The Sukhi blog

If you are asking this question — or even empathizing with the sentiment — you need to think deeper about work. Here is the positive news — yes, work can be simple. Here’s how.   Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash For work to be simple, it needs to be internally, and not externally, motivated. That’s when work will flow out of you and when you will enjoy it the most. To put it in a framework, simple work is: Meaningful to you, not just a means to an end (status, money, power, fame) but an end in itself Challenging A fair use of your time and ability Naturally flowing from your existing skills, or those you wish to develop In the company of people you find stimulating Notice how all of these factors really depend on you. Sure, there is an element of being around people who stimulate you but there is still a lot of “internal motivation” in that list. All external motivators (e.g. status, wealth, income, etc.) can only cater to your material needs. The ultimate rewards here are grea...

All relationships are built on trust. I mentioned this in  a previous blog , where I focused on all relationships outside the family and romantic / sexual domains. In this blog, I want to cover family relationships — and, you guessed it, these relationships can be simplified too!   Photo by  Ashwini Chaudhary  on  Unsplash I’m Indian. I have an extensive network of aunts, uncles, grand-aunts and other relations I barely understand myself. In fact, I even know the life stories of scores of people I have never met who are related to me in some obscure way. This whole network is just “one big happy family”. This is in sharp contrast to the concept of “family” in the West, defined as just parents and their non-adult children. There may be other relations in your broad family, but the family concept mostly centres around parents and young children. What distinguishes a “family relationship” from a “non-family relationship” is that there is an obligation with family. ...

This blog is about relationships, but not those that you’re thinking about. By “relationships”, I mean any prolonged association between two humans, but I am narrowing this down to outside the family and the romantic/sexual domains. Photo by  Cory Schadt  on  Unsplash   This blog is about relationships, but not those that you’re thinking about. By “relationships”, I mean any prolonged association between two humans, but I am narrowing this down to outside the family and the romantic/sexual domains. The reason for this is simple (pun intended). While doing research for this blog, I found a surprising dearth of literature about this topic. There are plenty of articles about the family or romantic / sexual relationships, but not as much research has been done on the vast majority of other associations that you might have. Simplifying these relationships will help you spend quality time with the people that truly matter (including family and romantic partners, but also f...

Life’s pleasures are the simplest, easiest and free-st. It may be trite, but that doesn’t make it less true. Kissing, the first bite of a decadent dessert, laughter, compliments, etc. seem to rank quite highly on different lists for the top pleasures — and you guessed it, these are all super simple pleasures. All great examples, which will help us get at the heart of what I am trying to do with this blog: define and make it easy for you to enjoy the best things in life or what I call “simple pleasures”  Photo by  Lesly Juarez  on  Unsplash To get there, lets break down these examples a bit further. Most pleasures listed on the different sources that I have read, or personally felt to be true , more or less align to the following four categories: Food pleasures: ice creams, favourite foods, desserts Social pleasures: people you love, a smile, a compliment Intellectual pleasures: a good book, an interesting television program Personal pleasures: napping, getting a mass...

In the previous blog we defined “simple life” as your life in its most essential, the undertaking of activities that really matter to you. By eliminating activities from your life that don’t add value and simplifying those that do (to the extent possible), you can focus your energies on the high quality events in your life. But why bother going through this exercise?  Photo by  AZGAN MjESHTRI  on  Unsplash The human brain has a finite amount of data storage that it can keep and you have a very finite time on this planet. As you should do for any resource in your possession, you should choose to invest these wisely. Living a simple life can empower you to strategically get the most out of life whilst not losing anything in return. Isn’t that enough? A simple search on the internet can give you a very good taste of the benefits of living the simple life. The following have been gleaned from various websites and personal experience: Improvement in sleep Better concentra...

What is a simple life? Well, to answer that we must define “life”, which is simply the lived existence that any animal has led on this planet we call Earth, Prithvi, Gaea, etc. It is the time that you spend living, being you. And so it follows that: A “simple life” is simply your “life” in its most essential. It is only undertaking activities that really matter to you. Photo by Ben White on Unsplash Remember, we defined life as “the time that you spend living, being you.” Every task you do is literally an expenditure of said time. Thus, a simple life is one that helps limit that expenditure to endeavours of highest quality. But what is quality? For those interested in philosophy, Robert M. Pirsig — the author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance — has written about the metaphysics of quality. But for others, the concept of “endeavours of highest quality” can be grasped intuitively — these are undertakings that bring you maximum joy, maximum satisfaction. These are things you do...