Humans have a tendency to get institutionalized. i.e. to get used to a way of things, e.g., prisoners sentenced for life at a young age get institutionalized to life in a prison and when offered parole at a later age, find it painfully difficult to live a life of freedom. This is also the reason old people find it very hard to migrate to a different house, city, or a country.

We not only get institutionalized about our environment, but also our way of seeing things and thinking about things.

One particular pattern of getting institutionalized is when a not-so-good system helps a person escape a terribly-worse system, but then the person gets institutionalized to the not-so-good system. Thus, later when he gets to see way better systems, he cannot wrap his head around the fact that the system that saved him from the terribly-worse system is actually not-so-good, and starts thinking that something must be wrong about these better systems, even if he can’t see anything wrong. In an extreme end, he’ll start making up wrong things about these better systems.

This pattern is very apparent in people that join rebellious groups, for instance, criminal gangs that help someone out of some serious trouble. But rebellious groups are of all sorts, e.g., we had a rogue student-organization in our university, that was a very small ineffective rebellious group¹. But then there are also, political factions, cults, etc.

But this pattern is more common in our everyday ways of looking at things or thinking about things.

For instance, one might notice that there are so many people or places that promise to help you achieve x, but later realize that all of these people or places are frauds or are ineffective, he might get skeptical not just of those fraud or ineffective people, but even of the fact that x is something achievable. In some cases, x might actually be unachievable e.g. if someone promises you to bring back the dead. But in everyday cases, x are things that are achievable, e.g. understanding about things, good friends, happiness, etc. So, for instance, if an actually happy person meets such an institutionalized-skeptic of a happy life, he cannot believe that living a happy life is even possible. Similarly, someone who could not understand things by reading textbooks would think that he is incapable of understanding things (most textbooks are extremely poorly written, or in many instances the person lack the pre-requisite knowledge for understanding a concept, where it’s better to re-start learning from first principles).

That was a common person example, but this is a pattern in overall way of institutionalized thinking. For instance, Einstein had gotten institutionalized to his relativity model which was a way better understanding than Newtonian model, but he couldn’t grasp the quantum theory when it came along which provided an even better explanation about some things.

How to de-institutionalize then? For anyone who has had experience helping old people switch to a newer technology will know how hard it is for them to grasp it, even when the newer technology is more convenient. So, before you think about de-institutionalizing, re-think if it’s really necessary. If it involves other people, you should respect their preferences on your own, because you might end up doing them more harm then good by trying to de-institutionalize them.

The only valid question then, is how to get yourself deinstitutionalized. The difficulty of getting out of a bad system is proportional to the time you have spent within. But even still, among people who have lived same time institutionalized, some get deinstitutionalized while others don’t. And it seems the pattern with them is that they interact more with people from other systems. But not just other systems, but better systems. So, they interact more often with people who look at things more perceptively, people who think about things more rigorously, or people who live their lives more fulfilled. But the important thing is that they engage in an honest dialogue and not a debate. Someone who actually has a better system has no need or desire to argue with anyone else. And so if one interacts in a debate-ish way, the people with better systems will start avoiding him, and he will find himself arguing with people who like arguing, which is people with other equally-bad or worse systems. And that is a terrible way to get locked-in in your institutionalized thinking.

1. There was a classmate of mine who was an active member of it. He was a nice boy otherwise in class, so I couldn’t understand why he joined that. I tried to avoid bringing up this topic, but as I talked more to him, he started telling about it himself, and I realized what was the thing. He was a shy and cowardly kid, but joining this thing made his cowardice go away, and so he became blind to all the morally wrong things this group was doing, even though he himself had good morals. ↩︎

When I was buying mine in March 2025, I found that there’s only one guy in Pakistan who imports used or almost-new e-readers from abroad. You’ll probably find the same guy on FB, OLX, Daraz, etc. (with usernames Syed Online Store or Readers are the leaders).

I found that I care about three things most. 1) Screen Size, 2) Frontlight, 3) Display Resolution.

Screen Size

Small screen size means more page turns per book. Almost 80% of ereaders you’ll find would have 6-inch screen. This is equal to some mobile phones, just less rectangular. For book-reading, it felt too small. So, you should try finding one with 7 inch or 8 inch screen. Mine is 8 in, and it is perfect. Larger than 8 inch give more of a magazine feel and are suitable only if you wanna read scientific papers, mangas, PDFs with large paper size, or stuff like that.

