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“I just want to this about that.”
― Steven C. Smith

A baby cot in an emptying room during renovation — on letting go of things that hold too much memory

The Art of Letting Go of Things (When Things Won’t Let Go of You)

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The man arrived at ten in the morning with a helper, a trolley, and a face that had seen too many dining tables to feel anything about this one.

He walked around it once. Tapped a leg. Looked at the surface with the practiced detachment of someone assessing timber, not history. Then he named his price. It was not the price you pay to take something away. It was the price you pay someone to do you a favour.

I looked at the table. Twelve years of breakfast. The dent where my daughter, age two, introduced her head to a hard surface and delivered her first proper howl. The chair she stood on, aged four, reaching for something she absolutely should not have reached for. The evening she ate her first real meal there, small fork, enormous concentration. The man with the trolley saw none of this. He saw four legs and a surface. I paid him to take it away. The room looked larger and felt considerably emptier than its dimensions suggested.

This is the problem I cannot solve. Acquiring is effortless. Disposal is grief dressed up as logistics.

The Ticket from Vegas

I have, somewhere in a box that has moved with me across three cities, a paper ticket from a trip to Vegas in 2012. Every time I reach for it to throw it away, something stops my hand. The ticket is not a ticket. It is a sealed jar containing whatever I was feeling on the day I stuffed it into my pocket. I do not know what that feeling was. I am apparently not willing to find out.

This is the part nobody warns you about when they talk about letting go of things. It is not disorganisation. It is attachment, distributed across a thousand objects, each one a small protest against the fact that time moves in one direction only. The New Yorker ran a piece on the heroic misery of trying to offload things. Its sharpest line: people prefer cheap to free. Meaning a price tag, however small, signals that something has been assessed and found worthy. Free signals the opposite. You cannot even donate your way out of the problem.

The Boxes

I have been thinking about the boxes. Not the contents. The boxes things come packed in. There is one on a shelf right now. Bright red. A perfume box, foam insert intact, carrying a faint trace of what it once held. The perfume ran out some time ago. The box did not. Too well made to throw away. Next to it, the moisturiser container with the elegant pump, long empty. And the iPhone box from two upgrades ago, because the cardboard was so clean.

If you cannot bring yourself to throw away the container, you were never going to throw away the thing inside it.

The Invisible Kind

A twenty-eight-year-old in that same piece offered a thought that stung: we have moved our accumulation online, he said. Digital purchases give the illusion of minimalism. The clutter is still there. It is simply invisible. Clay Shirky said in 2008 that the problem was never information overload. It was filter failure.

Free storage means no friction at acquisition, and no friction means no moment at which you pause and decide. The screenshots accumulate. The downloads folder fills. The brain does not distinguish between a drawer of cables for devices you no longer own and a folder of PDFs you will never read.

The Warehouse Economy

The United States has more than 50,000 self-storage facilities: warehouses you rent by the month for things you cannot fit at home and cannot bring yourself to discard. More of them than McDonald’s, Starbucks, and Subway combined. One in ten Americans rents a unit. The monthly rent, paid quietly over years, often exceeds the value of what sits inside.

India is building the same economy now, and faster. What we are storing, in the end, is not furniture. It is a mental state: unresolved pasts, uncertain futures, and abundance without clarity.

Learning to Let Go

Clutter is expensive. It costs the mind more than we admit: the low hum of unfinished decisions, the guilt of things unused, the weight of objects that demand nothing and take everything quietly. In a city like Mumbai, where every square foot has a price, it costs the home too. Space given to things you no longer need is space you are paying for twice.

I am trying to change this. Genuinely trying, not aspirationally trying. Filtering at source, before things arrive rather than after. Keeping the memory and releasing the object. The dining table is gone. What I was trying to keep was not the table. It was my daughter at two, howling. That is still here. It requires nothing except the occasional willingness to let it surface on its own.

I do not have this solved. What I have is the intention to work on it seriously, and the humbling recognition that intention is not the same as action. If you have found a way through this, I am genuinely interested. Tell me what worked. Tell me what you have not been able to let go of, and why.

