Reddit or not, here we come.

On June 20, 1789, members of what came to be called the Third Estate, who represented tax paying citizens, gathered on a tennis court in Versailles, France, and took an oath to not disperse until they had obtained equal representation from the elite. The movement led first to the storming of the Bastille, then France’s first written constitution, and eventually rippled into and changed the rest of Europe. This week saw a similar pivotal moment in American capitalism. I don’t mean to hype it, but in the context of everything else that is going on, it is analogous to the Tennis Court Oath at Versailles, a drafting of the death certificate of the old order. The story involves complicated terms like shorting, oversubscription on short interest, etc etc. I’m going to try and tell it without getting too much into the weeds. To be honest, I am an ignoramus when it comes to understanding how stock markets work. In trying to understand stock markets, derivatives and money instruments, I’ve always felt that I have done some vague, incalculable damage to my wellbeing. I don’t mean any disrespect to the financial wizzes amongst us. Forgive me, I speak truly in ignorance. Anyway, here’s what happened.

It is common for large Wall Street firms which control billions of dollars to bet against a stock. It’s called shorting, a bet that someone or something will not succeed. While some of us may recoil at the thought of betting on someone’s failure, it’s common and legal in investing circles. Some justify the ethics of shorting by describing it as the free market’s mechanism to weed out all but the fittest. While I don’t personally believe in such extreme and wanton cannibalism, I’m not the one making the rules here. I’m just the chronicler. So, a few large Wall Street players placed bets against a company called Gamestop, which sells video games. Suffice it to say, these firms (called hedge funds) got a little ahead of themselves and bet too much money in the hope of creating self-fulfilling prophecies. “If I bet heavily against X, then I can make X collapse under the sheer force of the assault.” So far, this story isn’t unusual. Wall Street firms shorting shares has been going on for a long, long time.

Here’s the plot twist. About a month back, I heard about an internet forum (on Reddit) called “wallstreetbets.” Curious, I joined in. It is a group of mostly millennials, a bunch of little guys who banded together and crazily enough, decided to wage war against the hedge funds. The group had less than a million members when I joined. As I watched in amazement, it grew to 7 million, helped by folks like Elon Musk who publicized it. This group of people agreed to buy shares of Gamestop to drive the share price higher, determined to punish every Wall Street firm which had taken short positions. More crucially, they all agreed to not sell the shares and cash out profits and hold out in solidarity. “YOLO. Ride or die.”

The way it works, the more the stock price rises, the more shares the shorters are forced to buy to cover their losses. It is usually the Wall Street firms who create such cycles to benefit themselves. Never has anyone been able to to do it to them. As more and more people joined in, one thing led to another and the stock price went from around $4 to $400+. As a result, at least one hedge fund worth $20B went bankrupt last week.

It was raw capitalistic anarchy unfolding in real time. The Reddit movement used the rules of capitalism against it, and stayed within the bounds of the law. If allowed to become the norm, who knows where it will lead? While the small guys celebrated with gusto, the Wall Street Goliaths, the US Securities and Exchange Commission and even the White House watched in horror.

What was amazing about these rebels was their organization, helped by the internet, and discipline, fueled by a nihilist indifference to their personal well being. I referred to this in last week’s letter. The guy who started the movement bet $53k and was sitting on $20m of uncashed profits, the last I checked. This battle is still going on.

I don’t know where this will lead. I don’t have a crystal ball. None of us do. Maybe Elon Musk does. But, we all know how history happens. It builds and builds relentlessly for decades and suddenly happens overnight. A Tunisian woman slapped a fruit seller, which led to the flight of a dictator. History had been on the brink of happening in Tunisia for 30 years. An innocuous slap tipped it over from possibility into reality. It is a narrative we should be familiar with by now – groups of inconsequential people striking hammers and leaving visible cracks. Growing inequality, the rise of the Tea Party, Bernie and Trump, the Russians hacking the 2016 vote, Chinese and Russian cyber espionage targeting US financial systems, the rise of Bitcoin, the writing of trillion dollar stimulus checks, and now a ragtag bunch of millennials using an app on their phones to drive Wall Street behemoths out of business. Cracks are visible and growing.

What sort of history is building here? What will eventually happen overnight? Should we allow it to happen? What do these people want? Will they succeed? Should they succeed?

