The Idea of Jobs and Placements creep me out

From the very beginning - since childhood, all the conditioning eventually leads to placements. Our entire youth goes scripted for this one goal.

The idea is to sit for campus placements to get a job in a company.

What is so creepy about this - is the idea of a company and what has been made of getting into it !

What is a Company?

I googled it and found this definition -

A company is a legal business entity, an organization formed by a group of people, that produces or sells goods or services to make a profit.

The definition matters as it informs what we think about a concept.

The early stage of a company is what we call as a ‘startup’.

I googled a startup's definition - what its formal perception is; This is what I found -

A startup is a newly formed company designed to grow fast.

This is literally the first line. It’s on the second line where it says -

It “usually” tries to solve a problem with a new idea or new technology.

So, a company is a money printing machine, and its child form is a fast-moving manufacturing process for producing this machine?

I was stunned when I looked up the definition, especially the startup’s.

It sounds quite misaligned with the ideal image of vision, visionaries, hustling team and breakthroughs.

I’ve heard it so many times it has become a cliché – the story of Steve jobs and Apple.

His ideas and speech at Stanford, how apple “changed the world”, reminiscence of its innovation and aesthetics - which is still highlighted today!

The idea of startup in my head was to bring a vision to life.

Shark Tank and Instagram stretched that ideal to its max !

While in-part it is indeed true, you can see that in the eyes of few founders and feel resonance in their voice, still how much of the company and startup culture is NOT vision but money? I know money is critical, but is that the primary reason to start one?

"not necessarily" - I asked some people, they say: usually you go for a service business instead of starting up if your focus is on money. Product is hard to crack and takes distribution. Agency can be started without big distribution or funding, it can become profitable if deliverables hold quality and referrals start. Getting clients can take less reps than to build a customer base.

So are startups driven by vision-led execution?

I'll leave that as an open question, I do not know.

What’s weirder is the abstract concept of these businesses.

What was a company? - Business "entity" !

What is a Business “Entity”?

Entity is something that exists independently [google]

But what is this “something”?

In real world, we see companies as huge, tall buildings with bluish-black glassy look or white concrete walls. With headquarters and branches. They hold assets and have liabilities. It has people within it whom we call as janitors, employees, managers and founders … These people "build", “work”, do their “jobs”.

The company can be listed on the stock market, its graph dances and makes investors dance with it. They look forward to gains and dividends. The equity holders may look forward to high exits and while it’s there - it gives them non-recourse debt-leverage.

They produce or/and provide goods and services as part of their “work”.

But why is the concept of “work” so abstract? Can we see it any other way?

Understanding what 'Work' really is!

Almost always when someone is asked what they do, the reply is something like –

“I am a software engineer at google.”

Well, that’s the job title and corporation name. It’s not what they do!

Doing sounds like “Oh I am part of engineering team building Google Meet which is a website and app that enables people to do online video calls.”.

Makes sense, you mention the product and you can explain it in a layman way.

For a more technical person you can elaborate – “It’s a web-based product. We’re using MERN stack/flutter to build it. It’s 28 of us in the team. I work with 6 other devs … (something like that)”

It isn’t like there is no vision! A startup may have few or just one vision which becomes visible through the media whereas a large company can have many in parallel. That is the interesting part! But they don’t mention it that way!

A very similar story is of "React JS". It's built by meta's teams. But it doesn't appears directly, we know the FB, IG and WApp. Now there's MetaAI, Oculus. Maybe it's because it isn't of any use to tell it to masses.

But as someone who might like to join a big company, if so many things happen inside, it's very useful to know what they actually work on ! 

When the vision is visible at the core, we can imagine a company a different way - not as a “legal entity” but as a “presence”. The presence of Visionary & Machines, materials and people who bring that vision to life. There is a sensible transaction between the two. You pay to get people and resources who “help” and “work with you” to bring your vision to life. You get paid to “help” and “work with visionary” so you can use that money to buy a life you envision living. That equally holds for the visionary too who can use his money to envision his own life.

Human Orchestra in Vision Realization

When I was witnessing my house getting renovations few years ago, I saw the process unfold at each step. We started with the decision to have small upper storey. Got an architect contractor and discussed the floor plan. A vision which found the first person to make it happen. He led to arrangement of labour, machines and raw materials. Then the work started. There were countless shops we went to for various purposes – electrical wires, switchboards, tiles, paint buckets, pipes, bathroomware, kitchenware, water tank... Then hire electrician, plumber, painter … It was a huge orchestra of human collaboration.

