Tag: contemplation

The quirks of human nature

Akshat RathiLeave a comment

Human nature is mysterious and beautiful. What goes into making it gives each one of us the uniqueness that we possess. If we were able to define human nature as the sum of a certain number of components then I am sure that we will have many many components and that a unique amount of each of those components goes into making us who we are.

Too philosophical? Well, I say this because I made some peculiar observations. They led me to believe in what I just described above. I will now stop talking like I have just made the world’s greatest discovery and tell you what led me to these thoughts… you can make up your own mind about it then.

Observation 1: I have a housemate who likes to see a clean house. Sometimes he can get really annoyed if it isn’t in an acceptable state. We’ve come to love him as he is and are happy to put up with his little requests. But he’s been away for the past few months and that has meant that the house has slowly become messy (not that bad at all but if he were to see it then he would definitely be annoyed). I realised today looking at the state of the house that I don’t mind it really. If the others living in the house have no problem with it, I am not going to cause a fuss about it either.

But that’s half the truth. I know that I will get the house in a presentable state before my housemate returns. The funny thing is that I know that when he does come back I will want it to be in a better state than it is now.

Observation 2: I had two lab-mates. One a freak for cleanliness and organisation, the other the exact opposite. I was between the two. I don’t mind some disorder but too much of it made me crazy too. So we had been working together for over six months pretty much keeping to our ways of working without bothering each other very much. We only rarely ever had grievances against each other’s ways. So far so good.

But last week the messy lab mate finished his time and left. Now, it was just the two of us, the organised one and me. The very next day when I came to the lab, I had this urge to get rid of all the mess in my work space. And I did just that, I cleared all the clutter. Suddenly my work place resembled the organised lab-mate than the messy one.

Discussion: I like being organised and live and work in a clean good-looking environment. But I don’t obsess about it too much. But that’s not it. It seems my level of ‘messy’ness is influenced by the people I am surrounded by, and unknowingly so. I say ‘unknowingly so’ because the realisation I had today in observation 1 and the urge I had in observation 2 came to me very naturally. I wasn’t thinking about the people whose presence or absence influenced my decisions. I just took the decisions.

I was troubled to see my peers could influence me in such subtle unknown ways. I knew it happens. Of course, peer pressure is a real thing but seeing it in action on myself was quite disconcerting. So I thought about it for a while and I found something interesting.

If my state of ‘messy’ness was affected by my lab-mates, how come their states weren’t affected by mine? Surely, my organised lab-mate should have become messier than he was and my messy lab-mate should have become more organised because of the presence of each other and me. But no, that did not happen. Then I thought – why consider only ‘messy’ness, if I was affected by my lab-mate’s ‘messy’ness and then surely there must be something that affects them and but not me. And sure enough I found that I am not affected by social pressures as much as my lab-mates. There are plenty of stories to tell about this but I don’t want to bore you. You will have to take my word for it or grab me to tell you that story if don’t believe me (and are ready to get bored).

Conclusion: So the only sensible conclusion that I could draw from all these thoughts was that we individuals have strong preferences for certain things and not for other things. Those things that we don’t have a strong preference for we let it get affected by our peers and swing the way our peers would want. But for things that we have strong preferences, we are ready to battle out the peer pressure and stick to our ground.

Not such a great discovery after all you say. Well, that may be. But hey, I noticed something important about myself, that in itself has tremendous value I think. Observing yourself, and I mean really observing yourself, isn’t easy. If I am able to tune that ability then I know that I will be able to spot my own faults better than I could before, which in turn will lead me to become a better person. Good enough for you?

If that’s not good enough for you then I have some more wisdom on sale today. The thing is that if our preferences for things can easily influence how much we are affected by our peers then we must really pay more attention to the preferences we have and may be think about which preference we should have and which we shouldn’t have. I know that changing oneself is hard but if peer pressure can act as a catalyst for change then why not use it for the desirable changes and stop it from making undesirable ones!

Here’s the geeky version of the post: If we were able to write an equation with n variables that all add up to make human nature then n would be large enough to have enough variables with large enough range of values to account for the uniqueness displayed by all of us. In those n variables some will have the ability to fluctuate and some not depending on the individual and the circumstances the person finds themselves in.

Written while RJD2 played Ghostwriter on repeat.

