No matter which part of the world you are living in, men tend to behave pretty similarly. And to satisfy those keyboard warriors, yes, there are always exceptions. I don't know if there are any studies that were done but it will be interesting to see if there are significant differences between men that played in playgrounds (or just play in general) versus men that didn't. Also, maybe a study in adult men that still play/active versus that don't.

America has a shooting culture. Americans have a lack of playgrounds. While these two might not be directly related, I have a feeling that the lack of activities make men unstable and shooting is just one outlet that they choose. In America (and other parts of the world), guns are a symbol of manhood. It triggers (no pun intended) the nostalgia of your manly great-grandfathers charging headfirst into war. I also think that is one of the reasons guys like Andrew Tate gets so many followers :'(  
Now, what do all these have to do with playgrounds? Well, men (and women) need to be active to keep their hormones balanced. But even more important than that, playing teaches men how to react to spontaneous situations, assess the importance of a situation, and interact relevantly with others.

Most of my male friends that play any sports or engage in group play with other men tend to be cautious of their strength around kids and women. I don't necessarily mean that men who play sports are kinder, but they simply are aware of the fact how they can appear threatening. And at least among my friend group, I can see a very distinct difference between men who are active in sports versus men that aren't (even without knowing beforehand). Men that don't engage in activities with other men tend to put up a facade of what they think other men will find manly. It is not an attraction thing; it's an acknowledgement thing. For example, if a conventional manly man walks into the room, some men will try to talk with a deeper voice (or project their voice more loudly). Sure, it's in all of us - that primal dominance character, but it can be seen more clearly in men who engage in very few activities with other men.

This constant maintenance of facade can get tiring very quickly. It can be overwhelming and when we are overwhelmed, emotions tend to become unstable. And this instability can make men lash out aggressively.

Case in point - we need a good community where men can do activities together. A good "band of brothers" keep other men's behavior in check.

It's not "You win some, you lose some" but "You experience some, you don't experience some" instead.

I was reading  Gabriel García Márquez's non-fiction book "The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor" which tells the story of a sailor who was drifting in the ocean with no water or food for 10 days. It's a great read and also only a couple of pages. The beautiful thing about the book is the vivid descriptions of the life in ocean, the natural scenery, and the feeling of seeing them from the sailor's perspective. This got me thinking - here is this sailor, who is literally clinging on to his life but was able to see whales breaching for air, under the dark night sky with clearly visible trail of the milky way. An awe-inspiring view that an average Joe might not get to experience in his life.
Then there is the part that an average Joe might not want to experience in life - dying of starvation out in the ocean.

I have a couple of friends and acquaintances that have traveled to multiple countries and truth be told, everytime they talk about it, I feel like I am missing out from those adventures. I get a bit jealous. But then when I tell them about my road trip stories with some random group of friends across USA, it seems like they feel like they are missing out. A humbling thought comes to the mind - no matter how hard you try, you can never experience all the same stuff your peers are going through and vice versa. Here I had FOMO when he was describing to me the night life of France and there he had FOMO when I was describing driving through Utah landscape to find a camping ground.

It's a weird feeling, you know. I don't know which one is worse - to think that you have a duller life than others or to think that you have to show excitement 24/7 about every aspect of your life. When in reality, and in a good way, you have neither.

I think if there was a way to total bad and good experience at the end of your life, we all would be ending up with just experiences.

As soon as you come to the world, you are claimed by the nature of the place you are born into. No matter the culture or religion your family belongs to, your existence becomes an amalgamation of the air, the sound, the light, and everything else that belong to the nature of that very place. In Bangla language, we have a somewhat poetic way of describing it - "naarir taan (নাড়ির টান)". Literally meaning the "pull of the umbilical cord", it is used metaphorically to describe the feeling of yearning one feels for the motherland.

Just as a mother's womb nourishes and shapes the fetus, the surrounding nature that you are born into molds and defines your spiritual character. It's as if you are handed off from one womb to another. It doesn't matter if you grow into a totally different person; the essence of your being has already been long established even before you learned how to think. Perhaps, when one is seeking spirituality, they should first seek to realize and acknowledge that essence and base their spiritual journey off of that. Otherwise, it is akin to pretending to feel at home in a stranger's house.

