PART C — WHAT DOES YOUR IDEAL LIFE LOOK LIKE?

The 4C’s — Connections/Collaborations, Curiosities, Certainties and Complexity.

This is not a Tony Robbins motivational seminar; there are no quotes from the Bible, nor promises of mega yachts. This is not about being at the right tail end of the normal distribution of all Humans (I.e. not Tom Cruise or Martin Luther King Jr. or Elon Musk).

This is about finding your happy while being comfortable with the notion of being ‘about average’[vii].

A part of your ideal life will have (assuming no psychopathy) connections: collaborators, friends, lovers, and family.

You can’t choose your family; you may have been blessed with a great one, you may have made peace with a bad one, or you may have awarded yourself the luxury of the worst of both worlds. Further, you may possess stellar self-awareness and human communication skills which enable/ have enabled you to transform a bad one into a good one, a good one into a better one and so on. Also, you may think it worthwhile to devote substantial resources to mending your relationship with your family, at the cost of much else; then, technically, this becomes the major “project” or your life and becomes the “work”.

For friends and lovers, you may have great social skills, learnt from your parents and their interactions with their friends, learnt from your own life experience, or from taking online social skill courses. If you believe relationships are what give your life the most meaning then this becomes your life’s “work”[viii]. (For Ex. Neil Strauss — who wrote The Game)

Reading and looking at most of the world’s great innovations, you will see that there has always been an amount of collaboration involved. And that these collaborations have been a chance encounter. (Think Lennon and McCartney or even Jobs and Wozniak).

For me, the happiest I have been was during my undergraduate degree, where I found (stumbled upon) 3 friends who constantly challenged me positively.

Roughly 70% of all jobs are landed through knowing someone who knows someone (a second-degree connection). A job significantly changes someone’s life, and as the statistics show — it just happens.

For love and finding someone you get married to, a similar story comes forward. “I met Kevin’s father at a party by Meg… he was just in town for 3 days!”. Micheal Buble at his sonorous best decrees “I just haven’t met you yet”. A friend moved countries, didn’t know where he will stay, but already on the 3rd day was head over heels for a girl in his class. (She rejected him, just btw. Complexity = 1, Connections = 0).

You think you’ve found THE perfect job listing — the interview is smooth sailing, and everything looks incredibly promising… till you find that your boss is obsessed with micromanaging, has the IQ of a manatee and thinks you’re as interested in shagging the secretary as he is. Or what if you have been put on a team with the cover girl of Narcissist Weekly? Equal responsibilities for you two, but she’s got more important things (Makeup) to do.

Essentially, there is too much chaos to model, predict and thus control the connections/collaborations part of your life. A fair thing to do is to hone your people skills to a fair degree, put yourself in a position to be constantly exposed to new people and then surrender yourself to the current of humanity.

The next part of your ideal life will have what is traditionally defined as “work” — which skill will you want to pick up and hone and hence monetize by getting a “job”.

As explained in Part A — where the limits of a skill begin and end are fuzzy at best. Further, if you are anything like me (euphemism: an intellectual whore) then this part becomes increasingly difficult. How can you commit to doing one thing for the rest of your life? Or prescribe and accept feeble, fixed, classifications of knowledge?

This is more personal than other parts of the article; I am curious about everything. I like doing a bunch of things. Sometimes I like x more, some other times I like y more, and the alphabet has 26 characters.

This becomes even more interesting when you’re planning to do a PhD — I took the GRE and placed at the 95th percentile. Thus, according to the most widely used measure of graduate study propensity, I’m made for graduate study… but in what field? Not that I don’t have one interest — I have too many. Further, I’m confident that with my fastidiousness, penchant for poppycock production, stellar confidence manufacturing abilities, and confound/charm/cologne approach, I will be able to land a paid PhD position.

I am from a STEM background, and switched to soft sciences for a masters degree. While I had no formal education in the field I am currently pursuing at a masters level, I managed to secure admission in a pretty good university — all through ‘hobby/extracurricular’ reading. Further, though it has been incredibly challenging, but I am doing as well as the most other people (I’m average) who have had 3 years of education in this field.

For me, and many others, there is no difference between a “hobby” and “work”. Further, there are countless examples where one benefits the other — remember our friendly neighbourhood Steve Jobs? He took a calligraphy class sometime, and that lay the basis of the font family the first Apple computers used.

Thus, aligning life with interests becomes difficult. Again, too much complexity to be able to predict, model and sustain interest in what you may like intellectually.

While having this discussion with some friends — another decisional variable was revealed; Morality and doing ‘good’.

You want to save the environment? Great! Why?

You want to make a driverless car because it will mean that the life of 1 million people/year may be saved? Great! Why?

You want to develop cures/further research for Cancer/AIDS? Great! Why?

I can hear intuition manifesting resolutely — it shouts,

“THIS IS THE RIGHT THING TO DO!”

Assuring you that we are on the same team trying to figure out where our human potential is best actualized, I direct you to a copy of The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt.

