Human psychology is the king.

If there was one and just one subject I can study all my life then I’ll pursue human psychology.

We humans think that we are a logic driven species. Which is far from true. Our instincts and biases determine our behavior.

How we treat our relatives, how we spend our money, how we do the work are all dependent on our psychology about different things.

Big companies exploit human psychology to make you spend more. We are all attracted to the “SALE” sign in the marketplace. It is nothing more than gaming our psychology to get our attention and then sell us things at their normal rate while giving us a happy feeling of getting a heavy discount.

We react differently on seeing different things and we ourselves don’t realize it. But with the coming of new technologies like Big Data analytics, companies like Facebook track our behavior on their site and see how we react to different things.

After this analysis Facebook knows our likes and dislikes better than our ownselves. It then goes on to try to throw ads of things we like which have high chances of clicking and buying by us. Thus making us buy something even when I didn’t really need it. In the end making me spend money, even when I had no intention.

You see how well everything is connected to our thinking about various things. Yet most business schools prefer teaching principals of management over human psychology.

Everything you do is because of chemical reactions in your head. These reactions are not driven by logic but by psychology.

Try and understand how illogical our behavior is at many times. It will sure help you live and work more efficiently than not understanding our thinking.

-ChoubeySahab

Liberty to be wrong.

Has it ever happened to you that you knew it won’t be right thing to do but still you did it. I mean, have you ever knowingly been wrong? Well, I have and it’s the most liberating feeling on Earth.

As humans one thing that is innate in us all is we make mistakes. Then why should one try to be right always. After all, pursuing the wrong has it’s own flavor to it.

By pursuing the wrong, I don’t mean doing something illegal or committing a crime. I mean it on a very personal level. For example, you think it’d be wrong to not study for the next exam, but you still don’t study, because you want a different flavor in the parents teacher meet. Maybe because your parents are tired of hearing the good stuff about you and no longer appreciate you for your good behavior.

Just kidding, don’t do this as the flavor that you get when you return home after the PTM is not something you want a taste of. But still, the whole point I’m trying to stress here is, I legit get tired of pursuing the right sometimes, so tired that I decide to take the other way just to see if that will be exciting.

Do I have an obligation to be right always? No, I don’t. Can I be wrong and sometimes even deliberately? I think so. Is life long enough to keep pursuing the conventional right path? Hell no.

Don’t fear deviating from the predefined path. That’s where all the fun lies.

-ChoubeySahab

Free will is a myth.

We humans tend to think that we get to decide of what we think. While little of this is actually true. Our thinking is unfortunately not in our control.

What thoughts come to our mind is completely beyond our control. It is driven by complex biochemichal mechanisms in our brain of which us humans have made little sense of.

Sadness, happiness, excitedness and all other types of emotions you feel are not decided upon by you. You don’t tell yourself that you’ve had a heartbreak, hence you need to feel sad. It happens automatically, even if you don’t want to be sad, you just can’t control it.

Is it a good thing to not have control over our emotions? Absolutely, we humans have misused whatever power we got. Given the lack of control when it comes to emotions, this actually makes us human and not machine.

Scientists and researchers are trying day in and day out to get this control in our hands. That would mean, you could press a button on your smartphone and get a feeling of your choice. If you don’t want to feel sad, no worries just tap on happiness. Even adjust the level of happiness you want to feel.

When this happens, we will take a giant leap in humanity or say from humanity to machinery. Our lack of control on certain aspects of ourselves keeps us human. If we get to control everything about this as well then we might as well call it just another man made machine.

Trying to accomplish more control over everything including ourselves doesn’t necessarily mean we are moving forward. The lack of control lends the fun to the game called life. Let it be the way it is. Change isn’t always good. Sometimes it’s just not needed.

-ChoubeySahab

Are you wasting enough time?

One thing highly underrated by our society is wasting time. Not being productive has it’s own merits. This is one thing I can say out of pure experience because I have myself wasted a lot of time.

When you waste time, you essentially do something unimportant to your goal. When you browse social media, watch the same news over and over again, procastinate on your tasks. All of this can be counted in as wasting time.

This time that you waste actually helps you in more ways than you can imagine. It gives you the freedom to do whatever you want, because whatever you do will be better than wasting time. It allows your brain to wander off to places where it would never go otherwise.