I think that the type of spirituality people should seek should be relevant to the place they were born in. Let's take an imaginary person - Dinesh. Say, Dinesh was born in India but has been living in the US since he was one year old and grew up in a very Westernized household. Even though he never practised either Indian or, for example, Native American spirituality, Dinesh might still find it easier to grasp the Indian spiritual teachings more. He may somewhat "grasp" the Native American spirituality but the root of the cause might rather be coming from fascination and a surface level understanding instead. Physiologically, it's just too different.
That's why I sometimes side-eye when I see an American or European who got "awakened" by Hindu/Buddhist spiritual teachings but never considered their homeland counterparts. In fact, their definition of awakening is very much tied to the Asian teachings while the idea of awakening is self-introspection. Spititual teachings of Asia are tools that worked for people in that region and even then, we have Hinduism branching off to form Buddhism to satisfy the spiritual craving of people in a subregion. Nature dictates our spirituality. I am not saying it is wrong to practise an Asian teaching while being a Westerner; I am saying it is better to adapt the Asian teaching to the nature of your home. You don't expect to put diesel in a car that needs petrol and drive it without a hiccup.

I remember watching an interview of the Dalai Lama where he said something along the line "...but ultimately, the migrants should return to their own land" and oh boy, that single line gave birth to thousand controversies. But was he wrong though? I mean it feels like common sense but it makes sense that people realize their full potential when they are in their motherland, their natural womb. Spirituality is not about gaining a new state of mind; it is returning to your original state. Your original state that got awashed and fogged up by countless experiences of life and waiting to be found by you again. It is returning to innocence.

It's kind of hard to watch couples competing against, and not with, each other. I know the old adage of salary competition when both partners are working, but the competition can be about anything. Unfortunately, I have noticed that competitiveness nature more in men than women as one would guess. It also could be that, as a man, I am more in tune with how men behave and thus observe it more.
Nonetheless, I have a few friends that are couples and it's quite clear that they very much adore and love their partners, but at certain times, you get a glimpse of their competitiveness slipping. For example, I have a friend who has a knack for painting and is really good at it. Her husband, on the other hand, was never really interested in it. His interest eventually did peak and he picked up drawing. Now, I agree this all sound innocent and I sound like a cynical person but it's the change in interaction between them afterwards that drew my attention. You see, nowadays whenever I talk to my friend about her painting, she feels compelled to mention that her husband also paints. And the times when she forgets to mention it, you can see him visibly get sad/upset. Same thing I noticed between another friend, who is a professional singer, and her husband. There is this tendency to one-up their spouses. But they also really love their wives so those two things are not mutually exclusive.

The way I understand it is, no matter if you are married or not, you are subconsciously measuring and seeking new partners. So when your partner offers something that others find attractive, you run the fear of losing them.  So you start advertising the same skill and try to undermine your partner's in hope to stay ahead in potential new match. That might also be one of the reasons you see mostly men, skillfully professing their love for their partners on social media with a dash of "marketing". A bit like advertising to potential women, "Hey, look at what you could've gotten" or trying to appear more desirable than those women's partners. I guess in the end, your intentions matter only so much if no action was taken and your partner didn't get hurt.

The ego never dies. At least, when you are still alive. Numerous people, who underwent psychedelic experiences, can relate to the concept of ego death - the dissolution of the self/identity as a concept. There are also a good number of people that believes ego death simply means becoming humble or have diminishing arrogance but we will not focus on them.

No amount of psychedelics or even meditation will result in the death of one's ego. They simply make you aware of it. What you do with that awareness is completely up to you. In fact, a lot of times, people who undergo ego "death" comes out as more arrogant and have an inflated ego. Probably they recognized the fragility of ego and ended up being overprotective of it. Again, what you do with the awareness of your ego decides what you will become.

The way I like to think of ego is as if it is like the earth's core. Throughout your life, your experiences get added to that core as layers, building up to who you identify as. When you have lots of experiences (layers), as it happens as we age, it progressively gets harder and harder to find that core. Thus, when you have a psychedelic experience or deep meditation, it can often result in chaotic confusion or total bliss. It depends on how you navigate through all those layers to get closer to the core of your ego. You need to realize all those layers and chisel them away to get to the center.

Now, I do not know what happens when you reach the center. Most people probably acknowledge the existence of ego and work around it to better their lives. But I personally do not believe in the idea of ego death. If you did manage to kill off your ego, what would your dreams be like? Would you still dream in the first person, thus proving that the self still exists?