The dining table is gone. The Vegas ticket is still here.

We are both works in progress.

Green kinetic sand creature with googly eyes and antennae, looking mildly bewildered

What your IQ says about you. And what it doesn’t.

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Somewhere in the last few years, a two-word phrase crossed over from the clinic into the conversation. It used to live in test reports and psychology journals. Now it turns up in press briefings, social media posts, and the particular kind of political commentary that mistakes contempt for argument. The phrase is “low IQ.” And before we go any further, it is worth asking what IQ actually measures.

IQ stands for Intelligence Quotient. It is a number produced by a standardised test. The average score is 100. Most people sit between 85 and 115. Above 130 is considered exceptional.

The test was invented in France in the early 1900s by a psychologist named Alfred Binet. His original goal was modest and genuinely kind: to identify children who needed extra support in school. A welfare instrument. It was not designed to rank human worth. That application came later, courtesy of everyone who found ranking irresistible.

The Giga Society publishes a list of the highest verified IQs on record. The 2025 report makes for interesting reading. YoungHoon Kim leads at 276. Terence Tao, who won the Fields Medal and became a professor at UCLA at 24, comes in at 230.

Garry Kasparov, who held the chess world championship for over a decade and once made IBM’s supercomputer look nervous, closes the top ten at 190. These are extraordinary human beings, and the list is worth a few minutes of anyone’s time.

Then there is Christopher Langan, IQ 195, who spent years working as a bouncer. And Richard Rosner, IQ 192, who worked as a stripper before writing for late-night television. Genius and a stable career, it turns out, are not the same destination. Which tells you something important about what IQ actually measures, and what it quietly leaves out.

I have not taken the test. My IQ is therefore unverified, which places me in excellent company, since most people deploying the phrase “low IQ” have not taken it either.

This is the thing worth noticing. When someone reaches for those two words to dismiss another person, they are not citing a score. They are borrowing the authority of a number they do not possess, to settle an argument they cannot win on other terms. It is credential theft, performed in public, and repeated often enough that the audience has started to find it normal.

The phrase has migrated from the clinic to the commentary box, and in transit it lost the one thing that gave it any meaning: the actual test.

Alfred Binet spent years building a tool to make sure struggling children did not get left behind. He would have been puzzled to see it turned into a put-down. Though watching the crowd cheer every time it lands, I think he would have found the response more diagnostic than the test.

White sculpture of a seated figure on a garden bench, gazing sideways, with bougainvillea and trees in the background.

Someone Called Me Names

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Someone called me names last week.

Not in the way that requires an apology or a strongly worded reply. One name. Carefully chosen. Delivered with the quiet confidence of someone who has read more books than most people own.

The name was flâneur.

She is the kind of person who uses words like flâneur without checking if anyone is following. Well travelled, widely read, opinions that arrive fully formed and correctly spelled. When she says something, you nod first and look it up later.

She had just read two posts on this site. The one about paying attention. And the one where I photographed a feedback terminal in an airport washroom and asked who exactly goes to a washroom, takes out their phone, and clicks a picture of a smiley face survey.

I thanked her, because that seemed like the right thing to do. Then I went home and looked the word up.

A flâneur, it turns out, is someone who saunters through a city, watching the world pass by. The word is French, which is already suspicious. The French have a word for everything, and the word is always more dignified than the thing deserves.

What they were describing, in plain English, was a man sitting on a bench looking at pigeons.

I have done this and will not pretend otherwise. I have sat on benches in Madurai, Mumbai, Melbourne, and a few places starting with other letters. And watched people cross roads, carry things, argue with autorickshaw drivers, and eat standing up. I have watched all of this with the focused attention of someone who is not quite sure what he is looking for but is confident it will appear.

This, apparently, is a philosophy.

The flâneur, has an artist’s eyes. He sees shape, colour and size. He freezes reality to step back and see the beauty in the bustle.

I read that sentence three times. The third time, I was fairly sure I had been doing something profound without knowing it. The first time, I thought it sounded like someone who had missed their bus and made the most of it.

Both can be true.