The older ones among us are used to seeing the system win. The house always wins, we’ve seen. It’s easy for us to be cynical about the Reddit millennials. We expect to see them crushed like bugs by the system, which is likely how this saga will end. But, the headline here is that yet another hammer has swung into the wall of capitalism.

Capitalism itself has not been the problem in its 300 year history. In fact, it was not a bad idea at all when it started. Charles Darwin himself derived inspiration from Adam Smith when conceiving an invisible hand in nature that propels evolution. What has always been problematic are those things that have been justified in the name of capitalism over the centuries. At first, capitalism was used to justify slavery and the imperialist ambitions of Europe. “The savages need our money and modern methods.” Through modern science, it was used to justify the idea that man must dominate the world. This has led to an un-winnable race against nature. Covid-19 is merely nature’s latest salvo in the arms race. Most painfully, capitalism is used to justify the harmful idea that the individual is paramount and society exists only to make a few successful. The rest are encouraged to look beyond their misfortune. “Think positively. You too can make it if you try harder.” There was a time when it was possible to see the truth in capitalism. These days, it is becoming impossible to ignore its lies.

It is almost certain that capitalism’s finest days are behind it. It is the same system which propelled a kid like me from nothing to something incredibly amazing. I have a sense of regret in watching it disintegrate but it is becoming increasingly difficult to take comfort in anecdotes, as personal and powerful as they are. There is no joy in leaving others behind. The Buddhists say that we start dying the moment we are born. Capitalism started its march to death when it was born. Whether it fades in 40 or 400 years, time will tell. In the meanwhile, it is worth noting the stories of the hammer swingers. Revolution is in the air. Davids are getting better at taking on the Goliaths. Anarchy is on the rise. Capitalism is under siege. One of these days, someone or something will punch through and history will be made overnight. Reddit or not, here we come.

Pop quiz: What’s the best television comedy show you’ve watched and why is it Schitt’s Creek?

Garish austerity, Driver’s License and the leakiness of work and leisure

Even before the pandemic, Americans have been embracing a nihilist numbness in reaction to the non-stop assault of news, memes, posts and tik-toks on their senses. In January 2020, the Economist proclaimed, “The shared world is intolerable.” A 2020 Super Bowl ad asked, “When did staying in become the new going out?” Minimalists from the Marie Kondo school advocated the wholescale purge of things, and living in empty spaces surrounded by naked, white walls. Nowhere was this truer than in the tech industry and among tech workers. Sensory deprivation became the mantra, and intermittent fasting the ritual. Companies emptied out buildings and turned them into austere open-floor spaces, with uncovered air ducts, white noise machines, and unfinished ceilings coming to represent the new vulnerable and bare chic. Extraneity in all forms was cancelled, luxury came to be synonymous with less, and nothingness became really expensive. I mean, really expensive. A can of CBD infused sparkling water, which advertises itself as “an antidote to modern times,” costs five dollars. CBD is a molecule derived from cannabis.

I can see why it is an appealing prospect to let reality slide off our backs; to succumb to a cocooned existence protected by essential workers, and enabled by faceless websites and contactless drivers. These days, the world is tough to break into. It is formidable. Crucially, it does not appear to be worth our efforts to break into it. It is easier to believe that the world itself will end before capitalism and racism do. Trump’s second impeachment simply becomes a glaring example of the pointlessness of impeachment itself, an exercise in futility.

Millennials and Gen Z have instinctively picked up on this. They have been preemptively retreating from the world, choosing to merge, instead, into the content streaming on their headphones and screens. The emptiness of public experience has been replaced with a rich, private one. As software eats the world, data surveillance envelops it, and cheap labor fuels it, spontaneity has been replaced with the seamless and smooth algorithms that keep news feeds moving and minds lulled, right in the middle of a global disaster. It’s a garish austerity you can expect when American excess meets Buddhist selflessness. Make America Nothingness Again?

Let’s face it. We are virtual wildebeest, migrating at the change of seasons from Whatsapp to Signal, from Snap to TikTok, and from Netflix to HBO, in a digital Serengeti. All the pandemic did was to accentuate the trend. Like a kid caught smoking being forced to smoke the whole pack as punishment, we were given an overdose of what we always secretly wanted.