This was a thought that occurred to me on my drive to grocery today. For a few months now, I have dramatically reduced my social media usage and in doing so, there was a temporary moment of isolation and loneliness that came with it. It wasn't only the feeling of missing out on stuff but even in real life, it became a bit difficult to converse with people since now I didn't have a point of reference (i.e., social media memes). I became estranged with a few friends and vice versa because of my lack of presence in the platform. Luckily though for me, I had quite a handful of friends whose means of communication wasn't only through the internet. I would go over to their places and they would come to mine.

AI entered the chat - now the game is on a different ballpark. Before, people that wanted to stay on the social media platforms and interact with each other at least knew that they were interacting with a real flesh-and-blood person on the other end. But now that trust is broken. You go on Reddit, get excited to see an encouraging comment from a user and right when you are about to reply to them, a thought occurs - what if it's just a bot? In fact, how much of the Internet is actually just bots interacting with each other and you are nothing but a bystander?
All the time that you invested in establishing your persona in the social sphere now seems meaningless. You hardly had time to learn to cook something other than Maruchan because your online followers were waiting for you to interact. But now you start to notice that a lot of those accounts make similar comments in other channels/profiles. Time of day doesn't matter, they are always commenting. You dig a bit deeper and come to the horrific conclusion - it's your old friend ChatGPT.

...how much of the Internet is actually just bots interacting with each other and you are nothing but a bystander?

All these times that you were interacting with online "people", you missed out on the opportunity to have actual real-life interactions with actual real-life people. Even worse, you feel deserted by both sides - the facade of your online followers is now shattered and with your real-life friends, you grew distant. You begin to realize that the dopamine rush that you got when an unknown account retweeted your post has nothing on the dopamine rush that you get when someone in real life acknowledges you just for being there. But it feels as if you woke up from a deep sleep and you have to pick up the pieces while everyone else has their shit together and moved on with life. You feel more at home on the Internet even though you know no one is who they say they are. But alas, it was your home all this time and that's your comfort zone. The bots' comments are your comfort food.

But you are a human and you are extremely good at adapting. That feeling of isolation and being a misfit in the society are temporary. Way more temporary than one might think. Humans need humans and the societal contract that we have with each other is very primitive - just don't be threatening and we are all good.

Growing up watching Bollywood movies, I obviously have an affectionate bias towards the genre. Just thinking about them triggers my nostalgia and happy times (thinking about Swades, Dil Chahta Hai, 3 Idiots etc makes me happy). But I think it's a bit more than just nostalgia and good ol' times. Cause after all, I felt the same feeling of happiness and ambition when I first watched them and there was no reference of nostalgia to begin with.

Contemporary Western movies, especially Hollywood ones, focus on reflecting the real life through the lenses. (Spoilers ahead) The recent Joker, a brilliant movie, takes a fictitious character and applies all the real-life values to it. Conversations about how the movie portrayed depression and manic in a realistic manner abound. Interstellar -  a science fiction about a NASA astronomer traveling into a wormhole. Instead of focusing on the creative aspect of the movie, the Internet got engulfed in the scientific accuracy of the movie. How "realistic" it was.
In contrary, Bollywood movies focus on bringing your daydreams to life. They indeed give you the escape from the monotonous daily life. Take for example, 3 Idiots - a story of university friends and their exciting shenanigans, then a friend getting mysteriously estranged, only to come full circle to get reunited with a happy ending. Sure, it does mention important topics such as student suicides and the academic pressure but the whole theme is eventually a positive one. Or take Swades - a NASA engineer, leaving the comfort of life in the US and going on a road trip in India to find a woman who took care of him when he was little and then changing the lives of villagers while doing so. Most people's daydream is always positive and Bollywood movies play into that positivity.

Westerners know very well about the sudden song-dance segments of every Bollywood movie. The over-dramatic, over-sensationalized choreographed dance routine where the lovers are professing their love to each other. Unrealistic? Sure. But it conveys the feeling of happy turmoil that one feels when first falling in love. Even the fight scenes (especially in Tollywood movies) - over the top punches and kicks. The hero gives a weak punch and the stunt actor jumps off the ground to only end up on the windshield of a car standing 20 feet from the hero. The audience knows it's obviously not realistic but still enjoys that fantasy. The whole sequence is very similar to how we played as kids and still fantasize about from time to time - to be a hero that takes up on couple of bad guys. And this is what makes Bollywood movies into Bollywood movies. Giving us a glimpse of our daydreams of what live can be and could have been. What we can achieve and become, whether it's possible or not. But at least we can imagine.