Frontlight

Eink readers are supposed to give a paper like feel, but still since there’s a thin plastic touch screen between the display, light is not reflected back from the surface as good as paper itself. So, when you take the e-reader outside, it will be readable perfectly, but in a normal room where you can read paper properly, you will find the e-reader not so well lit unless you are directly sitting under a tube light or something. So, you should opt for an e-reader with frontlight. You will also need it if you wanna read at night with lights off. (The seller will call it backlight, but he means the same thing).

Resolution / Pixel Density

E-ink display technology has evolved a lot between 2010-2020. Older models used E-ink Pearl technology which had around ~167 dpi but newer models with E-ink Carta display have around ~300 dpi (same as book-print quality). For good reading experience, make sure not to buy anything <250 dpi.

Note: Resolution (such as 1448 × 1072) is only comparable if you are comparing same screen sizes. The proper comparison is thus by using pixel density (dpi/ppi). The seller might not know exact resolution/dpi but just tell him you need one with good resolution and google the exact dpi for the models he shows yourself.

Manufacturer / OS

Amazon’s Kindles have largest e-reader market share, but that is mostly because of integrated system with Amazon’s kindle store. But if you are not buying e-books from Amazon kindle store (maybe because *coughs* the author directly sent you an e-book file), standard .epub files won’t run on Kindle. So you either need to find *coughs* ask the author for AZW3 or MOBI version, or convert the file. Also, Kindle’s overall UX isn’t considered good. Kobo’s UX on the other hand is considered best among all e-readers (based on user reviews).

Now Kindles and Kobo both use their own OS, but some e-reader brands like Nook use Android. Android is an overkill if you wanna use e-reader just for reading stuff and hence should be avoided unless specifically needed as it will consume more battery etc.

How I bought mine?

I actually didn’t know all this info. It took me a lot of googling and some experimentation to learn this. I asked the seller to give me a list of all models he has, so that I can choose. When he gave me, I gave that to Grok and prompted it to google relevant specs and it returned a table, which I took to Excel and filtered according to my needs and decided. First, I bought a 6-in Kobo Clara (which had front-light not working¹ and thus I could get it at lower price), but realized that 6-in was too small and front-light is necessary. The seller was nice enough to have me replaced it. I then chose an 8-in Kobo Forma (with minor scratches and page-turn buttons not working) which was the only >7-in model he had at that time with good resolution.

How to buy yours?

First check out Ereader ComparisonTables to get an idea of different models and their features and decide what features matter to you.

The seller I mentioned earlier is generally less responsive, due to other workload or something, and so he’ll reply late. If you’re in Karachi better visit his shop, or if you wanna buy online, try to share your requirements clearly early on so that it takes less back and forth for the final decision. It took me around a month from initial inquiry to final decision, which probably is not a good way to do it.

Other options are some shops that import new Kindles, or people who would have bought it from abroad, and are selling their used ones on OLX or FB groups.

After you buy your E-reader

If you are a nerd and need the best reading experience, KOReader is a must. Most e-reader UX’s suck and allow very little customization. KOReader is a third-party open-source software that can run on most e-reader devices (earlier it couldn’t be used on Kindle, but now even Kindle jailbreak has been released). It has some initial setup overhead, but with KOReader, you can make the device fit your needs. Kobo’s UX is best among all default manufacturers but even still, the page turns are slower on Kobo’s default UX (called Nickel) than if I use KOReader on same device. There are some engineering reasons behind it. There’s another third-party software called Plato which is even faster than KOReader but is less customizable.

1. Note: The seller would also have some models with some defects, which will allow you to buy them at lower price. ↩︎

I turned 22 a while ago. Which is an irrelevant fact here, as my writing this is in response to something I read¹, and I would have written it even if I hadn’t turned 22.

