I rewatched Terminator 2: Judgement Day a couple of days back.1 Probably for the 1,000th time. There’s a scene where the young John Connor tells the T-800 that his mother was with is father for only one night. But he thinks she still loves him dearly.
It made me think about the concept of time. How we perceive it. Our lives are nothing but collections of our memories. When a lot of things happen, time slows down. When nothing much happens, and we are in a state of a rut, time moves fast. Even though each day drags on for a lifetime, a lifetime goes by in a jiffy.2
We write our personal histories with the bulk of memories we’ve accumulated. When we look back and see a variety of them, the lives we’ve lived feel rich. The quality of a memory is influenced both by the number and the sheer weight of every life event. The numerous and varied the events in our lives, the thicker our memories, and thus, the bigger and fuller our lives.3
That’s why I think it’s super super important to invest in a bit of randomness, and move away from the whole idea of “stability” slightly.4
Back in 2016, I had quit my job to start a business with a friend. We did nothing by work work work5 all day all night. We were working from dawn till dusk where we mostly did one thing and one thing only: write code. Even though we had fun, it didn’t create a tonne of memories.6
This was a software project. I think there’s a different between software projects and what I call wedding projects. Both have moving parts. Both involve working with others. But while the parts of a software project are smaller versions of the big project itself, the same cannot be said for wedding projects. The smaller parts are as varied from each other as they come. Especially in Indian weddings. 7
When I look back at my 2016 days, I fondly remember the ancillary stuff we did — brainstorm ideas with friends, create pitch decks, attend networking events even though we sucked at networking. But I hardly remember the parts where we were just writing code day-in and day-out. Even though it was the most important thing to do, it’s just a single blob of memory without any richness or texture.8
There’s a reason why I stressed upon the importance of writing memoirs. I’m stressing upon the importance of adding a bit of variety and randomness to our lives for similar reasons.9
As we get older and older, events keep happening and happening, and we go on accumulating memories after memories. Now, all the things we do in life are not by choice. We’re forced to study boring subjects we don’t enjoy. We’re compelled to take up boring desk jobs that suck all joy out of our lives. We’re asked to talk to boring people who have nothing interesting to say. We’re required to occasionally visit a place where a certain machine forces us into endless repetitions of the very same movement.10
Do enough of these and suddenly our lives become devoid of any sort of fun or joy. We look back, and suddenly we see an aftermath of compromises after compromises, right from the very moment we left school and entered into promised land of adulthood. A life full of predictability.11
If the work you do entails a variety of activities, such as writing code, doing support, travelling to places, interacting with people, playing cricket in the evening, going to salsa workshops on weekends, it would be great! A perfect wedding project. But very few real-life projects would have you write code on weekdays and do salsa on weekends. Most real life projects are software projects. They demand you to work on more or less similar-looking things.12
That’s why it’s so crucial not only to focus on the necessary work (what we have to work on) and the enjoyable work (what we love working on), but also to engage in a variety of ancillary work. Work that is fun to do but don’t necessarily serve any practical purpose.13
This doesn’t imply randomly switching from one thing to another just to have “variety.” The depth of our time perception is not only influenced by the variety of activities we involve ourselves in, but also our level of engagement in those activities. Being mindful lets us fully enjoy the present, and by deeply relishing a range of diverse experiences, we create not only a fulfilling but also a richer life.14
This is where novelty plays an important role. Once in a while we should feel like we’re in unknown territory, exploring newer frontiers. This often happens at work when you get a promotion or get assigned to a new software project. But, being software projects, they have their limitations.
Unlike wedding projects, newer challenges in software projects don’t always add novelty in the truest sense. But when you engage in something like travel, which is a wedding project, it’s usually never the same.15 Also, anything that involves “natural” bodily movements (the ones usually not possible inside of a gym) and active physical work (again, not possible inside of a gym) adds to the dimension of creating fond memories.16
I believe realising how we perceive time allows us to live more consciously.17 We’ve been taught to focus on getting a stable job, make a stable living, have a stable life. But I think that misses the whole point of living a wholesome life. A wholesome life always involves a little bit of randomness and a sense of adventure.18
Having said that, you don’t need 24/7 randomness. Wedding projects don’t have to be lifelong. If two people have had an epic adventure together, it doesn’t matter if it ends in just one night. The higher the stakes, the multitudinous the moving parts, the heavier the weight on each and every small decision, the slower time runs. Even a single day feels like a lifetime.19
In The Terminator, Kyle Reese wasn’t just a guy with whom Sarah Connor had a good time. He basically changed Sarah’s life completely. They experienced so much together and that too of such magnitude that it’s only natural she remembers him and loves him even though they were together only for one night.