Disclaimer: If you think you need mental therapy, go for it. There's no shame in asking for help.

The general consensus is that younger generation is more open about their mental well-being as opposed to the older generations. Older generations (Gen X, boomers, and even millennials to some extent) are considered to suppress anxiety/stress and sugarcoat it with alternate reasons.  "To suck it up and keep moving" as people would put it. I believe, to some degree, this mental model of sucking it up and keep moving might actually be beneficial to an individual.

You see, mental health and physical health go hand in hand. They both affect each other and a good symbiosis between them is required if you want to be a healthy person overall. Imagine this for a second - you get a very small cut on your finger. Sure it hurts a little but you know that it's something you don't have to worry about. Your body will take care of the healing process and you also know that this small of a cut doesn't require any medical supervision/emergency. The cut heals as you continue with your life and your body becomes more resilient along the way.

I believe similar thing happens with your mental well-being. You go through particular mood changes because of external circumstances but if the issue is small enough, your brain+body handles the healing process while you get distracted with other stuff. Your brain has this sort of barometer to notify you when the pressure of the mood change is significant and that you should take action. And just like we were trained as kids when to and when not to ignore a cut on the finger, we should also get trained on when to and when not to ignore the brain signal.

Your brain has this sort of barometer to notify you when the pressure of the mood change is significant and that you should take action

Now, coming back to the topic why modern therapy might cause more issue than it resolves - a lot of times people seek therapy for which might be considered a very mundane issue. Should you see a doctor if you think you need to? Sure. But I feel like adults should also learn to listen to their body/mind and realize what is the right time to go to the doctor. Going to a therapist right away because you are getting stressed by a minor conversation might do more harm than good. You are not giving yourself enough time to absorb, observe the situation, and form an opinion by yourself. And depending on the therapist that you are seeing, you might start to rely more and more on them to settle things that you are already capable of handling.

You are not giving yourself enough time to absorb, observe the situation, and form an opinion by yourself.

I've had friends whose parents were over-protective. Anytime they got even a scratch in the playground, the mom would run with an emergency box and treat the scratch as if it's a life-threatening wound. And guess what? Those friends grew up to be very paranoid with any slight physical changes. Your neck is hurting a bit after you woke up? Oh no! It might a tumor growing under your skin. And as a consequence, their health is unfortunately worse than their peers of similar age.

People these days use mental therapy as a way of getting coddled. Things appear way worse than they actually are when you are always being coddled. Before rushing to schedule a therapy, ask yourself this - "Am I really bothered by this?". A lot of times the answer is just a simple shoulder shrug and you might realize that the stuff you are worrying about may as well be very insignificant compared to the bigger picture.

Don't try to make life happen; just let it happen

After too many long years, the feeling of homesickness re-emerged in me. I miss my country. I miss it so much that I have started missing even the bad parts of it - the pollution, the not-so-safe night streets, the unfathomable traffic. Just the whole enchilada.

Life in the USA has been pretty good, no doubt about it. Compared to where I was born, USA feels like an organized person that wakes up everyday on time, wears a suit and knows what to expect, versus my country, where it is akin to grabbing whatever cloth you can find and just try to work with it. And that's where I think lies the beauty - chaos. The sheer randomness of life itself. Americans love to quote the famous "Life is like a box of chocolates" line but at least they know that they are getting chocolates. In my country, what may look like a box of chocolate might end up being a box of needles and threads. You just never know.

In my country, life just happens; in USA, you try to make life happen

A good friend of mine recently visited his home country after almost 7 years and his reaction pretty much was, "It's chaotic but life is fun here". The blessing of being born in a developing nation is that people learn to get by with what they have. Sure, they complain but they also know how to go with the flow. They know how to navigate through chaos and not around it so as to avoid it (you can't avoid it anyway). You become more resilient to the insignificant inconveniences of life. In my country, life just happens; in USA, you try to make life happen. Maybe that's why life feels so monotonous here, it's the same pattern over and over again.