A company seems to be similar when the vision is at the core. The difference between this and a real company is likely monetary ROI. Company goes one step ahead towards scaling a vision, not merely having it come true. I suppose it’s when scaling becomes more important than the vision, that’s when enshittification happens.

Also, there is indeed a difference between a big enterprise & its owner and a worker. One understands the game while the other does not. One takes risks, other not. One belongs to the elite club while the other not. One lives on non-taxable non-recourse debt while other on taxable income. One is within a system which preserves and grows his wealth while the other is within a system which depletes it all.

Now, let’s talk the matter of Jobs and Placements.

Absurdity of Job Culture

Why does a job require strict computerized biometric attendance for punctuality? Why stay till night when you can finish the work by afternoon? Why get more work if you get free by finishing early? Why does it have to be endless work if salary is fixed? Getting Paid for hours you sit on a chair and do “something” or "nothing" and expand work-time to avoid extra-work is ridiculous. Why not get a definite well-defined work, get it done, get the money and leave?

I got half my answer when I went for a factory visit – human workers being no different than machines, on brink of replacement as soon as cheaper machines catch up. I felt so uneasy when I saw a worker put his right hands up, grab a drill-like machine, punch something onto a part he held in his left arm and then pass the piece to next person on the assembly line. Do it again and again, forever. It’s their month, it’s their year!

I was more sacred to see the weekly hall of fame board with a certificate appreciating a worker for “max units processed among all workers”.

We were shown how these “workers” are managed by our accompanying manager. You get trained to “walk” – to “walk” with a constant speed holding a material or even empty handed. There was a yellow strip on the floor with a clock above in the training area. Each worker is monitored with an AI CCTV grid, the materials they process at a specific station on the assembly line gets constantly counted and they are rated for moving their hands fast without screwing up. Doing well ofc gives you bonuses.

Credentialism and Continuity of Relic Methods

I could see how much the difference between myself and them was. I realised I am “privileged”. I would never be a worker (machine operator). In any case, even at junior position because of my majors I would be hired as a manager or enginner but likely not part of physical labour. Then I would monitor and command these people and report to higher managers. It is still human interaction and some techno-creative work for my role not purely machine-like work. Anytime these people could be gladly replaced as the incentive is to “maximize production”. It makes perfect sense on PnL sheet to have cheaper machines over humans.

But something is off - if these factories have on-prem training areas why need a degree or college training? The accomplice said to us that they know we (freshers) know nothing and it doesn't matter, we can be trained on-prem. It is mere convenience to have us filtered by an institution so applications are lower. They assume that even knowing nothing means "knowing something" because we go through the spaces of engineering talks. That made sense, kinda !!!

So, These credentials (degrees and certs) are barriers to entry. They control social mobility and keep the strata intact. The poor stay poor, middle stays middle, rich stays rich. That’s why to be rich, as a middle class or poor the struggle is higher. You defy the strata-preserving design!

You can read more about credentialism phenomenon from this resource –

[Reflections on Randall Collins’s sociology of credentialism, DOI: 10.1177/0725513619874935]

That although is logical, still it makes no sense.

Every institution rule from periods and bells to punctuality and deadline submission is designed like a factory - so you know you must leave your work midway and move to next station when you need to, be on time for your shift to the production doesn't stops or slows down. It was obvious. There is no prep for "mental flow state". That isn't the goal.

The problem is we live in a time and within a system which has expanded its subjects to mental ones too not merely basic vocational training and physical labor. That's because institutions can increase profits by being inclusive. Most of us won't be physical labors though - That was the case in 19th and 20th century and it worked very well. It still works for those who may want physical labor jobs. However, Mental labor training can't happen with move-your-hands-fast methods.

This is obvious to them as much as it is to us. That is why they have on-prem trainings for operators who'd work on machines and even for us to get trained in machine design, engineering and optimization.

But these roles require different training methodology and one doesn't work for the other. Then why use the same methods?

I think, the reason is - unless there is a crisis, there is no incentive to change. From an institution's perspective (any private institution for that matter), it is more "work" to change their systems. With everything as it is, they still get their admissions & tuition, development, backlog, fine and every kind of fees. Why change when no one's complaining? No one is actually complaining, because if we do it's not heard, so we drop it play along. It has happened enough times in our experience that we stopped trying. So why change?

