The Curious Corner / Issue #15

Periods of transition have always fascinated me. This in-between time can be both comforting and disorienting but is are also an important time to reflect and grow. I feel the same during the beautiful month of November, each year. November brings along a feeling of transitioning into the deep end of the year. Time both slows down and speeds up during the last two months of the year. It starts getting cooler and the month virtually demands you indulge in self-care.?

So get out that skin cream, those fuzzy woollens and soft fleece jackets and those thick comforters - winter is almost here. So get cozy and indulge in another self-care activity - reading. You never know what this period of transition will lead you to.?

In that spirit, to hasten this process of getting through the transition between you starting to read this newsletter and finishing reading it, here are some reads I enjoyed recently -

• 2022 has been the year of the personal brand. No matter what your age, you will find people and resources asking you to work on your personal brand, establish your identity, project a certain kind of image that will help you leverage your connections and network. While it seems perfectly harmless at first look, it holds larger implications for people who have made their work their identity - especially young people. The lure of the personal brand to get ahead in one’s career is not what it seems.?This was a lovely read on how young people obsessed with personal brands are coping.?

For the millions of people who monetize their online presence in some form, the downsides of this type of work are becoming more clear, especially in a moment when so many are rethinking their careers. Building a personal brand blurs the divide between an identity and a job. It puts pressure on families. It demands that every intimate experience is mined for professional content.

• Keeping with the theme of transitioning, one of the most important things to transition to (through all the unlearning after a certain age or stage in life) is your authentic self. The thing you find so “solid” in others, so “real” is most often the authenticity you can sense and see in them. It’s so difficult to fake and you know it when you see it. But what effect are internet algorithms happening on how we perceive this ‘realness’ about us and others? Remember the last time you saw a ‘9 others bought this item in the last 30 minutes’ message on an e-commerce site? What is that doing to us in terms of what we think is normal??A fascinating read about authentic selves in the age of algorithms?made me think hard.

The real problem isn’t personalization’s goal of getting you to feel normal; there isn’t anything wrong with a sense of belonging online. It’s the way that personalization pushes us to pursue our “authentic” selves. Personalization only works if we become self-interested, identifying with our emotions, our likes and dislikes, our preferences, and our affinities, so that the algorithm can return other people and consumer products that fit those affinities.

• One thing you cannot ignore when pointed out is the overwhelming male bias built into so many aspects of our culture and everyday life. While there is the fantastic book that talks about this subject - Invisible Women - there was one piece of writing that made me happy about a step forward in the right direction. The first female crash test dummy. Surprised about why this should make news??This piece tells you why.?

“We know from injury statistics that if we look at low severity impacts females are at higher risk… So, in order to ensure that you identify the seats that have the best protection for both parts of the population, we definitely need to have the part of the population at highest risk represented,” Astrid Linder, who is leading the research team, told the BBC.

• How often have you thought about your relationship with food? Chances are, if you are a woman who is reading this, you definitely have a lot of thoughts on this subject. A woman who eats too much, a woman who eats too less - I feel so many women have had to sanitise this aspect of their life without truly indulging in their cravings and desire. It might be part of the bigger issue that our culture has with women’s desires - food being one prism to look at it.?This essay about looking at desire and cravings through associations with food?warmed my heart. May we all embrace our desires and celebrate them, unapologetically!?

Craving is a mode of expression, and food is how I translate it. Sometimes it is through texture: I want to hear the operation of my jaws echoing in my head. To crunch is to be reminded of the mechanical reality of being embodied. I want the strange communion of eating ice cream, the way it melts on the tongue, dissolving into the body’s internal knitted network of streams. Sometimes it is the eating equivalent of a sauna or plunge pool I’m after: hot, crisp lasagne collapsing into chopped iceberg lettuce.

• This post by Google India really made me chuckle. Perfect combination of context + smarts for marketing and content! If you’ve ever had difficulty identifying the various types of dal, you are not alone.

Till next time, reader.

Stay curious!