The want to talk it out to an unjudging, faceless ear can be tempting. Writing is the out when there is nobody to talk to. I’ve been writing since I was 12, and as things go, with the good comes the bad. Writing also creates a permanent memory unless you gather up the courage to let go and throw or burn it all away. Nobody writes to forget.

A new belief system is hard to develop, instil and grow confident about when it’s constantly being challenged at a personal and emotional level. But then again, maybe that’s what it takes to have rock solid beliefs, having them challenged at every step. After all, I’ve never felt the need to fall back to the comfort of precedent unless I was in doubt about what to believe in the first place. One way or the other, the right set of beliefs bubble to the top.

Change is never easy enough that you offer no resistance, and is just hard enough to make you think you can reach if you just push yourself a little more. With every push, you lose a bit of your old self and gain a bit of your new self. All that’s left to remind you where you came from are the things that you’ve written and memories you’ve collected over the years, unless you gathered up the courage to throw them away. Then you can fully believe that this — your new self — is how you always were. Change is a sadistic, sadistic bitch.

This is not a review. This is more of a I’ve-spent-a-day-with-this-and-here-is-what-I-think kind of thing. Right out of the box, the screen stands out. It wasn’t until I removed the plastic that I realised that the “plug into your computer” graphic was on the screen and not a picture. I have an iPhone 4, so it’s not like I’m used to turdy screens, but text on this looks beautiful¹². It’s a relief to not be looking at a lighted screen for a change too. Although that means I can’t read it in bed yet, but my lighted cover should be here soon.

Getting content into it took quite a bit of fiddling around. Since the Kindle doesn’t have any settings for proxies, I can’t use it over the university LAN, and the only way to transfer anything is via USB. That means all the cool over-the-air things don’t work. Finding workarounds took a bit of work. I found services like NEWSTOEBOOK which were helpful, but there aren’t many out there that make a .mobi file for you and all the downloadable apps are Windows only. I couldn’t find libraries to create .mobi files either, except for this one which isn’t really complete. I would love to get my hands on whatever Instapaper uses to create its files; I could put it to some really good use.

Over time, this could become pretty valuable once I have a good collection of books. I can see myself buying e-versions of the books I already have just because it’s so convenient this way, like how we transitioned from cassettes to CDs and then MP3s. But this needs to become thinner, and considering my iPhone is about a sheet’s breadth thicker and does so much more, I think a thinner version shouldn’t be that hard. But then again, with the Fire in the picture I think the Touch and Fire will be Amazon’s focus, and I don’t think those two will go much thinner.

Overall, I’m very happy with this, and it gives a swift kick to my reading which I really needed. The moment I had it running, I bought three books that people have been suggesting for a while but I never got around to reading simply because they were a pain to get (including 1984). Plus all the articles I’ve been saving in Instapaper for a year now, putting off reading them for when I had something good to read them on. Longform, here I come.

I didn’t think about tweeting or blogging; there was nothing to say. I didn’t think about reading eulogies and tributes in Reeder, with all their anecdotes and nostalgic memories; there was nothing I wanted to read. I wanted to do something to show my gratitude, but it would be hypocritical of me to do or say something just because the occasion called for it. So I made a page, and set it as the front page to my site; the only part of the Internet (and hence, my voice in the world) that is all mine. I plan to leave it like that until I’m ready to move on.

There isn’t much to say that hasn’t already been said. We are all grieving and trying to show what and how we feel in our own little ways, but the truth is that none of it really matters. A man who changed the world for better died today. He did more for us than 99% of the world’s people put together. Today, nothing else matters. Not world hunger, not global warming, not nothing. Today belongs to Steve Jobs, the man who inspired a big part of how I think about what I do, who is always present as a question on a sticky note in front of me that asks “What would Steve do?”. There is little comfort in knowing that everything I use to go about my day has a bit of him in them, but little comfort there is.

Thanks Steve. For everything. We’ll miss you.

For the rest of this essay, I’ll be using the words “beliefs” and “philosophies” interchangeably. I know they mean different things, but for an atheist those two are the same. Beliefs and philisophies are reasoned and/or experiential conclusions.

