On Dressing Well, Taking Photos, and Refusing to Apologize for Trying
Jumping late onto to the Propaganda I am not falling for trend
Propaganda I am not falling for was a trend that started in the hip-hop Twitter1 where the user piinkcity said that they will not jump on the bandwagon of hating Doechii, SZA or Tyler. Since then it spread across the internet and different communities did different things with this trend.
I am familiar with the version of people telling ideas or concepts they believed or took for granted, as the society peddled them, which they no longer believe. I am late to jump on this trend, so let’s go
Dressing Well is for losers
For the longest time in my life, I didn’t dress well. I hated going shopping for cloths, I hated going to the trial room and I hated the fact I can’t wear a t-shirt to weddings. And that is what our media reinforces, the tech bro entrepreneur who doesn’t have the time to dress well. The outstanding scientist who just doesn’t care about social norms. The disruptors who only wear the same outfit every day.
A lot of it changed after Suits. One of the things I learnt from Suits is that one needs to dress well, people respond to how you are dressed. I am not proposing people buy new fashion every week or spend hours getting dressed. I just suggest that looking presentable, approachable and serious is essential.
First impressions last and if you start behind a the 8 ball, you are not getting in front. - Harvey Specter
So do you wear a three piece Suit everywhere? Hell no. Not even Harvey does that. You dress for the environment. 2
Another fashion thing one can learn from Suits (and the designers backstage), is choosing homegrown brands as they understand the kind of fabric and design that works in the lifestyle and weather (of the audience they cater to) and usually have better quality than fast fashion. Also, these companies usually are much more ethical and if we have to learn anything from Suits, ethics make a person.
Being Too Cool to Take Photos and Selfies
This point is being copied from my mother (who doesn’t have anywhere I can link to) as well as Nona Uppal.
There have now been too many events I have organised or been a part of, that I don’t have a single photo of. And I want to have photos of these things, if not to show other people, then to see myself. 20-30 years down the line. I want to look at the quizzes I conducted, the competitions I participated in and the places I went to.
Being, looking, feeling cute does really add to life. As stated above, I make some effort with respect to my looks and I should have something to show for it. I am no longer going to fall for the propaganda that it is somehow “cooler” or more authentic to be “too busy having fun” to stop for a picture, or that taking a selfie is inherently some vapid act of narcissism. I just want to be able to have memories and moments to share and look back at. Future me deserves to remember what present me looked and felt like, and I refuse to let some arbitrary sense of being “too cool” rob me of that.
Some days I take grumpy photos, other days it looks like a cloud of happiness burst on me, other days I try very hard to look hot and sexy and stylish as that is what being young is about (to some extent) and other times I just take them to remember some moment.
Drinking with Friends
Again, I’ll blame the media for this. In any coming of age film or show, we always have scenes of the friends drinking together and then doing stupid shit or having some drunken heart to heart and it is ‘the magic of youth’.
I refuse to do that. To clarify, I am okay doing stupid shit and having personal conversations. I just refuse to be drunk. The reasoning is very simple these things are psychedelics. They modify your brain chemistry, atleast momentarily. And now, suddenly, you are doing things you wouldn’t be doing otherwise. While this is great to open up with friends and break ice and all, you know what else it causes, periods of time where you don’t know what you did, why you did it and the only the only proof you did it is other people telling / showing you. That sounds straight out of a psychological horror novel, wait, it is literally a plot point in Jekyll and Hyde.
The second reason is something Brennan Lee Mulligan had shared in the Gianmarco Sorisi’s podcast. The pros of drinking and drugs is that it is fun, there will be fun times. The con is If you have 7-10 friends who drink, smoke or do drugs; 10 years down the line, one of them will vanish and every time you mention them or think of them, it will be sad. The only case that it is not sad, is if you are someplace such that you would not be able to be there when you all meet again.
Again, I don’t mind people drinking. I just refuse to partake in it.
Monetize Everything
This came from some self help book. "What is your salary? Now divide it by the minutes you work. That is your cost per minute. Should you be wasting it on doing things that don’t help you get ahead?
This is one of the dumbest thing I have ever heard. Because by this metric, every passion project, every gift, every celebration, every hangout is not worth it. This idea just feeds into the same hustle culture or capitalism stuff which I am tired of.
