Dopamine Culture, New Millionaires, And More
5 solid learnings from March
Hello there,
Welcome to another edition of our monthly roundups, where I try sharing 5 thought-provoking ideas, with the goal that at least one of them will make you spit your upma out and say “Shit, that’s so cool”.
Let’s dive in:
Psychology Of Power: A fascinating study shows what power does to our brains. In short- it works like an anesthetic that makes us insensitive to others, turning otherwise normal people into more impulsive, reckless, and disrespectful people. In one experiment, one group of people were asked to drive a regular car and the other was given a swanky Mercedes/BMW. While everyone in the former group waited for pedestrians when they reached a crossing, 45% of the participants in the latter didn’t stop and showed much ruder road manners! The team called this phenomenon ‘acquired sociopathy’- a non-hereditary condition in which the acquisition of power makes us behave badly with others. Hmm. Be careful what you wish for.
Dopamine Culture: We’re swiping right and scrolling down our way to hell. This is emblematic of the rise of dopamine culture, where depth gives way to shorts, thoughtful actions devolve into thoughtless behaviors, and entertainment has now given way to distraction (and the resultant addiction). This chart is a great demonstration of this major cultural shift. Wonder what the next step is in this beautiful transformation? One has to ask if this isn’t the endpoint, because what more can companies do to distract us from our (already addictive) distractions? [Btw, if you suck at handling your smartphone addiction, PLEASE read this]
Millionaire Towns: We’re witnessing an interesting trend in the emergence of a new type of wealthy people- they no longer belong exclusively to the top few metros. In the Top 20 Cities with the highest number of millionaires, guess what kind of cities came up? Tirupur, Rajkot, and Udaipur. But it isn’t just a handful of small cities striking its reach. This is a more secular pattern, reflected in how wealth management firms are approaching business. These money managers are increasingly traveling to Tier 2 and 3 cities like Belgavi and Pundri, courting a new breed of wealthy clients who are now moving beyond gold & land to invest in the markets. This is an interesting sign of where the Indian economy’s future lies.
Meditation & Math: We think breakthrough discoveries are made either in some god-forsaken labs or while furiously working on endless equations & derivations to arrive at a breakthrough. But that’s not it. Some of our big leaps have been made when people were simply sitting, immersed in meditation or prayer. An apocryphal story suggests that the number ‘0’ was discovered when Brahmagupta was in deep meditation and experienced a feeling of nothingness- which directly led him to come up with the idea of zero! Even the famed mathematician Ramanujam came up with some complex, unheard-of proofs while being immersed in his prayers. The connection between science and spirituality deserves deeper exploration.
Obesity>Hunger: A new Lancet study has found that more than one in eight people in the world are clinically obese! The number passed one billion for the first time. It is now the leading form of malnutrition, with the number of people considered underweight falling to below 550 million. As in most spheres of life, our next challenge is to deal with the problems not of scarcity, but of abundance. It’d be interesting to see if the new weight-loss drugs can help humanity tackle this situation so we can continue to gorge on those disgusting brownies until eternity.
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