There is something to it, though. The bench is not wasted time. The watching is not idleness. If you sit still long enough in any city, the city starts performing for you. People forget you are there. A man on a motorcycle will argue with a traffic light. A woman will feed a crow with the precise movements of someone conducting a ceremony. A child will find a puddle that has no business being where it is and step into it with complete commitment.

None of this appears if you are walking with a purpose.

Perhaps being a flâneur is just having no plan and dressing it up in French.

I am fine with this.

Green municipal waste bins on a street, a quiet reminder of what happens after someone decides to act

The Quiet Ones

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A couple of years ago, I was in Wayanad on a short morning hike. Pristine mountains. The kind of air that makes you feel briefly virtuous just for breathing it.

A friend was walking alongside. We were talking, as you do on such walks, about everything and nothing. I was doing what I always do in places like that: looking up. Birds, sky, the light doing interesting things through the canopy.

She was doing all of that too. Commenting on the birds, noting the trees, entirely present in the conversation. And also, without breaking stride or sentence, bending down every few minutes to pick up a stray pet bottle, a biscuit wrapper, an old phone cover abandoned on the trail like a small act of surrender. Each piece went into her bag. At the end of the walk, it all went into a bin.

No announcement. No pause for effect. Just a person who had decided, at some point, that this was simply what you did when you walked in a beautiful place.

I was, briefly, awestruck. Then mildly ashamed. Then back to looking at the birds.

Last week, a different friend told me about something she does at home. Every few months, she boxes up the plastic that has accumulated, wrappers, packaging, the soft plastic that no municipality will touch, and couriers it to EcoKaari, a Pune-based company that handweaves it into bags and wallets and things you would actually want to own.

Four times a year. A box, some tape, a courier booking.

I told a few people. The response, reliably: that’s a lot of effort.

Which is an interesting sentence. Because the effort is perhaps forty minutes. The time exists. We spend more of it each evening scrolling through things we will not remember by morning.

The issue was never time. It was importance. Microplastics are now found in human blood, in placentas, in Antarctic snow. The facts are not hidden. They are just, somehow, not quite inconvenient enough to act on.

There is a lot of talk in India about sustainable living. Reusable bags, organic produce, the correct way to feel about single-use plastic at a wedding. What there is less talk about are people like these two, who are not talking at all. They are just doing the thing, quietly, in the middle of doing everything else. No audience required.

Neither announced anything. Neither posted about it.

EcoKaari has upcycled over five million pieces of waste plastic. Every single one arrived because someone decided it was worth the bother.

Sustainable living in India, at its best, looks exactly like this. Unhurried. Unannounced. And entirely without applause.

By the way, this is not a sponsored or paid post. No one asked for it. These are personal observations about people I admire, written on a Saturday morning, thinking about better living.

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There is a longer argument about why we do not make time for things that matter. It starts here: Are You Happy Yet?

A collage of traditional Ramayana masks mounted on a wall, including characters Anchara, Surpanakha, Lava, Sita, Lakshmana, Bali and Bishamitra, painted in vivid reds, blues, yellows and gold.

When the Mask Comes Off

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Batman is, in real life, a sad billionaire named Bruce Wayne. Spider-Man is a teenager named Peter Parker who really should see a doctor about his wrists. And Superman — the most powerful being on the planet — goes to work every day as Clark Kent, a journalist who cannot spot an alien standing right next to him. The disguise is glasses, Clark. Just glasses.

But here is what we always get wrong about superheroes. The mask is not what hides them. The mask is what makes them. Take it away and Bruce Wayne is just a rich man with too many gadgets. Peter Parker is just a kid with a problem. Clark Kent is just a man who needs better glasses.

The mask is not hiding the power. The mask is where the power comes from.

Masks are not a new idea. The Ramayana worked this out a few thousand years before Bruce Wayne did. Those masks on the cover were spotted at the Kautilya Leadership Centre in Khalapur a while ago. They have been on my mind ever since.

Two real people understood this. One painted walls. The other wrote code.