I cook complicated and tasty food as it gives me joy (and tasty food). I made cute stickers for the Haskell course as I wanted to (and there are some pedological reasoning which I will surely discuss sometime). I made a matchmaking algorithm because I found the Stanford Marriage pact cool and wanted to do something like that but for best friends.
This newsletter is something I write for no monetary benefit, but that by no means makes it useless. If I were to monetize it, I would need to become regular and maybe provide perks for the paying subscribers and think about anything that may make people unsubscribe and what not; I don’t want to do either. I want to write when inspiration strikes and I want to write whats on my mind.
One idea I sometimes use in this regard is called ‘total utility created’. By spending 4 hours making questions for a pub quiz and 2 hours conducting it, I create atleast 2 hours of fun for 30 people. So I created 60 hours of fun in 6 hours, that a 10:1 return on time. And that if they forget about everything the moment the leave the door, if they learnt anything new which they ever use anywhere, the return get’s better.
Same way, This post took me about 3-4 hours to write, well if only 12-16 people read it and enjoy it or get something from it, I have made my return and this post will be online for a very, very long time (let alone people who read parts of it or quotes from it along with the additional utility if following some of this advice makes someone’s life teeny tiny bit better).
Never Risk Failure
This is something most Indian kids will grow up with. If it has a chance to fail, don’t do it. Because failure is bad and if you fail, everyone will judge you and think lesser of you.
While there will always exist people who will never try anything and judge everyone else who does, I am happier knowing that I tried. Anything worth doing, has a risk of faliure and if we keep avoiding it, we are not gonna do anything worthwhile.
The worst kind of people are those who look at someone who is excited about something and, like a vampire, suck their joy in doing so by making them feel stupid and that it will probably fail. In my experience, these people are never mighty successful anyway because they drain their own enthusiasm for everything and keep walking the ‘usual’ path and then keep blaming the world for why they turned out average. Don’t listen to these people (and for god’s sake, don’t be one of them).
Self Promoting is wrong
I am a talkative person. I talk a lot and can talk about a lot of things. So some school teachers, to shut me up decided to say: “Empty vessels make the most noise”
This to some level is demoralizing. My personal hall of heroes is made up of people who shared knowledge with everyone. One of the reasons that human kind is more developed than every other species on this planet is the fact we can communicate clearly. How would this world work if we all just sat down with all our knowledge and never shared it, unless asked. As no one is speaking up, nobody would know who to ask about what.
In Mahabharat, one of the Panadava, Sahadeva is blessed with wisdom so divine he could have prevented the entire war and all the atrocities leading to it. So why didn’t he? As early on in his life, he is convinced to never provide answers unless explicitly asked and not to show this knowledge off. Nobody other than a few minor characters ever figure out about Sahadeva’s gift. The war happens.
I believe that this is a cautionary tale. If everyone decides to only answer when asked, and never make it known that they have opinions or knowledge or ideas; unfortunate things will happen.
This eventually led to the fact that I started telling about this newsletter explicitly after more than 3 years of it existing. If it is good, people will discover it ‘organically’ is just propaganda and I am not falling for it. So in a very unsubtle manner: heart this post, comment something (nice) and subscribe.
Not Following People on Insta
I got this idea from this channel I used to follow back in the day with the name something along ‘hustle school’ (in my defense, I was a kid and also, it was not some red pill channel, it was more of hustle grindset thing).
They planted this idea in my mind that you should only follow at most 10 Instagram accounts who add value and knowledge to your life. If you find a 11th, get rid of someone else, only 10. I did that till grade 11.
If you think about it, it makes no sense. Social media is to be in touch with school friends, to know what cool stuff they are upto or if they need some help, it is to know more about the world: whether it be knowledge, news, opinions, recommendations or fun facts which I will use in the next quiz I set; but it is also for following people you find cute and looking at their pics (which in my case often come with book/movie recommendations).
Following my friends/classmates on Insta adds small amounts of happiness (in form of stories and posts) to otherwise an increasingly bleak and sad world. I hope my occasional story does the same for someone else.
Having a Niche
A common theme in propaganda I fell for is productivity stuff. This one was peddled by teachers (especially Kalra sir from Badal, iykyk) “Jack of All, Master of None” and Fedrer is a champion as he did only tennis, not 10 sports and Nobel Laurettes work in one field etc.
