The boiling frog metaphor and work life

 

Arun Kumar

We all have heard the metaphor of a frog in a pan of water sitting on a burner and temperature is slowly being raised by a fraction of degrees every so often. The metaphor goes that the frog, being a cold-blooded animal, whose body temperature keeps pace with the ambient temperature, would not feel the slow rise in the temperature, will sit placidly in the warming water and will eventually die as its cell functions gradually fail.

Whether the metaphor is true or false, it does not really matter. The point is that this metaphor is used in various contexts that humans, even with much higher levels of cognitive ability compared to a frog, also fail to recognize slow changes even if those changes have adverse influence eventually.

Take the debate about the potential influence of climate change on humans and the environment. A 2oC change in the mean temperature over 100 years falls in the category of meh, what is the big deal.

Indeed, it is true that gradual changes are hard to perceive on a daily basis, nonetheless, every instant they are happening all around and within us. The basic tenet of living organisms is continuous change.

A few weeks ago, I went on a trip for ten days. When I returned, all of the summer plants in the garden looked so much taller. It was as if they knew I was not around and together they conspired to grow faster and surprise me on my return. And they did. The first sentence I said when I saw them was — look much taller they became in ten days.

I am sure if I had stayed home and watched those plants every day, I would not have perceived their gradual growth. The impression after ten days would have been different, and I would have muttered to myself — are they ever going to grow and bloom before the summer is over?

Life looked through a series of snapshots separated in time gives a different impression than if watched continuously.

I am a victim of imperceptible changes without recognizing their consequences in another important way that catches many of us by surprise. It is how over the years, gradually the work life becomes all-encompassing and ends up becoming our identity, our purpose, and our meaning.

Looking back, I have no idea how and when this transformation happened. Slowly the tentacles of work life edged out other engagements in life.

I used to have time, and an interest in reading and used to read at least 20 books in a year. As years of working life went by that number kept going down. Reading ended up merely flipping through a stack of unread issues of Time (that kept getting deposited in the mailbox on a weekly basis) that I would carry with me on work travels to someplace.

The consequence of complete takeover of work over all aspects of life became clear when the prospects of leaving work (i.e., retirement) started to become real and the notion that one day work life will no longer be there came as a rude shock. The realization was like when sometimes we wake up after a deep sleep and for a few moments do not know where we are.

There are no regrets though. Work, and what I did was fun. It was an intellectually satisfying period, but it did happen at the expense of edging everything else away. That tide is now receding. It is time to clean up the debris left behind and to pick up the elements that fell off from the former life and stitch them back together.

Only now my eyes and mind are slowly adjusting to a new paradigm in which work is a room in which I enter through a door and at the end of the day leave the room through the same door for a different world.

Now I do not check the emails after hours or on weekends and make a concerted effort to read each day even if it is a few pages.

Talking about the frog there is another bit of scary trivia. How does rise in temperature by 1 Deg impacts human body? It raises the metabolic rate by 10%.

Ciao.

Beyond middle age

 

A defining feature
of what to anticipate
beyond middle age
is that
before the soles hit the floor
thoughts wander
whether the wind today
would be from the north
or from yonder
and joints 
will they ache yet again.

Whatever you do, do it well because YOLO

 Arun Kumar

Yvoire Caslte, Lake Geneva

The universe I will not touch is infinitely larger in comparison with what I will see touch and see.

At the end of life, I would only manage to traverse a sliver of this world and would only meander around in the vicinity of an infinitely small speck lost among its vastness.

If I were to trace the trajectory of all my movements since my birth, most of it would be concentrated around four places I have lived for extended time — two in India, and two in the US.

Coming out of those four points will be occasional wanderings to distant places. Those would be the tails of the frequency distribution of my meanderings. They would be my Black Swans.

Sitting here on the deck of the boat cruising along Lake Geneva I am wondering if those points will even be visible from the international Space Station circling the Earth.

It is the month of May, and we are on a trip to Geneva. In the past couple of days, we walked the old town, visited the St. Pierre Cathedral, took a trip to CERN, went to Carouge (Geneva’s small Italy), and while there, had a wonderful lunch at Indian Rasoi (recommended in the Michelin’s Bib Gourmand list of restaurants).