One day while I was wasting time, a weird thought hit me ie why are we letting our poop go down the drain? Is it of no monetary value? If it is then why aren’t we using it?

Another day I started pondering on why am I expected to bathe regularly when our early ancestors rarely bothered. We brush everyday but how did they manage to avoid that foul smell and yellow teeth? This intrigued me a lot.

Then another thing I was thinking the other day, can my hair be made into noodles. If not, why?

I agree these are all very cringeworthy thoughts but what makes them cringeworthy is that we never think about these things. These things aren’t inside the box that our thinking is trapped in. To get these thoughts, you need to let your head to wander off.

The only way to let your head wander off is to waste time. The best ideas come to you when you waste time.

Newton would not be newton if he didn’t observe carefully the falling of an apple. That would clearly qualify as wasting time if you were to do it. But it was something that introduced us all to gravity.

The best ideas are ideas which most can’t think of. Most can’t think of them because they don’t fall inside the box of our thinking.

So to get these ideas you need to go out of the box. To go out of the box, all you need to do is-

WASTE A LOT OF TIME!!

-ChoubeySahab

We are the last.

It is a dreadful thought but one that needs to be confronted. We are the last. Last of what? You ask. Last of the thinking homo sapiens.

Am I saying that our species is coming to an end? No, I’m just saying that the next generation might well be so dependent on technology that it does the thinking for them. We have already started moving in this direction.

Last time when I got lost at a weird place, I asked google maps, it took me through even weirder places but ultimately it lead me to my destination. If my smartphone or internet had stopped working in the middle then trust me I’d be scared out of my skin. Because then I would be lost at a place where no one was around to take help from.

You see how overdependent I’m (most of us are) when it comes to navigation. We trust it more than anything, if it says right then we move right even if the street peddler says left.

As technology moves forward, we’ll delegate more and more decisions onto these coding algorithms which take the decisions for us.

Tomorrow you could just say, “Alexa, order lunch!” and Alexa would go down the details of what you ate in the morning, what all nutrients you need most, your taste preferences and which restaurants deliver the best quality food. After all this research it will order lunch for you and you are more likely to like Alexa’s choice more than our own.

Because of this we let Alexa take more and more decisions of our life. Making us do less and less thinking. The future generation will call Alexa like we call our mum when we can’t find our clothes.

We are the last set of homo sapiens who think for ourselves. The next generation will have technology that knows what’s best for us. This, in my view, will be more bad than good because our brain is like a muscle, the more we use-the more we have and the opposite is also true.

It would be hard to say but I’ll make the effort to say it-

Your children will be dumber than you are.

Feel good yet?

-ChoubeySahab

Immigration.

Immigration is when citizens of one country go to another country to live permanently.

The term has gained ever more momentum in the past few years and was one of the primary issues of the last US elections.

For long, countries like the USA have been very open to immigrants and according to Donald Trump, this is the reason for slowed down growth of the United States. He believes that other countries send in only their bad citizens who frequently commit crime.

Although with immigrants holding top positions in top companies, this is hard to comprehend. Nevertheless, Trump has decided to close down the doors for immigration and focus on the native American population.

The US president wants to build a giant wall at the US-Mexico border to stop immigration. Note that this was one big promise he made in his manifesto and Americans supported him on this.

It is clearly evident that the world is retreating to it’s closed nature. Where countries like the USA are selfishly focussed on their own growth first. This is nationalism. It is much the opposite of fancy globalization where borders have little meaning.

Since US is the trendsetter of the world. It would be interesting to see if other countries also start focusing on their growth first and give globalization a back seat. If it turns out this way, then the world will no longer be a small village, it’ll be different planets on a single planet, all trying to outdo others.

War, the most dangerous consequence of de-globalization, also becomes a possibility.

Are we really moving forward and if we are then is this the direction we want to take this world?

I’ll leave that for you to answer.

-ChoubeySahab

Not doing it will make you tired.

Many think that the amount of work you put in and the tiredness you feel after it are directly proportional. While in reality it is not the case.

It was observed that the people who didn’t get anything accomplished in the day felt more tired than someone who got a lot of work done.

The thing that you need to understand here is, tiredness is mental not physical. You can make your body do amazing amounts of work and still not feel tired. This is because when you are happy for completing a task, this happiness releases chemicals in your brain which fade your physical tiredness and you feel ever more energetic.

