Seen that way, it is not easy to dismiss faith as nonsensical. In the sense that a group of people altering their behaviour as a collective, even for a short period of time, can affect things elsewhere.

Now, it is not a guarantee that things will change, or that it will change in the context the people who have faith want it to happen in; but, it is not a complete impossibility that it won’t happen.

Looked at it that way, faith becomes both an abstraction to understand events that we can’t control and also an unreliable process to affect change that you would like to see.

Considering that even for a person of no faith engineering butterfly effects in a precise manner is an impossibility, the difference becomes one of understanding and coping than the actual action.

I had never thought about it in that manner.

When I look back, most of my life feels like such an amazing experience.

When I moved to Delhi in 1999, I was very much that small town person who was punching above his weight and grade. But I always had this very binary and extremely strong sense of who I was and what I felt was right or wrong. It was all black and white and crystal clear.

How the recent years have changed all that. The last 13-odd years have been hard. The personal issues that a successful career helped hide came out to the fore. Multiple meltdowns, alcoholism, struggling to find good work are only a handful of the issues I have struggled with.

My sense of self that was so absolutely perfect and solid disintegrated into nothingness. That sense was my shield in the world. It helped me hide a dismal self-esteem and a thousand issues. It has been a hard slog learning to live without it.

Even before COVID-19 hit, the losses had been piling up. I was pushing harder than ever before and I was failing more spectacularly than ever before. The only way to not fall was to keep moving forward.

That said, life was tough, but life was fair. It always ensured that no matter how many times I fell overboard I never drowned. It is a distinction that I have become increasingly aware of in recent times and one that has helped me stay sane and grateful even when the going got really tough.

The pandemic years, particularly, have reinforced this perspective. The number of little blessings that go into making a very ordinary day is incredible.

My body, which is a miracle of so many things still managing to work together to keep it going in spite of all the abuse it has handled over the years, does its thing on a daily basis. This is a luxury that so many people don’t have and so many that I have known have had their bodies give up on them in the last couple of years.

That I am able to look after my people is because of the kindness and trust of so many people who value what I do enough to pay me for it. That the roof I live under stays functional depends on so many people having done their job well and the good fortune of some unforeseen event not destroying it.

There is not a thing that I see in this world these days that I feel is owed to me. I live on the kindness and generosity of the people I know and a million others that I don’t know of who touch my life every day without me seeing it.

That, every person that I care about, whether I speak to them or not, is around today is something I consider a blessing again. The people who have died in the last couple of years, I miss them dearly. I try to make sure that the ones who are still around I try to be nicer, kinder. It is a touch selfish, but if tomorrow does not have them in it or if I am no longer around, I don’t want my last memory with anyone to be one of unkindness.

That, I have done all that I could have done. That, I don’t regret that last interaction will be the only treasure I will take along with me when it is my time.

Life is not easy. It is tough. And sometimes, it is really hard. But it is still far easier on me than what it is for majority of the world. At the end of a hard day when I feel broken and nearly unable to keep going, this thought helps me stay afloat.

All this is a very unfamiliar place for someone who was 100% certain of their rightful place in the world and was acutely aware of everything that the world owed them. It also results in a massive conflict with a world that is increasingly tribal, where everything is considered owed and kindness is considered weakness.

I cannot find my place in it at all, but I can’t let that affect me too much.

Time is very limited, there is so much more to be done.

I am someone who in an endless rush to get to nowhere.

Difficult, because nearly 15-years of conversations, friendships, content — they are not easy to let go of. And, for all we fault these platforms, when we die the odds that what we created will live on for a long time is far better with a public platform than a self-hosted one. But, it was the right decision as life has been far more focused and manageable even in these times of extreme chaos.

It is not a life that is not entirely private. Even if I lock it down, my phone software will have multiple parties sending data about my whereabouts. Apps will read my text messages and infer what all I have purchased. Mobile phone companies have data about my location at all times. That way, the deletion is more about erasing your own public presence online than having even a laughable chance at having a truly private life.

Technology can be weaponized to aid policy, but technology cannot be a defense against an intrusive policy. But, I digress. I am not here to discuss that aspect of it. At least in India, that ship has sailed long ago and it is not coming back to port for a long time. And, by then, the damage done would be too severe to be repaired.

Instead, what I did find interesting was how easy it was to not share much of my thoughts or what I have seen or experienced in a day. When I die, all those thoughts and experiences will go away with me; almost like they never happened. It is such a unique thing in the current world where to share is the norm.

And that provides a sort of meditative filter for my thoughts. I do not have to frame my thoughts to get the maximum reach or tag the right people to so that it spans cliques and networks. Anything that is not really important to me is wasted thought and it allows me to think deeper and talk to myself without distractions.

I know it sounds a bit loony, but I have been relishing living this way. I do read up a bit on social media. There are a few people I check on regularly without an creating an account on Twitter (which the company is trying its darnedest to stop), but I use the browser’s autocomplete or bookmarks to open their profiles. The menace of the algorithmic timeline is a limited one for me.