Today we are taking a boat trip on Lake Geneva to Lausanne and back. The entire trip will take about 7–8 hours. Along the way, we will dock at quaint little towns like Nyon, Yvoire, and Morges to drop and pick passengers, young and old.

As the boat approaches these places slowly start to emerge. Nyon had a boardwalk with a restaurant dotted along it. People were sitting and having a leisurely three course lunch (with crusty bread and an olive dip as a side) or were enjoying a cup of coffee with croissants. In the backdrop there were occasional tall spires of the churches that rise above the rooftops and the green canopy of treetops.

Approaching the town of Yvoire the ancient castle on the very banks of Lake Geneva starts to shimmer on the distant horizon. After the boat docks, almost the entire contingent of the guests on the boat disembarks and treads uphill from the lake towards town. They all have been reading the same guidebooks and the day trips from Geneva. What gets promoted in their pages becomes a self-perpetuating positive feedback loop.

Throughout the trip other inviting little towns come into view and then recede. Some of these places call me to step off the boat and take a leisurely stroll for an hour or two.

On their own, these towns feel like they would be worth spending some time and getting familiar with. Perhaps, there is a hidden gem in one of its by lanes; a sight that would have made me feel instantly nostalgic as if I had been here before. But I would never know; we stay on the boat and through the camera on the phone try to pin the place in my trajectory of life.

Watching these places come into view and then recede, I feel the gentle ache of time drifting by and of its finiteness. Given the finite time I will only manage to see a few places, get to take in a few experiences. There is so much more I would not see and ever experience.

I would not get down at Nyon and Youvre and spend a day or two each and get familiar with its sights and sounds, and perhaps, the feel of cobblestones on our bare soles.

Side by side with that ache there is also a question that accompanies it — How does it matter if I do not see them all? Does it matter more what I missed than what I did get to see in the time I will have in Geneva?

I know the answer, seeing it all really does not matter. Among the infinity of things, I could see what matters more is what I did get to see. The other side is a battle that is already lost — there will always be more to see than I do get to see. That is what infinity is — subtract infinity from infinity and what is left is still infinity.

What matters more is that although I cannot see them all but what I do see and experience, I should see and experience, and savor them well. If I do not, what a terrible waste of the sliver of time I have been given it would be.

In that wisdom (which in the past, I have seldom acted on; so much for that), I am reminded of a podcast episode, the subject matter of which was YOLO — You Only Live Once.

The message in the podcast was that the implication of YOLO is not to do as many things as possible because you are going to YOLO and would not get another chance. Instead, make a concerted effort to excel in doing a few activities you get to do because, after all, YOLO would not allow for the luxury of getting another chance.

And while listening to that podcast I also learned that the origin of YOLO goes back to the Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart.

Sitting on the deck of the boat, instead of feeling sorry for not being able to spend a day or two in Nyon or in Yvoire, I should feel privileged to be able to see and soak in the beautiful sights of these towns passing by.

I may not get to see it all or do it all and traverse the vast tracts of the universe, and in trying to do that, try to invent hyperdrive, but if I try to be fully aware of the small part of the universe I will see, within that lies it’s the pleasure of getting familiar with another kind of infinity.

Ciao.

When life ends, it … really … ends

 

Arun Kumar

 

The possibility of dying without knowing what happens after is an ungluing bit of news. It is a bad ass factoid that has molded human behavior and created an uncountable number of superstructures of philosophical thoughts. And it is not that we had the luxury of eons to stitch philosophical thoughts and behaviors together. It all happened in the last 5000 years or so.

 

Not finding any plausible evidence that the self continues beyond death, if we do reach the conclusion that when life ends, it really ends, is it even possible to ever come to terms with our mortality and have a functional life?

 

Is it possible to find a place in the landscape of our thoughts where if the idea that our existence is finite springs up hoping to surprise us, we just shrug our shoulders and say, meh, thank you, but I am fully aware that it is finite, and move on.

 

Can we reach a state that is something like I have been told to strive for during meditation - let thoughts bubble up, note their presence, and let them float away with the current.

 

The question I am pondering is what one needs to do after realizing that when life ends, it really ends, and be able to have a functional and enjoyable existence while we are here.