These kinds of arguments foray into the realm of ideology (what is good, what is bad, for whom is it good or bad, capitalism or communism, lets perfect CRISPR and — à la Plato — give child production to the state) and grappling with these issues requires better minds than mine. Further, the questions I pose (ex. Environment — http://ec.europa.eu/environment/nature/biodiversity/intro/docs/Health%20and%20Social%20Benefits%20of%20Nature%20-%20Final%20Report%20Main%20sent.pdf) may have legitimate scientific answers. But, these questions are quickly reduced to optimisation problems of resources — ex. if saving the environment has health benefits, why not direct grants from environmental protection to gene editing which can lead to a super human populace?

(This is what policy makers debate about. To have informed, not incorrect, opinions, they stand on the shoulders of ‘experts’ in a field. You can’t know without being an expert in a field, and you can’t be an expert in a field without spending a substantial part of your life doing something, and thus you have already done whatever you did, and this article is not for you. You can merely guess, or justify your decision with how you feel. Personally, I am a ‘Nature Junkie’. I like nature more than I like super human babies. Rather than hiding behind gossamer like ideological facades, I stand with experiential immediacy — I feel awe when I stand on glaciers or watch the sky shatter into a myriad hues. Superhuman babies don’t make me feel that way. Ergo, I want nature.)

Unless you are exceptionally intellectually gifted and possess foresight and an all-encompassing consciousness, it is entirely possible that your moral compass is “miscalibrated” and you will, for the sake of the ‘good’ of all, benefit from self-critical introspection. In the event you are exceptionally intellectually gifted and possess foresight and an all-encompassing intellect (Dr. Manhattan/Ozymandius)– I (and I am sure others) would be THRILLED to hear from you.

Compound the complexity of Connections and Curiosities with the functioning of the overarching institutional umbrella (think Company/University culture), and the futility of deciding what you want to do using these as factors is revealed. The only theoretical solution is omniscience.

Then, what can serve as good mental heuristics? Certainties.

Certainties are complexity robust.*

Certainties are those aspects of what you want to do which are amenable to prediction, modelling and capitalization — these are satificable. These aspects of what you want to do retain their properties when shrunk to our bounded rationalities.

The challenge remains finding and optimizing the certainties.

The two most important (certain) certainties across most possible job options are compensation[x] and location.

Location is the lens which taints the compensation; 2000$/Month in Bangalore, India is more than 2000$/Month in Paris, France.

Living expenses also correlate with standard of living, and also with the taxes you pay. Bangalore lacks a good Public Health System, while Paris does a decent job.

Location also has important repercussions for connections/collaborations; high population density implies more people in lesser physical space, which implies more people you are interested in, in lesser physical space.

Leisure travel, while a recent (~ 200 years) popular pastime, is greatly eased by placing yourself in a location which you want to explore. A weekend is too short for an intercontinental voyage, but the perfect length for a train hop.

Half of the third (3A) is the manifesto — i.e. anything your institution gives you written down; including paid leaves, the “project” you will be working on, whether you will be a part of a team, the hours you work per week and so on.

This aspect of what you want to do is least certain — paid leaves change, projects get shut down, you propose a better idea and are suddenly team leader (or you fail and are the new coffee intern). Big consultancies limit the complexity by having predetermined time bound positions — from 1st year associate to Senior Partner… in step wise increments with generally reproducible results to new hires. Start Ups don’t and cannot.

The size of an organization is too chaotic a marker — it depends on the guy you start under; if he likes a disrupter and you are too docile, the promotion goes to the loud guy. If he likes subservient, punctual employees, the brilliant party girl who does 2 times the work in ½ the time is skipped over.

“No, thank you, you don’t get to go on the business meeting to Bahamas, because I am unsatisfied with my marriage.” — Manager of Brilliant Party Girl

The other half (3B) is the Institution and the type of position — A Janitor position will have markedly different responsibilities and require different skill sets than a PhD researcher.

However, there are many variables which can affect the quality of your experience within these labels… often with a greater affect than these labels (Read Bosses, Colleagues, or how your department head failed to procure funding because he slept with the chairman’s wife and as a result you don’t have the sequencing machine you need and thus need to switch jobs or run the same analysis for two more years.)

Going to an Ivy League School for a Selective Program looks better on you CV than does Community College, or that ‘College’ your Uncle runs in his basement, or even the Coursera courses for which you have 96% AND a certificate with a non-ugly photo.

But does the Ivy League School give you the same amount of Happiness than does your uncle’s Meth Lab? Is Happiness important for you? Is the Happiness that you get from your Uncle important for you? Is it as important/as much as Ivy league happiness? Will you have colleagues to call when you feel like shit or will your uncle want to be there? Will you feel like shit? Do you want to have someone to depend on? And so on and so forth. There is no end to this, and it varies for each one of you. Tune in, turn on, drop out — find your answers.

To summarise and conclude — there are 4 C’s which affect what you want to do; Connections/Collaborations, Curiosities, Certainties and Complexity. Complexity controls Connections/Collaborations and Curiosities. Certainties are (practically) Complexity robust. You don’t control Complexity.

There are 3 certainties that I have discovered, and I hope there are many more;

Compensation, Location, and the Institution, Position and Manifesto.