Nothing captures this zeitgeist more than 17 year old Olivia Rodrigo’s “Drivers License,” a song about teenage heartbreak. It debuted at number 1 on Billboard Hot 100, and has broken all streaming records known to man. As far as songs go, it’s a testament to the power of the teenage heartbreak anthem genre. Some things don’t (and rightfully shouldn’t) change. Rodrigo’s singing evokes Billie Eilish, Adele and Lorde all in one, and the lyrics Taylor Swift-ish. The song has, I must admit, a strange power to pull in listeners of all ages. Check it out.

Beyond its raw emotions, the song’s success was fueled by Tiktok, that digital slot machine into which you can insert a song, pull the lever, and hope that it snowballs into fame and fortune. Rodrigo invited her fans on Tiktok to indulge in the same emotions she did, and respond they did. Over one million Tiktoks have been set to “Drivers License.”

In the classic 1930 essay “Economic Possibility of Our Grandchildren,” the economist John Maynard Keynes forecast that the 21st century’s work week would last just 15 hours. The chief social challenge of the future would be the difficulty of managing leisure and abundance, he said. “For the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem,” Keynes wrote, “how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.“

Strangely, that prediction has not panned out. In 2015, 22 percent of men without a college degree, aged 21 to 30, had not worked at all during the prior twelve months. The steep drop in the employment rate of this group triggered a cultural, economic and social decline. These younger, lower-skilled men are less likely to marry, and more likely to live with parents. What are they doing with their time? Are they happy? They spend 75% of their leisure with video games, and they are happy, or at least, report higher satisfaction than this age group used to, historically.

On the other hand, 90 years after Keynes’ prediction, work and not leisure has come to define the lives of affluent Americans. Elite American men are the world’s chief workaholics. They work longer hours than poorer American men, and rich men in other countries. Work has become the closest thing they have to fun. What is going on?

One theory is that attractive employment for poorer men has disappeared, replaced by cheap entertainment. The fastest growing jobs are no longer masculine or require muscle. As entertainment becomes cheaper and commoditized, it becomes more accessible to the poor and is more likely to be regarded as inferior by the elite. Another theory offers that the elite’s puritan work ethic has transformed itself into a secular religion of industriousness, a kind of pluralistic ignorance. Which is to say, rich people work long into the night not because it is the moral thing to do, but because they are matching the behavior of similarly rich peers. “He went to Ohio State and NYU Law just like me, and if he works 17 hours on Tuesdays, so should I.” Surveys show many participants would secretly prefer to sleep more and work less. No surprise there.

A third theory is about the leakiness of things. Thanks to the ubiquity of smart devices, leisure and work are leaking into each other. For example, music used to be something we listened to in our cars, and televisions were things found in our homes. Now, smartphones have become instruments of both professional connectivity and leisure. When I open Twitter or stream a show, am I panning for a nugget of golden insight or am I taking a leisure break? A novel I read or the history book on my table can inspire a weekly letter. Every moment of my downtime could, in theory, surface an idea that promises to revolutionize my life or work or both. When a boss knows that her workers have smartphones, she knows they can all read emails on Saturday mornings. When does work happen? When does leisure happen? It is becoming harder to tell.

Keynes may not have got the work-leisure forecast right but he did predict that the rich would struggle to transition to a more leisurely lifestyle. “The strenuous purposeful money-makers may carry all of us along with them into the lap of economic abundance,” he wrote, “but it will be those peoples, who can keep alive, and cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself and do not sell themselves for the means of life, who will be able to enjoy the abundance when it comes.”

Stay calm and carry on. Abundance is coming. The Vaccine is always at hand. Have a wonderful week ahead.

The Inauguration Special

Trump is out. Biden is in. The nuclear codes have been changed, and have changed hands. We can’t breathe easy yet because of the pandemic which grips us but we can offer a prayer of gratitude. Gratitude that we have rediscovered our humanity. What is humanity after all but to err. To make mistakes, to see the error of our ways, to feel shame and regret, to forgive others and ourselves, to resolve to become better and move forward, and to stumble yet again. We missed all of that in our last President. Shamelessness, ignorance, self-obsession and thanklessness, sworn enemies of our collective wellbeing, transformed into virtues under him. Emotions such as shame, regret, and guilt, and mechanisms such as dialogue, debate and forgiveness are essential elements of human societies. Even if we display or practice them insincerely, our capacity for them is valuable. There is a proper place in our lives for death, grief and mourning. The highest office in the land paid no heed to such basics.