The man who owned every wall

For thirty years, a person called Banksy put art on walls all over the world. Without asking. Without signing his name. Without telling anyone who he was.

Alt text (for SEO and accessibility): Banksy's Girl with Balloon on a wall in London. A girl in silhouette reaches toward a red heart-shaped balloon. The words There Is Always Hope are written on the wall beside her.
Banksy, Girl with Balloon, London. Photo by Dominic Robinson. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

A while ago, on a street in Marseille in the south of France, he painted a bollard casting the shadow of a lighthouse it could never be. The bollard’s own shadow stretches across the pavement for real. The lighthouse shadow stretches up the wall in paint. One shadow is true. The other is a wish. Across it, these words: I WANT TO BE WHAT YOU SAW IN ME.

Alt text (for SEO and accessibility): Banksy's I Want To Be What You Saw In Me, Marseille 2025. A metal bollard on a pavement casts a painted shadow of a lighthouse on a beige wall, with the words I Want To Be What You Saw In Me stencilled across it.
Banksy, I Want To Be What You Saw In Me, Marseille, 2025. Image via @banksy

I came across it on my phone a few months ago and stopped scrolling.

The bollard is nothing special. The kind of thing you walk past every day without noticing. But in the painting it becomes something. A beacon. And the sentence makes it personal. Not I am great. Just I want to be what you once thought I could be. There is a lot of feeling in that gap.

It hit me the way it did because I did not know who made it. No name, no story, no interview. Just the image and whatever I happened to be feeling that day.

That is not a coincidence. That is the whole plan. The missing name was the point. The anonymity was not modesty. It was the message.

The man who broke money

In 2008, the world’s banks were falling apart. Into this mess, a person using the name Satoshi Nakamoto put out a nine-page document. It described a new kind of money. No bank needed. No government involved. No single person in charge. Just a system that anyone could use and no one could own.

Then Satoshi disappeared. On purpose.

Because a name is a door. And governments are very good at finding doors. Satoshi left no door. You cannot arrest an idea. You cannot freeze a network. But you can absolutely freeze the bank account of the person who built it, if you can find them.

Both Banksy and Satoshi did what Bruce Wayne does every morning. They put the mask on and became something their real names could never have been.

The masks came off

Reuters published a story naming Banksy. His real name, his real face, his real life in Bristol.

The New York Times went further. A reporter spent a full year trying to find out who Satoshi really is. He hired a language expert. He flew to El Salvador to meet his main suspect. He built a database of over a hundred thousand old internet posts and ran them through an artificial intelligence programme. His conclusion: Satoshi is most likely Adam Back, a 55-year-old British cryptographer who has been a well known figure in the Bitcoin world for years.

Both denied everything. Both denials had the sound of something that had been practised many times before.

I read both stories and felt something drop in my chest.

The journalism was not the problem. The NYT piece is serious, careful work. There is one moment I keep coming back to. The reporter is sitting with Back in a hotel room in El Salvador and reads out something Satoshi once wrote: “I’m better with code than with words.”

Before he can finish, Back jumps in. “I did a lot of talking though for somebody,” he says. “I mean…” And then he stops. Goes quiet.

Three seconds. But in those three seconds he spoke like someone who had written that line himself. Like he knew exactly what it felt like from the inside. Then he caught himself. And the door closed again.

The drop in my chest had nothing to do with the journalism. It was about what the journalism did.

What the bollard knew

A named Banksy is just a man from Bristol. A named Satoshi is just a person a government can drag into a court. The Bitcoin crowd is not buying it anyway. They are not being difficult. They just know that once you name the magic, the magic leaves the room. Some things work better as mysteries.

Superman is Superman because you never see him burning toast in the morning. I want my superheroes to stay masked, thank you very much. Whatever form they come in. Some shadows are better left where they are.

A street dog sleeping on a sandy beach, curled into the sand, eyes closed, entirely unbothered.

Why Did We Believe the Story of the Seven Dogs?

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There is a corgi at the front.

Small, determined, walking with the quiet authority of someone who did not ask to be in charge but has decided, since nobody else is stepping up, to get on with it. Behind him, six other dogs move along a highway in Jilin province, northeastern China. One is a German shepherd, walking slightly stiffly. The others stay close, turning back every few steps, as if checking.

