Writing on the inside of the ring

I read a story nearly twenty-five years about a young man who received a ring as a gift from his dying father. He thought of the ring as his good luck charm and wore it every day since.

A few years later, he went through a horrible spell and was on the verge of losing everything he owned after a spate of bad luck. Out of luck, he just walked aimlessly for hours and sat down near the side of the road.

He saw his Dad’s ring, took it out of his finger and began playing with it as he contemplated how hopeless it all seemed. Just as he did so, he noticed some writing on the inside.

It said “This too shall pass.”

He was elated – it felt like a message from his late father. He took the message to heart and decided to fight his way back.

And of course, the story goes onto have a positive ending after that moment.

Years later, I still recall that story from time to time. “This too shall pass” is the essence of the Bhagavad Gita in Hindu philosophy. It is also a big part of stoic philosophy.

It takes it place in the pantheon of timeless philosophical wisdom because it tells us the truth about this experience and provides instant perspective.

There’s no point getting too high or too low about this current moment.

Good or bad, this too shall pass.

AFOG

“Frame failure as an AFOG (Another F*cking Opportunity for Growth). You are more likely to recover from failure if you invest energy into unpacking the lessons.” | Prof Carole Robin

I was reflecting on a couple of my recent failures and chuckled as I remembered reading this.

It gets to my recent note about ordeals. It is no fun going through them – but once we get through them, we might as well soak in all the learning.

The goal isn’t to avoid failures or ordeals. That isn’t going to happen.

The goal is to experience different kinds… and get better each time.

Productive disagreements

The art of productive disagreements is to ignore the specific issue at hand and, instead, figure out the underlying principle at the source of the disagreement.

Two things happen as a result –

(1) When we’re aligned on the principle, it becomes much easier to debate alternative tactics to achieve the end outcome

(2) When we’re misaligned, we can either debate it, agree to disagree, or choose to escalate further (in case this is a professional disagreement).

Either way, we’re able to make progress.

16 years

This blog turned 16 on Saturday. There have been 6,674 posts in those 5,844 days.

I sometimes joke that this blog should have been titled “a reminder a day” because of how hard it is to learn.

To learn and not to do is not to learn. So, we only learn something when it becomes part of how we operate. That in turn means we change every time we learn something. We change our actions and, in time, shape our identity.

Change is hard however. That means the best thing we can do to inspire ourselves to change is to consistently remind ourselves to do so.

I didn’t know all this when I started. I didn’t know I was signing up 6700+ reminders over the next 16 years.

But I’m glad for it. I’ve definitely changed the shape of my learning curve as a result and become a better human being for it.

That doesn’t mean I fail or fall any less. I’ve fallen on my face many a time over these years. But, thanks to this practice, I’ve learned that the only thing that matters is to bounce forward. Failure isn’t the falling down, it is the staying down.

Perhaps most of all, I’ve been on a learning journey to focus more on what I control.

I don’t always get it right and have a lot of room to improve here.

But I’m playing the long game. So, here’s to doing better in the year 17.

Thank you for being part of the journey. I appreciate it.

Chirping

I spent a good chunk of time recently sitting outdoors and listening to the birds chirping.

Natural sounds have a way of being peaceful. This setting was no exception.

I’ve sat in that same spot so many times over the past couple of years. I’ve rarely heard the birds chirping. That’s because there’s always some internal noise from my own thoughts or external noise from conversation.

A good reminder that peace is always within reach.

It just requires us to pause and pay attention.

A time we never knew

I read a post from a Gen Z writer Freya India that was equal parts thoughtful, poignant, and painful to read. Here are a few excerpts.

There is a beautiful and melancholic word I like called anemoia. It means nostalgia for a time or a place one has never known.

But perhaps the best example of anemoia is the popularity of ‘90s high school videos, like this one trending on TikTok. Or this one on YouTube, with millions of views, captioned “Phones? No. We had each other.”