His followers didn’t stop to think about what he was saying or what they were doing. I remember trying weed in college, thinking that it would somehow give me a special grasp of reality. It turned out that weed didn’t give me any new insights. It just took whatever dumb ideas I already had and blew them up into gigantic proportions. Trump did to his followers what weed did to me.

In the final analysis, it doesn’t matter what Trump accomplished or not. Whether he was the greatest or worst in history. He simply failed to be human. Anything multiplied by zero is zero. For the self-obsessed, it is not easy to not be self-obsessed. 80 million people said, “This will not stand.” So, we get to go back to being human under President Biden. Biden knows all too well what being human is, having suffered the brunt of tragedy, the sting of defeat and the forgiveness of family. In many ways, he is the man for the moment – imperfect, aged and battered, humbled by the passage of time, anxious to be better, and perfectly human. As I write, he has taken office. He hasn’t done anything yet, but he has already made history. The first woman Vice President serves under him. I didn’t think I’d get to see this happen in my lifetime. Dr. Biden is the first First Lady to hold a doctoral degree. His cabinet is historic. I believe Joe when he says he wants to be everyone’s President. Now, let’s find a way to let him be that.

It’s a simple truth. Which is, we are all in it together. Whether you stand under the warm Indian sun or the clear blue skies of America, whether you are surrounded by the serene Arabian desert or the great Australian outback, we are all in it together. The world is watching, as always inspired by America. With this, I hope, come winds of change. I hope we become a world not torn apart by divisive demagogues, but joined by mutual respect. We are all in it together. Anyone who says otherwise is upto no good, I’m afraid.

The definition of human now reverts to everybody on the planet, at least in theory, under the new President. Evil begins with exclusivity, with categorizing some as exceptional and others as not. There is an idea of Caucasian exceptionalism that has gripped America for centuries. Unfortunately, there is no basis for it. Creation is a gapless continuum, and to pretend that there is somehow a break, where the supremacy of a few starts, is nonsensical. America’s fatal flaw lies here. We have to find a way to get rid of this terrible idea, else it will eventually destroy us all.

There are no chosen peoples. All of us are chosen. Human incompetency and hypocrisy can, at times, make this ideal appear unattainable, but it doesn’t take away from the truth of it. For a vast majority of us, our self-esteem and worth is derived from simply being viewed as human by our institutions, leaders, and mythologies. If we take that away, there isn’t much left to fight over.

The last four years were, in some sense, like a barroom brawl for freedom. It’s deeply ironic that the more freedom we have, the more restrictive we have to be in order to preserve it. It’s a conundrum. Freedom is the only thing capable of destroying itself. Strangely, this isn’t true for other “assets” like knowledge, wealth or health, which grow the more we unleash them.

As for what happens to Trump now, it feels like the right thing is to pursue him within the ambit of the law to ensure that not just he, but citizens at large, understand that there are consequences to malice. That’s where I would stop. I wouldn’t go so far as to re-engineer our society to prevent future Trumps. Most cheaters play on the margins, and know their boundaries. California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, is a good example. He is a mediocre, small time cheat. He is the typical cheat. Shame and humiliation are good enough to check them. Cheaters like Trump are outliers. They embody a lifelong attitude of “I’ll keep pushing it as long as I get away with it,” crossing over into insatiable addiction. If we try to prevent Trumps, we’ll end up overdesigning the system to our detriment. I say we stick to the usual norms, and risk the rise of the occasional cancerous lesions like Trump or Hitler. If we try to verify everything, we’ll end up trusting nothing. The price to pay is unaffordable. We could use better understanding of faith, more dialogue around it, and harness it for good. I’m afraid that facts and reason alone won’t carry the day. This, however, is a topic for another day.

It has been a remarkable week. Biden’s inauguration wasn’t the only inspiring moment in it. A callow, inexperienced team of Indian cricketers knocked off a combative and normally ruthless Australian one to claim the trophy. I don’t watch cricket anymore. I’m not as vested in it as I used to be. The last full match I saw was in 2011, when India beat Sri Lanka in Mumbai, to win the World Cup. I figured that was as good a moment as any to quit, and went out on a high. This is not to say that I don’t care. A few weeks back, when India tumbled to its lowest innings total in history, I felt pain. It was like hearing that a great friend, to whom I haven’t spoken in a while, had been hit by a car. The pain was real. For the Indian team to hit nadir, then to resolve to do better, and then will body and mind into an improbable victory is yet another triumph of the spirit. When we get into the zone, anything becomes possible. If we can manage to stay in it, the possibilities become limitless.

