Faster, Higher, Stronger....Err?

The superlative disease

In 1894 when the Pierre de Coubertin came up with the Olympic motto - Citius Altius Fortius, it was intended as a homage to the moral beauty and innate spirit of sport and athletics. Little did Courbertin realise that over the next hundred years this motto will move on from Olympics to pervade into every element of human life.

Consider these fragments from overheard conversations, social media stories and posts:

• Hey Guys, I am planning to read 100 books this year. Please send recommendations <insert namaste emoticon>

• Tiger Mom A: Sorry, cannot meet on Sunday, got to drive my son to painting classes, then piano lessons and then swimming. Tiger Mom B (response): Oh really, we have instructors coming in to save the travel time – it allows her to do boxing and ballet dancing as well!

• Just finished a House of Cards Marathon folks - 3 seasons in 10 hours. Thanks Netflix! #weekendwellspent

• 100 countries travelled in the last 3 years and still counting! #yolo

Sound familiar? Probably seen or heard more than once?

Coming across these “informal” battles on social media and in life and with increasing frequency, I started to think if it is some pervasive trend starting to plague our generation today. I like to call it the “superlative” disease.

Remember the Friends Scene from the One with Monica’s Massages where Chandler convinces Monica that she is best bad masseuse to make her feel better. Her desire to be the best at whatever she does is such that she is happy to be the worst. But oh no, never in the mediocre middle-dom.

What was just a scene about one trait of a character on a show seems to prevalent everywhere in our culture today. Our generation is obsessed with one-upmanship, with each one on an explicit or sub-conscious quest to show they are better or “more” in some form. In conversations, in memes, in posts.

But, if it’s so ubiquitous, does it just afflict the current generation (thanks to the entrenchment of social media)? Or is it a hangover being passed on from centuries and social media only aids to fuel and bring our “competitive” drives to fore?

Bite the Bullet(ins)

Yes, first signs of the disease can be found on social media or in bars (as with every other affliction today). Half of the examples above are indeed from posts. You see young people working furiously on their media accounts looking for more adjectives to describe their happiness in new and creative manners so as to outclass. Why?

Well, firstly social media does intensify the tendency to use superlatives – a chocolate cake becomes epic and vacations become legendary. Even if they weren’t, no one is going to “like” a post that says – “just a regular vacation to the beach where nothing out of the ordinary happened”. It perpetuates this need for demonstration of an unparalleled life.

The format of the medium too makes it this way, everyone is advertising for themselves on these platforms – unless you have a profile or an album that stands out because of some other qualitative characteristic – a superlative comes to be an easy way to garner “likes” and “wows”. Consider two of the most popular trends of our time which tend to occupy social media acreage – travel & food. When it comes to travel – swankier the resorts, flouncier the dresses, bubblier the champagne or bluer the color of the ocean. So much so that I met a girl at a trek in Argentina who couldn’t make it to the top while the sun was shining, so she spent five hours in the bus back working on Snapseed trying to process the image of the glacial lake we visited so it would appear sparkly!

Food is even worse. I am sometimes appalled at quest to stand out by way of adding more and more to dishes. If it is breakfast waffles, there’s got to be Nutella, marshmallows, strawberries and almonds and chia seeds and ice cream and whipped cream and custard and caramel. (*running out of breath*). There’s a slew of videos of recipes and restaurants out there adding just more and more to things to make them novel! Not even going into health concerns, what do you really taste when you bite into such a cornucopia? And I am by no means a conventionalist when it comes to cooking, having experimented with dishes like beetroot hummus and flaxseed steaks. But there is a soul to a dish which gets lost when you mindlessly add more and more.

I have been travelling for the last two years, and whenever I get back from a country/region, people ask me what did I do? Expecting answers like oh I did this amazing trek, ate the yummiest tacos ever and met the best people on earth. Unfortunately, they would get very “Tyrion-esque” responses like “I drank wine and I thought about things”. Which was true - most times I sat talking with nobodies of countries like people running Pancho stalls (a Chilean version of hot dog) or hawkers – about inconsequential things like common Indian & Peruvian cuisine spices or what sitcoms they watch in Brazil. Time & opportunity wasted, people will say – you lost the battle with time in that trip. Nothing worth pinning up on a social bulletin was done. Tch Tch.