When I was a bit younger, I used to think that I knew how the world works. I used to think that from much earlier age I guess. But every few years, I would realize, how naïve I have been, and would get disappointed at my younger self for being so. I also used to think, apart from that, that I knew how the world ought to work. While I kept realizing every few years that how I thought how the world worked was so utterly mistaken, I never really realized that I was similarly mistaken about how I thought the world ought to work². With new things unfolding in front of me as I poked at reality, I demolished things from my mental model of how the world worked that weren’t right and built new things to replace them that better fit reality. But for the other mental model of how the world ought to work, I merely built new things in respect to new things unfolding in front of me and never demolished anything. That model was very precious, and so I plucked out nothing but weeds and shrubs, but I kept building and building, with increasing sophistication, in order to accommodate everything and everyone and to handle all edge cases, the task becoming too complicated and too burdensome, but still failing to meet its purpose. Just like in a bureaucracy or corporation, where to solve a problem, you can’t remove anything, say, from a constitution or a codebase, only add more things. But the problem never gets solved, only evolves into a more complicated form to which you surrender to attempt to solve.

Henrik in an essay wrote how he wanted to have a book that he could give to his 7-year-old that taught her how to handle being sentenced to freedom, borrowing Sartre’s phrase. It is at 22 that I realize with my full consciousness, that I have been sentenced to freedom. As Henrik quotes a character from a Dostoevsky’s novel, we humans long to submit to authority, and so did I, and actually still do, but that doesn’t change the fact. I feel as much frightened as does a 7 year old. But now I have grown old enough to stop seeking comfort in what’s probably not true. Even though I know very little of him, I gamble that truth also has some comfort to give me.

The other model, of how the world ought to work, needed as much demolishing if not much more. But at this point, I will have to dismantle it very carefully. It’s not wise to just blow things apart. Because most of these building blocks are useful and important, and actually their much being useful to me was the very thing that made it harder for me to demolish the building. But I can dismantle it carefully, so that I can discard what I am not sure is right, and preserve what I think is important. Perhaps I don’t need to build something to accommodate everything and everyone. I can start from something small, a home for me.

1. which acted as the prompt for this kind of response; the thoughts in fact had been embedding for a while ↩︎
2. which consequently boils down to how humans ought to live ↩︎

Henrik had posted a new essay (When is it better to think without words?) some days ago and I had been holding out reading it. I think I do this because Henrik’s essays feel too sacred to be read casually. And it turned out right. I literally jumped off my feet–several times–as I read it today at dawn.

What makes Henrik’s essays so lovely is that it’s like, there’s a sort of hum of a melody you had heard somewhere in childhood and the details of it are faded (perhaps you had only heard it from far off and your ears didn’t had capacity to perceive those details in the first place), and that faded hum stays in your mind for days and months and years, and then someday, you turn your attention to someone, and they start playing that precise melody that has been taking up your mind for so long, with such sharp and crisp details that your ears start savoring with great attention so as to fill in those missing details, and as the melody is about to end, you are startled as you realize there is more to that melody that you hadn’t heard of before, and what you had been repeating was merely a segment of an extended symphony.

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I think I have been doing this thinking-without-words thing, for a few years, even though much rudimentary compared to Hadamard’s. This description seems oddly familiar:

He also saw something that looked like equations, but as if seen from a distance, without glasses on: he was unable to make out what they said.

this type of deep, consciously-blurry concentration

Often when, reading something or paying attention to something for long, excites my mind too much, I go for a walk, that sometimes continues for an hour or more, in which I think without words¹. And I feel this strange tension, because there’s this wide panorama, really really wide, and I can see these bizarre connections between remote things, but when I try to zoom in or to look clearly into the details of that thing to be able to validate if that apparent connection makes any sense or not, the whole image shatters and falls apart. And so I am left empty-handed, retaining neither that wide panorama, nor any conclusions about validity of any particular connection/pattern. It’s a very unsettling feeling.