As always, stay safe. I’ll leave you with the words of Amanda Gorman, America’s 22 year old Poet Laureate: “There is always light, if we’re brave enough to see it; if only we’re brave enough to be it.”

Freaks, Signal and Noise

“Certain years are so eventful they are regarded as pivotal in history,” Dean Baquet, the executive editor of the New York Times, recently wrote. He predicted that 2020 will join that list and cited three other historical years as examples. What were those other years?

(You can find the answer at the end of this letter)

Speaking of history, we find it littered with these freaks, who caused extreme pain to others. Alexander, Caligula, Hitler, etc. What twenty year old wakes up in the morning and decides to go on a spree to terrorize, maim, and kill complete strangers who live 3,000 miles away? Alexander did exactly that. Caligula got off to a slower start in his climb to insanity. When he got there, boy, was he unhinged. Once, he had an entire section of the audience thrown into the arena to be eaten by wild beasts, much like what happens on Twitter. Adolf Hitler, of course, needs no introduction.

These freaks were self-absorbed. They were insatiably cruel. They were liars. They were charismatic, which allowed them to wield power. Alexander believed that he was Achilles reincarnated. Textbooks eulogize him as a classical hero, and rewarded him with “the Great” suffix. Caligula insisted on being addressed as Jupiter. A large, unruly group of Rome’s citizens cheered his vow to make Rome great again. A member of Hitler Youth wrote, “We erupted into a frenzy of nationalistic pride that bordered on hysteria. For minutes on end, we shouted at the top of our lungs, with tears streaming down our faces: Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil! From that moment on, I belonged to Adolf Hitler, body and soul.”

Sound like anyone we know? Which leads me to Trump. He was impeached today. In a week, he’ll be gone from office. We need to make sure that he stays gone, which is what the impeachment is all about. There is really nothing left to either imagination or debate. Trump has made even a serious thing as impeachment a routine affair by getting impeached twice in 4 years. If he had gotten another term, he’d have gone 4 for 4.

With pressure mounting, and rising likelihood of being disbarred from holding office, Trump released a video this week, asking the proud boys to avoid violence during the inauguration. After having yelled “Fire” in a crowded cinema hall, Trump tried to draw our attention to a soul-stirring movie called America on the screen. I’m convinced that this man will do anything to get his Twitter account back.

Thoughts have been expressed on the January 6 US Capitol attack. None more profound than Susan Collins’ epiphany on hearing the mob storm through the corridors. Collins is a Senator from Maine. She thought to herself, “It must be the Iranians attacking.” I’m not making this up. She said it herself. She heard a bunch of guys running amok in the corridors and her first thought was, “It must be the Iranians attacking.” Seems logical. (insert sarcasm emoji here)

I’ve read more details about the horned, shirtless man who broke into the US Capitol last week. His name is Jake Angeli. I also hear that the poor lamb is anxious about going to jail because they don’t serve organic food there. Let’s pause here to reflect on the fact that I typed these words, you read them, and they are true.

More coronavirus variants have been spotted in the wild, by which I mean the United Kingdom. The Chinese government has assured us that we have nothing to worry about. As Sun Tzu put it, “Liar, liar, pants on fire.”

All in all, we seem to be at a critical juncture in America and the world, as Biden takes office. If you’re, by any chance, a Hobbit, who has found a mysterious looking ring, please throw it into the nearest volcano right away.

There’s an exodus from Whatsapp to Signal underway. This is driven by privacy concerns caused by data sharing between Whatsapp and Facebook. Elon Musk, the Delphi Oracle of our times, weighed in with a two-word tweet, “Use Signal.” I find it intriguing that we believe that our data is valuable. A Silicon Valley wag said, “If you’re not paying, you are the product.” True as that may be, I’m glad someone thinks that I’m a product of value, especially when there’s no evidence of it. In any case, there appears to be a more peaceful transfer of power afoot from Whatsapp to Signal than from Trump to Biden.

