Schadenfreude and the Pursuit of Happiness

For an idiot I have had a good life!
In that thought is the recipe for happiness.
For one it cuts the ego to size.
The ego that, oh so frequently, says I deserve better. Perish that thought. Crush that snake before it raises its ugly head.
The other secret ingredient is the realisation of the utility of mostly looking down instead of mostly looking up.

Looking up results in not just a crick in the neck but could be the proximate cause for a fall that hurts much more than any crick.
Looking down gives you much more robust measures of the good life than looking up does.
Look around and down and you will get a good idea of what the average life is in this vale of tears. Ruing that you have not yet made it to the Beemer owing class? Taking a ride on a Mumbai local is your ticket to feeling happy about your rickety Honda City.
Looking up is mostly joyless. Long stretches of envy and jealousy with the occasional empty frisson of schadenfreude - that unique German word for an emotion that roughly translates to the pleasure derived from some other person's misfortune.

The second-rung heiress who feels a pang of happiness as she sees the reigning queen wipe a tear on the death of her favourite poodle will have to momentarily go back to the endless ennui of envy as the reigning casanova hugs the queen tight in apparent commiseration.
Once in a while when life does not feel so good to me and unhappiness is circling around the edges of my consciosuness, I find myself listening to the tuneful masters of pop psychology, Eagles singing Desperado. The song somehow takes me back to that comforting thought with which I began this post.
For an idiot I have had a good life!
Given below is the song and its lyrics.
Cheers!

Desperado, why don't you come to your senses?
You been out ridin' fences for so long now
Oh, you're a hard one
I know that you got your reasons
These things that are pleasin' you
Can hurt you somehow

Don't you draw the queen of diamonds, boy
She'll beat you if she's able
You know the queen of hearts is always your best bet

Now it seems to me, some fine things
Have been laid upon your table
But you only want the ones that you can't get

Desperado, oh, you ain't gettin' no younger
Your pain and your hunger, they're drivin' you home
And freedom, oh freedom well, that's just some people talkin'
Your prison is walking through this world all alone

Don't your feet get cold in the winter time?
The sky won't snow and the sun won't shine
It's hard to tell the night time from the day
You're losin' all your highs and lows
Ain't it funny how the feeling goes away?

Desperado, why don't you come to your senses?
Come down from your fences, open the gate
It may be rainin', but there's a rainbow above you 

                                 You better let somebody love you, before it's too late

Memes and the Emergence of Crips

Memes have been a favourite topic with me, evident from the fact that of the 151 of the published posts on this blog fully four have had memes as an integral part of the rumination.

For those of you inclined to take a deep dive into memes and how this blog has addressed them till date, links to the four posts are given below:

http://www.hardrainindia.com/2012/08/beyond-brand-meme.html

http://www.hardrainindia.com/2008/09/coming-of-emotion-age.htm

http://www.hardrainindia.com/2013/11/memes-and-coming-general-elections.html

http://www.hardrainindia.com/2014/05/modi-meme.html

Meme: (me~m) n biology an element of a culture or system of behaviour that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by non-genetic means esp. imitation (The New Oxford American Dictionary) 

Before the advent of modern communication and travel technology, memes strengthened existing cultural and behavioural modes within geographical/ tribal boundaries contributing largely to the development of a wide variety largely insular civilizations and became the driving force in the creation of nation states. 

In the past six or seven decades, modern communications and travel have allowed memes to carry far and wide much like modern epidemics, leading to the emergence of cultural and affinity groups that cut across geographical boundaries. The global youth culture that pervaded in the sixties right up to the nineties is a vibrant example. A side-effect of the emergence of such affinity groups was the emergence of global brands and a global grammar for advertising. 

It also lead to the emergence of transnational diaspora identities with major geo-political consequences. Being Muslim or being Jewish became powerful memes with global implications largely due to the epidemiological implications of modern technology.

The past decades have been marked by not one but two major discontinuities on how people interact with each other. 

