The Quarter Life Dilemma

This blog post marks the “Golden Jubilee” of the “Rushin Speaks...” blog, so a hearty thanks to all the readers who stuck with me in this beautiful endeavor. Also this post, partly by coincidence and partly by manipulation, marks the Silver Jubilee of my so-far exciting and beautiful trips around the Sun. And hence, this post is about the transition and the dilemma that most people of our age face owing to the overwhelming possibilities of what we want to do and how much of it can be done realistically in the limited time that we have at our hand.

The first title that I had thought for this post was the popular phrase “Quarter Life Crisis”, but then looking back at what nature has bestowed me with, like a good job, much better friends and possibly the best family I could have asked for, saying that my life is a crisis would be unfair and ungrateful and hence, the term dilemma. Now this post may slightly go personal, or not everyone amongst us faces the exact same questions, which need to be answered. However, with slight changes in some parameters all of us 20-somethings would have already faced, are facing or may face in the recent future, some of these catch-22 situations.

The Psychological Impact of turning 25

Even the Vedas emphasize on the number 25, as the marking of the transition from “Brahmacharya Ashram” to the “Gruhasta Ashram”, which in simpler terms of Internet Lingo mean that the person’s status in Facebook or Orkut should go from Single to Committed and finally settle at Married. However, this thought itself brings shudders to many among us and yet, the fact that you turn 25, brings a psychological feeling to your parents and “other enthusiastic” family members to assume that you have now settled with work life and they can start processing your matrimonial formalities.

But, I am still NOT SURE...

About Education and Work Profession

While many of us are settled down with a job or an educational career, there will surely be some amongst us, who would still be trying to figure out how to go ahead with their own lives. There are people among us, who still dream of studying something, or taking some drastic decisions or risks.

For instance, you may be happy with your current job, but maybe the prospects of growth seem to be slowing down, and you think of making a switch. Or, there can be a more lucrative option available which offers you a much better chance of working provided you leave the city or the country, or a more drastic choice would be to return to your hometown or a city nearby and hence live closer to your family and friends.

About Commitment

The expert advice from our adults when we try to linger away from the topic of commitment, by defending our life’s uncertainty goes like, “Son, you will never be sure of where life will take you, so take the plunge and the two of you can figure it out together.” The fact that some of your friends start getting committed or married also catalyzes the process of people start discussing your marriage. In honest retrospection, I am not scared of having a person around who cares for us and helps us, but the very thought of bringing another person in our life does bring in some sort of complexities.

It is the additional responsibility that scares me. Getting married isn’t just a formal knot between two people, where one person goes to stay with the other person and hence pays half the rent if they stay in a rented apartment and splits the other expenses like maintenance and electricity bills. As a guy, getting a wife brings with it the additional responsibility of ensuring that the person, who left her home and family to become a part of your life always remains happy. This would also mean that the decisions like shifting to another city, or even another country would not just need an approval from yourself and the outcome of that decision should ensure that her wellbeing and happiness, and her job, if you may, is not impacted.

The BIG Questions

The dilemma of the Quarter life also brings me to two very important questions which need an answer. It is almost like the companies bring out the quarterly results about their status and future predictions.

Are you happy?

The first quarter of my life has been pretty fruitful. I got success, if you may consider it that way, with a decently high paying job and some quality education on the professional front and a very supportive and lovely set of friends and family on the personal front, but there are times when juggling the professional and the personal spheres of life make it complicated.

Looking back at my life, I see various happy moments, which make the journey worthwhile. Honestly I don’t really remember many sad moments, thanks to the grace of God, blessings of my elders and nature’s gift to allow us to memorize only what we want to. The current professional life however demands sacrifices like missing birthdays, other occasions and festivals since you are away from home. And yet, in the greater scheme of things, I believe it has been a wonderful first quarter of my life and am hopeful for the same experience in life ahead.

And the BIG question, which a lot of “elders” in the family bother me with “When do you think you will be ready for taking the next step for marriage?”

An honest answer is “I don’t know.” There is no shortcut to happiness and no shortcut to knowing where life while take you next. Looking back at my life, I have found that it is only the “Long-term” goals which we can plan, and most of the short-medium term goals that I planned have been modified by the events that followed the planning. So all I can say to my own life is “Surprise Me” again.

Final Verdict:

The title Final Verdict is put to only keep up with the spirit of the blog. There wouldn’t be a dilemma if I could have my own verdict.

Based on the various serious discussions which I have had with my elders and my colleagues and close comrades on the uncertain topics of life like marriage and profession in the future, the only thing certain about this uncertain situation is that buckle up and prepare well, but remember, that whatever you do, however much you prepare and ready yourself, it will never suffice.

And hence, the best solution for now seems to just flow with where the life take us. Trust your parents and trust your Guardian Angels, like the seat belts of the rollercoaster and take the thrill ride. The light at the end of the tunnel of confusion will appear when the time is right. Another turbulent and exciting quarter in the life of yet-another 25-year old kid, is just about to begin.

Flash on Apple Devices – Not a Near Future Possibility

The one thing common between the Apple iPhone and the Apple iPAD, except the fact that they both have an aesthetic appeal, wonderfully working touch screen and the illustrious brand name of Apple is the fact that both of them do not support Flash, which is one of the most prominent rich internet applications from Adobe. The spat between Apple and Adobe has been going on for many years now, and the exclusion of Flash from iPhone and iPad is just another chapter to this ever growing war between the two.

Flash is not only used for viewing videos, or creating multimedia websites, but it also can be used to create various applications and games, which has increased its popularity and reach many-fold, making it one of the de facto installations on the computers of people who surf the internet. The decision that Apple is not planning to provide support has made a lot of iPhone owners whine, more so, since Adobe came up with a Flash version for all major mobile operating systems like Windows Mobile OS, Palm’s webOS and even the Google Android, missing out only on iPhone’s Safari OS.

Apple’s Side of the Story

Apple has been adamant in not supporting Adobe Flash, since allowing Flash is against the Terms of Service Agreement of the iPhone. The main reason for this as per Apple’s software engineers is that allowing Flash will open a lot of backdoors or open up loop holes for malicious applications to misuse the information and even hamper the usability of the iPhone or the iPAD.

Moreover, historically, Apple’s MAC OS has never been in proper sync with the Flash player. Most complaints that the Apple Inc gets for the browser crashes is due to the use of Flash plug-ins and hence Apple is trying to stay safe by not providing the support for Flash at all, rather than allow Flash to compete for the battery life and the CPU cycles on the iPhone and the iPAD.

The “Other” Side of the Story

Apple is known to be a strongly coupled company when it comes to protecting its proprietary stuff. Allowing Flash to run on iPhone will not only enable users to view Flash content on their iPhone or iPAD, but it will also allow a lot of Flash applications and games to compete with their counterparts on the App Store. This will surely result in huge revenue losses for Apple.

Moreover, in the current scenario, all the things related to Apple iPhone and iPAD are owned completely by Apple and hence if they wish to make some drastic change like a Platform or architecture change, they can port and recompile their codes and libraries. However, if they allow Flash and then decide to do such a change, since Flash remains owned by Adobe, Apple would need to maintain some sort of a backward compatibility to ensure Flash support remains ON, until Adobe gets them the ported version of Flash.

Consolidating the Facts

The funny fact about Adobe Flash is that while all the major building blocks of the internet like HTML and CSS are open source, the most prominent proprietary software in the web-world is Adobe Flash. The popularity of Flash feeds itself and the result is it gets used more often. So the people who oppose the one company ownership idea like the fact that Apple is slowly weeding out Flash by sowing the seeds for HTML5.

Moreover, it is a known experience that while Flash works pretty well with Windows, it cannot do the same with Apple’s OS because the later does not allow Flash to access the lower level APIs and squeeze the maximum benefit from the hardware. However, while Adobe cribs that Apple doesn’t allow its platform level optimizations to be used for Flash, Steve Jobs rubbished Flash for being buggy and that was the reason why Apple is not too keen on granting support to Flash, and instead it supports HTML5 more getting the newer web-based applications.

Final Verdict:

According to me the reason why the Flash support on iPhone and iPAD isn’t encouraged, is a combination of both Apple’s way of trying to preserve its supremacy for the games and applications that get shipped for the iPhone and the iPAD, and also Apple’s intolerant behavior towards very stringent quality standards which currently Flash is not being able to adhere to.

For now, the situation is a dead lock and in midst of all odds, Adobe has come up with a bunch of tools which allow the Flash applications to get converted to a format where they can be loaded on iPhone. However, these applications match neither the performance, nor the elegance of what the original Flash could have offered.

And this leads us to the final big question is: When will Apple step down and allow a third party plug-in provider like Adobe, an access to its lower level APIs?

For now, the answer seems to be NEVER.

Man’s Search for Meaning – Understanding How Our Lives Fundamentally Work

The starting part of the title is borrowed from the book “Man’s Search for Meaning” written by Dr. Viktor Frankl. It is a short autobiographical volume of this Austrian psychiatrist’s experiences in the Nazi concentration camps during the World War II, where he was imprisoned and tortured because he was a Jew. The book is a wonderful starting point to discover the power of the human mind and in a very heavy emotional way, it explains how we humans perceive things. The experiences he had in the death camp were terrible, and the explanations of the hideous tortures and indignities which were afflicted on the prisoners show to which extent their will to live was demolished. It is during this time, that he realized something which he calls “the last ultimate freedom”, which means the power to chose one’s own response in any given set of circumstances. During that period of time he realized that his Nazi captors could not hurt him, they could hurt his body, they could hurt his self respect, but whatever they do, they could not hurt the person who stayed in that body, i.e. they did not have the power to hurt Viktor Frankl. And little by little the spark of this freedom in him kept growing and he became completely indifferent to the hideous events around him.

It is that feeling which explains the fundamental power of the human mind. Nothing can hurt us, unless we want it to. It is our willing permission, our consent which allows events, people or things to hurt us far more than they originally hurt us. The things can hurt us, physically, but the real pain comes from the emotional hurt, which makes the physical hurt to multiply the pain many times over the circumstantial impact. This is particularly hard to accept and even harder to implement, because all of us, right from our childhood have this tendency of blaming the hurt to the circumstances, or because someone else did something to us. We have this tendency to blame things like, I am upset today because my friend doesn’t have time for me, or I am upset because XYZ did or did not do ABC.

This brings us to another important insight. If it is true that we are miserable because we wanted to be miserable, or we chose our response to be miserable based on a circumstance, it is also true that we can chose otherwise and not be miserable. No circumstance has in it the power to make us sad, unless we truly want it to. It is not the circumstance that influences what happens to us, but it is our response to the situation that decides what actually happens to us. This same thing can understood though in a much simplified way by Steven Covey’s 90-10 principle, which states, 10% of life is made up of what happens to you. 90% of life is decided by how you react.

There above is a simple and yet very beautiful example of this theory. There are numerous incidents and people who portray this very beautifully. Movies like The Shawshank Redemption and the Pursuit of Happyness show the level where we can reach, rising from all odds, if we keep hope and faith and most importantly do not let the “person” in us succumb to the external circumstances.


Implementing this in Our Day to Day Life

The above shows the importance of how the reaction of our mind can make or break a day. There is a beautiful line in the movie the Matrix, which goes “What is Real? How do you define Real? If real is what you can smell, see, touch or feel then real means just the electronic impulses interpreted by your Brain...” If you dig deep, the above statement does seem to suggest the same thing. The whole world, the perceptions, the situations, the experiences and to an extent event the outcomes of events are all dependent on how we react to a situation, and not the situation itself.

Since we are on the brink of yet another summer season, there is surely going to be a particularly interesting situation, where people constantly crib and complain about how hot it is around this time of the year. Do remember to do this exercise and keep repeating something like Shit! The weather is so hot… its killing me to yourself, and you will realize that each time you say the statement, you will actually feel a lot of heat, and you will actually feel the brunt of summer. And then, on a completely separate note, try to react in an opposite way and think something like, if the weather won’t get warmer in summer, when would it get hot? The minute you start giving these positive autosuggestions to your brain, the heat will kind of reduce by a couple degrees for you.


Final Verdict:
While it is not particularly easy to reach the level where Viktor Frankl had reached and become completely liberated from the pains associated with the circumstances that keep changing the course of our life, it is also important to give moving towards this goal a try. Another thing, if you find yourself in self-pity or know someone else who is, I would suggest you pick up this short book Man’s Search For Meaning and gauge the situation that you are in today and be thankful to life for not being hard on you.

All said and done, the parting thought is that we keep in our mind is the fact that the key to a happy and satisfied life is to start choosing our responses and gaining control of our life. And the very reaction that it is not easy to make a change of this magnitude in our thought process, will make the process of this transition tough, and hence this negative thought, should be scrapped.

So in the end, it all boils down to what Mufasa, the Lion tells his cub Simba in the famous movie The Lion King, “Remember who you are”.