On Anchors
I seem to have drastically altered my core belief system about fiction vs non fiction recently. The pandemic made me re-evaluate this and am penning down the current post basically to document the core contributor to the change: a new term I am defining for myself and adding to #vocabulary. I believe this term — ‘anchor’ will one help think in a slightly better way about our core beliefs. This is also the kind of post I wanted to see from a senior PhD student as an undergrad myself: A kind that has the room to sporadically evolve. A roughly similar post I did see when I was in my Masters is this one by Jean Yang although there are a lot of differences. You’ll see.
Disclaimer: I don’t fully comprehend what I write. I am uncovering this path as I go, you know. Am just a clueless millennial. So use that grain of salt. If you do know what I am talking about, point me to resources. Thanks :) I think a #firstgen will be able to relate to this post very closely. I also use a lot of ‘I’s and I apologize if this annoys you.
The fiction-non fiction debate: I used to believe that we learn more from non fiction compared to fiction. I even felt guilt for indulging in whatever little fiction I did over the past 10 or so years. Admittedly, for the past decade I have been working towards my PhD and so it probably might have been a decent strategy to stick to non fiction. I don’t know. I guess I’ll never know the alternative.
I didn't have the same belief system always though. I loved fiction as a kid. I am a #firstgen and growing up was, lets say, not easy financially. Fiction provided this escape from reality which I thoroughly enjoyed. We couldn't afford the cable and so I immersed myself in books. I constantly oscillated between the mythological usuals to the wonderful world of Shikari Shambu, Kapish, Kalia the crow to name a few from Tinkle. As a teenager I particularly remember reading all the works by the likes of Sidney Sheldon, Jeffrey Archer, etc. Retrospectively, they did contribute to my value system and character but prospectively, they served just one purpose: escape.
As is the case I guess with every #firstgen all that changed at some point. For one, you cannot afford to stay in imaginary worlds, right? You got to work, earn, pay the bills, etc. That I did. As a (non negative) side effect, I also started reading more of the non fiction. You know the types — Stephen Covey, Daniel Kahneman, etc. Non fiction added a lot to my repertoire and I believed non fiction to be the hacky version of fiction: You are spoon fed what you need. Why bother reading half a book to understand the importance of patience rather than reading a single sentence ‘Patience is key’? Me being me, I went overboard. I completely stopped reading/entertaining fiction.
WFH gave me the opportunity to think about a lot of my core beliefs, including this fiction-non fiction debate. There has always been this internal tussle which I found quite hard to resolve. For instance, something happened to me when I first watched the movie Iron man — especially the dynamic between Tony Stark and Jarvis. I’ve been intoxicated ever since about having an automated sidekick like Jarvis. This something played a non trivial role in not just forcing me pursue my PhD but also where and with whom I do it. Having said that, it will be very hard for me to argue that this dynamic is related to non fiction. It is definitely stemming from fiction. But I couldn't name it thus far - the something.
Given the free time in 2020, I dove back into fiction with the amazing innovation of OTT. Namesake of the current post — Anchors — is a term I am now associating with the something. I heard this particular usage of the term in an exchange between characters in the series “Lost”. I highly recommend the series if you can afford the time and energy to watch it. Its mind bending. I love it. Masking the spoilers, here’s the exchange: “Jumps between X and Y…eventually she couldn’t tell which was which. She had no anchor.”
So what are these anchors? We have a basic understanding of the word itself, don’t we? Its something that supports the thing of interest. For instance, some people believe languages anchor our thoughts. I am however, interested in a slightly different interpretation of the word: that an anchor is something that we can hold onto.
At the heart of my argument is a base hypothesis - Not all X are same: Not all experiences are equally significant. Not all friends we are equally connected to, etc. I am beginning to associate the word ‘anchor’ with X that are most important to us. They define and then shape our core beliefs and our value system. Tony Stark-Jarvis dynamic is one of my anchors. Another anchor is the relationship I have with my best friend from undergrad whom I requested to take care of me back in June 2012 when I was moving out to a metro city, asked in August 2016 to take my call whenever I call coz I might be upset during PhD and whom I did end up calling in November 2019 at an odd time. Here’s a snapshot:
Your anchors come through for you, almost always immediately — They call back/get you back into your zone, etc. In short, your anchors are your superpowers, your guardian angels. You can accumulate more of them. Diversity helps. Other examples of anchors could be that song or scene or conversation or experience. Of course, you cannot expect a single anchor to repeatedly come through for you — they need to be used sparingly. If its a person, you don’t want to take up their time, space and energy. If its not a person, you need to have the law of diminishing marginal utility in mind.
We can build rich and diverse set of ‘worlds’ each with a different set of anchors. A trivial example of this would be work world and life world each characterized by different anchors with almost no overlap. Of course today with the explosion of social media, an individual can be part of multiple co existing worlds. In the first year of my PhD, I participated in subjective evaluation as part of research conducted by a peer’s sibling. The task roughly was aimed at understanding how music affects our mood. Fascinated by the study, I began generalizing the observations from the evaluation and employing anchors to regulate my instantaneous mood profile. For instance, there is a specific ‘sub world’ that I tap into to almost instantly raise my confidence levels if needed. These anchors facilitate our smooth traversal between the worlds. In personal help literature there is a phenomenon of diversifying one’s identity which I believe is similar in spirit. The idea in diversification of identity is that if one identifies themselves as not just an academic but also an athlete for instance, on days of low academic productivity they can wear the athlete hat and not get demotivated. I now believe having a diverse set of anchors contributes to identity as well as value-set diversification and helps one seamlessly transition between worlds.
Most #firstgen experience an anchor update when they transition to a different city/country for their education. While #firstgen are usually very resilient, almost every conversation I have with people who seem to be down appears to start at the large mismatch between their ‘worlds’ and subsequent reduction of anchors. One of my peers refers to this as the boxing phenomenon. We tend to store all of our anchors — for instance painting, dancing, reading non academic stuff, close friends, etc into a box and bury the box deep down in the oceanic floor of our soul. Since anchors are usually tied to our value system, I believe there is a direct relationship between number and diversity of anchors and the instantaneous mood profile. Over a period of time, this leads to a feeling of ‘being lost’ since the visible and current life trajectory does not seem to match the implicit value system we have built for ourselves.
It has to be noted that boxing is not intentional. The seemingly unrelenting pressure to work coupled with self imposed expectations results in organic boxing away of anchors. For instance, this is my conversation half a year later with my anchor — the same ‘best’ friend who immediately took my odd hour call.
While I am not proud of not being aware of basic life information, I am also not on a guilt trip since I know my past version was doing the best it could the way it knew then. But I hope this highlights how such cognitive dissonance in weak moments can quickly start at the station ‘guilt’ and proceed to the junction ‘What am I doing here?’ ending up in a sense of feeling lost. An interesting strategy for a #firstgen might be to do one of (a) constantly accumulating a diverse set of anchors (b) not reduce the existing anchor set or (3) ensure that the rate of reduction is slower than what one can tolerate depending on instantaneous and long term personal mood profile.
Coming back to the debate between fiction and non fiction, I now believe anchors bridge the gap and provide better mechanisms to position the way we formulate arguments. Non fiction might help with the ‘knowledge’ part while fiction provides one the ‘experience’ part using anchors thereby crystallizing everything into ‘wisdom’. Ok I took it too far. This is the part where you use that grain of salt.
Have a wonderful day.
P.S Note to self: I can totally write this post using the analogy of gut microbiome to talk about anchors. I should may be do a remake of this post post-PhD with that version.
