Confessions of a confused mind

I’ve learnt the hard way that there’s nothing I like about having my most personal experiences become anecdotal. There’s absolutely no spiritual upside for me in having a lot of strangers know about my life. But, still I continue speaking about my adventures and experiences.

Have you read that Hemingway story – Soldier’s Home? It’s about a soldier back from the first world war realising that sitting in places and telling people about the experiences he’s had over there is giving him this incredibly sick feeling, because he feels he’s sold out. That has kind of been my experience every time.

In Hemingway’s story, the character, Krebs, felt compelled to exaggerate his stories because he thought it was what people wanted to hear, and this desire to satisfy, to need to be listened to, resulted in the sickening feeling.

The feeling of having sold out has less to do with personal shame than the professional consequence. Everybody goes through certain experiences and, if you’re lucky, even with the worst things, you come out of them and they induce in you an altered perspective on the relative importance of things. With tragedy comes perspective. It dials the volume down on everything that stressed you out previously.

We’re very disconnected from fundamental things. Only wealthy cultures have the luxury of worrying about face creams that prevent ageing. Beauty, fashion – they’re the indulgences of the wealthiest cultures, and I think that along with that comes a tucking under of things you don’t want to confront. The more people sell you the idea of spiritual peace through what you drive and how you look and how you live, the less connected you become.

This theme is what attracted me to Fight Club. It still makes me laugh – that part where, if the character could just get that last unit from Ikea in place, he knew that he’ll be calm. It cracks me up. Fight Club was so much about the hilarious chagrin of recognising what a slave you are to consumer advertising – there’s no way you could not relate. How a certain part of modernity has bent people and left them extremely adrift and disconnected from the adult world they’re expected to engage in. It asks you to confront your feelings about what’s transpired, and confront mixed emotions. That is life – it is in equal measure beautiful and poetic, but it’s also painful.

The perception that I am serious, sombre and intimidating is largely due to my nerdy appearance and my deep interest in politics. Sometimes, I tap so effectively into the rage that it seems impossible that I do not inhabit this quality in real life. But my placid manner is one of my most salient features. Am soft-spoken, even-tempered; you can see me working out a thought, processing it like a philosopher. Even if I am talking about something I have talked about a million times before, I am trying to find a different way to say it.

Mountains beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World, by Tracy Kidder, was one of the most significant reading experiences of his life. It had paradigm-shifting ideas about poverty and healthcare. Here was someone with no ambition for fame or money. His ambition is to fundamentally change the way people look at the most intrinsic problem – poverty and health. I came away from the book feeling it had vaulted him to the ranks of the Gandhis and Martin Luther Kings. You read that and you go, What the hell am I doing with my life?

I keep written blogs. When I reread them, sometimes I think you tell yourself you’ve learnt certain things – you know, those moments when you really see the gulf between the vision of yourself you project and the actuality. It’s pretty fascinating how much of our behaviour is based on compulsion rather than conscious choice. I think we can learn how to rewire our behaviour – just not as easily as we think. It takes twice as many passes through an experience as you think it will.