The Formation of (my and our) Beliefs and Philosophies

Our first ever set of morals, rules for right and wrong, good and bad are set by our parents. Completely subject to their own biases and personal rules, we start off being molded in their image. One might say that parents only want the best for their children, but the truth is that parents are humans too, flawed, prone to bias and the sense of control like everyone else. But we can universally agree that the net effect of all parents in the world on their kids is definitely positive. I consider my parents to fall under the “house of logic” — they always let me believe what I wanted to, guiding me towards the correct and right if they saw me lose my way. Very few things were forced, but when they were, they were strictly done. My mother is religious, while my father is — I like to believe — mostly agnostic. I have had to visit my share of temples and holy locations, and meet and talk to holy people when I was a child, which on retrospect seems like a small price to pay for my mother’s peace of mind while showing me the other side of the coin.

The next phase in the formation of our beliefs comes from our teachers through primary and middle school. It’s why schools are important, and choosing the right one is more so. It’s not about the knowledge — we get that from books either way. It’s not about interaction either — it’s just a means to an end. What school is really about is beliefs. The first time a child is sent out to fend for himself, to put him¹ and the resilience of him as a person to the test. There are clashes between students as well as students and teachers, and these are more often than not a clash of beliefs. Many punishments are born out of challenging authority, and that’s nothing but challenging the administration’s beliefs. In school a child is always outnumbered — he is put up against a collective rather than individuals — and hence he learns to compromise and adjust his beliefs to maintain a certain level of peace. Most of school struggles goes into maintaining this peace — between students and/or students and teachers. I have been in three schools over my entire schooling career; I don’t remember much about the first, but the second and third are still quite fresh. The only way to describe my second school was “narrow-minded”, and on retrospect, all my rebelliousness was due to that narrow-mindedness that I did not want to be a part of. I was subject to more personal bias than I was before, or I have since then. Thankfully my parents saw through it and didn’t punish me everytime the school complained about something.

High school and college is all about individuals. And clashing beliefs with individuals is harder than clashing with people as a group. It’s an easy concept to understand — two warring enemies are easier to fight than one stable enemy. In a collective, people’s beliefs are at war with the other members of the collective as they try to find a common ground between themselves, so you can exploit chinks and weaknesses. But when it comes to individuals, they’re firm in what they believe. And the higher you go in the hierarchy, the more “one man authority”s you run into². My third school and first college was more about inter-student clashes, and it’s where most of my dislike for people my age comes from. I found adults — and by that, I mean people significantly older than me — to be a lot more receptive as well as logical when it came to discussions. Most, not all, of them seemed to lack the “I’m right” approach that people my age have. And it’s something you cannot talk to, something you cannot discuss or argue with, so every discussion ends with people agreeing to disagree and nobody learns anything new.

While the self discovery and understanding never stops, the earlier parts of our lives are almost completely dedicated to understanding ourselves, while the later years go in to understanding where we fit in with the rest of the world. I believe I’m at this transition phase, and it’s a very uncomfortable thing. It’s kind of like being a piece in a giant jigsaw puzzle, but unlike the puzzles we made as kids, you (a piece) have hundreds of sides, each with very similar and yet different cuts. Everytime you think one side has finally found the correct shape to fit into, another comes along where it fits better. So you either re-orient yourself, or try to re-orient the the rest of the pieces. But one of the two always changes³.

Need for a New Approach to Life

For my 23rd birthday, I briefly wrote about everything that bothers me as a person alive in the year ’11. It wasn’t complaining or ranting. Thinking about it now, I cannot think of a reason for why I wrote it, except for “disappointment”. Disappointment at something I taught myself not to expect from a long time back (or at least, I thought I did), and there was this feeling of frustration which also I’m not too familiar with. As I sat down to think about it, I realised that after 23 years, “peace” still eludes me. I can never answer the question “Are you happy?” with a straight face or a simple answer. Contentment and satisfaction are just words with meanings as ungraspable as a rainbow to a dog.