This was how I had described that feeling a while ago:

You can replace “thinking in pre-concepts” with “thinking without words“

The thought reference was the essay Think by Talha Ashraf:

[Deep thinking] depends on not only one level away from direct results but then another level away where you think about the effects of the effects and then again the effects of those effects and then also try to think about the results of these combinations. The only problem with this is that these levels exist as preconcepts, things that cannot even be defined with words because they are too vague at that point. Most of them you probably cant even identify as concepts so you wont be able to write them down and if you cant write them down you run into a very basic problem that everytime you start thinking about them you have to start from scratch. You cant start again from where you left off becuase the end was not a concept but a combination of vague concepts and their effects. This means that the only way to think in depth is through uninterruped chains of thought. You can only have uninterrupted chains of thoughts if you have time in solitude and the depth of your thoughts are then limited by the longest uninterruped duration of thinking that you can have. …

Now there is one caveat in solitude allowing the longest chains of thought. Which is that you can keep thinking about vague concepts in vague ways without ever actually turning them into something concrete. And this is where a lot of people get stuck at. After you have spent sufficient time in your thoughts you actually want to try writing your vague thoughts by converting them into words. You are basically trying to think in “type” where instead of interrupting your thoughts to write, you think in writing by just starting to write down your thoughts.

The thread in that screenshot was my after-thought to the difficulty I was having in thinking in type described in the thought-reference. So, I was basically having this tension where I was becoming ever more skeptical of my whole thinking (like, is the panorama even there or am I suffering from a thinking-schizophrenia?) because when I attempted to re-think those thoughts in words, they just wouldn’t come; without that multi-dimensionality there was nowhere to begin from. That was even more problematic because if somehow, I could grasp them in a concrete manner, I could at least shrug them off saying, nah they don’t make any sense, but now I couldn’t even do that, because absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. But also, if there’s no evidence, then on what grounds am I standing on? I can’t live suspended in the air.

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Reading Henrik’s essay clarifies a lot of things.

It seems the problem I have is this. What I have called the panorama is sort of a web of associations in a higher dimension space. It feels blurry because the eyes-equivalent-of-brain are physically incapable of looking at it in a distinct manner. What we can look at, is a representation of it that has been compressed into a lower dimension. But compression with minimum amount of loss, is very resource intensive. My brain is low in this processing power, which makes the compressing process computationally slow. Then, the working-memory of my brain is also very limited, and hence the residual accumulation exhausts it before the computation completes. The process crashes.

The way to get anywhere, it seems, is to not to try to compress the whole panorama at once but some chunks of it, that are large enough to contain useful associations. If somehow, I can keep hold of at least two remote points and the association between them², from the high dimensional space to low dimensional space, I will have something concrete to build further upon. And the good thing is that our hardware is flexible. If we keep exercising these compression computations, our working memory expands and processing speed improves, and thus we can bring in larger and larger chunks from the high dimensional space to the low dimensional one³.

Looking at the writings in my weblog, it seems I have been able to run a handful of computations involving compression of very small chunks of that wider panorama, without crashing. For those of you who have seen me, I feel just as much progressed with this exercise, as I would feel if I went to a gym someday⁴.

But the thing is, this whole affair is not about compression at all. It’s about building a better model in the higher dimensional space—a model that is closer to truth. That is why we compress it into lower dimensional space, in the first place, so that we can scrutinize it more thoroughly, looking for contradictions and flaws, and fix parts that need to be fixed, and demolish parts that need to be demolished, thus updating the high-dimensional model⁵. A very useful by-product of it though, is that we can share results of our findings (based upon scrutiny of the compressions) with others and read findings shared by others, and based upon our personal re-inspection of others’ findings, speed up the model-iteration process by magnitudes.

1. Probably more often than this, I do the other kind of stroll in which I do think in words—or speech to be precise. It’s a conversation I have with myself. [Probably, that’s why I have become accustomed to circling on the roof my hostel or veranda of my home (where I am alone), instead of something like a park, because I find it very hard to have a deep conversation with someone in presence of others (regardless of whether others are paying any attention or not). Even though I don’t actually speak aloud the words when I am talking to myself, but it shows in my behavior (I laugh at funny things and even slap myself (though much rarely))]. ↩︎
2. The other kind of stroll where I talk with myself (or think in speech/words) also helps make new associations, but those are mostly with points much closer in that high-dimensional space. ↩︎
3. But, the compressions are still lossy. You can’t substitute them for the thinking in high-dimensional space. Physicists or mathematicians are able to talk to each other in words or symbols, only when they can map the compressed representations to their own individual thinking in the high-dimensional space. ↩︎
4. Those who have actually seen me know that’s a false comparison. The state of affairs is much more feeble in meat-space. ↩︎
5. If I am not mistaken about the technical processes, this happens with LLMs only in the training phase. Once an LLM model has been trained, it is not re-updating its model with every single computation it does—unlike human beings. ↩︎

In my previous post, I have provided a much more broader but related context for what I will be discussing here.