A man driving through spotted them, pulled over, filmed forty seconds from his car window, and posted it with a guess that they might have escaped from a transport vehicle. He had not seen any escape. He was simply guessing, the way you do when you have filmed something odd and need to say something about it.

Ninety million views on Douyin and Weibo within days. Douyin is China’s TikTok. Weibo is its Twitter. Then it went global. By the time the internet finished with it, the dogs had escaped a meat truck, protected an injured companion across hundreds of kilometres, and were nearly home. AI-generated movie posters followed. A trailer. Reunion scenes.

None of it was true.

The German shepherd was in heat. The other dogs were following their instincts, which are considerably less poetic than loyalty but considerably more reliable. Everyone lived a few kilometres away and had gone home long before the world finished weeping for them.

The story that wasn’t

Which raises the obvious question. Ninety million people watched forty seconds of dogs on a road and decided, collectively, that what they were seeing was an escape narrative. Not because anyone told them so. Because that is what they needed it to be.

Think about what was on the rest of the feed. Bombs. Borders. Bombasts. Cruelty delivered from respectable positions with great confidence. In that context, a corgi leading a wounded companion home is not a distraction from the news. It is a rebuttal to it.

The brain turns footage into story faster than the critical mind can intervene. This is not stupidity. It is the part of us that still believes things should work out.

The fact-check travels slower. By the time anyone found the German shepherd’s owner in Jilin, the story was already somewhere people needed it to be.

The dogs went home three days later. The corgi went back to being a corgi: walking around as if it owns the street, leading no one in particular, meaning nothing at all.

The story did not need the dogs anymore. It never really did.

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If you are wondering why we keep reaching for these moments, this piece has some thoughts: Are You Happy Yet?

Coffee in a grey ceramic cup beside an iPad showing a draft in progress, on a wooden café table

A Short Education in Coffee (Or: How a Simple Drink Taught Me I Knew Nothing)

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I grew up believing coffee came in precisely one legitimate form.

It arrived in a steel tumbler. Poured with mild theatrical flourish from one vessel to another. It possessed the authority of habit and the fragrance of morning. It was called filter kaapi. My mother makes it. There is, and remains, no higher benchmark.

Then, decades ago, a young man at a Café Coffee Day counter in Bangalore looked at me with professional patience and said, “Cappuccino?”

I had grown up in Madurai. Outside my mother’s kitchen, the only other coffee I had considered was at a small roadside coffee place called Visalam in Goripalayam. My mother gave hers in a tumbler and davara. Visalam served it in a glass tumbler. That, I had assumed, was the full range of possibility. Cappuccino was not a category I had prepared for.

What Avvaiyar Knew About Coffee (And Everything Else)

There is a line by Avvaiyar, the ancient Tamil poetess, that I have known since childhood.

கற்றது கை மண் அளவு; கல்லாதது உலகளவு

Katrathu kai mann alavu; kallathathu ulagalavu.

What you have learned is a handful of sand. What you have not yet learned is the size of the world.

I had known this line for years. I had also attributed it, confidently and wrongly, to Thiruvalluvar. The irony of misattributing a quote about the limits of one’s knowledge is, I think, what philosophers call “a bit much.”

In popular Tamil online folklore, the line hangs on a wall at NASA. I cannot verify this. But for rocket scientists to keep this in mind, however remote, is comforting anyway.

Going Down the Coffee Rabbit Hole

I came to coffee late. But when I did, I came properly. I ground my own beans. Chose them carefully. Waded in. And at each stage arrived confident I had figured it out, only to be shown, cheerfully, the next wall of ignorance waiting just ahead.

The world is not content with “coffee.” It insists on thirty-odd variations before you reach the door: espresso, ristretto, lungo, flat white, cortado, affogato, cold brew, nitro. And that is just the front end. Behind the counter lurk Arabica and Robusta, spoken of as rival football teams. There are tasting notes. Chocolate. Citrus. Stone fruit. Hints of regret.