Eventually, I’d love to do away with this too, settle down in a quiet corner of the planet with books to read and writing to do. But that needs a level of income security that I don’t have. So, information is a necessary evil.

I don’t see going back to any of these platforms again, unless work demands it. It is very nice to sit down with just yourself and go deep into something that takes your fancy.

There is no debate or discussion about our lessons learned in the last two years. Half-a-million people died, some for a lack of oxygen, and nobody is responsible. We don’t speak about what steps we should take for the next time something like this happens. When we come from a place where everything was done right, there is no need to find out what can be improved. We are at our best, what we will do next will be better. What that was and what it will be does not warrant any discussion.

Grief, unfortunately, does not work like that. You can keep it hidden away, but it will eventually show up; either in your daily life in small things or in outsized reactions over the longer term. The grief of the 500,000 people, or more, who were close to the ones that died is a silent chaos that will grow over time. Its roots will grow into the everyday without our conscious knowledge and at a later time we will wonder about the odd behaviour exhibited by people.

Two-years-ago I stood at my window, looking at an eerily quiet neighbourhood on a weekday, not knowing what lay ahead. We went through months of not stepping out of the house every couple of days for anything other than grocery that we needed. The routine of checking in on parents who lived far away, twice-a-day, continues to this date as that generation is barely hanging on. The trauma of the perpetual wail of the ambulance’s siren, the chaos of finding oxygen, hospital beds. The devastation of the loss a loved one. It still exists, fresh and raw.

The grief is made worse by survivor’s guilt. Maybe it is the fact that things are the most normal it has been since March 2020 and I can allow myself to think beyond just surviving that provides this luxury of grief and all its friends. I keep wondering what is this upside-down where everything is vaguely familiar, but everything is irreversibly different? Life goes on, but what does it mean when it can go on so effortlessly after the deaths of half-a-million people?

I am able to, once again, do things that I used to enjoy doing in the pre-pandemic world. A sense of normalcy exists, but it falls apart when I realize that some of the people that I used to share this normal with are not there anymore. Am I, by living this normal, honouring their memories and acknowledging my good luck in having made it this far that? Is the right way to get past this tragedy to dive deep into the normal and pretend it never happened?

I must clarify that I am not saying you don’t need a lot of money; you do. The world we live in now is transactional to the core and quite expensive. Unlike a couple of decades ago, there is just no way possible anymore to live completely off the grid and with little money. This is not even a point worth bringing up.

I am taking about big money. How big is ‘big’?

Most of my peers, having worked a couple of decades, have already made more money than our parents (the middle class ones, I mean), would have earned their entire lives, even adjusted for inflation. But none of us are nowhere close to feeling we have enough and that it is okay to take our foot off the gas.

This is also a reflection of the world that sees increase in valuations that often does not keep in line with the actual amount of goods or services they provide. To justify the valuation, we need to assume that there is always going to be demand for goods and services at an individual level that is more than what is actually necessary for most of us.

Without this need for more than what is necessary the demand for goods and services will shrink. It is probably a better world for us to create, but it is nearly an improbable one for us to get to. We will live and die in this very addictive cycle.

1. Changes in the globally connected economy.
2. Climate change.
3. Technology: automation, AI, data.
4. Changes in the demographic dividend.

We are the fag end of the phase in the evolution of the world that was driven by emergence of the globally connected economy and the transformation of the world into a place where everyone had some degree of exposure to digital technologies.

The two-years of COVID-19 has demonstrated the vulnerability of interlinked global supply chains and the big countries are quietly moving the pieces to work around problems caused by it. This is not going to be an overnight change. The work that is being started now will show up as results much later, at least 5-years in my estimate. Till then, nobody is going to disrupt most of how things function now, but it will change drastically after that. Those who are not planning for this change will be caught out very badly.

The place of China is the global marketplace is big piece of the puzzle. The urbanization and wealth creation in China is primarily driven by their ability to supply the demand in other parts of the world. The primary threat to China is not from the military of nation that is their enemy, but from countries shutting off access to their markets to China. China’s own domestic demand, while being quite huge, is not enough to sustain their capacity. Which is also why China invests more into other countries that can keep the access locked in.

Climate change is the joker in the pack for everyone as we just do not know how it will all play out eventually. Weather patterns affect everything — air, food, water — on the ground and it is a lottery where any continent or any country is going to wind up at. There are models on predicting what changes this will bring about, but the impact of the changes are anyone’s guess. This is one of those things where it is not going to be taken seriously till it hits home hard. And by the time it hits home hard, it will be too late to start working towards mitigating it.

The nature of work and how we work are rapidly changing. How we train our new generation, how we upskill our existing generation etc. are aspects that cannot be ignored. Any edge or advantage that exists for nations are unlikely to be carried over in its current version over to the 2030s. Stumbling into that is going to drive millions into poverty.

