This week I find myself enjoying the cooling pleasures of an air-conditioned café a few metres south of Victory Square in the centre of Bangkok. The temperatures rising (it isn’t surprising…) but, having learnt over the last few years the benefits of pacing oneself, I find myself feeling cool in both the physical and affective senses of the word. I have been on the road a month now, but it feels like I have barely begun. Another six months of this peculiarly peripatetic lifestyle would surely not go amiss. Sadly, after a brief sojourn to Southern China, I am due back in Blighty in a mere ten days.
This particular café is much to my tastes, if not so much for its décor at least musically. I have been here ten minutes and enjoyed a nostalgic trip down memory lane to the strains of Simon and Garfunkel, Don McLean and Don Williams. Not the coolest choice of backing tracks perhaps, but much preferable to the short loop boredom of overly loud and intrusive music one usually has to suffer in Thailand and China.
The first fortnight of this particular sojourn was spent in Kanchanaburi being, on one level at least, incredibly lazy. The furthest I traveled in that time was down to the local football stadium and back to watch a lethargic match between the langurous and laissez-faire practitioners representing Kanchanaburi and their downright soporific and slumbersome opponents. On another level though, it was also a time of fairly intense activity. More or less every day a considerable amount of time was spent reading, writing and generally studying economics and value investment techniques. As it seems that an increasing amount of my (reasonably) passive income comes from that source these days, it both makes sense to understand the subject in some depth and, idiosyncratically perhaps, I actually derive a degree of pleasure from researching such arcane and apparently complex subjects.
Part of the process involved the investigation of certain ideas and concepts on the web. Much as the internet itself is an ever useful cornucopia of information and yet, for me at least, it also holds two dangers. The first, and one that I have been prey too far too much in the past, is the dreaded and dreadful ‘click-bait’ that one finds embedded in so many news sites. A scary thought for me would be the comprehension, if one were able to quantify such things, of just how much of one’s life has been wasted chasing one’s tail because of the temptations of these ubiquitous snippets of ‘news’. Tis designed that way of course, and annoyingly effective it is too. Being aware of the problem does help though, and I feel I have managed to remain far more focused during this trip than has been the case heretofore.
The second danger is that of the obfuscation of reality due to the tendency of people to forcefully express their opinions through the internet no matter how unsupported by fact, how nebulous or how credulous they are. This is as much the case in finance as it is in politics or religion. It seems that whatever one searches for one will inevitably find support for one’s own biases or, alternatively, someone who has a diametrically opposed view and wishes to express it forcibly. Tis a wonder to me how some people are able to extract completely opposite lessons from the self-same events. Oh well, nowt so queer as folk as the old adage has it.
I recently became aware of the Israeli ‘historian’ Yuval Noah Harari and even attempted to read some of his contributions online. Scarcely, if ever, have I come across such a hugely opinionated and tendentious commentator who seemed happily capable of making utterly presumptuous and preposterous statements and then, fearlessly adding insult to injury, extrapolating exponentially on those ideas (perhaps ‘biases’ would be a more appropriate word here…) to the point where the conclusions reached were but a distant and far-removed cousin of any reality I am aware of. To his credit though he did advance one very interesting and thought provoking notion; the idea that much of human advancement has been due to the actions of people inspired by a given concept, be that concept religious, political or philosophical – to some extent no matter how ill-founded the actual concepts were/are.
Great things have throughout history been achieved by those smitten by such beliefs, even when the most cursory examination of said beliefs demonstrates them to be at best nebulous or, at worse, downright nonsense. In the case of religion one can think of Judaism, essentially a collection of tribal myths of a wondering semitic desert tribe with unpleasantly racist overtones, or Christianity, effectively a serendipitous historic accident that grew, often for political reasons, out of all relationship to its original significance, or onto Islam, surely few religions have done more damage to the very people who espouse to follow it than this particularly illogical set of unpleasant prejudices? With politics one need look no further than the extremes of either the right or the left, the republicans, the royalists, the socialists, the communists or the fascists. All these ideas, deeply flawed as each and every one of them are, have inspired great men and women in their time and led to significant changes and, sometimes, even to progress. Unfortunately, the reverse is also true: many inspired by these self-same beliefs have committed and continue to commit the most heinous and inhuman acts and have felt quite justified by their ‘beliefs’ whilst doing so.
Such considerations are huge and certainly beyond the far more modest aspirations of this little blog. Suffice it to say that the internet, much like human society itself, is peopled by those who passionately express more or less every possible viewpoint … often to the point of absurdity. For this flanneur the realisation that much of this verbiage is far better disdained save for the occasional indulgence for amusements sake, tends to save an awful lot of time. Although once of more idealistic mien myself, in my callow and long-lost youth, a healthy and pointed pragmatism is all I tend to aspire to these days.
Time has moved on and time for me to move on too. It has been a very pleasant couple of hours spent meditating on these mentations in this cool and pleasant café. The Americano was good, the music pleasant, the musings interesting (to me, at least!). What more could a wandering and wondering flanneur wish for?
