Tag: Happiness

Why Is Enough NOT Enough?

 

Not until something challenges you to rise up, you shall always stay down; not until you realize your enough is enough, you shall always have enough.

 

The scars in our culture will never let you get away from the imagined slip between the cup and the lip in this case. Present day bookkeeping(at least the one that most of us seem to practice) seems to have only debit, deficiency and gaps.

 

This is our modern curse: A century of conspicuous consumption has trained us to be dutiful citizens of the Republic of Not Enough, swearing allegiance to the marketable myth of scarcity, hoarding toilet paper for the apocalypse. Along the way, we have unlearned how to live wide-eyed with wonder at what Hermann Hesse called “the little joys” — those unpurchasable, unstorable emblems of aliveness that abound the moment we look up from our ledger of lack.

 

What are you chasing? Or what is chasing you? Counting on life or making life count?

 

The democracy of inadequacy is NOT of the people, by the people, for the people. We all need a different domicile.

It’s time to script your own countercultural invitation to rediscover life’s true priorities amid our confused maelstrom of materialism and compulsive productivity.

 

“Enough is so vast a sweetness, I suppose it never occurs, only pathetic counterfeits,” Emily Dickinson lamented in a love letter. In his splendid short poem about the secret of happiness, Kurt Vonnegut exposed the taproot of our modern suffering as the gnawing sense that what we have is not enough, that what we are is not enough.

 

You, you-er, you-est is the perennial journey you will embark on and the ticket for that ride will be your investment.

 

This civilisational trance and the unabashed quest for more needs a wake up call and the time is now. Enough said.

 

If a contrarian take on productivity is of interest to you, allow me to take you there https://www.sureshdinakaran.com/blog/2020/06/08/rip-productivity-productivity-is-not-working/

 

ENDS

The Temporary Nature of Permanence!

 

Happiness is understanding and accepting impermanence.

That said, even happiness is impermanent, like everything else. Without impermanence, there can be no life. Impermanence is one of the essential doctrines and a part of three marks of existence in Buddhism. Asserting that all conditioned existence is transient, evanescent, and inconstant, impermanence is a concept found in various aspects of Hinduism and Jainism.

Cutting edge technology becomes obsolete. Medical breakthroughs avert certain disasters. Music goes from futuristic to contemporary to nostalgia. Idols and celebrities whom we revered but never met die young.

The Time Machine is a recent phenomena(of the 1800s). A thousand years ago people had no inkling of what today would have been like, Just like, we, the present generation, will have no inkling of what it would be a few hundred years from now. Except some crystal ball gazing or educated guesses.

Impermanence is the law of the universe. Our experience and relationship with time keeps changing. The concept of time zones was a derivative of clocks. (As an aside, Sir Sanford Fleming, a Canadian engineer, was the first person to propose the use of worldwide time zones back in 1878. His idea was to divide the world into 24 time zones that were each 15 degrees of longitude apart. The reason for this is that the earth rotates 15 degrees every hour, or 360 degrees in 24 hours). And mind you we didn’t have clocks till such time we invented cities.

Our idea of history is vague(what has been told to us- the concept of some people walked the earth some aeons ago)…and probably it is the same with our future. Whether we have a role in it, and will it shape up in the manner we envisage.

If the future were to be looked upon as an ‘ impressionist painting in landscape mode ‘, a couple of things will come to fore:

– The future will never stop surprising us and any control of it is only a myth in our heads.

– That said, we can have a greater role to play in the future and endeavor to make and leave an impact. Change is a culture thing and culture( and the way we can change it and therefore our future) can be only be changed by us, we, the people.

We will never have a stop watch to switch on and switch off the future, as and when we desire to. Nor can we request the future to lie still and wait for our nudge to get moving. Future is not an obedient toddler, unfortunately.

What definitely is in our control is the work we do, the stories we tell ourselves, the connections we establish, the paths we follow, the art we ship out- all of it determines our culture. And culture will echo what’s next!

ENDS

 

 

 

A Selfless Act Called…Branding!