I have grown stubborn — more so than I was — with an air of superiority that, thankfully for others around, stays trapped in my own head and doesn’t reach my tongue — for now. I have grown angrier at things that I would normally not care about. I used to have a higher standard of caring; I cared about very few things but in a very strong way, but not anymore. Small things get me riled up, and I will be in denial if I say they don’t matter. Simply put, I have lost control of my mind and my spirit. I’ve lost track of what is important, what is right and what is wrong (in the philosophical, not practical, sense), what should change and what shouldn’t — everything that makes us the person we are. It feels like I’ve remained human through sheer muscle memory. I can explain why I do certain things, but they’re more a front to appease other people. Internally, there is very little logic to why I do something, because I don’t know myself if my logic is sound or not. Some would call that being impulsive. I don’t know what to call it.

I don’t know how atheism really works — it’s not like there’s a book — but I’ve always thought that there is room for spiritual development without having to resort to a belief in a higher being; that peace can be obtained without completely surrendering to a God and blaming or crediting him/her/it for whatever happens in our life. But then again, maybe peace is that unattainable pot of gold at the end of the rainbow of our time. Maybe we’ve traded in our peace of mind for progress, and the pursuit of peace and satisfaction goes anti-parallel to success … I don’t know.

Of course, I’m probably wrong and all this is just my cynicism talking. This uncertainty is why there is a need here for a better set of beliefs. A Godless set of beliefs, but a set of beliefs nonetheless. One that should be adopted as a whole and not be cherry picked from. A set of beliefs that will enhance and augment my reasoning and logic, and hopefully lead to a better understanding of how this world works.

In my short research I’ve found that there aren’t many non-idealistic and non-idolistic philosophies. Buddhism has always intrigued me simply because it’s the only one that talks about enlightenment, rather than surrendering oneself to a higher power⁴. In my very limited understanding, there is no worship to please a god and no hoping for supernatural interventions. There is only learning, about oneself, the world and how they work together. Zen — in the meaning of the word, not the school of thought. And now I’m looking at going deeper and learning from it. Learning leads to understanding. Understanding leads to acceptance. Acceptance leads to peace. At least, that’s what the hope is. It may not be the answer to everything, but I doubt anything can tell me what the answer is. As the people in movies say, “That is for you to figure out.”

Then, maybe I will be at peace with this world and hence, myself. •

For every sentence spoken, there are people who agree or disagree. Yes, there are people who are agnostic, but these people don’t believe in taking sides anyway so let’s leave them out of the discussion for the time being. I want to look at the ones who actually have a mind of their own and can take a stand for or against things. There is a good chance they already have an opinion on whatever you’re saying before you’ve finished saying it. You cannot sway or persuade them. That would make them feel weak willed, and our mind is programmed to want to feel in control, so it will rebel against that feeling. If they agree with us, nothing has been added to the conversation, and if they disagree, nothing can be taken away from it. So why are we saying whatever we are, to whomever we are?

Is it a need to have our ideas and point of view validated? Is it to know that we aren’t alone in thinking those things? Or is it to have an effect and get a reaction out of people, regardless of the fact that we believe in what we’re saying or not, which ultimately boils down to “trolling” as the Internet so lovingly calls it.

A distinction needs to be made between informing and saying. Informing still has a reason: To add to someone’s knowledge that they may be lacking. But informing should lack personal bias, anecdotal evidence and commentary. Unfortunately it’s rather hard, if not impossible, for a person to leave those out and state things just for what they are. Hence, informing is not so much about adding to someone’s knowledge as it is about telling them about things the way you see them (unless it’s a universal truth, of course. There aren’t many different ways of understanding that the Earth revolves around the Sun).

Sometimes I look at this journal, my Twitter profile, the text messages on my phone, the e-mails sent and received over the years, and I wonder what the point of it all was. The world hasn’t changed because of them. The people I know haven’t changed because of them. I haven’t changed (much) because of them either. Out of all the inconsequential and useless things I have done in this life, I think “saying” anything is probably right at the top of the list.

Another year has gone by where the world has maintained its delusion of improvement, people have maintained their delusion of change, and the systems are functioning like they always have — sucking the life and blood out of the bottom and funneling them to the top.

News on television panders to its audience more than ever, with newspapers being slightly better in terms of intellectual stimulation, while television in itself dies a slow and painful death in houses of people that you and I might consider to be sensible.

