On life and time

We all have some opinions. It is impossible to live and not have opinions. Whether we want to or not, we have opinions.

In life, often, our decisions are driven by our opinions. How we conduct ourself is often the byproduct of our opinions. Soon, we become an end product of our opinions and we become rigid, dogmatic and stiff.

Change is a scary emotion and our opinions stop us from changing. Often, when we face a situation where we are about to change our views or decisions, we fall back on our opinions and decide against change.

Think about it. If you have recently rejected any idea, for example you rejected the idea of taking external help for a problem you are facing knowing deep inside that you do need help, did you do so because it completely made sense or because you relied on a historic opinion you formed that “I am a person who does not take help” ? And now you find it hard to change, and counter the opinions you formed ?

Another example, from my own experience. I have been avoiding to talk to a friend with whom I haven’t spoken in many years. I am avoiding because I have formed an opinion that he will not understand why I drifted away from our friendship. My opinion is so strong that I just cannot change it. I have strongly bought into it.

And now something interesting. This is the year 2025 (sidenote: I hope many decades from now, some of my grand children read this blog and form an opinion that their ancestor called Sajid was a wise man!!) and AI is all the rage. A key aspect of AI is “context”. Everything depends on “context”. If the context changes, then the output changes expectedly.

But in our life we live as if the context window never changes and there is infact an infinite context window. We believe that what we were many years ago is still a valid context and we need to stay true to that context.

How untrue ?

In life, context changes every moment. This moment is even shorter than a second. Think about this – In 1 second, Earth travels around 29.78 kilometers along its orbit around the Sun. Isn’t that a change in context ?

So if today I am angry and mad at someone, why can’t I be in love with them tomorrow ? In a day, the context has changed by thousands of kilometres if you think about the above paragraph.

We live in a world where our context literally and physically changes dramatically each passing moment. But we cling to the context which is centuries old and live a life that does not move on, does not adopt, does not change. We stick to our opinions as if those can be sold at a higher value in the future. Opinions have no existence in a contextual world.

That is a sad life.

A life worth living is one where we flow from context to context and change with life as it happens.