And just when you think you have grasped the situation, someone whispers: there are beans that have passed through a cat.

Kopi Luwak. The Asian palm civet eats the coffee cherries, digests the fruit, and passes the beans. They are then collected, washed, roasted, and served to people like me. I first had it in Bali, sceptical and mildly horrified. It was extraordinary. Smooth, almost syrupy, with none of the bitterness I deserved. I have sourced it wherever possible since. Make of that what you will.

Couple from Kopi Langit Bali with their coffee range, Bali — where the Kopi Luwak education
Kopi Langit Bali. The beans were extraordinary. The education was free.

My first purchase was from a couple in Bali. They sold me the beans and threw in an education I had not budgeted for. They explained processing methods, drying times, and the difference between wild-harvested and farmed civet with the patience of people who genuinely loved what they were doing. I left with more coffee than I could carry and significantly less confidence than I had arrived with.

Then I wandered into a specialty café. It was not merely a place that served coffee. It was a temple. Baristas moved with the quiet assurance of neurosurgeons. There were championships. Yes, championships. People compete at making coffee. There are judges, points awarded for crema, and somewhere, I suspect, slow-motion replay.

Coffee, I discovered, is not a beverage. It is a civilisation.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect in a Tumbler

The less you know about something, the more qualified you feel. Beginners are condemned to confidence. I had consumed coffee daily for decades before I understood I knew nothing about it. The peak of Mount Stupid, as psychologists call it, has a magnificent view.

Coffee crossed continents before it reached your cup — from an Ethiopian goat herder through Yemen and the Ottoman Empire to the coffee houses of London, where one cup bought you a chair and the right to argue with strangers about everything.

Today, for the exorbitant price of an Americano in Mumbai, you get poor coffee, the Wi-Fi password, and access to the toilet.

The people who know coffee best are uniformly humble. Coffee taught me why. Every door you open reveals three more. The domain you think you have mastered is merely the room you are standing in. I once watched a man at a roadside kaapi kadai in Tamil Nadu who had clearly stopped thinking about coffee altogether. That is what mastery looks like from the outside.

Back to the Tumbler

My mother still pours her kaapi from height, cooling it with a practised hand. Smooth arc. No tasting notes. No championship ambitions.

I still think it is unbeatable.

But now, when a barista reels off a menu of ristretto, lungo, flat white, cortado, cold brew, and something called a nitro coffee, I do not panic. I nod gravely, as though I have always known.

Then I look it up, quietly, before anyone notices.

Avvaiyar would understand. I suspect she would also help herself to the coffee.

Abstract patterns in wet beach sand at Alibaug, Maharashtra, photographed from above.

The Man Who Planned His Own Ending

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On 26 March 2024, Daniel Kahneman sent an email to his closest friends. It was, by all accounts, a very Kahneman sort of email: precise, warm, entirely devoid of self-pity, and probably the most carefully considered goodbye letter in the history of modern psychology.

He told them he was on his way to Switzerland. He would not be coming back. He was ninety, his kidneys were failing, the mental lapses were increasing. “It is time to go,” he wrote. The next day, he died by assisted suicide in Zurich.

The week before, he had been in Paris with his family. They walked for hours, went to museums, ate soufflés and chocolate mousse. He wrote in the mornings. The evenings were for people he loved.

Philip Tetlock, a psychologist and old friend, said afterward: “I have never seen a better-planned death than the one Danny designed.”

If you have not heard of Kahneman, here is the short version. He was a psychologist who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002, which is either a comment on the breadth of his thinking or on the narrowness of economics, possibly both.

His book Thinking, Fast and Slow, published in 2011, became one of those rare works that quietly rearranges how you see yourself. It sold millions. It deserved to. For me, he has been a north star. how we misread our own experience, how we are wrong in entirely predictable ways, has shaped how I think about almost everything. Losing him felt, in a way that is difficult to explain, like losing a teacher I never met.

The Man Who Understood How Memory Works

Kahneman spent his career proving that humans are bad at understanding their own experience. His most important finding was the distinction between the experiencing self, the one living through each moment, and the remembering self, the one who files the story away afterward. They are not the same person and they want different things.