Let's be honest - the IT industry is very broken and merely working by metaphoric duct tape. That's also the reason people are working longer hours than before and are also burning out. Here are some of the pointers that I can think of:

1. Password management
   This one really hit the gutter in recent years.  First of all, the increase in password complexity to keep our accounts safe is getting more ridiculous day by day. We are basically trying to fight a losing war against super-powered GPUs that can figure out the passwords in mere minutes these days. You cannot keep increasing the password complexity without making it inconvenient for users.
   To top it off, the MFA/2FA process feels like sugar coating a broken process. "You need one more device to access this device. Oh also, we need another identifying characters such as fingerprint etc. to let you in". Computers will keep getting faster and faster so does that mean we keep on stacking layers after layers to add security? It's like adding another door, and another, and another to access the main front door. Sure, it will buy you time but won't really increase security.
2. Multiple monitors
   I get it, it looks sci-fi to stare at a colosseum of monitors glaring right back at you. But I personally noticed that I actually work less efficient when there are multiple monitors running. Even if the extra monitors are sitting idle. It's similar to reading a book while having multiple books open right next to it. It's just harder to focus on the current task you are working on. Besides, you are just working way more and harder than what you are getting paid for.
3. Inefficient communication
   Be it workplace or just chatting with friends, we are actually communicating less efficiently than before. Chatting is very convenient but also takes longer to communicate an idea and textual conversation practically strips away any kind of tone and emotion required to understand the full context. Audio snippets are one solution but we haven't figured out how to use them in every settings. Maybe, this time we can use AI to tag audio snippets according to the tone of the sender? For example, sarcasm can be hard to come through clearly over texts so the AI can listen to the audio and tag it "sarcastic" something like that? That way, if you are in office where you may not be able to listen to the audio, you can still understand the context.
4. Prioritizing growth over innovation
   Most tech companies these days focus on the growth aspect of a company a lot more than coming up with innovative products. Venture capital is sweet but it comes at the cost of pushing a product that is not what it seems it is. Look at the ChatGPT phenomenon - companies are creating products left and right based on the technology without grasping even a little how it works. The other day I was visiting a website that has implemented ChatGPT-based digital assistance to help the customer. But since the assistance is using the same ChatGPT training model as pretty much everyone else, I was able to quickly divert the conversation from the product to the crimes of WWII. A human assistance would probably keep insisting to divert the conversation back to the product and not answer any WWII specific questions.
5. Minimalism taken too far
   This also is not specific to IT sector only. But I am tired of buying products where the design is so sleek that it's practically unusable unless I look up a YouTube video or tutorial. The other day I was trying to use a spare mouse that I had and for the life of me, I couldn't find the dongle that came with it. Then finally I remembered that the mouse has a small compartment underneath the top cover where you can store the dongle. Thing is, why didn't the mouse had a small arrow sign or something saying "Lift" to give the user some direction? A lot of mini computers these days also doesn't come with any labels on the body. I am well versed with all the IT symbols and voodoo but I sometimes see my elderly parents struggling with figuring out what this or that button do. Why they can't just label "On/Off", or "USB" and stuff like that? That's bad user interface design when the user has to look up Google to find answers.

These are just a handful of annoyance surrounding IT that I came up with off the top of my head. But notice that all these little inconvenience add up to the dissatisfaction of the IT industry.

Now that the pandemic is almost over, we got back the opportunity to meet others in real life, face to face. Don't confine yourself interacting with others through the internet only.

I know it comes off as a very "duh" statement and it is. But over the last 2-3 years, we have become so accustomed to interacting with each other through social media networks and the general internet that we were kind of forced to choose that as the new norm. Unfortunately, I have noticed that a lot of my peers (including me) are having difficulty going back to the "good old days" of meeting people in flesh and blood and are stuck at maintaining relationships with people only through the web.

Truth is, it takes effort and energy to meet and interact with new people. It also can be unnerving and exciting at the same time, no matter how confident of a person you are. But on the flip side, those interactions are not ephemeral like the ones you carry out on the web. On the Internet, we all are like celebrities and all our peers are like our fans. We only interact with the shell of a person. It's like when we listen to an artist's songs and we feel connected to them through their music but in reality, the artist can be a very different person. But it makes sense that there is a barrier between an artist and their fans since it's a business relationship. But why are we putting the same kind of barrier between ourselves? Between friends that can easily hit each other up and meet in real life? Because of convenience? Most probably but that way we are diluting the bond of a friendship, communicating over distances when there is no need.

There is no need to reduce our friends into numbers and likes when they are living a few blocks down the road. Even 30 minutes of real-life interaction with a friend covers what a 30 days conversation would cover, if it ever could. You don't make memories over social media. 5 years from now, you won't tell your friend "Hey, remember the time I shared that meme and we had a great laugh?". But you both most definitely will remember the time you guys were outing and had a great time. Even if it were just a simple good time.