One is that the power of mass media as a broadcaster of ideas and "news" is being transferred to the individual. 21st century technology gives the individual instantaneous and almost free access to broadcast or target-cast (with increasing ability to define targets)  information and emotion rich communication at very low production costs, limited only by the individual's cognitive and creative abilities (this blog is an example).              

The second discontinuity is in the dramatic reduction of attention spans. The reasons behind this reduction are manifold. One of them could be the unchecked proliferation of messages and media that impinge on and seek attention from the individual. The other is perhaps an increase in the cognitive and emotional bandwidth that allows faster absorption of incoming communication.

A result of the above discontinuities has been the transfer of the power of memes into smaller entities called crips.  

Crips is originally the name given, in the late sixties, to African-American gangs in Los Angeles. However it was the sub-culture of jazz musicians in Chicago that gave it the context in which it has gained currency as an idea driving cultural assimilation in the today's world. For jazz musicians crips are momentary, very brief interludes of music which a jazz musician plays around with in the process of improvisation that is the soul of jazz.

In the world of ideas while memes were fully formed, metaphorically akin to say a fully formed jazz composition, crepes are "idea strands" much like strands of DNA that can latch on to other collections of strands around a base structure to form an complete DNA helix. A crip is imminently suited for transmission/ absorption/ re-transmission by the typical low-attention span, digitally empowered, young citizen from the privileged classes of the  modern world. 

An example of a crip that propagated a decade or so ago was the phrase "whatever". It was a crip which in some cases attached itself to a DNA that defined a linguistic sub-culture while on the other hand was part of a cult of indifference if not outright rejection of the mores of fashion trends. So at one extreme this particular crip became part of a linguistic fashion and at the other extreme it attached itself to a sub-culture formed around the rejection of fashion.

Crips are abundant and multiplying in the modern world allowing an individual to define a cultural profile all her own. She can be a part of a unique cultural tribe of a few and even one with access to powerful communication tools, that were just a decade ago were available only to mass media, to express and sustain her culture. 

This is deep-set change that is destroying decades if not centuries old more of whole swathes of society and business. 

It's effect on the worlds of marketing and advertising are profound and are still in the process of playing out even as the traditional practitioners deny the need for any seminal change.

I can already see one more post on crips and their effect on the world of brands. 

Looks like crips will be fertile ground for this blog to sow over the coming months.

                 

Our Vedic Future

God knows we Indians have a chequered past. An immediate past that we need to overcome and a distant past that we can justifiably be proud of.

It is my belief that the misery of our recent past, our colonisation and our inability, over the past 60 odd years to make our independence work to give large masses of our people a better life, is because we have failed to use the greatness of our distant past, as a lesson and a lever to help us build a great future for ourselves and the world.

Our Vedic past needs no feverish projections of mythical scientific achievements to establish its greatness. The greatness of our Vedic past lies in ideas that are as potent today as they were for millenniums stretching back into pre-history.

Consider the power of this idea, as articulated in the words of Swami Vivekananda, “The Vedanta recognises no sin it only recognises error. And the greatest error, says the Vedanta is to say that you are weak, that you are a sinner, a miserable creature, and that you have no power and you cannot do this and that”.

As a wonderful inspiring assertion of human possibility how different and from the fear-instilling restrictions of quotidian religion. How can you believe in God if you don’t believe in yourself?

Isn’t the above viewpoint not a guidepost to great achievements -  breakthrough science, world-altering social revolutions? Not achievements in the distant past but achievements of an urgent future that draws closer by the day?

The above is just one of the many ideas of  timeless utility and inspiration that the Vedas offer us.

So why do we need Vedic airplanes to get high on the glories of our past? Why don’t we instead ride on persistent hard work guided by these precious Vedic insights and prescriptions to a golden future.

Our future can be and should be both our homage and our goodbye to our distant and recent past.

Look to this day,

for it is life, the very breath of life.

In its brief course lie

all the realities of your existence;

the bliss of growth,

the glory of action,

the splendor of beauty.

For yesterday is only a dream,

and tomorrow is but a vision.

But today, well lived,

makes every yesterday a dream of happiness,

and every tomorrow

a vision of hope.

Look well, therefore, to this day.

(Ancient Sanskrit)