This is something new on this forum. Here are some thoughts of mine on the 14th of Feb, on the significance of this day for me. In short I don't care at all about it and cannot understand what the fuss is about. I don't necessarily discount the essential emotions to which it refers, although I do think that we make too much of them. I do, however, have severe reservations against the commercial nature of it and against the general expectations which come with it.

Let's begin with the latter and destroy some fake romantic ideas here. This is yet another day which has been designed so that you will be subconsciously compelled to buy shit. Like Christmas, new year's, mother's day, friendship day, this is just another day to squeeze out a little more from your wallets. The feeling behind it, although may be seen as noble by itself, nevertheless merely ends up getting cynically used up by the market forces. Since almost everybody around you is consumed by the madness of valentine's day, you feel compelled to join in as well. The social expectations end up forcing you to do things that you might not have done by yourself. But there is a very high probability that that is your entire life anyway so I won't dwell upon it too much.

Then comes my other objection to this special day but before I state my objection I should mention the following. I think in life it is important to strive to be happy and one of the sure shot ways of successfully going about it is finding a well adjusted human being, with whom one has some things in common, as a companion. And on finding such a person, compromising, if need be, on pretty much all other expectations because they are not important. The current dating climate fails these simple rules on two accounts. First, a distinct lack of well adjusted human beings in society. It seems that nutcases are running wild crashing into other nutcases in bars and on dating websites and apps (like chickens running around with their heads cut off; if you've seen one you'd understand the apt and inspired comparison). Second, the culture of compromising, settling for what one has, and not always being in search of something better, is slowly dying away with the passing of a generation which didn't just sit around on its ass over-analyzing its love life. Nutcases + greed, that's the perfect recipe for long term dissatisfaction. And this day plays very well on these two shortcomings of the modern society. This day helps to create a vile and devious fiction, that one's love life is extremely important. This day is the distillation of Sex in the City kind of message and idiots get easily taken in by it. But then that's the main purpose of idiots in this world anyway, to get taken in by various fictions.

I ultimately have a soft corner for a certain mix of feelings that one might have towards another person but it is most definitely a mix of feelings. In that mix lies romantic attraction but it is not the most important one. I think respect is equally, if not more, important. Respect not in some vague charitable sense but respect earned properly and honestly through the manifestation of some concrete qualities. So while one can be romantically attracted to all sorts of people of questionable worth, the requirement of respect serves to separate the melody from the noise, the worthy from the riff-raff. In fact, the all too many stories of the various travails of people hopelessly in love fills my heart not with any sympathy for them but with contempt. Pure love, they say, is blind and they are right. It is also contemptible and thoroughly deserving of the misery it so often inspires. Inasmuch as Valentine's day might celebrate this balanced, restrained, and stable vision of happiness and love, I will support it. I don't think it does though.

There is much that is ghastly about social media in general and Facebook in particular but the one aspect which really gives me the cancer is how happy everybody is there. There is a certain kind of happy person who is thoroughly insufferable. One who is never angry or sad or mean. And it seems everybody on Facebook is that insufferable person. There was a time when the number of people whom I had not unfollowed was still in the double digits but that was a time of great personal agony for me. I was continuously swamped with ridiculous photos of people trying to one up each other in a surreal contest of idiocy. Lovingly shot photos of delicately arranged food, adrenaline fueled selfies of people jumping off of airplanes, a relentless barrage of mediocre self-promotion, people in various stages of inebriation among large groups of friends with smiles too wide and teeth too white, lukewarm brain droppings of questionable merit posed in sentences which try to make the thought appear deeper than it really is, a general presence of too much communality and too little individuality. And the final issue is not accidental. Individuality must suffer when the primary purpose of one's presence is to fit in. When I meet people in the real world I can still see in them that other half of the human nature which has been suppressed so brutally in social media. The part that is slightly devious and politically incorrect and vile. Combined with the courage to accept this vileness as one's own, I see a real human being in them with real emotions and real worth. On the other hand what does one find on social media? If the media is anonymous (reddit) then we find people who behave like uncivilized animals and if the media is not anonymous (facebook) we find  useless robots who are only too eager to be nice and well meaning. They acknowledge other robots of their kind with similar expressions of fake happiness and lukewarm ideas which are at just the right temperature to not be offensive to anybody. Mildly pleasing and ultimately well meaning always and, therefore, absolutely worthless. There's no meaningful concept of light in the absence of the idea of dark and my primary beef with social interaction of the kind that I see on Facebook is that the black has been removed from the personalities of its robotic denizens. I can't remember the last time anybody posted about being angry or sad or hopeless. It would be a depressing world where these emotions were removed like they seem to have been online. After all, much of the beauty that humans have created over their history in the form of music, painting, poetry, and literature is based not on happiness but on sadness. But I think we are entering just such a world where these valuable emotions are being pushed under the rug, if not consciously then subconsciously, and our online discourse is as much a symptom of this malaise as a driving force.

Well I don't face the personal agony I described above anymore when I visit Facebook. Looks like the only people I haven't unfollowed are those who are too cynical to post anything and/or have a real life. Just like me. I rather prefer the real world and I still take solace in the fact that in the real world people can still snap out of their online morbidity after a little poking. And that they can still share a human moment together where they reveal themselves, like I do, to be slightly but refreshingly unsympathetic, vile, askew, hopeless, and angry.

