Understand Yourself

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. ...

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. ...

In my old blog, “The dream you took for granted”, I gave an example of myself. I said that I am living the dream life of my 19-20 year old self, and yet, I don’t feel that great. Many people have a similar situation as mine. As a solution, I had mentioned that we should practice gratitude (check out the blog for more details). We should be thankful for everything that has went our way. Few of my friends questioned this, and they had a very valid point. If we are always satisfied of where we are, how will be put in the effort for growth? We will forever stay stuck where we are. The negative emotions that we get in our current position lead us to work towards a better future. In this blog, I will hopefully be able to provide an answer to this question. ...

There are many vegetarian people I know, who don’t hesitate to kill mosquitoes or cockroaches. Isn’t that strange? Vegetarianism is all about not killing other living beings. And they have no problem killing mosquitoes or cockroaches? I am not here to discuss whether it is right or wrong to kill insects, that is a separate debate and I don’t want to get into it in this article. I am more interested in this behaviour where, in a person’s subjective morality, doing something is bad; but they themselves do it in some other way, or in some other context, and have no regret about it? In fact some people even encourage other people to do it. I have seen people totally panicking on the sight of a cockroach, jumping around and telling everyone to just get rid of it. I was intrigued by this behaviour and decided to think a little on it. Here’s my opinion. ...

We all have heard quotes like “you should work hard and your life will become easier” at least a million times by now. But I haven’t always found this to be helpful. Working hard is important, there is no debating that. But I have a problem with how the whole self help industry, philosophers and motivational speakers portray it, and how we feel about it. This might be a little controversial. Allow me to explain. ...

With the election season in India over, I have a few thoughts. During this election, I observed a few things with myself as well as others. A few things about what kind of people we generally tend to follow, what kind of people influence us, why do we get influenced by the people we do. This election was all about people being either pro Modi or anti Modi. A few people said this is a dictatorship, a few people were completely in love with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Mainstream media was either treating Modi like a God or a tyrant (I am including big youtubers in mainstream media, because nowadays they are). I observed a few interesting things with people who choose to follow one or the other. People are generally very stubborn in changing their beliefs. The people who view Modi as God won’t get convinced against their opinion no matter how much you try. Even clear facts and statistics won’t convince them against Narendra Modi. People who view him as a dictator have the same story. They always tend to agree with something that is in favour of their opinion and disagree with something that is against, no matter how valid the opposite arguments are or how dumb the supporting arguments are. This is called confirmation bias in psychology. ...

Let’s talk about dreams today. Not the dreams that you see while sleeping. The dreams that keep you awake. The ones that motivate you to get out of bed and work. The ones that give you some purpose in life. We all have dreamt of something or the other. The dreams have been of different magnitudes based on the conditions around us and our age. For example, when I was in kindergarten, I used to dream that I will become the Prime Minister of India one day and all the criminals and “bad people” will run out of India. Now obviously that is ridiculous. All of us have had some ridiculous dreams when we were young. But we have had some serious dreams as well. I had a dream college. I wanted to go to IIT. I tried to achieve it and failed. That hurts. But what about the dreams I already achieved? What about the dreams YOU already achieved? ...

In the part 5 of my blog series “The Secret to Never Ending Happiness”, I had ended by saying that most of the people don’t even know what are the factors that affect their state of mind. We can identify those factors by self evaluation or introspection. That is precisely what we are going to discuss in today’s blog. So what is introspection? I would define introspection as thinking deeply about your own thoughts, ideas and feelings and examining them. Although the definition of introspection is accurate, but it does not help. It is not an easy process and the definition itself is not helpful to cultivate its habit. Now you would ask why bother to introspect? There are tons of advantages of introspection. It helps you boost self-awareness, improve your decision making, enhances your mental wellbeing, sparks personal growth, I could go on and on about this. So let’s delve into this extremely important and underrated topic with a few examples. ...