My disdain for my own kind (i.e. people) continues to grow as I see how gullible and prone we are to be herded around like sheep by the big and intimidating but sweet talking dog hovering around us. That, and the fact that money still reigns supreme even though on the surface we say it doesn’t matter, that the value of what that money brings is higher. The truth is that people who don’t have money are trying to make it, and the people who do are trying to make more of it. The human resource is worthless, inefficient and easily replaceable. And the only reason it has survived in the work force is because it’s cheap. At least the barter system was more humane, if a little limiting. Maybe giving someone what they want wasn’t such a good idea after all.

Our sense of entitlement is at an all time high. “Entitlements” we have done nothing to earn. “Entitlements” we claim the right to just because we are born as humans and not animals. We want equality — between men and woman, the various social castes — but we want to be treated differently, with reservations and those “Women Only” seats on buses and trains. We haven’t made progress. We’ve just put a cork in our regression.

On a more personal level, being alone is purely a function of settlement and compromise. How much are you willing to compromise on your ideas and thoughts so that you can give the other people in your life their needed sense of control? The more you compromise, the less alone you will be. The most popular are the ones who are the least deviant. Then again, some of the most deviant are very popular as well, but are they deviant if they’re popular? The thing with being a rebel, an outcast, is, you’re only a rebel if you’re alone. And nobody wants to be alone. Not even the alone.

What amazes me is the human nature/instinct to bunch together. Give people a reason — any reason — regardless of how obscure or irrelevant it may seem, to come together, and they will. And this isn’t just about meeting people in real life and forming said community; we will use whatever resources that are at our disposal if it allows one to feel connected to someone else.

I’ve seen subreddits that span from love for a game to a promoting a belief. These are common factors to form communities around because they’re tangible. But my moment of epiphany was running into the r/randomactsofpizza subreddit. Take a moment and have a look at it. It’s the simplest thing: you can barter a pizza for something, or you can send a pizza, and it’s a mini-community built out of giving and receiving pizza.

I’ve been critical of the human need to belong, to feel connected, even though I understand where it comes from. And I do still feel that looking for that sort of validaton outside of oneself is wrong. But every now and then I run into something like r/randomactsofpizza and realise that in a big bad world full of unfamiliar, stressful and scary things, feeling like you’re not alone even though it’s because of an obscure habit, belief or idea, can’t be such a bad thing. It’s the little things that are worth living for.

What is important in a person’s life should probably not be left for that person to decide for himself. It might sound counter-intuitive, but our perception of importance is warped because it’s relative to our past. On the other hand, a machine could analyse hundreds of thousands of lives and figure out common patterns, classifying the overlapping ones like “first words” and “marriage” as important along with other things that might not have seemed important to us but from a global perspective, it was. Like graduation¹.

While all that will probably never happen, the next possible thing is a manually created lifestream. When I say lifestream, I don’t mean the common-knowledge meaning²; that isn’t too interesting. Recording a person’s online life doesn’t achieve anything — it’s their real life that matters. What we can do is use their online activities to keep track (in a non-creepy way) of what they have been up to to build a history of their life, since people love to document things through pictures, blog posts, status updates, etc.. The only problem is the fragmented way they approach it.

A few weeks ago, I saw Dustin Curtis throw out a link to his Lifepath.me³ page. It’s a beautiful, presumably manually created lifestream service. Since signups are closed, I don’t know how it really works. But it’s a pretty decent attempt at a very good idea. I took inspiration from his and created my own⁴. This allows me to, if I choose to do so in the future, experiment with the automation and pattern recognition I wrote about above. The only problem is that I’m not so good at the documenting bit — I prefer to fully immerse myself in enjoying the moment rather than try to document it for the future. And this is a personal pet-peeve: being an advocate of the experience — enjoying and learning from it — it’s counter intuitive for me to think about not giving in to it a hundred percent, trying to chronicle and share it with others instead.

The trouble is that extra deliberate step we must take to initiate that documentation. This wouldn’t be much of a problem if there was a way our devices, e.g. cameras or whatever you use to send out tweets, could work off of intentions. Or, there was a way to bring together various different experiences to complete your own if you missed out on something⁵. The second solution is do-able. Services that have a check-in system, status updates and photo uploading all integrated can do this quite easily. But it won’t work unless it’s open and visible outside of said service.