Only true fans of The Terminator film series would appreciate the depth (and few lame in-jokes) of today’s comic.
A lot of things happen even when nothing happens. But they are mostly obvious and boring and non-random. Nothing stands out in them. They don’t leave a mark on us.
The abundance and diversity of life events contribute to the complexity of our memories. This complexity, in turn, translates into a sense of fullness and richness in our lives. It’s like having a mosaic with an intricate design, reflecting the varied experiences that have shaped us over time. So, the more we embrace and engage in the diverse events life offers, the bigger and more fulfilling our life becomes.
If I could predict what my day would exactly look like, I would feel a little bit dead. Few objects bring more thrill than a recovered wallet lost on a train.
Only Rihanna fans would get this.
A part of it might have to do with the fact that we were really shitty at doing business and had to close shop after a year-and-half.
Few random mini-projects from a typical Indian wedding are: mehendi application, designing and sending invitations, arranging accommodations for out-of-town guests, selecting wedding attire for bride and groom, purchasing jewellery, hiring caterers, floral arrangements, hiring a photographer, Organising religious ceremonies, booking entertainment for the sangeet, coordinating transportation for the groom, planning beauty and grooming sessions, managing payments to vendors and service providers, distributing gifts, managing the return of rented items, and many many many more.
I think the same happens when we’re going through a tough time. Time moves slowly and we accumulate a lot of emotional time. The impact is huge emotionally but it’s just one damn event stretched ad infinitum. There’s no randomness and it doesn’t create any memory time.
Living a life devoid of randomness creates a disease the philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb called touristification. What a tourist is in relation to an adventurer, touristification is to life. It consists of converting activities, and not just travel, into the equivalent of a script to be followed. “This is my term for an aspect of modern life that treats humans as washing machines, with simplified mechanical responses — and a detailed user’s manual. It is the systematic removal of uncertainty and randomness from things, trying to make matters highly predictable in their smallest details. All that for the sake of comfort, convenience, and efficiency.”
Some people call it the treadmill.
This is the reason I sometimes feel a person who is deeply focused in perfecting a single lifelong activity, like a monk in meditation or an artist engaged in a prolonged project, may have fulfilment in their lives, but not necessarily richness. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but a life devoid of a bit of randomness can be monotonous.
The solution to this issue is not to entirely stop doing what you feel obligated to do. As much as we’d dream of that, this isn’t really practical. And, even if it was possible for everybody to stop doing whatever they didn’t want to be doing, there are important things that needs to be done that would not be done otherwise. Nobody really wants to write washing machine manuals. But, they are important nonetheless. They have to be made. Not only that. I also think that the stuff we’re obligated to do serve some purpose. They make us value the things we truly enjoy doing because they provide a contrast. The existence of monotonous tasks in our schedule enhances our appreciation for the activities that bring us genuine satisfaction.
We sometimes call them hobbies.
One cannot engage in this constantly. Breaks are essential. Just as you can’t travel incessantly. You need to return to your routine occasionally. The positive aspect is that each return deepens your appreciation for your seemingly ordinary life. Being away for a while grants you a fresh perspective. Maintaining a balance between adventure and tranquillity is vital. This equilibrium ensures sustainability and allows you to accumulate captivating memories and stories over time.
As long as you travel like an adventurer, and not like a tourist.
I envy filmmakers in this aspect. They get to experience something different with every new project. No two good projects are ever alike. This is also why I love and respect travel vloggers.
Sensitive people have a bit of an advantage here. Since they feel things a little more keenly than others, they experience things a little more deeply. When they look into the rearview, their lives feel a little more richer. The downside is that despair hits them equally hard. In any case, I think it’s better to be a little more sensitive than less. As much as we’d want to whizz through moments of despair, especially when we’re grieving, grief is an important emotion to experience. It shows us how much we love someone. How important they are to us! Grief is just the unexpressed love we have for our loved ones, so it’s equally important to experience grief deeply. I’m speaking from personal experience.
There exists a kind of people for whom life is some kind of optimisation project. After talking to them, you stop feeling good for a while. Life starts tasting like food cooked without salt. In contrast to this modern obsession with optimisation, ancestral life had no homework, no boss, no bureaucrats, no academic grades, no consultant with an MBA, no table manners, no tax forms, no work trips, no conversation with someone boring. Life was all about random stimuli and nothing (good or bad) ever felt like work. Dangerous, yes. Boring, never.
Just like our lives, our relationships are also defined not by their lengths, but by their breadth of experiences.