Just Continue the same 20th century relic until it becomes unsustainable.

Now, Why does it have to be about The “Job Market” situation, Placement rates, competition, interviews, exams, curriculum, industry-institution gap-filling and prep-grind? What about CTCs and LPAs?

Absurd.

What should you prepare for to work?

I watched a video while learning dart & flutter made by Google’s internal team itself who worked on Notebook LM app. It’s an AI chat-app which uses “your” sources/references and replies strictly from those with citations. They said they used flutter to build it.

Does it take an industry-institution collaboration and curriculum revision to learn that I need to know flutter and principles of building and scaling to join their team considering technical aspects? Is it that complex? Do I really need to read and memorize PPT content and get tested in my exams to prove that I know it? Even if I do so, does my test reveal anything about my ability?

Is it not clear that I can myself figure it out what it will take me to join someone if they just tell me what they do, how they do it and what building blocks & tools goes into building it? Nobody anyways teaches “social skills” or “culture skills”. It’s all technical only.

Despite being so simple, it doesn’t work that way.

Hey Sheeps, Join the herd !

I cannot work my own way or choose my own thing as it cannot be systematized and standardized. It cannot be outsourced. If I choose my own path, I cannot be tamed and moulded.

Every student has his own desires but he must be funneled with the rest against his will so the market demands meet the supply and the institutions can have their cuts. Humans are tools and resources. It's not about the student or his interest, he's a resource for the market and institution.

To teach everyone same thing, same way efficiently we standardize - which by its very nature must eliminate all personalization. Thus we have entrance exams and limited seats. It's the demand of market, profit of institutions and holding the strata which matters!

Incentives of the institutions aren’t aligned with the students personal desires.

This is where a student-life gets messy.

The institution is a business, especially the private ones.

The pedagogy isn’t effective and isn’t innovation upon. Infact effective systems already exist so there is little need for innovation, but they aren’t even adopted.

Why our system is destined to fail us forever!

Below I will describe how my/our current academic training experience is, and if the system you are in is the same or has similar features, I argue it won’t ever work. Here’s why –

A.    Let’s begin with Lectures

Lectures have been around for very long time in history. The relevant part is why!

They were a mechanism for orally disposing useful information, usually from a rare manuscript, by a speaker, to large audiences at once before the Printing Press was invented; when books were expensive and rare to get. In both Greek, ancient-Indian style (ones I looked into, could be others too) of Lecturing it wasn’t a mere disposition though, it was coupled with dialogue, questioning, interpretation and recitation. It was also used as a mechanism for storytelling.

They largely became obsolete as form of information dispersion when printing press democratized it by making it affordable and available - supercharging the Renaissance, until it was brought back by institutions and bureaucrats in colonial time to systematize dispensary of standardized & authoritative information to large audiences. 

From the above ones, the current model only has the disposition. Questioning model has inverted from audience asking the speaker to speaker asking the audience. The assumption is a student will listen attentively, understand, remember and eventually use it practically.

Here’s the problem with the assumption.

1.      Attentiveness - Student do not listen attentively. One evidence is no. of students using phone visible through naked eyes to an observer. Other is number of Notetakers. First is generally very high, second is very low. This is strictly contextual to universities as schools enforce phone-bans and mandatory note checking.

2.     Understand - Even if you listen to speaker, how do you know if you understood what got delivered. Not later in exams when you re-study everything, but immediately. There is no mechanism for immediate testing. Feynman Technique - one of effective methods - proposes “writing” to explain what you understood, in your own terms. However, lectures lack mechanism to produce. It’s only passive consumption. Note-taking is transcription not production. There is no time to produce when one must constantly listen.

3.     Remember – Memory reinforces through recall and relevance. Thoughts themselves are forms of recall. Revisions have same nuance – you recite the info without looking at it (recall), if you just re-read you will forget. It takes retrieval. This is also where modern exam-prep techniques like active recall and spaced-repetition come in. But they are an add-on over self-study, not part of the system itself. Even within self-study it is ineffective.