A Primordial Plague

However, I soon realised this is not another of those benedictions of social media. In fact, social media, surprisingly, in this case could pretty much go scot-free as just a symptom that is perpetuating the disease. It’s much more ingrained in us.

Remember parents asking your friends’ marks back at school, or your colleagues’ salaries even now. The desire to “compete” and outdo has been in society well since the advent of sliced bread. Or possibly from before – Duryodhana’s jealousy was after all the one of main causes of Mahabharata. It is one of those fundamental human characteristics. The novel part is that it now occupies all facets of our lives sans control.

Interestingly, I see this happening with the “negative” superlatives too i.e. things you don’t have to be so proud of. Like a friend tells another – “Babe, I was so drunk that night I puked all over the bar”. Pat comes the response – “That’s it, I was so smashed I passed out in the washroom and had to be carried out”. Or the lawyers & investment bankers (my ex-profession) at drinks on any regular day – “I was working on BlaBla deal and couldn’t sleep for three nights”. And the banker replies, “Dude, my boss hasn’t let me sleep more than 3 hours a night in the last one year”. And I was always left wondering - What sort of a world am I living in? What values are these people competing for?

Consider this good friend of mine who is aiming to read 100 books this year. I am all for reading and to be fair to him, it is an honest goal. But achieving the target would require reading a new book every 3-4 days. Even if he were not absorbing himself in any other activity, that is a tremendous toll on brain power or cognitive resources. Also, what about post-book reading about various interpretations of the book or researching on the concepts in the book he didn’t understand. What about research on the author. Hell, what about the days needed between books to reflect, cool down, reorient!

Now, you could say that the person isn’t really aiming to get to hundred but only using it as a number to inspire himself. There! That is exactly my point. Why is inspiration only reduced to some numbers now? Or more accurately and worse still, reduced to a ratio of some number against some measure of time?

Which brings us to the two common manifestations of “superlative” disease – the size obsession and the speed obsession. Coincidence that they are the first two of Coubertin’s motto?

Cometh the Juggernaut

The obsession with speed & size isn’t new. At what age did your child start counting? What was your SAT score? How many beers can you drink in a night-out? How many years did it take you to become a Managing Director from an Associate? How fast did your salary grow? CAGRs come into picture to collapse yearly measures into further single numbers. How much did your sales grow in the last five years? One can even come to the country level - how fast did the country grow from a USD 100 per capita GDP to USD 1000?

This reduction of metrics to numbers is quite similar to what a lot of educators have been lamenting about – the measuring of students on standardised tests and a summary measure of intelligence through single scores such as IQ and SATs or PISA scores. Reduction of a whole wide qualitative experience with hundreds of facets to a single number. Except that these de facto single dimension measurements happen not just with students now but with everyone in our daily lives. Every person – countries, people of all ages, corporations.

The world is complex – so we come up with simplifying measures of success and then measure everything around in them. The deeper qualities are subjective to measure so we would rather ignore them and get on – How well has the child learnt the subject? If a country is growing at this pace – how wholesome is the quality of growth – is inequality increasing, is it sustainable, is it through deceit and malice, is quality of life improving, is the environment being sacrificed in getting that growth. If you watched 10 episodes of Breaking Bad in one night and followed it up with two movies how much did you really understand of the point that the director was trying to make when he sat through hours working on each scene? Placing each object, thinking of every single word. Could you appreciate the fine points in the acting, in the colors and screenplay? If you read a hundred books in a year, how many of those ideas did you really get a chance to assimilate and co-relate with other ideas that you had?

In banking, where I worked for more years than I should have, the competition was always on who delivers the pitch earlier – if the CFO of the Tata Group asks for it to be delivered by next week, my boss would say we will do it in three days. From then would follow days of slogging over the weekend, working on spreadsheets. And guess what got sacrificed in the quest for speed – the quality of ideas, the ability to enjoy the time doing a wonderful research on a business model, not to mention, the health.