How would you feel if you had only two password tries left to retrieve $225 million from your account? After eight failed attempts, Stefan Thomas from San Francisco lies awake at night, wracking his brains over what the password to his Bitcoin stash could be. Two more fails will lock his treasure forever, out of anyone’s reach. My suggestion, Stefan: sell your remaining 2 tries to a professional hacker for whatever you can get (I’m thinking, $100k) and move on.

In the meanwhile, Nidhi Razdan, a well known news anchor on one of India’s largest news channels, is scratching her head after being duped into believing that she had an offer from Harvard University to teach journalism. It took her over six months to wise up to 1) she was never a journalist, investigating even basics is not her forte and 2) Harvard does not have a school of journalism. I’ll bet this makes Rajdeep Sardesai, another prominent Indian news anchor, wonder if an offer to become the next CEO of Google is for real. RIP Indian ‘journalism.’

On the personal front, things in California continue to be in a hunker-down mode, with strict and indefinite stay-at-home orders, against a backdrop of escalating Covid-19 cases and fatalities. My company has designated ~80% of us as “edge workers,” which means that folks like me, who have been categorized thus, will no longer have an assigned office to return to, when we are able to do so. This mirrors similar decisions by other Silicon Valley companies.

Work from home has been a staple in the tech industry for a while. Most tech workers, in pre-Covid times, typically spent 2-3 days a week in the office. A push towards 2-3 days a month seems extreme. I think we’ll be back to some reasonable medium in 2-3 years. I love the flexibility and not-flying-for-business-meetings parts that this new working model has brought. But I miss the inconsequential water cooler conversations, and realize how important they were to my sense of well-being. This year, I look forward to staying a homebound introvert, who dines out, catches up with a small group of friends once a month, goes to a show or a concert every so often, and travels twice or thrice a year for fun.

The answer is: 1865, 1945 and 1968. The American Civil War ended in 1865. World War 2 ended in 1945. And 1968 was a year of “deep generational fissures,” as Baquet wrote, with large protests in the US and Europe, as well as the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. It was also the year I was born.

You’ll be happy to hear that The Vaccine now has 67 subscribers, as I write this. As always, stay safe and have a great week ahead!

And, God said, “Let there be dance.”

Let’s get the serious stuff out of the way, early in the year.

2020 put our fears and anxieties on the center stage. Normally, we push them to the background. We are forever discovering new ways to keep them from surfacing. Then comes along a year like 2020, rudely interjecting unreality into the reality of usual distractions. At some point, each of us went, “Goddang. This is unreal. Entire nations shutting down. Machinery cranking to a halt. I’ve never seen this before. And yet, somehow everything appears normal on the surface. What really is real?”

Much of 2020 played out in the mental dimension. While Covid-19’s death toll was and is devastating, its mental toll, I fear, is ten-fold. Our bodies are fairly robust things. They are used to being knocked around, getting up and carrying on. They will stay reasonably fit if we walk them around a few miles in a week. Our minds, on the other hand, are fragile and poorly equipped. This beautifully organized central nervous system that we have come to consider The Mind is a feedback control system. Its job is to create Loops so life may continue to thrive. Believe it or not, this is Bad News for those of us with minds, which is nearly all of us. We are prisoners entangled in Loops, even as we confidently proceed with the assumption that Free Will, Individualism, Reason and Thoughtful Control can come together to produce coherence and help us prevail. And, something like 2020 happens to upend that assumption.

What’s startling is, we’ve spent our whole lives on setting ourselves up for this fiasco. From day one, we have trained ourselves to Control, rather than to Trust. To believe that Control leads to Life and Anarchy leads to Death. It is not surprising that the mighty human race was brought swiftly to its knees by an invisible, microscopic speck, smaller than the smallest predator, and more insidious than the largest one. While the virus preyed on some of our bodies, it seized all of our minds.

We humans are peculiar for our awareness of Time. We are capable of predicting things. The price we pay for our predictive powers is Anxiety. The good news, we learned last year, is that we can resist anxiety. Other than creating loops, our minds can do two things well: Self-Awareness and Self-Control. Those of us who reached into the toolbox for them were the better for it in 2020. There were extraordinary acts of courage, kindness, generosity, and compassion amidst the gloom. There was an amazing outpouring of creativity on Insta, Youtube and Tiktok. Robots danced. People sang, drew, spoke and wrote. They learned languages. Thanks to Duolingo, you could learn to say, “I have a thousand cat photos on my phone” in Mandarin if the situation ever called for it. There were some beautiful moments. We even had an Alpaca from a farm in upstate New York on one of our work Zoom calls to relieve the tedium.

