Never Celebrating the Ordinary
Notes on negative visualisation
Recently, I was on a call with a friend. Just a normal catch-up.
The first ten minutes of our conversation went really badly. It was rather morbid.
We were talking about how everyone we knew was doing. It was one piece of bad news after another. Death, heart surgery, bone-related issues, diabetes, you name it. They were all there.
After the conversation, during my usual post-dinner walk, something made me a bit uncomfortable. It was not all the bad updates that I had been hearing from friends and relatives. But it felt like I had been receiving too many of them all of a sudden. It reminded me of something from work.
If you work with data, and all of a sudden you see one metric doing significantly better or much worse than before, there has to be a drastic change in the way the business is being conducted. Some conditions have been altered, knowingly or unknowingly.
For example, suppose sales of a product suddenly drop in one region, despite no change in price or demand elsewhere. You would start looking for the condition that changed. Perhaps floods disrupted deliveries, a local strike kept shops closed, or a competitor launched a major campaign. Something must explain why the usual pattern no longer holds.
I started thinking about these conditions in life. What might have caused the surge in unpleasant news that I was receiving? There is no pandemic right now, so why?
I could come up with two reasons.
Most of my friends and acquaintances are entering their thirties. Almost all of them are in the 26 to 35 range. During this time, most of our parents are also entering their sixties. And the grandparents who are still alive are about to touch ninety or are already in their mid-eighties. The chances of having health-related issues increase once you enter these age brackets. With improvements in medical science, people are healthier after sixty. Probably healthier than ever. But still not completely invincible. So, maybe it makes sense that the children and grandchildren are worried about their seniors.
The other reason is the way we might be hardwired. We never really celebrate being ordinary. I was trying to recall my old conversations. All those times when no one shared any bad news. Neither I nor anyone else celebrated that. We never really appreciated that everyone we knew was doing well. Minor niggles here and there, but nothing more than that. Good health is rarely treated as news. Its absence immediately is.
The Stoics have a strong meditation related to this. It is called negative visualisation. It is the deliberate practice of imagining worst-case scenarios. Every day, they advise spending a few minutes imagining the loss of things or people that you value in life. It can be something that gives you comfort, or someone you love. The idea is to keep it short and not dwell on it. Once you do that, you begin to appreciate what you have more.
I have been trying to do this actively. Even if not every morning, I try to do it whenever I find myself annoyed with something or feeling the fear of missing out.
I remember walking through the wide footpaths of Westminster, England. I was feeling jealous.
“Imagine being born in Westminster and not West Bengal,” I wondered. Great public parks, a clean city, great air quality. Within ten seconds, I found another voice correcting me: “At least it was West Bengal and not a war-torn country.”
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