Saturday Serendipity
Quote,Finding Balance in Extremes, Interesting find.
Hi.
Reading time: About 5 minutes
Quote
“Consider how hard it is to change yourself and you'll understand what little chance you have in trying to change others”
― Peter Bevelin, All I Want To Know Is Where I'm Going To Die So I'll Never Go There
Finding Balance in Extremes
“If I did not feel despair or fear, hurt or pain - I did not feel joy or excitement, awe or amazement. If I could not cry, I could not smile.” - A case for being emotional and intuitive by Trisha’s Publication.
This is a really interesting quote from a really interesting post written by my sister.
My interpretation of this, of course, might be different, but the way I see it is that if you never feel pain or suffering, you may never feel happiness or joy.
To take this in another format entirely, Paras Chopra wrote something interesting: "You can only succeed if you know how you can fail." This, in my opinion, is a blessing in disguise because failure is something that, even if you do not want to achieve it, you have no option but to experience it. Failure is inescapable, no matter who you are in this world.
There’s this really interesting quote from The Office (US) where Andy says,
“I wish there was a way to know you're in the good old days before you've actually left them.”
And really, this is the beauty of how the world works, in my opinion. You don’t appreciate the things that you have if you have never experienced how the world is without these things.
One of the things that makes people appreciate what they have in life is seeing others suffer. You might be sitting in a cafe, sipping coffee and enjoying time with your friends, but at the same time, you see other kids begging for money on the street. Maybe that makes you appreciate how lucky you are to be able to afford these luxuries.
The world is relative, and that makes experiences different.
In this particular context, I’m comparing the privileges of money, but there are many other scenarios as well. For instance, people with money may be emotionally miserable, have no sustainable emotions, etc.
“When told that even the richest 10 percent of Indian households earned just Rs 21.6 lakh per annum in 2021 (details of how this number is derived follow later in this chapter), most readers will tend to be incredulous and unhappy.” - Liliput Land.
This is something crazy to me. When people think of themselves as middle class, they often compare themselves to the top one percent who earn more than a crore a year. The people who make a crore a year feel poor in comparison to those who make ten crores a year, and this goes on until Ambani feels he is poor in comparison to Adani or vice versa. In reality, this entire 10% bucket does not realize that the majority of people out there cannot even make ends meet. In their eyes, they are not successful.
It is all about perspective. This is what makes the mental model of relativity so important.
Sorry, I lost track, but let’s relate it back to the main idea. You don’t know the joys of winning without first experiencing losing. You don’t know what happiness is if you’ve never experienced unhappiness.
I think the beauty of life, in the context of emotions, is the fact that we always end up experiencing both extremes. This is simply an assumption, but I don’t think I have met anyone who has been happy their entire life. And as far as I know, the opposite is also true.
In a world where everyone strives to be successful and ambitious, I think it is really important to first pause and analyze where you stand in the current moment (present).
This is really hard to do, as you either focus on the past or the future, but never live in the moment. Trust me, even I cannot think about the present without comparing it to the past or thinking of what it will be like in comparison to the future.
Even if you cannot deeply analyze the present like me, if there is any evidence that the life you are living right now is better than it was a few years ago, then appreciate it. And if you are facing a hard time, remember that this is just a phase, and work on making it better for the future.
And just to end, here’s a wonderful lesson from Charlie Munger, as shared by David Senra, on facing problems in life:
“Charlie has an almost complete indifference to problems. The way I would say it is like, troubles from time to time should be expected. This is an inescapable part of life. So why are you letting it bother you? And if you're listening to the lessons that he's trying to impart on others, you realize what he's saying is like, the problems are inescapable; you're going to have some level of problems. But you can reduce the number of problems that you have in your life by aiming for quality. High-quality business and high-quality people produce fewer problems. So one of the notes I left myself after this was, I don’t ever want to forget this. It makes your life easier if you go for great. Great businesses are rare; great people are rare. But you will have way fewer problems in your life if you're in a great business and you surround yourself with great people.” - Founders podcast.
Interesting find
Roger Federer gives commencement address to Dartmouth graduates.
Thank you for reading,
Samvit.