In some conversations I had with some friends, the conversation naturally gravitated from the thinking-problem in the masses to the academia to the children and then to parenting. We observe the children in our surroundings, and the way they are being brought up, and we consider it to be very much problematic. There is this one extreme where children’s brains are being lobotomized by them being given unsupervised access to mobile phones at a very young age. The parents of such children had not had these technologies when they were young, and so they do not have any mental framework or policy to be able to supervise their children. But then there’s an even bigger problem that is only going to be exacerbated in the near future. The generation of people that are having their first newborns at this time, or will have their first newborns in next 5-10 years is the generation of people who themselves have an extremely unhealthy relationship with technology. Children are excellent learners, and the behaviors they are going to learn from their parents will be extremely problematic. This situation is extremely depressing.

My roommate has a very troubled relationship with teachers at his academic institute, and in one such a rant, he commented that if only the Principal would take one suggestion from him, it would make his life easier. He would suggest that, they should check teachers’ social media profiles for signs of mental maturity before hiring them. I asked him how on earth will then this normie institute find teachers that pass the criteria?

This is the social environment in which our children will be born, where parents and teachers (to whom parents have started entrusting their children at a younger and younger age) are not mentally well capacitated to provide children an environment that allows them to develop a thinking capability. 

All of this might sound dull and gloomy, but the situation does not warrant pessimism. I believe children have extraordinary capabilities beyond our imagination. Have you ever tried learning a new language? You probably haven’t, but if you know about the process, it’s not an easy one. But look at children, they learn a completely new language without any guided or structured process within span of a few years, and that too effortlessly. This is crazy if you think about it. You just have to put them in the relevant environment and they learn insane things. (These children then grow up and become human beings who solve complicated problems and build unimaginable stuff.)

But as I mentioned, creating such an environment for our children is not going to happen by itself. It will require a conscious and sustained effort on our part. That is why I have read and thought (and argued with my mother) a great deal about homeschooling and parenting.

However, there’s one point where all my previous frameworks of thinking break down. And I had to accept this when my friends asked me about the same point, that I haven’t been able to figure out a solution for that part (yet). The problem is this. You can think and conjecture all day about what kind of environment children should have, but there is a crucial detail you are omitting from the scene, and that is that a child has two parents. If your partner does not have a shared understanding of this whole problem, and is not aligned with you in these principles guiding your child’s upbringing, this is simply not going to work. Period.

So, the sub-problem that is unsolved yet is this: How do you find a life partner who aligns with your goals and is similarly committed in achieving those goals together?

The fact that my framework of thinking breaks down at this sub-problem means that it needs serious thinking. And when I think about this, then I do think a part of problem is that we (or at-least I) shy away from thinking or discussing this problem. So, the purpose of writing all this, is to stop sweeping certain crucial details of this problem under the rug, and confront them.

For a person to be the right life partner for you, they must align with you in the broader principles of how you are going to live your life. These broader principles are linked with the context I discussed in first post. One aspect of it is about what kind of things would we be spending most of our lives doing, and second is what kind of environment will we be giving to our children in which they will spend the transformative years of their lives. If two persons, do not align in both of these aspects, then I don’t see any point in the marriage or relationship of such persons.

So, how do you find a person who aligns with you in these aspects?

I don’t know. So, let me look at how it’s being done in my environment.

In my environment, I see two different cultures which have a separate mechanism for how people choose their life partners. One is the culture to which I belong. This culture’s mechanism is more traditionally rooted where matches are made or suggested by the greater kin and relies on the kin’s perception of the two individuals but even more than that, their perception of the two individuals’ parents, because a fruit inherits the characteristics of the same tree. If the two families find themselves compatible or aligned in their values and socio-cultural aspects, the match is made.