Why? – Because the incentive and relevance are to remember it for “exams”, the relevance in practical scenarios is “unknown”. The practical scenario itself is “unknown”. Great Caveat is if you build something you constantly look up the information, recall it to apply so it naturally gets reinforced. When you think, the thought itself is recall, when reinforces it further. Creation by its very nature reinforces memory. Revision/Deliberate recall in such cases is not required.

4.     Practical Use – This gets pushed beyond placements. There is an assumption that a student can pass an exam and never recall the contents again for years, never think about them and magically still remember it all when it needs to be used, if ever. If a counter argument is usage in practical classes, that’s a subject to discuss of its own. Let’s do it.

B.     Practicals

By default, the assumption with practicals is – it’s a form of hands-on vocational learning. That rarely is the case though. Let’s go through several deviances one by one:

1.      Write-ups – These are files where you compile the theory and readings from practical classes for submission to the professor at the end of a semester. This practice has poisoned the entire mindset of what a practical must be. The focus shifts from learning and developing skills to finishing and submitting writeups as these are what decide the marks and credits you get and whether you pass, not the hands-on – that’s formality.

2.     Research disguised as practical – In almost every subject I have taken during my 4 years, always among our 8-10 practicals for a subject in a semester,  4-5 are just case studies or research work. We sit in our labs bored and clueless with our phones and expected to research on a topic we don’t care about and handwrite them on assignment papers. We end up chat-gpt-ing it. Everybody does. The relevance of topic and research it “unknown”. +There is no hands-on.

3.     Expert demonstration – For many practicals, instead of us students getting chance to perform hands-on, we only get to see a lab assistant demo the practical to us, so we can collect the final readings in our notebooks and attach it in the writeup file. Yes, there is some understanding but it’s not the same as learning by doing, the nuances are never revealed until we perform. We never know we can screw up if we touch that equipment.

4.     Equipment scarcity, teaming up & ghost members – whenever a practical is performed mostly - instead of each student performing chance by chance, we are told to form groups. Problem is equipment and time are limited. Within span of an hour or two - barely a few people can perform, and when they do, they obsessively stay stuck to it. By the next session we move onto the next topic. Many never get the chance and slowly lose interest in even trying to get one.

Many of team members don’t take any interest anyways – it’s not that they are not interested, I used to think so, but I was wrong - Folks like to perform and enjoy it if they have the equipment in their hands. Exceptions are there but these are people who ended up doing the course due to coercion by someone else or cluelessness. They simple don’t even wanna be there.

This approach is possible to fix, and we had an experience outside college which gracefully solved it. You simply invert the model. 80% practical and 20% theory. Not the opposite. Gives way more time. + No writeups. Then you divide students into small batches of 6 and assign one mentor to each group. This is different from dividing entire batch of 20 or more into multiple groups and letting them wander – because each group is small and assisted with an expert, he can encourage each student to perform hands-on, evaluate and immediately correct on the spot. This repeats for hours per student until the skill is honed. You start with a simple task demo-ed by expert, all 6 perform it one by one, then you move onto more difficult /complex task, again they would perform one by one, then onto the next task and this repeats until you get comfortable doing it and decent skill is developed.

5.     No-work classes – It is not uncommon to either get no work assigned at all or get something you can finish in 20 minutes. If not that, you know the nerds are gonna do it and share on WhatsApp, so when the submission deadline comes you can throw 200 rupees and get your pages printed and punched in a file. There is no incentive or reason to learn. We have to forcefully sit inside room till the period ends just to avoid a “higher authority” catch us leave early and lecture the professor.

6.     The why – No task is appealing enough unless we find it practically useful to us. Why even bother? Are we ever gonna use this? For what? Maybe it gets used in “industry” but would I be in such an industry or company where it is required? There are many unanswered questions. Always we are handed a scripted list of tasks and are expected to perform. We did not choose it, hence have no idea how it is significance for us.

There is a solution to even this. It’s simply giving students the choice to decide what they wanna build.

The people who join technical clubs to build require the same or similar skills that are in the curriculum. Difference is the great depth they go into, how they perform as a team with sincerity (without writeup nonsense) and how each thing they do connects to the bigger picture.

I recently got into a new obsession – building my own mac-like laptop. I started digging into the rabbit holes and found something very interesting. If I want to have an aluminium chassis for my laptop I would need to select the material, create and send the CAD design and ask a vendor to “CNC machine” the material it for me. I learned about CNC machining and CAD design in my second year, but I was never interested. It didn’t seem useful to me back then, now it became relevant and am not interested in learning it. It’s weird but drive is often internal.