This video has nearly 30,000 comments, some from Gen Xers nostalgic for their ‘90s youth—but many from Gen Z, aching for a world they never experienced. Older generations might dismiss this as teens wanting to be different and reject modern culture, as they often do. But the comments reveal something deeper:

“The whole concept of a real ‘childhood’ is completely out the window at this point in time and that’s extremely sad to me. Btw I’m 15, born in 2003.”

“I’m 20 years old so I wasn’t even conceived at the time of this video but it leaves me feeling empty. My highschool experience was nothing like this. I remember short bursts of people living in the moment but EVERYTHING revolved around our phones, Snapchat/Instagram status. It almost makes me angry because I’ve never had simple straight forward interaction as shown in this video. Even looking at people in the background, they are completely present and not buried in their phones. Everyone seemed a lot more social. I’m jealous of millennials/gen x, yall experienced a golden time to be young and free.”

“As someone who graduated in 2015 this looks like such a nice time. Not a phone in sight. People actually talking face-to-face. I wish I could have grew up in an era like this.”

There were hard times, of course—the ‘90s weren’t all bliss; no era is. But the world we inhabit now is so markedly different. New technologies cheapen and undermine every basic human value. Friendship, family, love, self-worth—all have been recast and commodified by the new digital world: by constant connectivity, by apps and algorithms, by increasingly solitary platforms and video games. I watch these ‘90s videos, and I have the overwhelming sense that something has been lost. Something communal, something joyous, something simple.

I am grieving simple joys—reading a magazine; playing a board game; hitting a swing-ball for hours—where now even split-screen TikToks, where two videos play at the same time, don’t satisfy our insatiable, miserable need to be entertained. I even have a sense of loss for experiencing tragic news––a moment in world history––without being drenched in endless opinions online. I am homesick for a time when something horrific happened in the world, and instead of immediately opening Twitter, people held each other. A time of more shared feeling, and less frantic analyzing. A time of being both disconnected but supremely connected. 

But I never knew it. Maybe briefly, as a child. But most of us in Gen Z were given phones and tablets so early that we barely remember life before them.  Most of us never knew falling in love without swiping and subscription models. We never knew having a first kiss without having watched PornHub first. We never knew flirting and romance before it became sending DMs or reacting to Snapchat stories with flame emojis. We never knew friendship before it became keeping up a Snapstreak or using each other like props to look popular on Instagram. And the freedom—we never felt the freedom to grow up clumsily; to be young and dumb and make stupid mistakes without fear of it being posted online. Or the freedom to be unavailable, to disconnect for a while without the pressure of Read Receipts and Last Active statuses. We never knew a childhood spent chasing experiences and risks and independence instead of chasing stupid likes on a screen. Never knew life without documenting and marketing and obsessively analyzing it as we went.

Now, the next generation? Gen Alpha? I can only imagine the loss they will feel. They are on track to never know friendship without AI chatbots, or learning without VR classrooms, or  life without looking through a Vision Pro. They are being born into a world already anxious and atomised. My guess is that one day they will find family photo albums and hear stories about how their Millennial parents met and be hit with anemoia. 

But it doesn’t have to be this way. We can give future generations a real-world childhood.  We can prioritize play. We can delay entry to social media platforms until at least 16. We can encourage young people to just hang out with each other, without supervision and without smartphones. We can take elements of childhood from previous eras and re-introduce them in modern life. But we have to remember what has been lost. When we are grieving record stores, mixtapes, old-school romance, and friends goofing around in ‘90s high schools, what are we actually grieving? Delayed gratification. Deeper connection. Play and fun. Risk and thrill. Life with less obsessive self-scrutiny. These are things we can reclaim—if we remember what they are worth and roll back the phone-based world that degraded them.

We have to start somewhere. I suppose what I’m asking for here is some sympathy and a little more grace. It’s easy to mock Gen Z and Gen Alpha for their soaring screen time, to roll your eyes at teenagers wasting their youth in their rooms, ruminating about themselves, and feeling hopeless about the future. But they are trying their best to keep up with a world so agonizingly different from any before it—and it is the only one they have ever known. 

So please. Next time you cringe at Gen Z for not coping, for not feeling cut out for this world, remember how painful it is to think that the good times are over. Then imagine how much more painful it would be to realize you never knew them.