The second culture’s mechanism is relatively a new one, where an individual’s kin or even parents have effectively no role in such a decision. While the first culture discourages pre-marital relationship between two opposite gendered persons, the second culture freely allows it. In fact, since there is effectively no role of the kin, the pre-marital relationship is exactly the mechanism through which people are supposed to find the person they are willing to spend the rest of their lives with. Marriage is a commitment between two individuals for spending the rest of their lives together. In this mechanism, there is a pre-marital process called dating. During dating, the two individuals live together and kind of simulate the post-commitment life, to try to see if that will end up well, before actually making that life-long commitment.

This is a very rough sketch of the mate-matching mechanisms I see in the two cultures.

I have described these two mechanisms, because they are distinct in their methodology and the people I get to observe and know about, follow either of these mechanism, and it would not be logical that while observing the situation of their relationships, we do not keep in consideration that mechanism.

So, when I observe the current situation of relationships in the people from both the cultures, the situation is pretty bad at both places. However, the nature of relationship problems is different in the two cultures.

Let’s consider the second culture first. In the second culture, individuals are exposed to this process of dating in their teenage or early-20s, when they are very young, and their worldview isn’t properly developed yet. However, their bodies have sexually matured, and hormones have started kicking in. So, when these young individuals will start talking to opposite-gender individuals, they will naturally gravitate towards them due to the purely natural biological attraction toward opposite sex, even if there is no deeper principle aligned between the two of them. So there will be inevitable failures in relationships in early years because their process is not a process for finding a life partner but a process for finding a sexual partner.

This was the general-population problem. But then there are people within this culture who are serious about things they want to do in their lives and serious about finding a life-partner with whom to live their lives. This culture’s mechanism causes problems for them in two ways. The major problem with this mechanism is because it has made relationships too much fungible. It is relevant to note that this second culture’s mechanism had emerged as a reaction to mechanism of the first culture. In the first culture, relationships were too rigid; incompatible people felt compelled to continue their relationship further than they ought to, and thus suffered. So, this second culture first encouraged divorce and ending of long-term relationships, and then in continuance of making relationships more flexible went as far as discouraging the initial long-term commitment in the first place, by abolishing the tradition of marriage. So, the lines between short term experimentation part called dating and the long-term commitment part got blurred. As I defined earlier, the dating phase is an experimentation phase where you kind of simulate the post-commitment life before making that commitment. So, it is a fake simulation, because due to the idiosyncrasies of each individual, there is a certain minimum level of compromise or tradeoff you will have to do to be able to live together, but you will not be willing to make that tradeoff, if you are not committed about it for the long-term. So what happens is that on every hiccup in the pre-commitment experimentation phase, you either (i) consider moving on to a different relationship, or (ii) when you have done that enough, you become defensive and start doing things to ensure that the other person does not move on to a next relationship, and thus you start compromising a bit too much and that is also a problematic because it might take the relationship to the commitment phase, but then you will stop compromising too much and the other person will have a rightful objection to that, and things will start going downhill. All this happens because without commitment, the simulation is fake. A true simulation pre-commitment is simply not possible. So, this is the problem in this culture. How are you going to be able to build relationships that are based on broader life principles and not natural biological attraction owing to the hormones, and how are you going to find a life-partner when no one is willing to commit to a longer term relationship without a short-term fake simulation phase that does not in fact tell you about your compatibility with another person?

Now, let’s discuss the first culture, where although an individual might make the final decision regarding choice of his partner, he himself would not be the one looking out for potential-partners to decide about, rather his extended family or kin would be doing this task for him. The primary problem with this mechanism, specially in this age, is that individuals have become more differentiated but with that many levels of hierarchy involved in finding the potential partners, the actual preferences or values of the two individuals get completely abstracted away. And for individuals who are supposed to make the final decision, there simply is not enough information to be able to judge whether the other person believes in same kind of principles as they do. It’s just a blind guess. But since the problem of complete abstracting out of individual values started getting felt, the culture (or some subcultures) allowed flexibility in the mechanism. That is the individuals are now allowed to talk and discuss with each other, before making the final decision. This flexibility is limited, but still I think you can get to know a lot about other person’s worldview by having a few conversations with them. But the problem is that this flexibility only solves part of the problem not the entire problem. The flexibility only allows you to filter out incompatible partners, but it still not solves the problem of how the kin is supposed to suggest potential-partners that are actually compatible, given that the kin does not understand the true goals or values of the individual. Maybe, if you are lucky, one of your parents might understand your preferences or values, but the sample of potential partners that your parents will directly know of is too small, and if they take suggestions from kin, then those suggestions would be not guided in any way by your individual preferences or values.