Looking at the issues that make headlines in India these days it is impossible to see a clear strategy or leadership that will take India into a position of strength by 2030. It is deeply worrying.

I do feel there is a case to be made for small, profitable companies that have anywhere between 20,000 to 100,000 paying customers a month. These companies are most likely not going to be be built by people who desperately need money as they will take around a year at least where it can pay for the core team itself. But, once it hits steady state, it can grow gently, paying the small team well and also adding more to the core finances that will allow it to see it through any tough times in the future.

Companies like these won’t feel the need to sell user data or mine it excessively. They can listen to their users for feedback actively and respond to it and use data only to catch errors and bugs. We have almost forgotten that such things are possible. Imagine a scenario where you don’t run tracking of anyone who lands on your website?

Some of the things that I really liked about it:

Other Life Forms

Almost every science fiction series that tackles the idea of life forms that did not originate from the earth inevitably take the lazy route and imagine them to be humanoid forms that evolved differently from how humans evolved on earth. Or they wind up looking like variants of the things Sigourney Weaver took on in the Alien movie.

There are the rare exceptions to this in some of fictional works, but the norm is to fall into this trap and it does tremendous disservice to the fact that what life looks like on earth is due to a series of circumstances that and a set of variables that, on a galactic scale, is not easily replicated as the universe itself contains so many different combinations of these variations.

The Expanse does not go into a lot of detail as to what the other life forms the characters in the story have been impacted by look like. The most consistent presence is of the ‘protomolecule’ that present itself in a form that looks nothing like human beings and they work differently too.

Space Travel

Space travel in science fiction often show vessels with human beings zipping through galaxies, starting as a blip in one galaxy and reappearing another blip in a different galaxy. And the living beings on those ships carry on as if they display no physiological effects of moving themselves through space at these speeds. The slightly smarter shows work around this by putting the characters in some sort of cryostorage or suspended in some kind of liquid that protects them from the ill-effects.

The ‘burn’ in The Expanse, and the rate of it, is well thought-out and it impacts the characters and the story line in greater detail than what they could have easily gotten away with. The physics of space and its constraints are very real and it is good to see a work of fiction that takes it into account to the extent that The Expanse does.

Most of the story, without the use of the gates (some kind of wormhole), is based within the solar system. Even with the ‘Epstein Drives’ humanity still takes a long time to get to the outer limits of the solar system. This allows for faster mode of travel, but not that fast that we are able to ignore the limits of laws of physics and human biology as we know it.

Multi-dimensional Worlds

Continuing the idea of the laws of physics in space, it is important to realize that at the scale of outer space everything — time, space — changes. Things we take for granted, like ‘locality’ is different in space when you expand the scope of it to even a little bit outside the inner planets.

To make things happen at the same time in those space, or to make something local in far flung areas in space at the same time, you need access to a different dimension from the ones we are used to. Not having access to that makes it impossible to project power in a meaningful manner.

Being Wrong While Doing Right

There are no outright evil characters in the series. Everyone is wrong and right at different times during their individual stories and they often do things that are wrong, but with the right intention. Just as in real life, even the people in the wrong believe they are doing right thing, because they believe that their intended outcome is noble.

This means that it is going to be impossible for any country, including an Afghanistan, to completely disconnect with the rest of the world. It is also instructive not note that no country has, in recent decades, gained considerable swathes of habitable territory in recent times, making any notion of a grand larger nation (often one that is drawn from a period in the distant past) an impossibility.

Thus, growth and prosperity in this era is going to be internal. It is the same reason why a China looks to increase its influence by means of easier or privileged access to other markets over claiming actual usable territory. Those markets feed the engine that urbanizes China as a country. Our era has little use for territorial dominance that does not provide market access. And where market access is possible without territorial dominance, the latter is an abject liability, and makes you a huge target in those territories.

When you violate the formative contract for a country, you compromise one of the key factors that enable prosperity and wealth creation for it, which is stability. This is particularly problematic for countries that are relatively young, with heterogeneous populations. The ideals, agreed to up on during the formation, is what it keeps it together. Change it, and you break the contract.

The contract is the thing that holds the country together. It provides a clear cost-benefit analysis and the give-and-take involved. When you unilaterally change it, you change the incentives for all the players. Countries are multiple parties that understand clearly their incentives in a collective. The sum of the parts is the nation, but the nation cannot exist without a significant number of the parts.

There remain major gaps in our understanding of the virus and how it affects the body and how it turns fatal for some people, while there are others who have been infected twice and are doing quite fine. We are still learning how the vaccines work, that masks work only if you them in the right manner and that not everyone has the luxury of doing what you think is the right thing.

For a world that harps a lot of on mindfulness and similar themes, the lack of empathy towards your fellow human being has been astounding.

Why has it become so difficult to admit to still not knowing enough about things and that some of the earlier assumptions were wrong? We are stuck in a loop where never admitting to being wrong is the most important thing, even at the cost of everything else.

The death of our civilization is not likely to be an asteroid, but the narrow-mindedness of everyone.