 

Ideally, yes! And mind you, selfless doesn’t mean private.

 

Lets look at the importance of selflessness..

 

Selflessness improves relationships, Selflessness can keep you healthy, Selflessness gives us a new perspective, Selflessness forms connection, Selflessness gives you a sense of peace, Selflessness can be a form of therapy.

 

Typically brands spend millions of dollars to realise some of the above, if not all.

 

A great brand naturally flows out of the product or service. Graciously. Optimistically. With the singular focus of making it successful.

 

Yes, it needs shaping. Crafting. Articulating. Calibrating. But, the underlying shape- the bones of whatever it is- are present from its inception.

 

And the role of the brand builders is to help it find the appropriate outfit, to coach it on how to walk and talk, mentor it and set it free into the real world. So, when it finally goes out into the world, its appearance matches its personality.

 

Selfless, really?

 

Isn’t branding all about yourself? Looking inward? A transcendently selfish act?

 

Well, a brand is part of the society. As it steps into the world, it has to signal very clearly what it stands for.

 

That said, a brand cannot live in isolation. Like the fish in water, which are dependent on the ecosystem around it, a brand on its own is pretty much a useless entity.

 

A mobile phone needs a cellular network, an electrical infrastructure. It needs a marketplace, it needs software, it needs applications, it needs accessories. And each one of these ecosystems breaks down into smaller and smaller subsystems. Without all this, a cell phone is a useless brick of metal, plastic and glass.

 

With a logo on its back.

 

If a brand lives by itself in the forest, will anyone know it’s a brand?

 

You just maybe tempted to take a look at this article from BrandKnew about Personal Values and the Need for a Purpose Led Brand Culture.

 

ENDS

Emotions that have no speed limit when it comes to virality !

Rage seems to be in Rage when it comes to emotions traveling the farthest and fastest across Social Media networks.
The omnipresence of social media, the glut of messaging and content distribution platforms, the sophistication of social listening, combined with readily available news(breaking and broken) and events round the clock, the Damocles Sword hanging on people’s head called ‘ status anxiety ‘, the perennial quest for the next and best viral; all provide the perfect foil for brands and marketers to understand what kind of emotions travel the quickest on social networks and strategise what to ‘avoid‘ and what to ‘adopt‘.

If one were to go granular with the emotions’ basket, we would have the following and more in the bucket list:Happiness/Joy; Sadness/Depression; Rage/Anger; Pride/Prejudice; Disgust/Disillusionment; Wonder/Awe and so on and so forth.

Researchers at the Beihang University in China gauged various online emotions by tracking emoticons embedded in millions of messages posted on Sina Weibo, a popular Twitter-like microblogging platform. Their conclusion: Joy moves faster than sadness or disgust, but nothing is speedier than rage. The researchers found that users reacted most angrily—and quickly—to reports concerning “social problems and diplomatic issues”. It’s diabolical that a strong anti social emotion like rage gets the maximum social attention and currency!!!

In many cases, these ‘ social flare ups ‘ triggers a chain reaction of anger with multiple circles of the social community getting influenced and participating with equal or more venom.

In another study conducted by Jonah Berger and a colleague at Wharton based on 7000 articles covered by The New York Times, they discovered that if there was one emotion that overtook rage in billings, it was awe. The wonder and excitement of a new discovery of beauty or knowledge or a breakthrough in the fight against cancer; puts awe as an emotion in overdrive thus heaping bagfuls of viral.“Awe gets our hearts racing and our blood pumping,” Berger says. “This increases our desire for emotional connection and drives us to share.”

For all those who thought that sadness would emerge triumphant in the race to viral stardom, sorry to disappoint you. Sadness was considered to be a ‘ deactivating emotion ‘ where people pull down or withdraw leaving it with little torque to go the distance. If you feel a little melancholic about it, let that stay.

​So, the next time you see or experience road rage​, talk yourself into believing that it need not be infectious(or go viral).

​ENDS​

​groupisd.com

brandknewmag.com​