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What is money? Money is a piece of paper or coin with specific markings on it, or it can also be defined as a number displayed on the smartphone. This is the raw experience of money and this is how babies would define money (if they could speak). Let’s ask the question again, what is money? Money is something we give to get things. I give money, I get chocolate. I give money, I get groceries. This is how children and a few adults would define money. Let’s ask the question one more time, what is money? Money is a medium of exchange, a store of value, a unit of account. It allows people to trade without bartering. It allows millions of people to co-ordinate without knowing each other. Let’s say you buy coffee from Starbucks in Mumbai, the coffee farmer in Brazil doesn’t know you. The truck driver who transported the coffee beans to the port, the manager of the port, the manager of the shipping company, the manager of the roasting company, the manager of the Starbucks in Mumbai, the cashier at the Starbucks, none of them know you. Yet, you were able to get the coffee. This is perhaps how an economist would define money. Let’s ask the question again, what is money? Money is nothing real, it is just a story that humans collectively believe in. It is a shared fiction sustained by collective trust. This might be how a sociologist answers the question. A philosopher might go even deeper, they might ask something like, “If money is a symbolic representation for value, what even is value?” ...

When I was around 13-14 years old, I remember having this very strong belief that money is the root of all evil. I also remember having very strong reasons for it. I used to often think, why don’t we ban money? Clearly, movies where rich people with a lot of black money were criminals had a lot of impact on me 😄. But that was not just the reason. I saw that people committed heinous crimes for money. I saw that rich people had no morality left in them. I had very valid reasons to hold that belief. But I don’t need to tell you how naive that was. ...

I’ll try to explain my point today through a short metaphor. I am trying something new here, so let me know how you feel about it. There were 3 female pigeons. All 3 of them laid eggs on the same day. All 3 of them took a lot of care of their eggs. After a few days, all the eggs hatched and 3 baby pigeons came out. After a few days, it was time for the baby pigeons to start learning to fly. ...

I am a software engineer at JPMorgan Chase as of writing this blog. I joined in 2022. When I joined, we were following a hybrid model of 3 days a week from office and 2 days remote. I decided that I would go to office every Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. There was some rationale behind it. The specific rationale is not very important to our discussion here, the important point is, that it was a logical decision with some meaning attached to it. As weeks progressed, going to office every Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday became a norm. I did not give it much thought. It went something like this, “Today is Monday, I am going to office”. That’s it. No reason, this had become a norm. After a point, other people in my office and home started noticing the pattern. They started expecting me to go to office on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. The norm almost became a rule. If someone would see me in office on a Thursday, they would be shocked. If I don’t go on Monday, my mother would ask me, “Are you okay? Visit the doctor if you are ill today”. After a point, the logic behind going Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday was lost (not lost exactly in this case, it was easy to recollect if I tried, but you get the point). It was just a rule. This example, though trivial, reveals a very important aspect of human psychology. Let’s discuss that today. ...

We see a lot of debate around AI these days. The reason for many of these debates is the multiple studies of people outsourcing more and more of their thinking to AI and their decline in cognitive skills. Another completely unrelated trending topic these days is the miracle weight loss drug Ozempic, which was originally created for patients with type II diabetes and is exploding in popularity and is being marketed as an easy weight loss drug. I am no expert on Ozempic, but based on what I have read, it suppresses hunger leading to less food consumption and drastic weight loss. These seemingly unrelated trending topics highlight something very core in human experience, and they are much more related to each other than they might seem at first glance. So let’s discuss these issues in a generalized way in much more detail. ...

The proud man can learn humility… but he will be proud of it. -G.K. Chesterton Being humble is almost always hailed as a great virtue. Almost all religions, philosophers, thought leaders, successful people promote humility, and rightly so. But I want to take a different perspective today. The question I want to ask is, by being humble, are we really being humble? Or is it just a camouflage for our ego? This might sound ridiculous, but hear me out and I might be able to change the way you look at humility. ...

We have all heard of the left and the right wing political ideologies. We have a broad understanding of what is left and what is right. Left wing is generally liberal, emphasizes on equality, social justice and reform. Right wing on the other hand are more inclined towards free market, authority, tradition, duty, hierarchies and individual liberty. More generally, I think it is fair to say that the left wants big reforms in the current system and the right wants to maintain the current system. But if we try to view it even more generally, left and right wing is applicable not just to politics, it is applicable to each and everything in our life. Here is an example to elaborate my point. A young startup may be categorized as left leaning if it has an innovative business model and if it wishes to disrupt the market. On the contrary, if it wishes to optimize an existing model and build on its success, it will be categorized as right leaning. A young person who has just joined the job market will continuously look for new opportunities. They want rapid salary growth during their initial career and they will many a times go out of the way into uncomfortable situations for growth. This is left leaning. On the other hand, a person who is close to retirement will look for stability and work-life balance. This is right leaning. ...

If you follow politics, you might have noticed that politics dealing with “us vs them” works very well where the “them” is considered an enemy. The “us” and “them” could be based on religion, caste, language or any other such thing that comes to your mind. Why does it work this well? You might think that if a person belongs to a particular religion, they have deeply internalized their religious beliefs and if they come across any conflicting belief, they react in… not an ideal way, to say the least. This leads to politicians exploiting their radical mindset and using it for their own benefit. While this is correct, I feel that it lacks nuance. So let’s explore this “us vs them” mindset on an individual level, rather than on a societal level. ...

What does it mean to achieve freedom? When is a person free? Let’s break this down today. To understand what freedom is, let us first define freedom. Freedom is having autonomy to do whatever we wish. This is a very raw and broad definition of freedom. For some additional context, let’s define what is the opposite of freedom, or what does it mean to not be free? We could define it broadly as something controlling us; something hindering our autonomy. Now this “something” and “us” will also have to be defined, and that is what brings us to the main topic of this blog. We will consider several different definitions of “something” and “us” and this, in my opinion, will help us understand freedom in a much more nuanced way. ...

All of us have heard statements like “love marriage is better than arranged marriage”, or “living in Europe is better than living in India”, or “X religion is better than Y religion”, or “science is better than religion” and vice versa. We also know a lot of people who strongly believe these statements. These are blanket statements. These are generalizations that people believe in. I have some thoughts on these. ...