Hi, I'm Bhuvan

The always-excellent John Burn-Murdoch at the Financial Times has published a revealing piece with data showing that young people are becoming less conscientious, less outgoing, and less trustworthy—while also becoming more neurotic and more argumentative.

In the article, Burn-Murdoch tentatively points to smartphones, digital technologies, and the abundance of easy distractions as likely culprits.

Digging deeper into the data, which comes from the Understanding America Study, we can see that people in their twenties and thirties in particular report feeling increasingly easily distracted and careless, less tenacious and less likely to make and deliver on commitments.

While a full explanation of these shifts requires thorough investigation, and there will be many factors at work, smartphones and streaming services seem likely culprits. The advent of ubiquitous and hyper-engaging digital media has led to an explosion in distraction, as well as making it easier than ever to either not make plans in the first place or to abandon them. The sheer convenience of the online world makes real-life commitments feel messy and effortful. And the rise of time spent online and the attendant decline in face-to-face interactions enable behaviours such as “ghosting”.

I’m a little hesitant to attribute all, or even a large part, of this depressing and worrying shift in people’s attitudes to digital technologies and smartphones—although I think they play a significant role. I suspect there are social, psychological, economic, and perhaps even spiritual dimensions to this.

Whenever people talk about the meaning crisis, I think this is, in essence, what they are referring to. It’s an area I’ve been trying to come to terms with, but I don’t yet have a clear enough understanding to articulate it fully.

The awesome Derek Thompson has been writing and speaking to experts on what smartphones are doing to us for a long time. So I went to his Twitter account and searched for "smartphone" and found some cool insights:

Technology-induced anxiety...

I didn't know that hybridization in plants and animals can lead to sterility in many cases. Well-known examples include the mule (a cross between a horse and a donkey) and ligers (a lion-tiger hybrid). But sometimes these chance encounters can lead to remarkable evolutionary innovations like potatoes.

Apparently, on a bright sunny day 8-9 million years ago, the roots of a tomato plant and a flowering plant called Etuberosum touched for the first time. This was no ordinary encounter. Normally, tomato plants wouldn't find other plants that attractive, but today something was different. There was erotic love in the air, or rather, in the soil.

One thing led to another, and soon, the tomato plant and Etuberosum were engaging in furious underground sex. Fast forward some years, they had a baby that was unlike anything the world had seen before—they called their new child "potato." Fast forward more decades and centuries, and the potato family grew, and today there are 107 wild potato species.

Solanum etuberosum

Why was this love story special?

In most hybrid love stories, the offspring are biologically neutered—they can't have babies, but the potato was different. The tomato ancestors of potatoes made fruits above the ground, while the Etuberosum ancestors made underground stems. Potatoes inherited the right genes that allowed them to form tubers, or those underground organs that allow them to store nutrients.

So the next time you dip fries in tomato ketchup, you are engaging in an act of cannibalism.

From this fun article in The Atlantic:

Knapp and her colleagues have found in a new study, appears to be the case for the world’s third-most important staple crop: The 8-to-9-million-year-old lineage that begat the modern potato may have arisen from a chance encounter between a flowering plant from a group called Etuberosum and … an ancient tomato.

Tomatoes, in other words, can now justifiably be described as the mother of potatoes. The plant...

Reflections from 500 Pages into War and Peace

At the beginning of this year, I started reading War and Peace thanks to this post. This is my first proper literary classic, and I was intimidated—it’s a massive 1300-page novel. At that size, it’s more of a doorstopper, a blunt-force murder weapon, a budget-friendly bullet shield, or an effective paperweight—certainly less of a “novel” and more of a commitment.

I was also anxious that it would be too dense for my feeble brain. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Contrary to public perception, the novel is easy to read, enjoyable, and gripping. The best way I can describe it is as the most searing and brutal portrait of life. Because of the novel’s length, the characters are deeply fleshed out, and their psychological insides are laid bare. Tolstoy subjects them to the full spectrum of the human experience—love, loss, grief, doubt, gluttony, boredom, epiphany, and assorted existential crises.