 

It is not too hard to infer or become convinced that there is not a before and an after the start and the end points on the timeline on which I will exist (a timeline that, I think, exists without me, although philosophers will say that it is a debatable point, and starting from that create another philosophical superstructure, which I am sure, already exists).

 

At least for me, or what I hear from the limited number of people that are in the circle of my limited universe, there is no evidence to the contrary.

 

I do not remember the moment of my birth or what was before that (I was too young to remember anything, and further, as consciousness evolved, the memories of what was before birth did not appear either).

 

It could happen that as I get older and cognitive faculties decline, and if I would die of natural physical wear and tear, then like birth, I may not even know the moment of death or what comes after.

 

But if I were to die with my faculties intact, would I then remember what comes after that? There are plenty of unfortunate instances when cognitive faculties are intact until the last moment. Consider the example of the human cruelty of putting people on the death row or under a guillotine.

 

Another point to note is that not knowing what comes after death is different from not knowing what was before birth. Birth, after all, happened but death has not happened yet. One can have another philosophical argument on how one can hope to know what has not occurred yet.

 

To push back against that possibility, for a moment just assume that I do continue to exist in some form and consider what some logical outcomes may be.

 

There is no reason that my present form is the one and only that is going to be there. If there is one then why not more? Why one and not two?

 

If indeed true and I have lived many times, even then I do not carry any remembrance of what existed after my previous deaths(s) either. Following the philosophical traditions, one can also pose plausible hypotheses for explanations why it may be so.

 

A simple hypothesis could be that because a finite brain cannot carry the information from an infinite cycle of births and deaths, and therefore, life has evolved mechanisms to forget what happened before. Natural selection, after all, can easily give a plausible reason for something that exists and has not yet gone extinct. In the counterfactual worlds where I went extinct, the trait of remembering past lives became an evolutionary burden.

 

Or perhaps, I do not remember anything because it is the first time I have had a lifeform where I have the consciousness that allows me to think and ponder over this question. And this would be the one and only lifetime it would ever happen.

 

I can tie myself in knots splitting hairs, but a simple fact is that once I become aware about the birth and death AND do not know what came before and what would come after, I can come up with various hypotheses that can possibly explain why that is so.

 

In deciding which one is correct, one can also follow the Occam’s razor. Given the overwhelming evidence, the least complicated inference one can draw is that when life ends, it … really … ends.

 

Also, irrespective of whether I continue to exist or not, as I do not remember anything before or after, functionally, my situation is no different from inferring that when life ends, it really ends.

 

If I accept that, I open a gate for all kinds of awkward questions to come knocking.

 

Is there meaning to this finite existence? What is the point of being born and going through living only to die? Without any meaning, ultimately is not it absurd to go on repeating the same cycle of activities we engage in day after day.

 

They are the questions that humanity has faced in its past and has tried either to argue out of dilemmas it poses or has tried to find various antidotes as measures of self-protection.

 

This brings me back to the original question…

 

Is it even possible to ever come to terms with our mortality and have a functional life? Yes, perhaps, it is possible, but for now, it is just a vague feeling.

 

Occasionally for fleeting moments I get a passing feeling of connectedness with the vastness of the universe and that brings the insight that it is possible that when life ends, it really does not end.

 

I can think of reasons why I will continue after my death is a plausible notion and it comes from realizing that the timeline exists independently of me, and star and galaxies were present along that timeline before I came along and will continue to exist after I pass away, and (b) the sum of mass and energy is conversed.

 

I also know that every other thing in this universe is made of the same atoms and at a fundamental level we are all the same. Although the present configuration of atoms that make my present form will disintegrate, I will disintegrate, some of what I am was part of some form in the past and will become part of some other form in the future.

 

If that is true and is what happens to me after death then I continue to live as being part of some form or other. Further, the world in which the form I would become lives in would be the sum of acts I do today. And that also imparts a meaning to what I do in my present form – for my future self, I should make the present a better place.

 

As for why I do not remember what was before or after my finite existence, and atoms do not have a means to carry memory, even if I continue to exist in different forms, I will not have the means for a memory of before and after.

 

I know what you are thinking. How is the plausibility of what I am proposing - when life ends, it really does not end - any different from believing in a religion? A one-person religion of my own sorts.

 

Perhaps it is, but I have to find my own religion and one that fits my body and mind and allows me to have a functional life.

 

Ciao.