We have this understanding of time as an “enemy” – stemming from the finite quality of life. We see it as the thing to be beaten in any situation. So much so that it becomes the only conferrer of value. And in quest for that we lose the essence of the activity, the thing itself. We forget the other aspects.

That this size and speed disease is a by-product of the competitive, capitalist economy would be stating the obvious. That in the last 100 years of thriving in this world, not enough people have paused so far to reverse this obsessive disorder, is what surprises me. I mean we are, by definition, measuring most things relatively. So, if a few people swore to slow down, the whole pack could. If China’s GDP is only 4%, India’s 3% wouldn’t look bad.

But, wait, all’s is not lost.

Wake me up, before it blows blows

It is not that people haven’t woken up to this. A “Slow Movement” started in Italy (primarily from the premise of Slow Food in response to a McDonald’s opening) that advocates a cultural shift to a slow life. It has various offshoots such as Slow Food, Slow Cities, even a Slow Sex movement! A Canadian journalist wrote a book “In Praise of Slow” in 2004 analysing the cult of speed today covering some of these trends. However, despite decades having passed, not too much seems to have changed around us.

Countless amount of research has been conducted and is being done in the field of education in OECD countries on how to take students away from extrinsic goals such as ranking in relation to other students, marks or money and focus on bringing them to a growth-mindset where they learn because they are enjoying what they do. In several studies it has been shown that students who are given “learning goals” than “ranking or performance goals” exhibit a better understanding of the subject material. The aim is that students should stop uni-dimensionalising themselves in single measures of success.

A step in the right direction but by the time the research comes into mainstream education and the current crop of the superlative-afflicted pass on, it will probably be a hundred years. Don’t know if the world will survive till then. What about now, do we not need to do the same thing at an adult / current culture level too. Where people stop trying to surpass each other as their main goals of lives. Do we not need to at least try to tell everyone - “Breathe!”

Interestingly, what woke me up to this fact was one of the trends too – Travel. When I quit my banking job and started travelling two years ago I was bombarded with articles about people who have travelled 100+ countries in the world. But what happened with me was something totally different – I went to a place in my own country – Spiti and ended up staying there for 3 months – formed a family like relationship with scores of people. Is this how this is going to go? I thought. But I didn’t realise what a blessing that slowness bug was it was till I went to South America and spent weeks in the same cities doing nothing, understood the joy of walking every morning to buy bread from the same panadero or the countless relationships with little restaurant owners built sitting at the same shop sipping tropical juices in Brazil or connecting with people at cinema halls via a movie and then being offered their spare rooms to stay. The quality of relationships was something way deeper which would have never happened had I started with a target of a number of countries.

Magic in the Fourth Dimension

There is a sort of magic in understanding and growing. In understanding the machinations and mechanisms of the universe, in understanding the beauty of what goes on in people’s heads and inspires actions. This process of understanding is so pleasurable that the more the time taken for it, the deeper the connection with the subject, the more interesting it is. Think about it like this, you’re in bed with someone you love, do you want a shorter or a longer orgasm?!

Or meditation for example, something that by its intrinsic nature requires time – there is no way you can say I was the fastest to achieve the transcendental nirvana state, can you? It’s no surprise hence that it is indeed one of the things various people in the world recommend as a way to disconnect from the rat race.

Educators talk about the concepts like “Flow” while doing a job in which all concept of time is lost. When the “activity” or “thing” you are lost in becomes so much bigger than you and the world that its size doesn’t matter anymore. I think we need to find “flow” in our lives.

Time is a friend now, I don’t see it as something to be beaten by filling the unforgiving minute with sixty million micro-seconds of distance run. (Sorry Sir Kipling but I still swear by all the other parts of the poem). Or look askance at the tracks to see the progress of my cohorts. Time’s a tool I have, to get better at understanding everything I want to. The growth is own self’s. It’s almost working in an antithetical way to what we know – the more the time I take to do something, the better I am becoming at it. The more engrossed, the more familiar with all its aspects. The more in love with it.

And in that vein, I am going to drink this beer I am sitting with as slow as possible (believe me, it is still going to be a challenge).