A richer life needs more context
Why inside jokes are so fun
I love hanging out with my cousin A. She’s super fun to talk to, a great listener, has a great instinct for storytelling, and laughs really hard at my jokes. The thing I like most about her though is how she can sense what’s going on in my mind by observing my body language.
When someone at the dining table is telling a very serious story and a faint lopsided smile shows up on my face, barely perceptible, she notices and says, “The gears are turning… What’s going on in your mind?” She knows I’m tense when I’ve forgotten to breathe for 30 seconds and my shoulders start going stiff like Count Dracula. And when my eyes glaze with a half-asleep look, with my nostrils contracting like a cobra about to strike, she knows I’m on the edge of rage barely holding it together (I don’t know if that’s how cobras strike, but if I were to animate them, that’s how I would draw them). If I pick up the phone and say “Hello” with an inflection that has a half-degree deviation from normal, she’ll ask “What are you so sad about?”
I love that she’s able to pick up on these signals. It’s like magic. When she first started catching my turns in emotion and sensing my mood, I found it uncanny – but the crazier part is that I had no knowledge of my body language till she started to witness them. I was like a poker player who thought he was perfectly composed wearing an impenetrable mask, only to discover that he had a repertoire of tells that gave away exactly what he was thinking.
Which is even more weird, because I love observing people and am decent at doing impressions, yet I had failed to pay attention to what my own tells and mannerisms were. After A started attuning to what I was feeling, I got a third-person perspective of how my body reacted to my own shifts in emotion. That experience taught me how to witness and pay attention to other people as well.
Why do this at all? I don’t know. It makes my life feel richer. I used to stuff my life with more things – more movies, more books, more places, more people, more experiences, more work, more money – and cliche as it sounds, these got me nowhere. I read journal entries from ten years ago, and I realize that I’m basically still the same guy in terms of what I enjoy and how I approach life. I cringe.
This is a diary entry from 19 years ago:
“Good but sad day. Spent a lots of time with AA. Saw 3rd movie of Harry Potter. It was boring. Got to bus stand at 8.30. Bus came only at 9.30. I was very sad when I left with Granny and Grampa. Could not get sleep at all.”
That’s it. That’s the entire entry for the day. Now here’s an excerpt from something I wrote last year:
“I am tired and fatigued. On top of that, I am not satisfied. I just finished reading Dune after nearly a month of reading, and I’m left with a feeling akin to bloated dyspepsia after a rich buffet at a Corporate Annual Day function where the korma was nice but the cauliflower pulao seemed tampered with. It felt like I was repeatedly being worked into moments of excitement and anticipation but repeatedly deflated by how there was no emotional catharsis. I can understand the withholding of catharsis in a Raymond Carver story, but my man Frank Herbert ain’t no Carver. He’s somewhere between an Asimov and a Tolkien and a GRR Martin, but more cerebral than soulful. Long passages of the book read like courtroom transcripts of teenage kings arguing against each other (found a video on YouTube today where Paul and Feyd Rautha squabble over their trash-talking. Hilarious. Wish the book had taken at least that direction).
And then I continue writing for another three pages as to why Dune didn’t quite cut it for me, whether watching the movie before reading the book spoiled it, what does that say about my personality, why can’t I see the movie as a movie and a book as a book, and so on… Point is, 19 years later, my criticism of the things that I find boring has become more high-resolution. What changed in that period is that the context got richer. I have more things to relate it to, more insight into my own enjoyment, and an ability to pay attention to my own stream of thought that I find addictive.
But why is richer context more meaningful?
The simplest explanation I could think of was that it saves time. When you have a shared vocabulary with a friend, or they get certain things with just a nod of the head or a wink, it compresses a lot of information into very little space (Isaac Asimov took this idea to an extreme in Second Foundation, but I’ll stop there so I don’t spoil it for you). But the beauty of this time-saving is not in its efficiency alone. With the saved time, you get to add more layers. You get to tell stories in a shared language without explaining all the backstory. Your inside jokes acquire a new layer of meaning every time you use them. If you don’t have much context, texting and meeting in person don’t feel very different – if you do have shared context, meeting in person is a multimedia experience, akin to watching a movie.
I find it much easier to write long texts to my friends than to write blog posts – and I’ve noticed that my letters end up being my most personal bits of writing. I think the context I share with that specific person adds a flavor to the writing that a faceless audience just cannot create.
A rich context is everything. It’s what I value most these days. Plot is great, story is fine, but reading the poetry between the lines is chef’s kiss.
I get a bigger kick out of reading the classics, like “The Great Gatsby” or “Anna Karenina” because it’s like getting to know a person. Even a single paragraph has so much to unpack, and the feeling when I return to it later is akin to sharing an inside joke with A or seeing my own self reflected in the book (no man steps in the same river twice something something). It’s like the difference between buying an emotion ready-made at the emotion store versus getting something tailormade to fit the texture of your mind and the shape of your curiosity.
It’s the same with relationships – it’s cool to meet new people, and familiarity breeds contempt 80 times out of 100, before you move on to somebody new. But there’s a joy in a shared awareness of the foibles and imperfections of us as people and our dynamic, that is only available with time and a richer context. A friend of mine once said that people are the ultimate form of novelty. Just when you think you know them, you ask them a new question, put them in a new situation, or go to places you haven’t gone before… and they’ll surprise you. In being surprised, I learn a little more about the assumptions I made, the things that I missed, and see things about myself that I was never aware of.
That process is what I’m hooked on.
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