In similar fashion, another obsession I got into was Linux Hyprland desktop customizations. Linux is flexible enough to allow you have any aesthetic you want for your desktop screen. Some designs look way cooler, tasteful and personalized than even the MacBook. You start by wanting to have aesthetic desktop but end up indirectly learning about Linux filesystems, config and bash scripts, mechanisms of graphic rendering and way more. Obsession creates unexpected high-leverage learning outcomes as a side-effect.

C.    Assignments

These are like practical write-ups, almost identical. You are provided question you must write answers for on an assignment sheet before a deadline. These sheets carry marks and get counted in Internals. Submission is obviously more important than to learn. The questions are hints for what will be coming in exams.

D.    Standardized Exams

These are the same for everyone with expected questions to be answered in a specific format. There is step-marking and you must score a minimum number to clear the subject. These are the primary reason why learning from PPTs makes more sense than to read huge volumes of book.

If you remember what I explained about memory in ‘lecture’ section – because memory requires recall and relevance and exams are the relevance in themselves, the learning doesn’t matter, only exams do. As revisions stop after exams, the information is forgotten. Even if someone continues to revise for interviews or otherwise, the theoretical information has little value when it’s practical implementation doesn’t happen and its place in real work is unknown. Why would someone read volumes of book to gather loads of theory just to forget it later after exams. Is it not “effective” and “efficient” to memorize the compressed version of the PPT and pass in the subject with some maybe decent GPA.

E.     Projects

For the last 2 years and even now in my final one, I have been having variations of collaborative project-based or research-work subjects with credits introduced under the NEP2020.

While I honestly thought it’s a good initiative, I found myself doubting my opinion when it started! The execution was ridiculous.

So, the idea is – Myself and my team must solve a problem that “helps society” and do it in a way which is related to my domain - my chosen branch for majors.

The technique we were prescribed was to read research papers related to the problem title we chose, then navigate through paper-mill fake papers, jargons, complex math which seems irrelevant - to find gaps through the research and then try to fix it with a prototype based on our own ideas or borrowed ideas from those papers. It sounds sensible until you do it. Or are you confused already?

I realized ‘Oh! my professor is just gonna review, not actively teach. I don’t know anything about building. Me and my team must look for a societal problem to get the marks and pass, which “society” cares about but we don’t, then solve it in a way where our domain knowledge is applied. We must research about it, can’t be 4-5 papers but should be 30-40 papers – we struggled to find 10 even with sci-hub, forget about institution subscriptions, so we obviously used AI – perplexity and crammed all sorts of papers into our references section of PPT for review, with topics going tangents. As we’ll be spending from our pockets, there’s no funding, hence our expenses were deliberately frugal. The end-product doesn’t really matter – we weren’t interested, neither our mentor - for both of us it was a new formality overhead introduced by the institution management. Each semester we barely did any work (except nerd ones in one) but showed up to reviews with a patched-up AI PPT and got our grades to pass. No incentive to learn. While ‘MIT Maker Portfolio’ YouTube videos look cool, we don’t have the culture and drive like the students in the west to push ourselves. It just doesn’t matter. When an environment is so lifeless, you end up being just as lifeless. It’s all for grades and if someone builds something (very rare) it’s a marketing and CV material – useful but not a drive high enough for extraordinary attempts!

The craziest part is the constraints! From experience, the problems are rarely found by us. Often, we are already connected to a pain-point which makes us care about solving it. To look for a problem to get grades which helps society and solve it within our domain ‘only’ at extraordinary level is a ridiculous demand.

You must bring a revolution while following our orders! What an expectation!

Absurd.

F.     PR Events as Credit Courses

This is the most interesting part. How NEP2020 has enabled institutions to turn their PR, marketing and networking events into credit courses and enforce mandatory attendance. When I had my first event of this kind in my first year, my mom told me that it got printed in the newspaper and her colleagues were praising the institution seeing the article and the thumbnail. Huge ground packed with students from front row to the back.

Allow me to tell you where such a crowd came from. As I mentioned these events are part of credit courses now, which means if you don’t attend them you get a backlog, you get detailed in that course and you’ll have to attend it again next year and if you refuse to do so, you get a full year down because of the backlog.

