Mehul Kamdar

Mehul Kamdar

Data scientist, developer, writer, bibliophile.

Favourite links

Some of my all time favourites:

  • Joseph Brodsky on boredom. Joseph Brodsky, the Russian-American Nobel laureate, gives us a classic Russian masterpiece. I find it funny that this was the commencement speech to Dartmouth graduates in 1995 (and subsequently published in Harper’s Magazine).

“When hit by boredom, let yourself be crushed by it: submerge, hit bottom. In general, with things unpleasant, the rule is: The sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface. The idea here is to exact a full look at the worst. The reason boredom deserves such scrutiny is that it represents pure, undiluted time in all its repetitive, redundant, monotonous splendour….

For boredom speaks the language of time, and it teaches you the most valuable lesson of your life: the lesson of your utter insignificance….

Try to embrace, or let yourself be embraced by, boredom and anguish, which are larger than you anyhow….

This awful bear bug is no mistake. Nothing that disturbs you ever is.”

“One of the obstacles is the demand that we be happy and enjoy our lives. I think it’s a huge distraction and it’s very very undermining I think. So living in a quasi-hedonistic culture I think is a big problem. It’s a problem because…in the old days, whenever that was, there was an internal injunction to be good. Now the injunction is to be happy, or to be enjoying yourself.

And the reason this is a distraction is because life is also painful. In other words, and it’s a very simple thing, and its very obvious, and this starts in childhood, which is that if somebody can satisfy you they can also frustrate you. This is ineluctable. It is structural; it’s never going to change. This means that everybody has to deal with ambivalence. They’re going to have to deal with the fact that they love and hate the person they love and hate.

What we’re continuously being sold possibilities for pleasure one way or another. As though all we want to do is to get rid of the pain and increase the pleasure. I think this is a very impoverished view of what a life is, even though every life must involve trying to do something with the pain and having pleasure. But there’s a difference between evacuating pain and frustration, and modifying it. And what we’re starved of now is frustration. There isn’t a really powerful account of the value of the state of frustration. It’s as though we’re phobic of frustration. So the moment there is a feeling of frustration it’s got to be filled with something. It’s a bit like the mother who overfeeds her child. She does that to stop the child having appetite. Because the appetite is so frightening. Now it seems to me that there is an attempt to foreclose appetite. And that means foreclose people’s capacity to think about what is really missing in their lives, what they might want, and what they might do about getting it.

Fantasies of satisfaction are saboteurs of pleasure. One of the things we need to have conversations about is the nature of satisfaction - what do we really want, what really gives us pleasure, what kind of pleasures do we want. And again, this would seem to me to be about cultural consensus, about people putting ideas out into the culture, or there might be plays or dances or all sorts of things, which give us pictures of ways of being that we might aspire to or love or like or admire or emulate. And that’s a very good thing for a culture to do.

I think we need better enticements to adulthood that are not about becoming omnipotent, omniscient, having all the girls, all the money, because this is all trivial and childish. We need better pictures of satisfaction that have more to do with an adult sense of the way the world is. But adulthood has got a really bad press. And for some reason children are idealized, and I think they are idealized because they are not adults. It’s a symptom of real despair in the culture - idealizing children. What it really says is: being an adult is a disaster. But it’s going to be the best period of your life. Being a child is terrible in many ways, because you are so helpless. There’s so little you can do.

I think that it would be possible to have pictures of good lives that are not set up to make one fail. So that a more realistic idea, as opposed to an ideal, would be one that is genuinely attainable. So, if a five year old boy says to you: I want to be an astronaut. You don’t say: no, no, you’re a five year old child. You say: that’s a great idea. If an adult says to you that I want to be an astronaut, you say, are you going to be able to do that and how are you going to do it? In other words, we’d be talking about fictions rather than ideals. We’d be talking about ideas that are more or less transformable rather than ideals which are things you have to comply with. Seems to me that ideals very often create fight-or-flight. Either you run away from it and get rid of it and use another one, or you comply with it, or you battle with it. I would be interested in people producing fictions that are discussable, that are realistically possible rather than humiliating. Because the other thing about cultural ideals is they’re set up to humiliate us. So the fictions would be non-diminishing. They would be genuinely possible but they would keep alive the idea that we don’t know who we might become. And that who we want to be is very important.”

It must, I think, be admitted that the evils of the world are due to moral defects quite as much as to lack of intelligence. But the human race has not hitherto discovered any method of eradicating moral defects; preaching and exhortation only add hypocrisy to the previous list of vices. Intelligence, on the contrary, is easily improved by methods known to every competent educator. Therefore, until some method of teaching virtue has been discovered, progress will have to be sought by improvement of intelligence rather than of morals. One of the chief obstacles to intelligence is credulity, and credulity could be enormously diminished by instruction as to the prevalent forms of mendacity. Credulity is a greater evil in the present day than it ever was before, because, owing to the growth of education, it is much easier than it used to be to spread misinformation, and, owing to democracy, the spread of misinformation is more important than in former times to the holders of power. Hence the increase in the circulation of newspapers.

In America, which is the most advanced country industrially, and to a lesser extent in other countries which are approximating to the American condition, it is necessary for the average citizen, if he wishes to make a living, to avoid incurring the hostility of certain big men. And these big men have an outlook—religious, moral, and political—with which they expect their employees to agree, at least outwardly. A man who openly dissents from Christianity, or believes in a relaxation of the marriage laws, or objects to the power of the great corporations, finds America a very uncomfortable country, unless he happens to be an eminent writer. Exactly the same kind of restraints upon freedom of thought are bound to occur in every country where economic organization has been carried to the point of practical monopoly. Therefore the safeguarding of liberty in the world which is growing up is far more difficult than it was in the nineteenth century, when free competition was still a reality. Whoever cares about the freedom of the mind must face this situation fully and frankly, realizing the inapplicability of methods which answered well enough while industrialism was in its infancy.

  • Dude, you broke the future! by Charlie Stross. You are concerned that the singularity is coming, that the AIs will rule us all. But an AI already rules us all - it is called the corporation.

Interesting blogs / websites: