The heat trap,dopamine loops & conformism

Photo by Caught In Joy on Unsplash

Heat

Elevated temperatures affect mobility, health, sleep cycles and productivity.

The uniform model of working/studying hours and commute may not cut it anymore (along with the dress code requirements in many a sector, generic formal dresses are not compatible with our hot, humid conditions).

Yeah you might use AC rooms/vehicles but that's just temporary insulation.

Maybe if given the option, people will prefer early hours/post sunset for work or school or commute to make things more bearable. The latter may affect your circadian clock, but let's be honest; whose is okay anyways these days?

The disruption due to heat is no joke.

Dopamine Loops

Just a swipe on screen and keep your dopamine levels boosted enough to hook you for more reward seeking, thus eating into your hours and attention capacity.

Not a tech-savvy generation only problem by any means.

Almost every age group (my rough guess, from 5 to 75?) exhibits a variable degree of addiction to short form content, some even consume for 7-10 hours a day (equivalent to working a job).
Losing hours, focus, and motivation as nothing normal quite triggers that spike anymore.

Doing hard things turn out to be harder.

Conformism

I mean conformism in education or how we Indians learn in general.

I wonder how many schools/colleges truly promote free thinking, rationality and ethos.

Don't think we expect anything in this space from public school education system which struggles to even provision adequate infrastructure or teachers.

That leaves out a large chunk of the populace too unfortunately, who cannot afford to mind if their child doesn't even get classes regularly (or at all).

But anyways, our systems (which still work) evaluate and reward how much information you have gathered and can reproduce at specific points.

You need to cover Nyquist plot in your engineering semester, why? Don't bother, just do it, finish the syllabus.
Then Bode plot, Nichols plot, and others.

Iterate, move level by level with more concepts stacked up.
Are you facing the question or the need that made people think and formulate this though?

Nope.

We aren't having the mental space or will, to back off for a bit and internalize the facets of a concept, why did they do it this way? what exactly does it solve? how does it all make sense?

Be a model student, be compliant and reverent (not just respectful), aim for maximizing your scores.

Be taught rather than learn.

Conform, get through the tests to ultimately get a respectable job, and you are good.

Mix the above, a systems problem?

Conformism of this kind has been around us for a long time.

Learn to think (or not) a way in your formative years, and we mostly apply the same in adult life.

Mid 2000s consensus was, do engineering because it has scope, you will be settled, we have seen your cousin/neighbour do well in IT.. follow.

Early 2010s, Data Science is kind of hot right now, should do it.. I see people are bagging jobs at big tech.

2026, we should do tokenmaxxing, people at Meta are doing it to be 100x, I heard Jensen Huang advocated for it. Forward deployed AI agentic staff developer FTW!

The truest of understanding comes when you (or your intellect) truly needs what you learnt to solve a problem that you care about. The 'caring part' is just diluting away further among a deluge of SOPs, trends and shortcuts.

Mix it with comparatively recent phenomenons like cheap dopamine hits and extreme heat, (am leaving out a plethora of other socio-economic conditions in India) and you have a debilitating concoction for anyone who depends on labour.

How much effort and investment can you put in to counter these realities so it doesn't affect you, and for how long?

I think it's about time the broader fraternity begins to accept in public discourse, that nothing happens in isolation.

We may strive for lofty individual aspirations (atleast the so called knowledge workers could afford that dream), but social or governance problems are not individual problems.

They need trust, rules, enforcement and institutions to actually work.

We are stuck with systemic problems, which cannot be solved with individual brilliance or outliers.