When you enter the tent, you have to scan your ID and once you enter “YOU CANNOT LEAVE” until one section of the event ends. There are senior volunteers who physically block the gates, personally confront and do not allow anyone to leave. This is why the photos have such huge crowds - Mandatory attendance and physical lock in. These sessions were rubbish in my experience – speakers who can’t speak English well but do it anyways, load speakers, heat, everyone - with no exception was clearly either gossiping or was hooked to their phone – scrolling or playing games. I saw zero exceptions. I was turning my head around just to find a miraculous sincere student and didn’t find one. It was a gut-wrenching misery to endure for hours on stretch being repeated for days. It there wasn’t a backdoor to skip some sessions and get your attendance through CR/LRs and some CT buttering, it would be hell.

G.    Finally, Mandatory Attendance Criteria

Simply explained you get detained in a subject (backlog) and debarred from its exam (cannot sit to give exam) if your lecture attendance falls before a very high 75-80% mark excluding medical reasons which is reserved within remaining 20-25%. This is the most ridiculous rule which is enforced very strictly.

You cannot apply for internships as you can’t go, cuz you gotta maintain your 75%. You can’t freelance in the day because you got to attend lectures. It is incredibly tiring to sit on a low-quality wooden flat bench hurting your ass for hours back-to-back, listening to nonsense as you anyways self-study before the exams only to forget it all after passing. You get back to dorm or home and have low motivation and energy. How possibly can someone sit again on a chair and do “useful work” after hours of torture? That is inevitable now for our generation though, we have to “do useful work after useless hours at institution” – it is almost a must to “lock in” and “hustle on the side” as the future of classical job hunting doesn’t seem so bright.

To summarize if you go through the academia system as-it-is without a side-track working for you, you won’t have any opportunity at the end.

Why would someone give me internship or a job if I:

- don’t know anything. Can’t do a single real thing practically

- get judged and filtered by my grades and backlogs when such metrics are absurdly ridiculous

- never built anything meaningful because I neither had the drive and rewards or the people, the ecosystem incentivizing me to push forwards “in my majors domain”. If I do a side-hustle, it’s a “side” thing, not a part of academia – Infact, academia comes in the way. I cannot really apply based on a side-hustle cuz it's not of my core domain.

Absurd.

The Greatest barrier to self-led study, hustle and Improvement

As much as side-hustle and self-improvement is an option, most do not end up succeeding within it – for a very logical reason – it’s not discipline or motivation problem, it’s way deeper and much worse. This is what has been stopping us :-

Let’s look at the problem directly.

First - every work we tend to do is “mental work”! With large parts being digital!

Mental Work isn’t the same as Physical Work

You cannot compare mental work with physical work.

I can walk into the kitchen, drink water, put my hands on the floor, do 10 push-ups, wake-up & go wash my hands, then be back to what I was previously doing.

I am being specific to physical-work itself not what it takes to start physical work.

The lack of motivation to goto gym for instance, is not a physical body problem, it's a mind problem. The friction is much higher so it excuses. But in above example, the friction was negligible. It's my kitchen.

It’s way-way easier.

It’s not the same with the mind when performing a technical or creative work. I cannot just snap into a project, do it for some time, randomly checkpoint its progress in my head, wake up go do something else, come back and effortlessly continue from where I left. Never happens.

Chain of Thoughts, Flow State and the Culture of Disturbance

I have a chain of thoughts when I build something, it can have modular stages but not everything within a stage is modular. The deeper the flow state gets, more insightful and practical the thoughts become. If my flow breaks due to interruption, it is incredibly hard to get back that clarity.

The problem is it takes too long to get into flow (like an hour or 2) and even longer to finish one thing while being in such state (6-10 hrs). But, once it’s done, it is incredibly satisfying and tasteful. Finishing itself is quite satisfying and drives us to do more, create more.

The problem is routine -conflict. I you do not live alone and have other people, especially adults living with you, there is always conflict over things to be done. And done immediately. The idea of obedience and alignment to authority has deeply penetrated the minds of adults in this country. Everything must happen immediately according to their schedule and denying is insulting and disrespected.

Let me give an example. If your dinner is read, it must be immediately poured in a plate and consumed by you. It is not acceptable that you finish your work, go to kitchen, get your food yourself from a thermos-utensil and eat it.

Such is same for many activities, and this is not “my” story. This is a culture level issue, and it’s easy to realise that after watching tons of relatable reels on Instagram. Everyone goes through the same problem.