Duration barely registers in memory. We judge an experience by its peak intensity and its ending. A holiday that ends with lost luggage is a bad holiday, regardless of the ten days of sunshine before it. A painful medical procedure that ends gently is remembered as less bad than a shorter one that ends badly. Kahneman called this the peak-end rule. He found it held not just for holidays but for entire lifetimes.

He had watched his mother decline into cognitive deterioration. He had watched his wife, Anne Treisman, die after years of vascular dementia. He had spent decades, in other words, studying the ending he did not want. So he did not wait for it. He applied his own research to his own life and, as one friend noted, “created a happy ending to a ninety-year life, in keeping with his peak-end rule.”

Meanwhile, in Silicon Valley

While Kahneman was eating soufflés in Paris, Bryan Johnson was monitoring his nighttime erections.

Johnson, 48, spends $2 million a year to reverse his biological age. He tracks over a hundred biomarkers, follows a strict vegan diet, sleeps at the same time every night, and has recently launched a programme called Immortals, offering three clients his exact anti-ageing protocol for $1 million a year each. His movement is called Don’t Die. He means it.

The longevity industry attracted nearly $8.5 billion in investment in 2024. Some of that money is funding genuinely interesting science. Some of it is funding Bryan Johnson, who spent a period receiving blood transfusions from his teenage son. If kids I know were his son, he would have some difficult questions.

One Species, Doing the Maths

Sometime ago, as strong black coffee woke me up, I read a mind-numbing statistic. One in five butterflies across the US has vanished since 2000. Insects vanish globally at one per cent every year.

From ten thousand kilometres away, the picture assembles itself without much effort. One species is spending billions to extend its tenure on earth indefinitely. Every other species is spending its last reserves simply trying to survive that one.

But I digress.

A Happy Ending

In his final letter, Kahneman wrote: “I discovered after making the decision that I am not afraid of not existing, and that I think of death as going to sleep and not waking up. So if you were inclined to be sorry for me, don’t be.”

He had been working on research papers the week he died. When asked what he would most like to do, near the end, he said he would like to learn something.

In the end, he did not ask for more time. He asked for a good ending. Soufflés in Paris, the childhood playground, the people he loved in the evenings. Then he left, on his own terms, while he still could.

Two years since he left, that was the clearest thinking he ever did.

Raked sand bunker with concentric circles, a visual metaphor for attention and focus.

Pay Attention

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A teacher I had in Madurai had one instruction. Delivered daily. With the confidence of someone announcing a natural law.

Pay attention.

I paid. Mostly because she was terrifying.

It took forty years to notice the instruction was strange. You pay taxes. You pay rent. You pay for mistakes you didn’t entirely make. Attention, apparently, belongs in that list.

Seventeen browser tabs later

A few months ago, I was reading Steven Pinker. Something about language and how it shapes thought. A small question snagged. Why pay? I looked it up. Then something else. Then it was an hour later and I had seventeen browser tabs open and a strong opinion about German.

Here is what I found.

English is the only major language that treats attention as a transaction.

In German, you gift it. Freely. No invoice.

In Irish, you bring it somewhere, like a person arriving with something tucked under their arm.

In Japanese and Chinese, you pour your mind into something. Slow, deliberate.

In Arabic, the root of the word means to wake up. To attend to something is to be alive to it.

And then there is English. Where attention is currency, the mind is a wallet, and a classroom in Madurai is apparently a debt collection agency.

Lakoff and Johnson wrote a book called Metaphors We Live By. The argument, simplified badly, is that metaphors are not decoration. They are the architecture. The way you phrase something tells you what the thing actually is, in the mind of the person speaking.

Which is worth sitting with for a moment

The bill, and what it assumes

If attention is something you pay, it can be paid reluctantly. Dutifully. Resentfully. You can pay attention to a meeting you hate, a speech going nowhere, a relative explaining their knee surgery in considerable detail. Obligation discharged. Ledger balanced.

If attention is something you bring, that changes. You had to decide to carry it.

