My Top 15 Blog Posts of 2023
This was Blog Post no 1740. A Blog every day... and by the year-end, I'd have written 365 blog posts for this year. Most of them are around the topics of life, habits, mindset, psychology, and sometimes about films or weekly learnings and weekly recommendations. Amongst such a plethora of content, during the end of the year, I pick out the top 15 blog posts of the year, where I feel I unlocked something deeper than the other writings and should be read amongst everything else that was written.
1. Mislabeling our Identity
- When asked ‘Who are you?’, most people reply with their names followed by their titles and the company they work at. ‘Who are you?’ defines an individual’s identity, which is then replied with an answer that is associated with one’s professional life. The question also summarises how one equates their identity with their work and that goes for the majority of people around us.
Read here.
2. The haunting cycle of bad habits
- Amongst such habits, a definition of good vs bad habits derives from how a particular habit impacts your life, whether the said impact is positive or negative and our feelings are not the right catalyst to measure the positivity or the negativity of this impact.
How much longevity do these habits have, and in which direction does life head with those habits are questions which become a usable use case of good vs bad habits.
Read here.
3. The correlation of art, artists and consumers
- The question that arises in such a journey is when does the art stop becoming art for this artist… and when are they doing it simply to not even gain, but to deliver the said commercial value that is attached to the art. The artist creates their art as an expression of something that they want to convey, and when that stops, they’re basically acting as a machine delivering the output, but somewhere they are not invested in the process anymore.
Read here.
4. The more something is spoken about
- The attention and awareness of the consumer have taken a paradigm shift from learning the facts and the information in depth to now hearing those things that are being spoken the most – irrespective of how legit or true they are – and while the attention is diverted in that direction and it is now easy than ever to sway that attention in different directions, the core of what’s spoken about has now rested in whoever speaks more slyly or loudly or twistedly.
Read here.
5. Summarizing people into generations
- Once people are clubbed as a generation, then a few major traits that belong to a majority of that generation is thus clubbed as something everyone in that bracket is now known by.
So now when an individual shares their birth year, they’re identified by their generation and the trait/s that generation is known for… whether that applies to the individual or not was never considered.
Read here.
6. The self-worth of a rabbit
- We have all heard of the rabbit v tortoise story – it’s a story that’s been repeated to us since childhood. The countless times when we have heard how the tortoise was slow, but maintained its focus and won the race whereas the rabbit being super fast, was distracted and eventually lost the race to a slow tortoise.
There were quite a few lessons that could be extracted from such a story… and it also, during the childhood phase, showed the importance of going slow and going determined brings the results – instead of always going fast and knowing you’re fast and being overconfident about it. But there’s a problem.
Read here.
7. The cycle of disliking your previous versions
- Most people aren’t a fan of their present, let alone the past… and yet when we, all of us, look at our past selves/ previous memories, we usually end up disliking our previous versions, for many reasons. Soon we realize, that back then, we disliked the even earlier version of ourselves, and when we realize this now, we come to understand the cycle of disliking our previous versions.
Read here.
8. Life Lesson from an Art Gallery
- If you’re browsing around, observing the artworks, noticing the strokes and the paint colours, penning your meaning to the art… you’d only invest all that time and thought into the art that you like and appreciate. But the ones you don’t, you’d have simply walked past those pieces. That’s not to say that the art is bad unless it’s a consensus, but it wasn’t for you and thus you walked past it and admired the one you liked, probably staring at it for minutes and more.
Read here.
9. You cannot erase what you already know
- The thing about time is that it cannot be reversed.
The thing about change is that it is inevitable.
The thing about learning is that it never stops.
Now what happens when there’s a correlation between the three?
Read here.
10. The root cause of a problem is another problem for that individual
- Whenever a problem occurs, in any aspect of life, first we are distraught by it. But after a while, we decide that it can’t be carried and should be solved. So, in an optimum scenario, you look for solutions and try to solve that particular problem. When this individual goes through a list of solutions and is still unable to solve the problem at hand, they keep wondering what needs to happen so they can move on to the next problem in the list.
Read here.
11. It sometimes feels easier to help others than to help yourself
- It’s not something that you notice others doing, but we, everyone are a part of that play. Whenever we hear something that we remotely know about, some antenna pops up and we start giving advice. That advice comes out as a stream of water flowing, it’s not that the words don’t make sense… they do.
So the scenario is there’s a problem and you have a solution to that, therefore you share that with someone (in the form of advice). But what if you were feeling that some problem and feeling stuck?
Read here.
12. The ironical cycle of positive messages
- The thing about seeking positivity is that we keep on seeking it constantly. It feels like a drug which we can never get enough of. It works like a colourful tape on top of a crack so the crack isn’t visible to us or anyone else too. But that doesn’t mean the crack isn’t there, it’s just doing a good job of hiding it.
If there was no crack, would you need the tape to hide it?
Read here.
13. Your habits come back to haunt you sooner or later
- Every habit, and because it is repeatedly done… sometimes the once-in-a-while things can skim off, but the repeatedly done habits always have an outcome. There are some of them with an immediate outcome, some with an immediate outcome as well as long-term compounded results, and some the results of which you don’t see for years.
Read here.
14. Good memories or bad memories?
- When you think about a person/ place/ situation or even a particular year for example, what kind of memories do you have about it, good or bad?
As time passes, we tend to lose the minute details of any experience we saw/ lived, and only remember the emotional output of it…
Read here.
15. The bigger picture vs what’s happening with you
- We often confuse what’s happening in the world or around us with what’s happening in our lives, and vice versa. The confusion of reality. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t care about or not know about what’s happening in the world (the term world signifies a larger context here, not necessarily the world). There are a lot of events that occur which affect us mentally too, but to let those emotions drive our daily life isn’t the right way to go about it either.
Read here.