It is not acceptable that people can have different routines and they can happen in-parallel without conflict. It is not acceptable to not do something after delay. When you get called you must give your grandiose darshan.

Absurd.

This is problematic for very reason I explained above. Because we have different routines and need than the other adults, every interaction – though just an interaction – is also an interference, it is disturbing when working – and breaks the flow. And because nothing even gets done properly, we are “always working”.

Why we find ourselves always working but never finishing?

The “always working” problem has this cause –

You sit down to work, it’s a work with a finish line, you know what you must do and where it ends. Every work does have an end. But every time you get interrupted during a mental activity – the flow breaks, chain of thoughts break. These interruptions are not massive hence it’s offensive to adults when you point it out. But even if it’s a 30s or 2min work, if the flow breaks it’s an hour long pain to get it back and more hours to get work done while being within it. Just like you cannot drive a bike at 80 km/hr with speed breakers very few metres - Frequent interruptions even for small tasks act as breaks and do not allow momentum to be formed and if somehow it gets formed, it breaks. The work which should take an hour takes a day and yet is unfinished.

With endless interruptions, slow to no progress, the mind naturally feels discomfort and deviates from the work I am “supposed to do”.

And because most work happens digitally, meaning there is by-design endless distraction waiting for me to drown in it, it is super easy to get drifted into overconsumption and entertainment, scrolling. Consuming is tiring by itself. It just gets harder to work after hours of consumption while still not being in flow state. Very hard to collect back all the context, slowly build-up chain of thoughts and continue meaningful work.

I feel convinced I live among society of adults who rarely to almost-never experience flow. They have no idea such state exists or don’t remember being in one. Which makes it difficult to communicate, as words barely articulate experiences.

The Stigma against Solitude

If they knew, the classic replies won’t be a thing.

In India, if you know you know, closing the gates of a room fumes adults with anger. Even more if I turn off the lights.

It’s not privacy preservation; I just think more clearly when I am alone. Darkness cuts distraction so focus goes inwards. Usually negative thoughts grow, that happens too, but while building something there is a “topic” to ruminate on and isolation plus walking in dark produces great ideas. I am not recommending it as a technique to copy.

The adults are so scared of being alone, they do everything to escape isolation; always be in herds. It makes sense as when you look inside, you encounter darkness but once you in deep enough, it flips. You get comfortable to the darkness, and it stop affecting. So, ideas and clarity start to develop.

Music & Mood, Mood & Thoughts

Then there is music!

I although believe the folks who walk with EarPods ON like all the time, they are surely addicted. I don’t buy that GenZ aesthetic, it’s quite dystopic to escape so much whether you listen to music or educational podcast.

But sometimes music can change mood, mood can change thought patterns which can kick-off useful creative thinking and even pull out of negative rumination. It also can do the opposite, so genre matters.

It works two ways - thoughts can influence mood, mood can influence thoughts. But often mood changes due to external factors, not thinking. But this different mood certainly changes thought patterns.

There are real differences in way two generations experience and perform work, the gap is tough to communicate as both experience two different worlds and have radically different mindset.

The mindset becomes a problem even when you try to create content. Everything has an element of content creation now. There’s LinkedIn. Every post will be seen and judged and opportunities will be given or ceased. There must be a mask you wear.

When ideas get shared, they reveal a part of you which not everyone has seen. When someone is around it is hard to even speak as if your tongue slips and you reveal a non-dogmatic belief - it instantly creates violent or cringe reaction. If you subscribe to norms, you get surprising support but defiance for change is a war hard to win alone.

There is surveillance, negative judgement, doubt and interference when you attempt the right thing and tons of pressure and support for the wrong thing!

Absurd.

Why we don't get to walk an Alternative Path

It must not be surprising a student cannot prove that an alternative plan works. He or she cannot. How possibly? When in our lives were we ever given a chance to experiment, fail and figure out. Every deviance from traditional path has endless corrections and coercions to being the sheep back to herd. There was no freedom ever to do it different.

When the well-accepted, widespread system cannot guarantee me a good profession after taming me for 2 years of preschool, 12 years of school and 4 years of university – 18 years of control and manipulation; why are we expected to prove than alternative path can guarantee a good future before even attempting to take that alternative path.

How can the evidence appear before the event?

Good night.