Face With Tears of Joy

It's never too late to be happy. In fact, it's never too late for anything!

In the recent Declutter episode of Everything is Everything, I mentioned that I’ve been trying to rid my life of toxic people. Negativity creates a vicious cycle of inaction and complaint. I was part of too many Whatsapp groups where all day people would shit on others with screenshots and gossip. I left them all.

I’ve also curated my social media feeds to keep negativity at bay — too much of social media is performative, with people shitting on others to raise their own status. Passing judgement on others is the easiest way to come across as virtuous or knowledgable.

And we’ve all heard about negativity bias in the media. Bad news gets more clicks than good news.

So is the world a negative place? Is the human condition bitter and angry and entitled?

No. And no, no, no!

I have data to prove it.

Give Me a Smile, Throw Me a Heart

Check out this list of the most popular emojis. Almost all of them are positive, happy ones. ‘Face with tears of joy’ is the world’s favourite — followed by a simple, red heart.

Why do emojis matter? Well, I believe they are more honest than words, which can be imprecise, deceptive and dependent on context. An emoji is usually a spontaneous expression of the way we feel in a moment. And because emotion is contagious, you can actually make the world a better place by just smiling. Have you smiled at someone today?

Don't Just Stand There, Do Something

Everything that is good around has come about because of positivity. Negative people sit around and whine. Postivity pushes you to do things. This line from Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park sums it up well:

There are watchers in this world and there are doers. And the watchers sit around watching the doers do.

There’s a great tweet by Beff Zesos (aka Guillaume Verdon) which speaks to this:

From POV of normies, as a founder you'll be seen as crazy until you've proven that your idea works, then you'll be deemed lucky.

Good creators are too busy creating to shit on others — or perhaps to spend too much time on social media, which might be one reason why negativity is disproportionately represented there.

We contain multitudes, of course. Sometimes we feel bitter and angry and hate the world. At other times, we are shiny happy people, inspired to create something.

It’s never too late to shift that balance towards the bright side.

It’s Never Too Late

Rohan Bopanna has been in the news in the last few days for becoming World No 1 in the Men’s Double rankings — and he’s 43 years old. This is a tribute to his perseverence, of course, and to his tennis. But he’s been doing this for ages, and one might well ask: is it possible to start doing something late in life and become good at it?

One of my favourite moments in The Seen and the Unseen is from episode 235, when Kavitha Rao spoke about her mother:

My mother is an amazing woman. I mean, she's 76 years old now. And at 75, she started learning the sitar and now she has passed her first exam. And I have never heard the words I'm too old for this come out of her mouth. In fact, she spends most of her time saying, I don't want to hang out with all these oldies. And when you actually look, you can see that the oldies are some 10 years younger than her. And she hangs out with people in their 30s because she does a lot of volunteer work. She's a bonsai teacher and she has about 400 bonsai. So she gardens, she plays the sitar. Before the pandemic, she used to do solo travel. She used to just pack up and go to various hill stations and this, that to look at gardens and things. So she's an amazing woman. And I've never seen her say anything like, I'm old, I'm going to die.

Started learning the sitar at 75! This calls for a couple of popular emojis: ❤️🙏.

My favourite example of a late bloomer is the great novelist Penelope Fitzgerald. She wrote her first book, a biography of Edward Burne-Jones, when she was 58. She was 61 when her first novel came out. She went on to write acclaimed novels like The Bookshop, Offshore and The Blue Flower — but my favourite is The Gate of Angels. She was 74 when it came out.

Let me also direct you to this Instagram post by Elle Cordova, in which she writes:

Instead of 30 under 30, can we get a 50 over 50?

I want to read about people who found their callings late in life. Switched careers at 55 and finally opened their dream bakery to wild success. Wrote their first bestseller at age 68.

Read the replies in that thread. It’s possible. All you have to do is be positive. Be the emoji you use!

120 Is the New 70

Whenever I worry about the passing years, my friends Roshan Abbas and Ajay Shah remind me that as time passes, we’re gaining years, not losing them. Medical advances are faster than us. They assure me that I will live to 120 — and that my healthspan will increase, not just my lifespan, so I won’t spend 50 years in dementia.

Whether or not this is true, our lives would be better if we behaved as if it was. As Ajay points out in an episode of Everything of Everything — I forget which one, so watch them all — once upon a time, we’d plan our lives as if we could just follow one track. So get an education, get one career, be a company man or woman for 40 years, retre at 59 if you get that far, embrace your dotage. But now, he says, we have the time to live different lives. Do one thing for 20 years — then learn something new, and do that for 20 years. Rinse and repeat.

This open up possibilities, doesn’t it? My plan for 2024, besides continuing the work I already do, is to learn new things. Specifically, I’m going to learn a musical instrument this year — and I’m going to learn some computer science and coding. In fact, it was in Lecture 0 of the iconic CS 50 course that I learnt that the most popular emoji in the world is ‘face with tears of joy.’

If you increase your surface area of serendipity, you will never stop learning.

May you stay forever young.

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Illlustrations by Simahina.

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