If attention is waking up, reluctant attention barely makes sense. Either you’re awake or you’re not.

In Tamil, the word is kavanam. From a root meaning to watch over something carefully. Almost protectively. Less a school instruction, more something you’d say to someone you trusted with something precious.

My teacher never said it that way. She had twenty three children and a chalk duster she was not afraid to use.

But I have been thinking about her instruction ever since. About what it asked for, and what it quietly assumed. That attention was a cost. That a child in a classroom in Madurai had a payment to make.

The metaphor you grow up with becomes the instruction you carry. It tells you what you owe, and to whom, before you are old enough to question it.

Decades later, I am still paying.

Though I’m no longer entirely sure to whom.

Two parasailers over a blue lake with snow-capped mountains in the background, towed by a speedboat

Are you happy yet?

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They gave happiness a day. Not a month. Not a year. A day. Yesterday, to be precise. Whoever decided this was being more honest than they perhaps intended. Today is a different problem.

I have spent a considerable part of my adult life trying to attain happiness. I approached it the way most of us do.

First, through acquisition.

Better job. Better city. Better car. The list goes on. Phone. Bag. Shoe. And so on. Nothing explains it better than my shaving razor. My dad got me started with his single blade Wilkinson Sword. I have lived to see it progress steadily, and the one I have now has six blades. My dad would have laughed. I am not sure my face is better off for it.

Each upgrade arrived with the quiet promise that this was the one. Happiness showed up, signed the register, and left before breakfast. So I upgraded again. Happiness came back, stayed a little longer, left anyway. Buying my way to happiness has not helped.

I have tried the other route as well.

When I become a manager, I will be happy. Once the housewarming is done. When the home loan is repaid. When I get married. When the kid gets into a good college.

And so on, in perpetual deferral, each destination promising to be the one where happiness finally unpacks and stays. It doesn’t. It was always just passing through. I kept buying the ticket anyway, earning the loyalty points, and using them to fly back and do it all again.

Psychologists call this the arrival fallacy. It is not a flattering name.

The World Happiness Report

The World Happiness Report arrived, as it does every year on World Happiness Day, with the usual suspects at the top. Finland, for the eighth consecutive year. Denmark. Iceland.

The Scandinavians, doing whatever it is they do in the dark and the cold that the rest of us cannot manage in the sun. India came in at 118th out of 147 countries. We have moved up from 126th last year, which is progress, and I am sure someone has already denounced the report and submitted real data, or quoted the Rig Veda, or both.

This year the report looked at social media. The conclusions were not cheerful. The more we scroll, the worse we feel. Somewhere between the highlight reels and the carefully filtered holidays, we have decided that everyone else is living better. They are not. They are just better at cropping.

Here is what the science says

And it has been saying this for a while, quietly, in journals nobody reads. Happiness lives in real experience. In wonder. In curiosity. Relationships. In conversations that go longer than planned. In the wrestling match with a hard problem and the particular satisfaction when something finally gives. In the state where you are working on something and before you know it an hour has gone.

In a filter kaapi that arrives at exactly the right temperature. In conversations with strangers. In kindness. In generosity. In gratitude. In ordinary moments that ask nothing of you except to be present for them.

Not in the object. In the moment around the object, before it arrived and the wanting stopped. We know this, most of us, somewhere in the back of the mind where inconvenient truths are stored alongside gym membership intentions and unread books about living better.

Go back to being a child

This year I have been trying. Refresh. Slower. More deliberate. Renewing myself to what actually matters. It is harder than it sounds. But I am on it.

Phone less. Wonder more. Laugh at things that are not that funny. Talk to somebody, not at them. Ask a stranger how they are and wait for the actual answer. Be curious about things with no return on investment. Be generous without calculating the exchange rate.

A hundred studies. A dozen reports. Several thousand years of philosophy. All pointing to the same postcode. It is not complicated. It is just inconvenient. A soulful tune nobody can hear over the sale notifications.

As I write this, a friend texts asking if I know when the iPhone flip is coming. Does anyone have a kidney to spare?