Another problem with the first culture and its mechanism is its traditionally rooted association with patriarchy. Apparently, the strictness and rigidity regarding the lives of females has loosened a lot on surface level. But the actual autonomy females living in this culture have with their lives is still low. The first part of their lives is governed or influenced by their fathers, and the second part by their husbands. Traditionally, females were married at a younger age and thus when they were married, they would be more adaptable to the ways of their husbands. Now, when marriage age is relatively later, the lives of females get well adjusted to their father’s way of living which makes re-adjustment to their husbands’ way of living much difficult. But either way, females do not have any kind of autonomy in their lives. This is a big problem. Because as I discussed in my previous post, there are already too many of a forces forcing a person to switch off their minds and follow the bureaucracy. Now, those few females who have somehow still developed the ability to think by themselves are very negatively impacted by this lack of autonomy. What lack of autonomy does is that it makes one’s mind reach this conclusion logically that there a lot of (fixable) problems that can’t be fixed, because the lack of autonomy disables them to even consider a big portion of the solution space. So even in areas of life where they do have some level of autonomy, they do not use it as much as they can, and that is a problem.

So, that is where I find myself currently in. This is the culture I find myself living in. And the one discussed before it is the only other culture I see or know of. And there are problems existing in both of these.

So, the problem at hand that I haven’t figured out the answer of is this. Given the context of the graver problems I described in first post, there are certain broader principles I have developed (of course they are coarse and less developed now, and might go through some changes in details, but at a broader level I don’t think they are going to change) that are important to me, so how do I find a life partner who aligns with these principles and is willing to put in the conscious effort to live by these principles, specifically given the context of the cultural environment I find myself in. 

The problem is already complicated enough, but there’s another element that I think is of crucial importance in this problem, that is one’s religious belief system. Most people subscribe to religious belief system they inherit from their parents by default. They not merely inherit the name of the religion/sect or the loosely-defined belief system, but also the degree of its influence, i.e., in which affairs of life does that belief system influence the actual practices or actions of a person (and to what extent) and in which affairs it doesn’t. For the values and goals of two individuals to align enough to be good life partners, it is important that both the set of beliefs (or lack thereof) and the degree of their influence must also align. For instance if A is agnostic, and B subscribes to belief-system X only in practices of social traditions like marriage ceremony and funeral and not much else, then in belief-space they are close to each other. But if say, C belongs to belief-system X and is influenced by it to the extent the kind of work he’ll do will be influenced by it, while D only follows belief-system X in social traditions, then they are further apart in the belief-space than A and B even though both of them apparently follow they same belief-system.

Currently, I’m in the phase of life where one starts to question and re-define the belief system he inherits by default, and I believe figuring out this part is going to take a while, but whatever the final redefinition is, it might add another level of complication to the already complicated problem. Because, if you plan to have children, it will be cause severe conflicts in their upbringing if both the parents do not lie close in the belief-space.

So, the final form of problem is this:

How do you find a life partner who:

• aligns with you in your broader principles of how you are supposed to live your lives
• aligns with you in your vision of the kind of environment you would like for your children to have and is willing to put the conscious and sustained effort in providing them such
• is autonomous and believes in these principles independently, and not merely because their life-partner believes in them
• thinks for themselves, so that both of you help each other get unstuck in hard problems of life
• lies close to you in belief-space (regarding belief-set and its degree of influence)

This is the unsolved part. I notice I had titled this piece as The (yet) Unsolvable Problem, which is funny because I should have used Unsolved instead of Unsolvable.

So, this is the yet unsolved part.

I will send this blog post to a few friends of mine. I might scare them away from writing a blog, but my challenge here is to not let that happen.

So firstly, instead of pointing you my very badly articulated blog post of mine that explains why my blog is called a weblog, I give you a tldr.

