The Curious Corner / Issue #12

???Welcome to the latest issue of?The Curious Corner – a weekly newsletter where I share interesting reads around culture, psychology, work-life balance, books and more!?

Like clockwork, one makes plans for the weekend. And like clockwork, those plans fall apart. Just like the plans of this issue of my newsletter reaching your inbox on a Sunday evening (which it did not).?

However, we cannot stop.?

The festive season calls. And we go on celebrating our living, with as much enthusiasm as we can gather. I hope this issue finds you in festive spirits and that the remainder of this year turns out to be even more rewarding than you thought.?

To go with that thought, here’s the collection of reads that fed me curiosity this week-

• It is a safe guess that almost all of you reading this newsletter are old enough to know about Farmville - the farming game that first gained incredible popularity through Facebook. This game, which was a farming simulation, hooked millions of people and had 32 million daily users when it was at its peak.?I tried the game once but could not see the appeal. Though I was always interested in why it became so popular.?This read that combines culture and psychology as it looks at why farming simulations are so popular around the world?will truly make you think (and maybe give a farming game a go!) ?? ??

Food writer Michael Pollan has discussed the irony that cooking shows and celebrity chefs capture our imaginations at a time when people in the U.S. spend less time than ever cooking daily meals. In a similar vein, the current proliferation of farmers markets, community-supported agricultural subscriptions, farm-to-table dining, and urban gardens reveals a fascination with farming on the part of many people living in suburbs and cities.

The popularity of farming simulators points to people’s enduring engagement with farming as a way to understand our relationship with the natural world, not just a system of food production.

• One of my favourite quotes of all time is by Simone Weil - 'Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.'?And though I aspire to be a person who is able to pay a lot of attention to everything and have just the right amount of focus, it has not always been possible.?I find my mind racing, my thoughts all over the place and my mind’s landscape feeling like a web-page that never loads as fast as I want to scroll. Have you ever had the same feeling??This read about how we are losing our ability to focus?and what people are doing to combat this gave me perspective. ??

Design choices in communication technology have changed how we socialize, how we work, how we stay informed, how we are entertained, and perhaps most disturbingly, how we think. Like runners on a treadmill, we try to keep up with a pace that on some level feels unsustainable, without taking a moment to think whether it’s worth our time. An accelerating pace of life is one of the themes of modernity, but it feels in this era that our day-to-day rhythms have become irrevocably altered. We exist in a “What did I miss?”, anxious frenzy of checking in, and it’s dominating every part of our lives.

• Growing up, I used to think not having ambition was almost a crime - a disservice to all the privileges in life I enjoyed. Now that I am a functioning adult, my views are different.?Ambition is a choice.?Ambition is also something that (rightfully) means different things to different people. I love the fact that young people are having conversations around their relationship with ambition - how their having it or having the lack of it should not really make a difference to personal relationships and how we can all do better. I found?some really nice tips for someone to look at their career and work with a healthy degree of detachment.?????

Some people think about career ambition as a profound virtue. Others think of it as something closer to a capitalist sin. I think ambition is a taste.

What does that mean? I love Central Coast California wines. They’re important to me. But when I meet people who don’t care about wine, I don’t care that they don’t care. Because drinking wine isn’t a human virtue. It’s a taste.

Similarly, for reasons I’ll probably never truly understand, I’m ambitious about my career. But some people aren’t, and that’s fine

• If you knew you’ve read a thousand books, I am sure you’d have a LOT to say about reading. I wish I could claim I was one of those people who’s read so many books. But you can read some pointers from someone who has.?This piece has a lot of things about reading?that I agree with. If you implement any of these approaches to reading, do let me know. Also, please, share what you’ve been reading. I’d love to know! ??

Life is hard and complex and emotionally taxing. A bit of escape and entertainment are more than warranted — and for me, there’s no better entertainment than reading.

I haven’t yet figured out a way to say it better than CS Lewis, who wrote that reading allows us “to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as our own.”

• The Peter Pan generation is often a term used to describe a generation of adults that seeks to delay adulthood as much as possible. I’m in my 30s. I feel this. I don’t want to be an adult. Or at least don’t want to feel like. Time and again, I feel myself getting sucked in by trends adopted by people a decade younger to me. And then I force myself to take a reality check. I cannot be *this* close to behaving like a kid, can I? Can I? I mean.. why not?!?This is a delicious long read on the culture of kiddification - of adults acting like kids?and how we can trace it back to Japan of the 90s. Some really relatable text ahead! ??

Examples of this kiddification can be found everywhere once you start looking. Grownups pepper their online conversations with emoji and kidspeak, like ‘adulting’ and ‘besties’, sounding suspiciously like those pioneering Japanese schoolgirls of decades past. More adults read young-adult novels than the tweens and teens for whom they were ostensibly written. Hyperfans known as ‘stans’, whose lives revolve around their favourite celebrities, have roiled social media, the music industry and even US politics.?

While thinking about what book I’d like to recommend this week, I instantly thought of an author who I found out about only too late. But I am so glad to have read a couple of books by him and enjoy his writing. A mix of philosophy and humour, Oliver Burkeman’s writing offers solace and hope in an ever-anxious world. I?loved?reading The Antidote and all the warm wisdom in its pages on how to embrace one’s limitations and failings to do better. Surprising? Read this book and you’ll agree with him (and me!)

Till next week, stay curious!?

-?Sukhada