Indeed, there is nothing more vexing, for instance, than to be rich, of respectable family, of decent appearance, of rather good education, not stupid, even kind, and at the same time to have no talent, no particularity, no oddity even, not a single idea of one's own , to be decidedly "like everybody else." There is wealth, but not a Rothschild's; an honorable family, but which has never distinguished itself in any way; a decent appearance, but very little expression; a proper education, but without knowing what to apply it to; there is intelligence, but with no ideas of one's own; there's a heart, but with no magnanimity etc. etc., in all respects. There are a great many such people in the world and even far more than it seems; they are divided, as all people are, into two main categories: one limited, the other "much cleverer." The first are happier. For the limited "usual" man, for instance, there is nothing easier than to imagine himself an unusual and original man and to revel in it without any hesitation. As soon as some of our young ladies cut their hair, put on blue spectacles, and called themselves nihilists, they became convinced at once that, having put on the spectacles, they immediately began to have their own "convictions." As soon as a man feels in his heart just a drop of some sort of generally human and kindly feeling for something or other, he immediately becomes convinced that no one else feels as he does, that he is in the forefront of general development. As soon as a man takes some thought or other at its word or reads a little page of something without beginning or end, he believes at once that these are "his own thoughts" and were conceived in his own brain. The impudence of naivety, if one may put it so, goes so far in such cases as to be astonishing; all this is incredible, but one meets with it constantly. This impudence of naivety, this stupid man's unquestioningness of himself and his talent, is excellently portrayed by Gogol in the astonishing type of Lieutenant Pirogov...

-From The Idiot (Dostoevsky)

I came across an article on Nytimes about some new study which has found that the optimal time that one must jog in order to live a long life is lesser than one might expect. While women in yoga pants and bros in shorts have been sacrificing themselves at the altar of fitness for tens of hours every week, it turns out they only need to do so for around 2 and a half hours. Being a reasonable person, this new study is extremely concerning to me. I fear that if these people end up taking the advice of the article seriously, they'll  hang around in this world longer than now. Are we as a society okay with such a grave repercussion? I mean, what are these people doing in this world anyway? They take in the energy which has been laboriously created by plants and animals over months and years and they immediately convert it to waste heat. No value addition whatsoever. They are the bluntest of examples of the futility of human life. There is no shorter route from order to disorder than these people. The second law of thermodynamics is being accelerated by them.

There was a short amount of time when I ran but I wised up soon enough. I hated it which is what I think is the predominant feeling of most who run in order not to get fat. I figured that in life I'll make a bargain. I'd rather chill out till the age of 60 and die (if not running does shorten my life) than choose to live miserably every day till the age of 85. This is why I haven't jumped on the many bandwagons that these health nuts tend to do. And although I don't smoke, I have respect for an honest and proud smoker. Not for one of those ridiculous people who smokes those e-cigarettes but those who smoke the real stuff. I'm sure they love it and the most dedicated of them have probably made a similar bargain in life. A bargain that has never been more clearly explained than by the great Bill Hicks himself. I really hope that if this study is right (I have my doubts, I mean what is an exercise scientist anyway?) then it gets ignored by these joggers. For the greater good.

It's going to be ten years this August since I moved to the US and I think this is a respectable amount of time in which to begin understanding the psyche of a culture. I believe that as an essential outsider I have naturally had better tools to evaluate this culture than a person who was born and brought up within it. I have always had a reference point with which to compare, and a supremely good one at that in the form of the Indian culture. I don't mean to say that the Indian culture is perfect, or even very good, but it acts as a nice counterpoint to the American one by virtue of being fundamentally different. If I were to think about what is one thing which is great about the American culture and what is one thing that is ridiculous, what would the answer be?

I think the greatest thing about this culture is the freedom to choose and the fact that at their very hearts people here do take that as a sacred principle. This freedom is almost always dormant and hidden away but it is ultimately there. One can choose and one will not face the kind of social, economic, or political repercussions that they might in other places. On the scale of the severity of repercussions, I think the middle eastern countries, along with China and Russia, lie at the bottom, with Asian countries like India, and Latin American countries somewhere in the middle, European countries with Australia and Canada above them and ultimately a distant second to the US. It might appear that countries like Canada are better than the US in this regard but that would be a mistake in judgment as they derive their sense of freedom essentially from the British idea and the British idea is not nearly as free as the American one. One example is the existence and strict enforcement of the first amendment in the US whose analogue surprisingly doesn't exist in Britain. I think it is safe to say that the this culture, more than any other culture, respects individual freedom and tolerates dissenting opinion.

The worst thing about this culture also emerges from the freedom it provides. At the very basic level it is an obsessive inward looking tendency and I think it is made possible because the culture tolerates an infinity of narratives, some of them naturally being more supportive of a particular kind of malaise. There is an obsession with the self and the ridiculous idea that I matter and that my issues are important. I never found, and still do not find, this obsession in India nearly to the extent that I find it here. In India people are, in general, in much worse situations but they have no other option but to face life and to get on with it. But in the US I find whole industries devoted to legitimizing and feeding the issues of people with regard to their own self. I don't mean to trivialize the real issues which some people, I am sure, face but on their coattails ride entire hoards of people who obsess about their physical, economic, spiritual, and sexual well-being and who, had they been in a less prosperous country, would have merely been told to stop whining and being a general pest. I think this obsession has deeper roots. It emerges from a fundamental emptiness of meaning, of purpose, of real relationships, of the sense of one's place in this world, and, more importantly, from an intense reluctance to face the dim truth with honesty. In this instance India is a brilliant demonstration of the capital T truth, that the I doesn't matter and the world will hum along nicely enough without bothering about the I.