Buddy, Human beings are complex. It makes no sense that we can reduce people to a single clean compartment. No, not even sportspeople are singular focused. Cross training has been a thing for quite a lot of time and has been proven very effective. Tennis players routinely train in Basketball, Soccer and Baseball for obvious reasons. A lot of Chess players train in track running, Basketball and sometimes Yoga or Gymnastics (I have even heard wrestling. Wait, aren’t a bunch of Chess people also decently trained in boxing, to the point that Chess Boxing is an actual sport).
Yes, all the training and dipping toes in other sports are in service of one goal, but by the concept of having a niche/expertise, they should not even spend a moment becoming ‘jacks’ in these things; just focus on becoming ‘master’ of one thing.
Similarly, A lot of academics do things outside their field. Willard Libby, a Chemistry Nobel Laureates who have contribute significantly to Archeology; Noam Chomsky was a formal linguist and a political scientist; Alan Turing contributed in Math and CS aswell as in Biology. And this list goes on and on.3 It’s a literal stereotype that every mathematician does rock climbing.
Have you noticed that when you learn a word, you suddenly start noticing it more often? That is called the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon. This is true for skills as well, as soon as you learn something, you will notice more and more places to use it. Ever since I did my reading project in voting theory, I have been seeing a lot of it everywhere (and places where it should have been obvious).
This why generalists beat specialists every day of the week and twice on Sundays; it’s just a bigger knowledge pool leading to them having a better ideas, having more tricks up their sleeves and finding inspiration more easily.
After all, the complete saying is:
“A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one”
So why have a niche? Just learn and share cool stuff. After all everything I do will always be covered under a trivial niche: Things I do.
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” ― Robert A. Heinlein
AI can do somethings well
My disdain for AI is nothing new. However, in a moment of weakness (aka burnout due to other factors), I was fell for the propoganda and decided to use it for certain things to reduce my workload and was convinced that it was doing some things well. It wasn’t. I would like to thank Shubh Sharma for pointing this one out.
AI can’t do anything worthwhile well. It really can’t. Using it for a presentation was perhaps one of the dumbest mistakes I could make as it made me look like I didn’t know my stuff. And while I don’t usually care of what people think, these things are really a bad look (and a prof I admire was planning to come to this talk, he, in retrospect luckily, didn’t come as some work came up).
I had made a presentation (which was way, way too long), I just used AI to cut parts out, re-write it as bullet points and make it more ‘conversational’ as I was tired and lazy and didn’t want to kill my darling slides. That was a bad idea and hurt my content.
Same with any writing I have ever used AI for. It does a bad job and through sycophantic flattery convinces me that it’s not that bad. It can’t even name things, let alone write about them. I had used AI to name a few things for a DnD game; it named two political houses ‘Vaelor’ and ‘Valora’. That just caused confusion and would never happen if I made the names manually.
The only things AI does decently is doing tasks that are just menial labour. Any amount of freedom to be creative or make discretions given to it will bite one in the backside. So if and when I do my matching theory seminar this semester, I am making the slides myself because I know my shit and I am not letting a chat-bot make it seem like I don’t.4
I shall not refer to it as X because that’s a stupid name by a stupid person.
For me, that looks like wearing an ironed shirt or kurta with jeans to class and clean, non-stinky tees and shorts elsewhere. I also normally wear a watch as I think it adds to the look.
Similar to most characters on Suits, I wear the same watch everyday. While the designers of Suits did this to tie in all the looks and as most people have a signature time piece; I personally haven’t given my watch too much thought, other than the choice to have one at all times. My last watch was stolen/lost during an exam (we deposited it at the gate, someone else took it) and the new one is comfortable and decently nice looking, I refuse to ever wear a smart watch, my reasons are pretty much the ones outlined here.
Dear Kalra sir, I don’t care if you disagree with this or think you are not as smart or talented as any of the people you mentioned. You don’t know shit about teaching, giving advice or me. My literal research interests run on the fact that I refused to mug up Social Science as it will never be used in future and also as I biology and math in my grade 11-12. You are mark focused, shallow, biased and frankly, terrible teacher/person.
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this hit home surprisingly hard...
even if only 12-16 people read your newsletter, i am happy to be one of them :)