The Internet is going to be BANNED.

The internet has over a billion people connected to it today. Engaging with it, driving it, learning from it, conducting commerce and relationships on it. Its easy to think of the internet as one common, global identity which lives on facebook, google and twitter but of course that’s not the case. There’s the commercial internet, the information internet, the science internet, the pornographic internet, the internet of cultures and sub-cultures, the dark internet and so many others.

I feel we are still in the early stages of the internet — relatively elite, billion users who like to believe that the internet has rules, where we know UPPER CASE is rude and we are easy with our digital slang. Its easy to think of the internet then as a relatively calm forum, some unruly elements here and there but overall a place that can be open and peaceful forever.

I think we are wrong.

The next billion users are going to be a mass billion, driving the shape and nature of the popular and mainstream information internet - facebook, twitter, youtube. As the internet connects to the hinterlands of the world, we are going to see another kind of billion connected and that billion is going to be crude, raw, earthy, passionate — creating a “mass internet” and bringing to our stark attention the kind of world we really live in. That our society is not the really just our friends and family but a mass of possibly illiberal, local views. The next version of the information and social internet is almost bound to be ugly, seeing that the mass of people especially in populous parts of the developing world are still very ethnic, deeply-rooted, conservative to a local identity and as such are vulnerable to a crisis of a local identity — a crisis of custom or community. Not that the rest of the world is immune from these crises but what’s different is the sheer number.

This internet is not really built for balanced debate and equivocal, nuanced views but is driven instead by sheer numbers, and this is getting hard to control and manage without regulation.

Before we had the internet, we had the press, and it was relatively simple for a mass leader’s voice to be amplified to many by controlling or managing few information sources. Media was used intelligently, articulately even by leaders good and bad. Some chose to shut it down and have a state-sponsored vacuum. It was possible.

Today, the forces between leaders and masses have equalized. It’s harder for public leaders and governments to manage information flow, avoid personal attack and rise above the debate. This is going to get much, much worse.

Is this necessarily good? or just plain bad? I can’t really say. All I know is that it’s unmanageable. Especially in populous, semi-literate countries, its easy to spark debate, rage and conflagrations over almost any kind of issue. The very power of the internet — its virality becomes its death. Governments routinely shut down cellular communications in areas with unrest. How long before we see almost daily unrest in various parts of the nation flaring up over the internet? Twitter and facebook are platforms that can topple governments today. How long before we start to see them being regulated? Or Banned.

I hope I am wrong but If I was a leader , even a liberal one - I would see no other way to govern a nation but to manage the internet. Shut down mainstream parts of it where people connect and can address each other without barrier — and keep alive only essential parts of the internet- the commerce, the research and so on.

We liberals will scream ourselves hoarse about rights of free speech and debate heatedly about how history has shown that muzzling of the people has never worked. How its important to let people speak freely to let a nation breathe. As the mass internet grows and we start to see the ugliness parade on all our popular feeds, I am afraid we will start to feel differently.

Sometimes its hard to remember there never has been an internet in our planet’s history. And I am beginning to think there will never be.

Talking to your 20 year old about Careers — is it time for the Learn-Earn-Learn career?

I was talking to my 20 year old niece -an Economics grad about “career advice” and “job opportunities” and I surprised myself. Surprised myself with how boring I sounded to myself. And it got me thinking — this is old hat. The world is going to be very different for a 30-year old in 2030.

I thought about how much the world has changed for India in two decades. And how much more so for skilled Indians — Lawyers, Doctors, Engineers (software engineers), MBAs and even artists. There has been economic hyper-growth for skilled Indians who are seeing their incomes double every 3–6 years. And it might jump even more in the next two decades. With it has come so much economic freedom and financial security — yes even for the notoriously doomsday predictors — incomes are far outstripping expenses, and if you net out the asset building mentality (read houses, gold and more houses), most Indians born north of 1980 are / will be very well-off (relative to what they grew up with). In no small measure, due to the fact that for most Indians, beyond a certain point they remain relatively frugal in their spending.

