. Here are 3 ideas that I found myself reflecting on –

On anger — Don’t express it directly. Channel it into your work and productivity. Anger expressed directly often leads to irrational behavior and words you later regret.

On trust — Never completely trust people right away, no matter how nice or competent they seem. Look closely for subtle cracks and inconsistencies in their character before investing time and energy into the relationship.

On criticism — Don’t take criticism personally. Look at it from the outside, as valuable feedback that can help you improve. The more open you are to criticism, the more you will learn.

    I read the book more than a decade ago. I was early in my career and remember finding the book a bit dark. For a few days, I kept an eye out for power games everywhere. But, Robert Greene is a talented writer. And the book had insights and well researched wisdom on dealing with human problems.

    As I reflect on the difference in my naivete and idealism today relative to that period, I think more of it would have resonated if I read it now. :-)