You don't make memories over social media

No, this isn't a blog post written by ChatGPT or any other AI bots. This is more of a blog post about the realization and self-awareness of how we are similar to A.I. We had to be, of course; after all, the design of neural network is based on human brain.

Since I was 16, I had a keen interest in artificial intelligence and especially in the workings of neural networks. I was an well-attentive and particularly good student of Human Biology (GCSE) and the inner workings of neurons always awed me. And now to think that we are able to design the same neuron inside computers? Super awe!

So I would search the then dialup Internet for articles/tutorials on neural networks and how I can write one easily in Visual Basic (I was slightly proficient in that language at that time). But the thing about intricate topics such as neural network is that you really have to understand how it works if you even want to begin learning it. Just touching the surface is not usually enough.
I would go to my local library (British Council Library) and search for books remotely related to the topic of neural networks. I eventually got my hands on a bunch of machine learning and neuron design books that I brought home. And wow, those books were hard hard to understand. They were written in English but seemed Greek to me.

Around that time, I used to follow a guy who maintained a blog about building his own robot. I believe it was called Sluggish Soft in the UK but unfortunately it seems like the blog has been lost in the ether. The robot was called Rodney, named after Professor Rodney Brooks of MIT, and the author of the blog maintained a very detailed journal of his progress. If anyone reading this blog has any update on it, please do let me know! That blog was a huge inspiration to me as a teenager.

The blog had actual code (and also in Visual Basic) of implementing neural networks for his robot's brain. Now I was armed with the theoretical knowledge from the books and the actual code from the blog. So I invented this methodology of reading a chapter of the book over and over again until it clicked; even only a little. So chapters on backpropagation, activation function, etc. were all foreign to me but as I kept reading them over and over and over and over again, it started making sense little by little. So much so that I could actually go through some of the code the blogger wrote and understand them a little bit more. I figured that I am somehow understanding the concepts, even though abstractly, but understanding still.

I was able to extrapolate a concept just from my abstract understanding and majority of the time, my extrapolation was pretty accurate. It's like throwing a dart - you don't know the exact formula to hit the bullseye but with practice, your brain builds up this function that can accurately predict the outcome given all the variables (given years of practice). This is the same concept as unsupervised learning.
Do we know the formula? No, it's just a blackbox that we call experience. Accululation of trial and error and nudging the variables here and there until we achieve what we want. Just like the current generation of AI.

Do we know the formula? No, it's just a blackbox that we call experience.

The other day I was talking to ChatGPT and had this weird sensation that this "innocent being" was somewhat learning the exact way I did when I was a 16 year old - it's trying to make sense of what I am talking about by reiterating through the conversation (and million other conversations) over and over again. It's just estimating, after all, what I will be saying next. But this is exactly what we do as humans - we estimate others during interaction and adjust our behavior from the feedback.

It was an unsettling feeling that my learning experience is very akin to that of an AI.

Lately, I have been practicing reducing my reliance on some particular pieces of technology. One such technology is the GPS (app). Over the years, I've noticed that my sense of direction has been getting worse and worse and not only that, but my confidence in myself about directions has also been declining. For example, the gym that I go to is only an 8-minute drive from where I live. And fortunately, I go to the gym 4 days a week so I should have the path pretty well memorized, right? Well, no. Thanks to my frequent and continuous usage of Google Maps, I don't practice memorizing directions anymore cause I just don't need to. The feeling is very akin to when calculators were becoming common in the school - you knew how to calculate 19-4 but just in case you were wrong, you wanted to double-check the answer with a calculator. "Just in case I am wrong" - that tingling feeling is the one I am talking about. That self-doubt that rises the more you use a particular technology as your second brain. You are offloading knowledge to a device and this is what I am calling cognitive offload.  

Ever since I started using GPS less and less, my sense of direction has improved. Not significantly (yet) but I noticed that my mental map of some particular streets is improving. Like, I pickup cues from the surroundings to figure out where the next turn will lead me to. Improved guesstimation, you could say. It's a practice of overcoming one's fear of self-doubt. In the beginning, I would pick short distances to drive to without using my phone. Those were easy and when I got comfortable with them, I started going longer distances. Baby steps. For the so-called "longer" distances, I would have Google Maps pulled up on my phone but not pointing to any particular direction. This was just for in case of emergency. In the US, and the State I am in, taking a wrong exit in the highway can be bit of a headache. And also, time. It depends on how much time I have on my hand to make mistakes.