What then of our children? our 15-year olds and our 20-year olds? Do they have to go get hyper-educated and then “build a career” like we had to?

For the large part, building a career=do meaningless work for the first five years of your career, find your sweet spot, earn money, buy a house, get married and then earn some money, hit vice-president or senior consulting physician or and then earn some more? Until you pretty much hit a wall of cholesterol and stress and general irrelevance before you go into hyper-retirement consisting of chess, arthritis and the odd mentee meeting.

I think we can do better than that when we talk to our 20 year olds. And there are a few reasons why they are different from us.

A) Zero Drive to buy homes: One of the biggest drivers for a lot people so far has been the ability to own a living space. Today, there already exist multiple homes in the family, and they just don’t know the ownership scarcity that we grew up used to. They don’t have to have the “home EMI” or even if they do, I doubt they will maximizing square footage. What this really means that notions of “security” are changing. From assets to… ? something.

B) Hey, Look at my Ferrari ..errr.. NOT really: We don’t realize how used to we have gotten to ‘competing’ for respect and how old hat its gotten. These guys have grown up with relative wealth and more importantly, their entire ‘social status’ set has moved online. Its far easier (or tougher?) to carve your niche and gain respect with your own life story than it used to be.

C) Its about Skills: I think peer respect has moved from a paradigm of “what do you own?” to “what can you do?” or “what are you world-class at?”. Being an accountant or an investment banker just isn’t cool enough any more. Coding, Science, Engineering, Psychology, Photography, Design, — so much to choose from — and why choose only one?

Something else is happening in a parallel universe.

Learning has gotten ridiculously accessible and democratic. Average students are getting into good universities — there are enough seats to go around, as long as you know the tricks. The elitism of red-bricked premier education is not as intimidating as it used to be.

From remote learning programs to short duration, high intensity courses from good institutions, learning doesn’t have to be the long decadal grind that it used to be. I believe its a lot easier to super-specialise and I also believe there is more of a market for niche skills than there used to be and lot easier to earn money deploying just skills as opposed to a resume.

So what then?

Career — In a nutshell, I don’t see careers as defined as long accumulation of skills experience and reputation as being as relevant going forward. (Caveat: hard skill guys — Lawyers, Doctors? A scarier thought is what if the caveat doesn’t apply!) I think the new age Gen-Z “worker” won’t really work as an employee who will “invest” years into an organization to earn her equity and respect by climbing the intricate hierarchy we built and nurtured.

It might instead evolve to a cycle of deepening skills in a “Learn- Earn- Learn” cycle with a working life of say 40–45 years being split over 5–7 year bursts of earning in various organizations, roles, ventures interrupted by a few months of deep learning or sabbaticals.

Its sounds blasphemous to say but money and career is not going to drive the next generation employee in countries like ours. Human labour is going to be a lot, lot more valuable than we imagine it today. Among other things, happiness, learning and freedom are going to count for a lot more.

So what are you telling 20 year olds today?

The way we think about death is broken.

Actually, the way we think about life is broken. How many of us think about death and life anyway? Why should we after all? Isn’t death inevitable? Why spend time thinking about something that is going to happen any way? Besides, we aren’t wired to think about death. We push it away. We are wired to think about life. About survival. Which is why we may be missing the bus on an incredibly important thing.

Once you get out of your teens, and arrive at reasonably stable identity for yourself, your mad rush, in the next four or five decades or so (for the majority anyway) is to fighting the fear of running out. You work very hard to provide for your family and yourself for a time period that is damn near infinite in your mind. If there are children in your family, you are almost certain to feel the responsibility of providing for them and their children. To put it bluntly, you are feeling the pressure of creating wealth for an infinite period. Which means you will push the daily and final boundary of your productive life.

It is possibly natural to think that way. It’s possibly also very foolish.