We like to think of Life as a Journey, like going on a train or a bus. We get on the train, and it goes from place to place. When death comes, we get off it . This is the story we tell ourselves. In times like these, it fails us. I was on this lovely train, headed somewhere nice. I was told there’d be a goody waiting for me at the end, if I followed some basic rules. And, someone, something.. rudely yanked the chain and brought the train to a screeching halt. “Hey, am I still getting my goody?”

Life-as-a-Journey implies a start and a destination, a today and a tomorrow, a purpose, reasons, maps, plans, tracks, stations, flags waving, and other such things. Tomorrow never comes. When we realize that there never was and is no goody waiting for us, we feel vaguely that we are about to be cheated. Instead, how about Life as a Dance? A movement that follows music. Music and dance have no purpose. Music and dance don’t exist so they can start, or finish, or anything in between. They are all of it. There’s the Dance of Creation. There’s the Music in our Hearts. And, there’s Our Own Little Dance. From all of it, great meaning arises.

Speaking of music, 2020 had its moments. Taylor Swift’s double, back-to-back album drops in the last month helped add to a cautious but growing recovery in my spirits. If you’re a dad of two young women, there’s no escaping Taylor Swift. But, I’ve got to say, she is the real deal. A superstar. With Folklore and Evermore, it is gratifying to see her come into her own as a song writer with evocative ballads. In the meanwhile, Blake Shelton, country music star, Gwen Stefani’s soon-to-be-husband, and my second favorite judge on The Voice, put out a single (clearly about his love for Gwen), which includes a line in the chorus that goes, “Girl, your love can make a man feel rich on minimum wage.” Blake, minimum wage? Seriously? That line doesn’t work, buddy. Not. now. Not. ever.

Among other things, it feels like America has lost its moorings. It’s hard to process a headline that says, “Horned, shirtless man breaches the US Capitol along with 1000s of others,” without a sinking feeling. The end of Modern Rome is near, doomsayers say. Granted, all things eventually come to an end, good or bad. But, how close are we to America’s moment of reckoning? If I were to bet, I’d say, “Hold on. We’re not done yet.” America’s dance didn’t start in 1776, the Year of Independence, or in 1619, when Slavery, its most horrific crime, started, or, even in 1492, when Columbus discovered the New World and ended life as they knew it for the Indigenous Folks. America’s story began a few hundred years before Christ with Aristotle. The idea that man can use intellect and reason to control the world is an ancient one. It shines brighter today than ever, in America, in its belief in Manifest Destiny, and in its ideals of Liberty and Happiness.

America is the latest chapter in a book that Aristotle prefaced and the Europeans authored. Great Good has come out of it. But, vast energies have been spent on promoting a view that, amidst the continuity of Nature, there is an inexplicable break where a Specific and Exclusive Caucasian Exceptionalism begins. Great cathedrals of progress have been built with this view. They have brought Life, Wealth and Power to America. They have administered to our enjoyment, and inspired the occasional poet. But, these cathedrals haven’t inspired a sacred association in our hearts as sites of fulfillment. We are sealed in an impenetrable chamber where the Flame of Progress burns brightly. Some day, the oxygen will run out, and we will be overpowered by poisonous fumes. Or, will we? That is the Question.

A society molds its men and women according to its best ideals. All of its Institutions, Legislatures, Standards of Praise and Condemnation, Conscious and Unconscious Mythologies, and Teachings promote these ideals. The American ideal is of Perfection in Physical, Intellectual and Moral dimensions. Its flawed yet great Constitution stands testament to this ideal. Even as America scaled new heights in the physical and intellectual dimensions, and perhaps because of that, its Moral Fabric frayed. Moral Deficit began to overcome Intellectual Surplus. Oxygen began to yield to Poison. Will a window open and let new air in? Time will tell. For now, the flame burns as brightly as ever. More cathedrals will be built. And, there is plenty left to tell in this story of America, which will alternately jar and inspire the world for decades to come.

As always, stay safe by getting weekly shots of The Vaccine. We have now moved from trials into the mainstream phase, from essential readers to err.. the non-essential ones. Do announce it from the rooftops to One and All. I mean that. Tell. Everyone.

Have a great week ahead. Here’s to the Music and Dance of Life.