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Good morning,
In Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything—Even Things That Seem Impossible Today, Jane McGonigal, author and game designer, suggests we practise hard empathy. She says there are two types of empathy. “The first kind, the easy kind, happens when we can directly relate to what someone else is feeling because we’ve gone through the same thing ourselves… ‘The second kind, hard empathy, is more effortful and creative. It’s what we have to conjure up when we don’t have any personal experience with what someone else is going through but want to understand.’”
How to practise hard empathy? McGonigal writes: “The easiest way I’ve found to practise the skill of hard empathy is to go to any news source, magazine, or social media, and look for a story about someone experiencing something radically different, almost unimaginably different, from my own life. And then I try to imagine that my life is more like theirs.”
She gives the example of the severe water shortage that occurred in Cape Town, South Africa. “Residents would be forced to stand in line at one of 150 water-collection points around Cape Town for a daily ration of just twenty-five litres per person. It was reported at the time that Day Zero was potentially just weeks away, as dam storage levels had dwindled to less than 15 percent total capacity. And so people in Cape Town had to make incredibly tough choices, day in and day out.”
She offers a series of questions inspired by that:
“If you’ve never lived through a prolonged water crisis, then this hard empathy challenge is for you:
- Imagine you have to live through months of a similar water restriction. Imagine that the city or state where you currently live has implemented exactly the same policy.
- How would you spend your fifty litres a day?
- What would you give up first? Showers? Laundry? Cooking?
- What would be the hardest to give up?
- Would you share any of your fifty litres with family members or neighbours?
- How would you feel if a member of your household took a twenty-minute shower and burned through all your family’s water for the rest of the day? Angry? Frustrated? Jealous?
- “How would you feel wearing the same clothing many days in a row, even if it started to smell? Embarrassed? Gross? Virtuous? Accepting?
- Try to get into the physicality of the situation. And try to feel your way through the social aspects of negotiating over water decisions and helping or sacrificing for others.
- Think about what emotions the prospect of your own Day Zero would bring up—anxiety, dread, or maybe motivation to help?
- What actions would you take to prepare for a possible Day Zero? Would you become a water hoarder? What kind of help would you give others? What kind of help would you need?”
Take some time to consider these questions. What are your feelings, thoughts?
Have a great day!
Intimacy and money
Since the time Sushmita Sen started dating IPL founder Lalit Modi, a spate of jokes have started doing the rounds on WhatsApp. Most of them snigger at the fugitive that Modi now is and paints Sen as a gold-digger. Then there is the difference in age between them. She is in her mid-forties and continues to be very attractive while he is in the late sixties and past his prime. Is all the trolling warranted? Absolutely not, Leher Kala writes in The Indian Express. While Modi is a rich man, Sen is a rich woman as well who has made it on her own. The problem lies with us, who laugh at them, Kala insists.
“The world’s all-consuming obsession with wealth means we view anyone hitting the jackpot via a romantic liaison, as a cold-blooded opportunist. Indeed, we are a cynical generation. Ask anybody what they’re looking for in a partner, they’ll say honesty, to be understood, even, somebody to watch TV with. Ask them what they think others want and the tone immediately gets bitter. We tend to think our own motivations are honourable but presume the rest of humanity is finicky and superficial. Actually, everyone, rich or poor, wants exactly the same things out of romance—broadly, intimacy and good company.
“That’s not to say that money and love aren’t critically intertwined for women; it’s only in the last 50 years that marriage has become about finding soulmates, or falling madly in love. From a historical perspective, marriage was the most important financial decision women could make since they lost out on inheritance to brothers and dowries were controlled by husbands. Matrimonial alliances to gain land, gold and influence have been a prominent feature of politics in ancient India. For most of our existence on earth, marriage has had nothing to do with love. Any evolutionary scientist will attest, carefully considering a man’s bank balance is a survival instinct. So, blame systemic misogyny for creating, over the course of time, the many fraught truths that continue to plague modern relationships.”
Dig deeper
Chinese censorship
That the state apparatus in China goes to great lengths to censor content it deems inimical to its interests is well known. It is a fact Chinese citizens have come to live with, is what we are told. But what got our attention is an altogether new kind of censorship that has even Chinese citizens stumped.
“Imagine you are working on your novel on your home computer. It’s nearly finished; you have already written approximately one million words. All of a sudden, the online word processing software tells you that you can no longer open the draft because it contains illegal information. Within an instant, all your words are lost,” Zeyi Yang writes in MIT Technology Review.
Yang reports that a Chinese novelist working under the pseudonym Mitu was at work on her manuscript using WPS, the Chinese version of Google Docs or Microsoft Office 365 and the only person who had access to it was her editor. And then, suddenly, earlier this month on July 11, her editor got locked out of the document and Mitu lost access to the million-odd words she had already produced. The news blew up on Chinese social media.
“WPS has not officially confirmed whether it is the act of sharing work that triggers the algorithmic censors. But a comment left by WPS’s customer service account on Weibo on July 13 seems to confirm that hypothesis: ‘Syncing and storing it on cloud won’t trigger the reviews. Only creating a sharing link for the document triggers the review mechanism.’
“Even for Chinese internet users, used to tough censorship laws, this seems like a step too far.”
People on Chinese social media are discussing the theme threadbare and how the state handles this going forward will be watched closely by observers outside China.
Dig deeper
A million-word novel gets censored even before it was shared
Remembrance of things past
(Via WhatsApp)
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Warm regards,
Team Founding Fuel