Before I began, I came across a review—I forget where—that said the book is filled with philosophical digressions, and they were “annoying.” That stuck with me, probably because I had just started exploring philosophy myself. But after reading 500 pages, I can confidently say that these reflections—on love, faith, duty, honor, the meaning of life—are my favorite part. They’re dense, nuanced, and quietly brilliant.

One of the most underappreciated aspects of the novel is how it forces you to interrogate your own philosophy of life.

Here's on such philosophical reflection.

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From Book Six: 1808–10, Chapter I:

“How pleasant it is, your excellency!” he said with a respectful smile.

“What?”

“It’s pleasant, your excellency!”

“What is he talking about?” thought Prince Andrew. “Oh, the spring, I suppose,” he thought as he turned round. “Yes, really everything is green already... How early! The birches and cherry and alders too are coming out... But the oaks show no sign yet. Ah, here is...

I just finished watching The Theory of Everything, a biographical drama about the life of the famed theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking. It follows how Hawking finds love and battles adversity as he slowly becomes paralysed after being diagnosed with motor neurone disease. He was given two years to live after his diagnosis, but he defied the odds and lived for another 50 years, passing away at the age of 76.

The movie is light on science and heavy on the emotional toll that Hawking’s condition takes on his wife, Jane Wilde. It’s a beautiful, feel-good film. The highlight, of course, is Eddie Redmayne’s stunning performance. That’s not to say Felicity Jones, who plays Jane, is any less brilliant.

One of my favorite parts of the movie comes toward the end, when Stephen Hawking is asked about his philosophy of life. His answer is devastatingly beautiful with echoes of Carl Sagan.

Guest: You have said you do not believein God. Do you have a philosophy of life that helps you?

Stephen Hawking: It is clear that we are just an advanced breed of primates on a minor planet orbiting around a very average star, in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies. BUT, ever since the dawn of civilization people have craved for an understanding of the underlying order of the world. There ought to be something very special about the boundary conditions of the universe. And what can be more special than that there is no boundary? And there should be no boundary to human endeavor. We are all different. However bad life may seem, there is always something you can do, and succeed at. While there is life, there is hope.

So I read through the poem. And it's brilliant. The poem is basically a father's advice to his son on how to be a man. And I mean, as far as advice goes, it's pretty good. Of course, the thing about advice is that you can't generalize it. And sure, you can nitpick this or that. But I think you can do a lot worse than following the advice Rudyard Kipling gives.

Here’s the full poem, in case you’ve never read it or need a refresher:

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If—

by Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and...

A few good links.

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Kevin Munger on Anti-Mimetics

I always enjoy, although frustratingly so, reading Kevin Munger, who is probably one of the most interesting thinkers on all things media. I don't always understand half of what he says because it's often deeply technical, and I don't come from a media studies background. But I make it a point to read his work because it's phenomenally thoughtful. This post on anti-mimetics was delightful. I'm still processing it, but here's an excerpt that stood out:

Humans are quite plastic; our sensory apparatus changes based on the communication environment in which we are raised. But we're not infinitely plastic. The information-density frontier must involve all of our senses, telling us something about what the human is, what evolution has designed us for. When are our senses most heightened? When the stakes are high and we are physically engaged with many other people. Team sports. The high school dance. The street protest. The memes in these context are physical processes using all of our sensory inputs to react to the behaviors of many other people simultaneously.

So, The Poster is correct that the meme is (potentially) the densest form of communication within the degraded artificial space of a feed-based social media platform. But these platforms' antimemes are the embodied, social processes that cannot be encoded as digital media, and they are far more information dense than anything that happen on a screen.

Note: What are Memes and Antimemes?

To understand what Kevin Munger is getting at, it helps to clarify two key terms he's playing with: memes and antimemes:

A meme—in its original sense—is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person, like a cultural gene. In the internet age, memes have become bite-sized units of communication: an image, a phrase, a remix, a trend. They travel fast, mutate easily, and carry meaning in compact form. In Munger's words, they're "the...