Paradox

The world is filled with things that make less sense than they ideally should, and we either continue to operate around them or aren’t aware enough to even acknowledge them many a times. Simply put, the world is filled with paradoxes. Today, let’s try to decipher one very commonly faced paradox and see how we can acknowledge it, and find a way out (if there is one).

“I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.”

Plato

Before we begin, a vote of Thanks

So, this one is going to start with a long, emotional opening, because my site just reached 3000 hits. And before anyone makes fun of this number, please note, I have celebrated numbers way smaller than this, and there is fairly limited you can influence with my excitement about the number 3000. Also, Iron Man celebrated the number 3000, and the world loved it.

Now, anyone who knows me even a little bit is aware of the fact that I started this blog as an outlet for weird thoughts I get in my head at around 3 AM in the morning, preventing me from getting enough sleep. It didn’t matter much if anyone read my posts or not, as long as I was not troubled at night and could sleep peacefully, I would have wanted to continue writing.

Eventually, life happened, and I became more intermittent with my writing. This would have been incentive enough for me to stop a long while back, but then something really interesting started to happen. People actually started reading what I put out. Not a lot of people, but real people, and those who weren’t related to me, didn’t owe me money they couldn’t repay or sympathize with me as yet another nine-to-fiver looking for an escape.

And they started responding to my articles too, and that made a big enough difference for me to stick to it for four, long years. And these four years also changed my motivation, my vision (if you will) of putting these articles out. From clearing my head, my motivation turned into “If I can make just one person think after reading this article, my job is done”.

So, if you have ever read anything I have written or this is the first one you’re reading, and if you figure these articles have given you food for thought, I want to take this time to say thank you. Thank you very much for spending your extremely valuable time to read my articles and giving me some more incentive (as intermittently as I do) to continue writing.

Come to think of it, this is kind of the first paradox I could discuss in this article. As much as my initial motivation was very interior and self-centered, I wrote a lot more because I wanted to make sure that I made just one person think after reading what I put out, which is a more exterior motivation.

Now, onto the more abstract subject. There are a lot of things that have come to my notice in the recent past, which act as proof for the theory that the world is filled with paradoxes, and I have caught one which is worth exploring in a little more depth.

A moment of crisis brings out what we truly value.

The example I have in mind has been there for at least 10 years. So, please bear with me.

The primary purpose of a wallet is to hold money (again, please bear with me). But over time, it evolved in to an instrument that can hold things like identity proofs, visiting cards and plastic money; along with real money. Now, imagine you lose your wallet in public. Your first thought, would hardly be the cash. It would be more of saving yourself of the consequences of identity theft, credit fraud and other legal issues, or, around how you would get back home (unless you drove there).

Paradoxically, we spend a large portion of our lives earning this money (making it high value, in a big picture perspective), which loses all its value in the moment of crisis. There are various other illustrations I can think of where what we value surfaces itself, despite us not being able to understand it earlier. Our health, for example. Money flows like water when we realize that is the trade off we need to make to secure our well being.

Therefore, I think it’s worthwhile to consider what is it we are valuing in any moment, and if it’s actually worth assigning the amount while trading off other, apparently less valuable facets of our lives.

I have yet another couple of daunting questions to end this article. If what we value is latent, and what we value is what our decisions are based upon, can we truly trust our decisions? Are all our decisions in our best interests?

If you stuck around this far, thank you for your time. If you enjoyed this, share this with one friend of yours whom you think will benefit from reading this. Thanks for reading, and I will see you in the next one.