When I tell you to write a blog, I don’t want you to tell you to write the kind of blogs which are commonplace these days. I want you to write the kind of personal blogs that people used to write a decade or two earlier, and back then it was called weblog (which later got later shortened to blog) meaning a log on the web. Very few people write that kinds of blogs these days, but as they say:

0.01% of people is a lot of people

— Visakan Veerasamy (@visakanv) February 12, 2021

I was about to go to a tangent, but let me come back. So… as I note in my badly articulated blog post, this is what a weblog is:-

• Weblog is a personal project.
• It is mostly a log of observations, thoughts, ideas, and/or activities of the person.
• The weblog is primarily intended for a very limited audience [or you should entirely ignore who’s going to read it and that would be a very reasonable thing].

          ~ Tamseel in a very condescending tone

This is a very meh definition. So you should probably not delve very much on that.

However, I will point you to read something from some essays by Henrik Karlsson (whom you might have heard a many times from me).

He has this essay/blogpost titled “Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog” which is a simple bullet list of points. Interestingly, the most interesting point is at the end:-

In real life, you can’t go on and on about your obsessions; you have to tame yourself to not ruin the day for others. This is a good thing. Otherwise, we’d be ripping each other’s arms off like chimpanzees. But a blog is a tiny internet house where you decide the norms. And since there are already countless places where you can’t be yourself, there is no need to build another one of those. The law of the land is that everything you think is funny is funny. Those who find the texture of your mind boring or offensive can close the tab, no need to worry about them. It is good for the soul to have a place where being just the way you are is normal. And it is a service to others, too. You’ll be surprised how many people are laughably similar to you and who wish there was a place where they felt normal. You can build that.

In another point:

Not that many people will care about what you write, at least for the first few years, so make the writing useful to you. Write in a way that lets you refine your thoughts about the things that matter. Write to experience what you care about in higher resolution, write to enhance your feeling of aliveness.

Also:-

Your contradictions are an asset. You’re a lover of classical English architecture and you’re also a dirty little punk—expressing both at the same time is more interesting than sharing just cute pictures of English gardens or just wild trashy stuff. The more you incorporate everything that you love and that comes easily for you, your interests, your sense of humor, your grammatical tics, etc, the more your style emerges.

~ Henrik Karlsson

He also has another interesting and rather longer essay titled “A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox” which you can read sometime else because reading it now can possibly overwhelm you which is against our purpose [or maybe you can also read now; the point is, follow whatever trails that seem interesting]. But I’ll leave an excerpt.

People feeling alone in their interests has always been true to a certain extent, but the internet has made it much worse. The excess of information allows you to travel down your path of interest with mad velocity. On the internet, Wonderland is recursive, with rabbit holes opening up to yet more rabbit holes; you never stop falling. And the further you fall, the less likely it is that anyone you’ve ever met is falling where you are. This will make you immensely sad. You will visit your parents, and when they ask you about your life you will have two choices. You can either be incomprehensible and see them grow concerned about things you are excited about, or you can talk about surface-level things and cry a little when you are alone at night.

The reason I’m spelling out this dynamic is twofold. First, you can get out of this mess if you want to. You do that by writing online (or publishing cool pieces of software, or videos, or whatever makes you tickle—as long as you work in public). Second, if you want to get out of the mess the key lies exactly in understanding that you are not the only person who has no one to talk to about the things you get obsessed by.

This essay resonated with me a lot, and since the time I read that, I think have gotten out of that mess. 

I just now went away started re-reading some of interesting Henrik essays. I want to point out some of them here, but I won’t because I might write a separate post where I share some of the most interesting essays of him. And the reason I’m telling you this here is because if I don’t write that I’d like you to nudge me to do so. The way you can nudge me is by writing to me, and that is what I’ll discuss in my next post.

 Anyways, back to writing a blog. If, by any chance, you have actually decided to give it a go, I’ll help you with the undecidedness about where exactly to write. For now, you have only two options:-

• Choose the simpler path, and make a blog using the same platform I use for my blog at the time i.e. WordPress.
• Go be nerdy about all kinds of blogging platforms, and list down all their pros and cons and then eventually reach the same conclusion as mine. Hehe. Bye!

Being able to spin up a room of your own with a few clicks is one of the great advantages we have over previous generations. Make use of it.

~Henrik