We have all collectively got the concept of tiredness wrong. Doing more work doesn’t make us tired, rather doing more of unrewarding work does. Because the latter doesn’t make you happy and hence no happy chemicals are released.

On the other hand, procastinating on your tasks and not doing work can make you feel tired just as if you had a tiring day at work. This is because putting off work for later creates panic which releases different chemicals in our head and we suddenly feel tired and all worked up without having done much practical work.

So you see, this is much like a paradox, the more work you do, the less tired you will be and the less work you do, the more tired you will be.

Tiredness is not physical, but mental.

Your mind is the king.

What goes inside reflects on the entire body. Thus making your mental health a primary concern. Are you mentally fit?

Your body has the answer.

-ChoubeySahab

Not everyone is as good as you.

As they say is, life isn’t fair. You don’t get good in return for good. The reason for this is that most people aren’t as good as you. Most won’t even say thank you for the good you do for them and then you end up feeling bad about it.

It has happened to me innumerable number of times that I did a favor for someone and the other person left without even feeling thankful forget saying it.

One such weird incident was when a man wasn’t able to kick start his scooty, apparently the problem was with the scooty which required more than normal kicks to warm up and get started. This man asked me to help him get it started and so I did, after 10-15 kicks it got started.

I felt really good at being able to help a stranger and by the time this good feeling was over, the stranger had already left without appreciating the effort.

You’d probably say that one should do good regardless of the effort being appreciated or not. I disagree, there are so many who genuinely need help but never ask for it while on the other hand there are thankless people who ask for it and easily get it. You know why? Because most people are good.

The problem is we expect others to be like us and in the process spend our energy on the people who don’t deserve it.

Be careful of whom are you helping and does the person genuinely need your help or is just delegating his/her work on you. Like the scooty owner who was 30ish man could have started the scooty himself in 10-15 kicks but why put in the effort when people are there to help for free.

You are valuable and your energy limited. Spend it on the right people. Not everyone deserves the good in you.

-ChoubeySahab

Racism to culturism.

The west was long accused of racism ie discriminating based on skin colour. It was widely believed that people of certain skin colours are inferior to other skin colours.

Even many doctors at that time, under the pressure of the ruling elite, produced research papers proving particular skin types to be biologically inferior.

Today, it is a generally accepted and even scientifically proved fact that people of all skin types are biologically similar. This took away the very basis for racism.

Now that there’s no scientific backing for racism, several groups have sprang up trying to put down any attempt at racism.

But even if it is proven that all skin types are biologically equal, something that is still believed is that different cultures shape different people and this has become the new ground for discrimination, those discriminating on this basis are called culturists.

Culturists, like racists, discriminate against certain groups but not on the basis of skin colour but on the basis of culture. A classic example of this can be when Indian firms refuse to recruit black Africans because they believe that it’s the culture of Africa that isn’t suited for their workspace, not the skin colour.

Culture becomes a safe excuse for discrimination. It is difficult to argue with culturists because it is very much accepted that the culture one grows in has massive impact on one’s personality.

If one grows up in African country where drugs are the norm then it is bound to have an impact on the person growing up in that culture.

As discriminating on the basis of skin colour is losing steam, discriminating in the name of culture is gaining steam.

The world is slowly shifting from racism to culturism. Neither of which is good. Fighting culturism will be a much fierce task as compared to against racism. Are we up for the challenge?

-ChoubeySahab

Nothing is meant to be.

I hate people who use this phrase “meant to be”. I believe nothing is really meant to be or not meant to be. In my view I control everything and I have the power to make things the way I like them to be.

Till date I’ve believed this and I’ve seen this actually working for me. Call it the law of attraction or whatever but believe me you can just get whatever you want and there’s nothing like “it’s not meant to be”.

The people who use such phrases are either weak who can’t put in the effort to make it the way they want it to be or are just using it as a mere excuse because maybe they don’t want it enough in the first place.

I outright hate people who tell me that maybe it just isn’t / wasn’t meant to be. For I have, all my life, believed and seen in practice that you get what you want if you want it enough to work for it.

While using such a phrase, you essentially tell me that I don’t control things and however effort may I put into something, things may end up differently than what I desire.

Writing this one to tell them loud and clear that nothing is meant to be and I have the power to make it whichever way I want. So to all the naysayers, shut up and watch as I go about it. I’m sure you’ll learn a lesson or 2 in the process.

-ChoubeySahab