It's a practice of overcoming one's fear of self-doubt.

Another technology that I have been avoiding for a long time is the usage of to-do lists. Again, very useful utility but it needs moderation. Couple of things that I have noticed when using a to-do app was that I would enter way more items than I could actually complete in a day. Maybe it's just how my brain works in particular but seeing 6 items in the list made it sound simpler than it actually was. But once I stopped using the app, I recognized my brain's capacity of a to-do list. It wasn't much but it was more realistic and doable than what I was entering in the app. Also, I realized that since entering items in the checklist was an easy task, I would enter too many items and actually feel overwhelmed looking at the list and fail to complete the whole checklist. But now that I rely on my own and without an app, I usually chalk off 2-3 items to do and then focus on completing them all the way through. Then if I have more time in hand, I think about what I can do next and add 2-3 more items to do. Divide and conquer; rinse repeat.

The third piece of technology that I am trying to reduce is, ironically, the keyboard. Maybe I shouldn't say reducing but I have been doing more writing with pen as of late. Why? Well, I like writing and I like the act of writing. Maybe it's nostalgic but I like the physical sensation of the pen tip scratching against the paper. Also, physical writing is just ubiquitous. Heck, you don't necessarily need a pen or pencil. You could just write stuff out in the sand with a stick. Or with a finger. Or a stone. Anything really. Keyboards are nice but just like any electronic technology, it needs that "magical" pump of electrons to work. And seriously, keyboard typing is actually very limiting. We all are so used to the QWERTY layout that typing would be almost impossible if a new layout was given to us (or if someone swapped the "N" and "M" keycaps. Please don't do this).

Thing is, I feel like we are going about it the wrong way with technology. Instead of using a separate device for our extended memory, maybe we could devise a technology that would increase our brain's capacity instead. Maybe the device will foster the generation of new memory cells/neurons. In fact, gym equipments are a good example of technology that improve our lives without the need for us to rely on them all the time. If apps and devices could do the same for our brain, then that technology would be awesome. And I am not talking about Elon Musk's Neuralink tech because eventually, we are still offloading the memory and cognitive skills to a non-living device.
Maybe somebody could make the memory machine from Dexter's Laboratories a reality (and without the side effect) - Omelette du fromage anyone?

I am excited about AI-generated art and entertainment. In general, AI-generated content.

For a while now, the Internet has been nothing but SEO-powered experience. Meticulously planned ads placed all around the sites that you visit, subscription-based model diluting the idea of purchasing and owning a product, and social media sites full of business people disguised as influencers trying to sell you products. It felt like a huge mashup of billboards rather than a community of individuals.

Enter the AI era - content creation cranked up to 11. It's not so much of a concern if people will be fooled by it or not as they already are being fooled. It's the fact that digital content will lose its value. Over-saturation gives birth to exclusivity. And I believe, the exclusivity will be contents/entertainment more tied to the physical world. That would drive social interaction among people and which is I think will be a boon for the society.

Over-saturation gives birth to exclusivity.

You can already see it happening bit by bit (no pun intended) - vinyls records and DVD sales are going up every day. Sure, they are eventually digital content but they are more "real" than simply streaming bytes over the Internet. You can also feel the ushering of brick-and-mortar stores. Burned by Amazon products not matching their descriptions, people nowadays started to prefer checking out the actual product by visiting a nearby physical store.
Covid might have exploded the usage of Zoom and video calls but it also gave us a glimpse of how we still long the feeling of physically being in the same place together. And now that it seems like we are getting over the pandemic, people are rushing over to travel and visit their families and friends.

I am personally getting into printed photos again. The quality of the paper has improved tremendously and they do not degrade as fast as the older ones. Also, printing them forces me to carefully organize and rate the photos. It's akin to buying CDs and vinyls - you only buy music that you really enjoy. Maybe it's placebo, but owning and holding a physical content makes it so much more valuable than its digital counterpart. As with a painting where you can see every brush strokes, it is inherently more valuable than the printed version.

The Internet is slowly becoming what Twitter has become - an abyss of bots interacting with each other. And just as the usage of Twitter dwindled dramatically, so will the usage of Internet. Don't get me wrong - I love the Internet and the whole idea behind it but I worry about the current direction it is heading towards.