Tag: nyt

Too cheap to cancel

One of the great philosophical battles of our times is the “cancel culture“. This culture dictates that if you have ever done something reprehensible in the past (I’m sure in my case you can find lots of incriminating blogposts and tweets), then you deserve to be “cancelled”.

This is how it works, according to Vox:

A celebrity or other public figure does or says something offensive. A public backlash, often fueled by politically progressive social media, ensues. Then come the calls to cancel the person — that is, to effectively end their career or revoke their cultural cachet, whether through boycotts of their work or disciplinary action from an employer.

In 2019 alone, the list of people who’ve faced being canceled included alleged sexual predators like R. Kelly; entertainers like Kanye West, Scarlett Johansson, and Gina Rodriguez, who all had offensive foot-in-mouth moments; and comedians like Kevin Hartand Shane Gillis, who each faced public backlash after social media users unearthed homophobic and racist jokes they’d made in the past.

In any case, recently the New York Post found that some ancestors of their great city rivals New York Times were slaveholders and supported the confederacy.

While it is pretty certain that any white American who had an ancestor who lived in the US in the early 1800s is likely to be the descendent of slaveholders, maybe this is good reason enough to “cancel the New York Times”?

Anyway the point of this post can be seen in the replies to the tweet, and you can think of the sole purpose of this post being to save that idea for posterity.

Essentially, New York Times is a subscription-based newspaper, and a more conventional meaning of “cancel” applies to it – you can simply cancel your subscription. I’m a subscriber, having taken advantage of a ?25 per week offer they ran a few months back (this is less than half of what I pay for a print edition of the Times of India; that is how zero marginal cost products work).

Now, through my twitter timeline I’ve been seeing several people make a case that the NYT is not what it used to be, and that it is a partisan rag now, and that it is not worth subscribing to, and hence deserves to be (in the conventional sense) cancelled.

Every time I come across such an argument I briefly consider cancelling my NYT subscription and then I think “what the hell, it’s just ?25 per week. The option value of a few good articles here and there is worth more than that”, and I move on.

I have mentally set myself to cancel my subscription in March next year, when my cheap offer ends, but until then, as far as I’m concerned the “NYT is too cheap to be cancelled”.

So that led to this thought – you can only be cancelled if you are not “cheap”. As long as you are cheap enough, people will see no benefit in cancelling you.

Now I’m reminded of the time when at the New Year’s Eve celebrations, I got the “cheap guy of the year” award for 2004 at IIM Bangalore. I suppose that’s insurance enough against getting cancelled?

The Importance of Discipline

I’ve never been a fan of discipline. I think it is a major constraint and hinders creativity, and puts too many walls within which you need to live your life. Despite constant exhortations by my father, I never wanted to join the army. Hell, I tried my best (successfully) in order to even avoid NCC when I was at IIT. I pride myself on being some sort of a free spirit who isn’t held back by any arbitrary rules that I create for myself to live my life by.

A really nice article that I read today, however, makes me think twice about this stand. So this article is about “decision fatigue” and is not very dissimilar to what I’d read a long time back (again in the NYT) about the Law of Conservation of Willpower. So this article talks about how every time you need to make a decision it consumes some part of your mental energy. Irrespective of the size of the decision that is to be made, there is some willpower that is lost, and that causes you to be suboptimal in your decision making as the day progresses.

The article really struck a chord with me, and I realize I’m also heavily prone to decision fatigue. Sometimes the smallest decisions take away so much energy from me that I simply put NED. And yeah, on a related note, I’ve got the wife upset innumerable times solely because of my indecisiveness, a part of which can be attributed to decision fatigue. I even remember not going to a wedding reception some three years back because I couldn’t decide which shirt to wear! And no, I’m not making this up.

So on that note, here’s where I think discipline has a part to play in life. By putting certain constraints on your life, you are reducing the number of decisions that you have to make. And that implies your willpower and mental energy will be reserved for those things where it’s really important that you decide carefully. By making a schedule for yourself, you are outsourcing to you-the-planner all the trivial decisions of your life. Yes, you might feel constrained at times. But it saves you so much energy by way of saving you from several trivial decisions.

Of course, feeling constrained can also affect your mental energy in a negative way, and prevent you from giving your best. Nevertheless, this decision fatigue thingy implies that discipline may not be all that bad. Or maybe I need to think about it some more.