I doubt I’m the first one to see the potential in a well developed and implemented lifestreaming service that truly keeps track of people’s lives. The sociological, psychological and statistical uses would be tremendous — all the things I’m looking at as subjects for a future PhD. proposal. It’s a very interesting time for people who like data. Privacy is dead; long live privacy.

Update 23 Sep, ’11

Looks like Facebook is getting in on this. Sadly, Facebook is in the best position to do this (like I hinted at above) but its closed nature really takes away from how useful this could truly be. That, and the fact that the Facebook crowd is too dumb, privacy-paranoid and resistant to change to grasp how amazing it actually is.

Update 2 Dec, ’11

The new Path is awesome. They describe themselves as a “Smart Journal”, which is just them trying to not use the term “Social Network”. But Path is unique in the sense that you don’t need to connect with other people for it to be useful, and I decided to start using it privately to log my activities through the day. The option of sharing something publicly is always there with the integration with Twitter. It’s a manually created lifestream, but a beautiful one with very low barriers so the hindrance is not so much of a hindrance. The UI hammers the whole “timeline” perspective home, right from the things one can share to how it looks.

I think Path is doing a lot of things right, and it will be attractive to people looking to have a small, private network. I’m definitely an edge case, but the fact that a social network allows itself to be used this way is very interesting.

One of my goals with this version of the website was to have a single place where I could store things — whether that be things high on importance and sentimental value like pictures, intellectual value like articles, or even low on value but still worth saving like tweets. Whether it be just a reference (i.e. saving a link to the content stored somewhere else) or the actual thing. The idea was to have a single point where I could point people to find anything and everything they wanted to about me. The latter half of this decade has allowed people to create content without having to worry about where or how it is being stored. If I may take a well-established context liberally, there’s a very app-ish feel to the Internet. All people see is their content; all they need to know is the name of the service they are using¹. For users, the service is the data, just like on our iPhones the app is not only a window to the data, the app is the data. Flickr for our photographs, Tumblr for our writing, Twitter for those impulsive thoughts, Google Calendar for our events; we’ve truly and completely fragmented our online identity.

On the web, the norm is to borrow space that isn’t one’s own and use it to keep things, important or otherwise, for free. Free of costs, and free of worry. There is an inherent — and baseless, if I may add — trust in services to maintain the integrity of the data², i.e. keep it safe and not misuse it. Plus the fact that there is no one place where someone can go to get all the things associated with a person; everything is scattered, and many of them abandoned and without ownership. If you don’t have the link to something, you can’t see it — discovery is again becoming a problem amidst spam and just the sheer volume of data. And with the advent of URL shorteners and users who don’t know how they really work, many links eventually lead to dead ends.

There are a lot of things wrong in that one little paragraph. In fact, it’s everything wrong with how we have approached our data in the last decade. It is such a mess that I think we will spend the next ten years un-doing the models of the last ten. That’s pretty much what all this “semantic web” talk is all about — making sense of the data, relating them to each other and to you. The most popular apps of the next decade will be the ones that let us bring all our data from all over the Internet and keep it together — literally or figuratively. Facebook does (or at least, did, when I was still using it) a good job of aggregating content from many places once you tell it to, similar to how Friendfeed works. But the trouble is that Facebook, yet again, is a second/third-party service (based on where you place it in the chain). Your data is locked in, and only people with Facebook accounts can see them³. Above that, if you ever want to get that data out, you’re dependent on Facebook to give it to you, of which they might or might not do a very good job⁴.

To bring some order to our content on the Internet, our possessions, there need to be some fundamental changes in how people think about it. And to make that happen, there need to be shifts in how we — the developers and designers of services which make up the consumer facing Internet — do things as well as how consumers perceive the value of said services.

What We Should See From Users

What We Should See From Developers

There are many problems with the Internet, but a lack of ideas on how to fix it isn’t one of them; everybody has one opinion or the other. Ultimately we’re all trying to turn it into something more than a glorified telephone network. Even though I’m a pessimist, I believe this is one of those things that can be fixed and should be done. We just need someone to get the ball rolling. •