End of the diet and the lessons learnt

Akshat RathiLeave a comment

Friday was the last day of my four-week slow-carb diet experiment. It has been a great experience and I have learnt many lessons which I plan to implement in my diet for the future.

Stats first: I now weigh 66 kg which is 2.8 kg less than the day when I started the diet. My total inches have gone down to 129.0 from 133.5 (lost 1 inch on the thighs, 2 on the waist, 0.5 on the hip). Even after taking experimental errors into consideration, this is definitely a good enough reduction.

cheat day breakfast

Before I talk about the lessons learnt, I have to admit that I have allowed myself a few deviations from the diet in the last two weeks. I’ve had a few chocolates (two or three in the week) and beer twice in the last two weeks. These weren’t allowed on the diet as I had planned but I happened to have them anyway. Apart from these confessions, I have stuck to pretty much everything i.e. no fruit, no milk, no white carbohydrates and no sweetened drinks.

Here are the lessons then:

  1. Sweets: I need tighter control on my sweet tooth. Normally, I need something sweet after every meal even if it’s something small. Then I tend to have something sweet in between my meals – cookies, chocolates, biscuits, muffins, etc. Now on, I am going to be careful about these. Try to keep to having only one sweet thing a day, if I can manage it.
  2. Breakfast: Before starting the diet, I rarely had breakfast. I was usually in a hurry to get to the lab and that meant skipping breakfast was an easy option. Not any more. A healthy breakfast (spinach and sweet corn is awesome) does plenty to keep me active till lunch time.
  3. Low carb: Too much carbohydrate isn’t good to maintain weight. I am definitely ok to skip french fries, bread and rice. I will have roti but only if I really want to. I will also be restricting my intake of sweetened drinks allowing myself only fruit juices.
  4. Snacks: As I realised at the end of the first week, on this diet I had to have five meals. Usually, my snack used to be something sweet but in this diet I instead chose to have carrots or peppers with humus. I think it’s a much healthier choice. I eat more but take in the same number of calories.
  5. Cheat day: I think it’s a great idea. I will keep up with it. On Saturdays, I will allow myself to gorge on whatever I like (a cheesy pizza, yum!). On the remaining days, I will try to keep my carbohydrate intake low.

One of the important aspects of doing this experiment was to understand the difficulties of keeping control on my diet. I have to admit, it’s hard. I don’t think that a low-carb diet is something I can keep forever even if that’s a healthy alternative. But it’s doable. I know if ever I add those unnecessary kilos to my body, there is a way to get rid of them.

But more importantly, I know the cost of losing just 3 kg is substantial. So it’s better to keep an eye on the diet. Eating habits are amongst the  hardest habits to change. Now that I’ve already spent four weeks trying to adopt a diet, it should be easier to keep the lessons in mind and to continue with the habit that I’ve formed.

The information diet

Akshat Rathi4 Comments

I have had a blog post in the drafts section for some time now, it is titled ‘rethinking our digital lives’. I will publish it some day soon but what actually got me thinking about writing that post was the fact that all of us spend a lot of our time on the internet. It may be for work or pleasure, doesn’t matter. The fact is that the ease of opening a new browser window or tab means that distractions are only a click away. That’s been a bit a of a problem for me and I suspect for many others. Something needs to be done about that and so I’ve decided to go on an information diet.

Here’s what I am going to do:

  1. Check email only three times a day.
  2. Check facebook and twitter once a day for not more than 30 minutes in total.
  3. Check my blog only when I decide to publish something.
  4. Any article which I deem worth reading, I will send to my Kindle. Thus, I can get to it when I have the time.
  5. 30 minutes of video everyday including YouTube.

Being able to restrict social media won’t be that hard but to deal with email I am going to need some help because I essentially use it as my to-do list. I’ve installed Boomerang for Gmail which will help me schedule replies, bring emails to my inbox when they need to be dealt with, etc. For reading articles I’ve been using SENDtoREADER which simply re-formats the article like Readability and sends it to my Kindle.

Just like food, there is some information that is good for you and some that is bad. Being able to focus on the good in this world of distractions is a hard thing and that’s why I think there is much value in choosing to do this. My experience with dieting is only a recent one but along with my polyphasic sleep experiment it has give me enough confidence in my ability to discipline myself that I think I can take on this task.

Finally, unlike the slow-carb diet experiment, this will not be a four-week experiment. I want to make this information diet a habit so that the extra time I get are put in meaningful work.