Is there another way to think about this? Yes, and its been around since mankind itself. At least the theory exists. Practiced by a rare few.

Choose your time to die. At a certain age.At a certain level of physical health.There are a million ways to think about it. But choose.

And once you are past that age, why wait for an illness or a truck or a fall down the stairs. why not choose a day? Spend it with friends and family. Have a glass of wine. Go to sleep. Go away laughing. I know I have decided. I know I need to let everyone important know. But I need this to be my choice. I need to be in control if I can.

I have been spending some time with seniors of late — and it shocks me how much rationality can erode with age. People I have known all my life seem to change with age. Some literally fall off a cliff after a certain age. A lot of fear seems to set in. A lot of “irrationality”. These are of course qualitative judgments and there is so much to correct for. But one thing is blindingly obvious — I cannot take my mind for granted.

I think I was prepared for physical frailty. But seeing myself thirty years on, I am shocked at how much I am going to degenerate even in relatively good health. It is like all the inconsistencies and eccentricities, which I smooth over and manage today to present a reasonably consistent personality, are going to be magnified and find explosive expression. I am not going to be able to trust myself to stay on as a being of relative reason.

It’s a shattering realization.

And I know now I need to plan for it. And the more I think about it, the happier I find myself. In fact, I find oddly clarifying. Like someone with a terminal illness, it makes suddenly every day quite valuable. It makes me think about my self-inflicted cages. It makes me think about breaking them.

The cage of money

For long, I seem to have thought of money as a surrogate for how smart I am. And like most people, I want to be very smart. Of course I have rationalized it a thousand different ways. But at the end of the day I know there’s a thrill about earning money and power. It’s like beating other people to win a video game. And what’s funny is how much I am going to give up for it.

Now, If I choose to live a certain number of years, I need to have X(money I want to spend every year) x Y(Number of years I plan to live). It’s a simple equation. Like fuel left in a racing car at the end of a race, anything left is pointless. For people with healthy children, I don’t know if I am simplifying but it seems to me that it isn’t our job to provide for their whole lives. The first couple of decades ought to be enough.

For many of you who haven’t ever done a financial planning exercise, every planner worth his salt will ask you to put down your life goals on a piece of paper. And he will strive very hard to get you to a finite number for wealth, however ridiculous it may be.

It’s a healthy exercise for every one. It also asks you to assume a certain age. I think everyone says eighty in the sheet. Like thinking about anything more may come across as greedy and anything less may be just too morbid for polite conversation. It’s a daft thing to do and not a little worrying that these are the only transactional conversations we actually have about death.

I now find that if I shave a decade off the assumption of eighty years as my life time, my present life gets dramatically easier. How about five? Or what If I stay at eighty? Even if I stay with eighty years, I find that I now need no “buffer” for those awkward I-am-now-past-eighty years. And what it does is lift the pressure. Like exhaling a breath I have held in for too long.

The Cage of Time

This cage is much more closer than money. It probably afflicts fewer but it binds you tighter; till you can’t breathe — the need to be productive and doing something. Or die of guilt. It’s a legacy of the scarcity economy we grew up in, drilling into our minds from a very early age the virtue of being purposeful, preferably economically purposeful. It’s scarier to give up for we don’t really know what to do with time if not work and clean and rearrange.

It’s as if it would reveal us for who we really are –lazy, somnolent asses who are happy to consume packaged art and packaged food in perpetuity. I think we do ourselves an injustice but my point is that we have an incredible opportunity to find out what we really love and could create or experience.

I fantasize all of us at a small cozy pub at the end of our lives, sitting by the fireside sipping ale and raucously telling each other our most fantastic experiences on this planet. I think that’s the metric for time I would like to use. Of course that’s just me.

These are just two cages but there are many, many more.

So that’s it? The secret to life is planning your death? Of course there are unanswered hows, what-ifs and why-nots. My point is that thinking about death will make you think about life itself. And it’s a long deep delicious thought. We have the time for it.