PAGE- 10 July 2016
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Thoughts to Inspire
Bill Gates
Life as a Checklist
People daydream a lot. It is their one way to escape
the seeming pointlessness of everyday life. And to
replicate the movies inside their head in the real
world, they invariably consort to the checklist. You
know, stuff like:
1. Learn Data Science to get a high paying job
2. Talk to S’s father about our marriage
3. Backpack around Europe
4. Exercise regularly and have a great body
5. Read the Proust oeuvre before I die
You know what they’re like. All of you have them.
Checklists are great, they give us a purpose in life, a
list of objectives to achieve, carve a path through the
wilderness. But they are the most foolproof way to get
depressed. Show me any man and I’ll show you a list
of unmet goals. We know better than to assume that
all our lives will be awesome if we check every one
of those goals. And yet we keep writing them down,
keep pushing the timelines, keep scratching them off.
I suppose we don’t know any other way to live.
As kids, our parents and the social circle created those
checklists for us. And the method of implementation
was coercion or castigation. Either I’ll give you some-
thing if you achieve this, or if you’re not a certain way
we will not let you enter this exclusive club. And so
the primary focus of childhood and adolescence is
to achieve the goals already set out- learning to play
the guitar, breaking in to prestigious colleges, buying
that fancy bike and the like. But as we grow older and
become more entrenched in our real selves, whatever
they may be, and are comfortable in our little social
circles, we are faced with the daunting task of taking
up new targets and reaching them. That’s one way to
get through the problem- With hedonism and indif-
ference. If I have to have ambitions,
let me be insouciant about them. If I can’t achieve
them, let me look down upon them. I call it The Dude
Way (for those of you uninitiated, I can’t recommend
the Coen brothers’ The Big Lebowski enough). It’s
simply letting the Id take over. I think it’s a great sur-
vival mechanism only if the bloody Superego didn’t
intervene from time to time.
We want to achieve things in life because our ad-
vanced minds keep telling us there’s more to life than
just Self-Preservation and Reproduction. We seek ac-
ceptance of people we look upto, we try to build nar-
ratives around our lives so that we are remembered
even after we’re gone, we yearn for freedom from the
repetition of everydayness. And for that we want to
be a certain way. Which is precisely the root of the
problem. We don’t want to do something as much as
be seen doing something. The focus of our lives has
shifted from the being to appearing. Geniuses are ex-
empt from this problem because they seem to be en-
amoured by the act. But the rest of us mortals aren’t
passionate enough to be obsessed by one activity and
lack discipline to work on it at the cost of everything
else. And so we seek to emulate them. When an act
becomes play, it is ego-annihilating. When an act be-
comes work, it becomes ego-inflating.
All of life is, essentially, a balance between surren-
der and discipline. How do we reconcile previously
decided goals with present temptations? If my past
me wanted to ride around the country on a motorcy-
cle because of a romantic image in his head, and now
that I have the bike and the time to do but don’t have
the inclination to do it, is it because I’ve outgrown
that phase or I’m too scared to get going?
I once knew a man who said the moment you get
something is the moment you lose it. The pursuit
gives meaning to the thing being pursued, gives pur-
pose to the pursuer. And that’s how I see checklists
too. They’re just a random collection of traits and
things we wish we had. Once we’ve achieved them,
all that remains is the void. So all that we can do is
keep making new ones. For what we intend to seek
and who we wish to be defines the personality of our
beings.
I— finally, I have the body that I want, and
that’s a thing people really covet. It’s a hard
thing to achieve, and I did. And I’m going
to tell you how to have exactly the body that
you want. You just have to want a body.
That’s all it is. You have to want your own
ugly, disgusting body.
-Louis CK
SRISH ADITYA
From Philosophy to Sociology, Post-Mod-
ernism to Ruby Programming. Child-rearing
to Game of Thrones trivia, Aditya has lit-
tle knowledge and many opinions on a lot of
things. Crappy Programmer, Confused Neo-
liberal, member of The Wannabe Writers Col-
lective, This is his little podium in the vast
cyberspace where he’ll raise a voice on what it
means to be Indian in the 21st Century, in all
its chaotic glory.
KICKING AND SCREAMING
By.
SRISH ADITYA
