Addicted to Ease
The formula for new age success? Shortcuts! Less work, more convenience, fatter paychecks, endless vacations.
We’re not just celebrating successful people, we’re making heroes of those who made it with ease.
Answer 15 questions and you can become a millionaire
Children obsessed with gaming find studying difficult? The solution is to make learning fun. Timothy Feriss professes to follow the 4-hour workweek. Getting rich quick is the other mantra.
And the opening line in the sales pitch is usually about how easy it is and how little you have to do.
Whether it is an online business or losing weight – it’s as if we’re scared of work and scared to fail. And that is a formula for failure.
Paul Graham’s wonderful essay, The Acceleration of Addiction is scary. Because it is so true. We’re already at the stage where we cannot conceive of a life without the internet, mobile phones, and gaming.
While we classify only those who are on drugs and alcohol as addicts, how do you respond to those who spend hours gaming or texting every day?
He ends on a thought-provoking line ‘We’ll increasingly be defined by what we say no to’.
An escape from work is easy in today’s world. One just has to pretend that there is a lot going on. The Bermuda Triangle of productivity is captured in an insightful illustration.
Every generation has tried to make life easier and more comfortable for the next one.
Leisure over work.
Matter over the mind. And according to Graham, we’ll increasingly choose what we like. Not what is good for us. So, we’re hurtling along the highway enjoying the speed.
What’s waiting around the corner?
From Silicon Valley to Indus Valley
The first is the flagbearer of startups and the ecosystem that built the IT revolution.
The second, Indus Valley is known in India, at least, as the most ancient civilization.
But the first report of Indus Valley, focusing on startups in India, makes for interesting reading.
How several generations and cultures co-exist and even thrive within the same fragmented system.
Massive inequality,yet generating new streams of wealth and fostering change.
One of the first photographs in the report is a masked street vendor holding the UPI QR code to conduct a transaction with a car passenger.
This would have been unthinkable a couple of years ago but the pandemic made the impossible happen.
The cost of 1 GB of data dropped from Rs 268 to Rs.6 by 2021 - driven by the countrywide penetration of Jio and the network they put in place.
And though India consumes the highest data on smartphones, only a tenth of Indians have shopped online
Another contradiction - the country produces the lowest numbers of employable engineers and yet has the 3rd highest number of projects on GitHub.
And in terms of venture funding, India ranks fourth.
What is India buying online? Mobile phones, electronic goods and white goods.
And though Amazon's Prime members in India are just 5-7 million users, they account for over 50% of the company's Gross Merchandise Value in India.
From being a flagbearer of IT services, SAAS in India has taken over that place. Accounting for 12% of funding and 10% of direct jobs.
This is an evolving story and it will be interesting to watch how this changes year on year going forward.
For some products, staying 'dumb' is smart
That's a recommendation coming straight from the Department of Cybersecurity and Infrastructure in the US.
The problem is that if power backups like UPS go down, so does whatever they are protecting.
It could be data. Or medical devices. Or patient monitoring systems.
A cyber hack can bring everything down with just some malicious code.
The online UPS has grown into a category by itself. It requires a smaller set of people to monitor. The maintenance and upkeep can be done remotely.
But in a crisis situation, the one thing that should keep going is the backup.
The alternative is to go back to offline power backups. Or to keep the management of these systems behind a VPN. Increase the password strength and security.
But we all know how that works, especially when a large number of systems are connected. Security gets lax, the protocols are ignored.
The fear is that entire data centers could be targeted, not just an office or a few buildings.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is growing by leaps and bounds as companies bring everything from printers to refrigerators online.
Every point of access can become a point of vulnerability.
The way things are going, we may have to devise a solution where master backups are not connected to the internet at all.
In a situation where the power infrastructure is targeted, the power backups are the last line of defence.
And if they are compromised, the situation could get a lot more complex.
The Internet of Things (IoT) should draw up a list of exceptions.
Devices that should never ever connect to the internet.