Arjun Khemani



Vicious cycles. They’re rather deadly. And you don’t want to be stuck in one.

I think one of the finest parts about experiencing life is all the differences, all the amazingly vast and diverse stuff on our planet (and beyond!). There are so many different people and a limitless amount of diverse things we can get to know of, and learn from. All the incredible stuff here, which make up life on our small blue planet, we have categorized and labeled so simply into so many different names. I have to call it “stuff” because I can’t think of any better word to describe all there is in the infinite Universe.

Vicious cycles are unsurprisingly a phenomenon which could be categorized to be somewhere very deep in the line of all the stuff humans are aware of and have defined. Vicious cycles are extremely relevant to human behavior. They don’t allow us to see the stuff beyond what is already in our personal visible spectrum (our perspective). They block out one of the finest parts about experiencing life. We get stuck in a never-ending feedback cycle, where we assume we have gone in too deep into the work to ever get out of it. And so we keep running on the same path again and again. Chasing and chasing and chasing, in an infinite looping feedback cycle. One seemingly “good” thing leads to the desire for the next one, then on attaining that seemingly “better” thing we get a new desire for the next “better” thing. And the process continues. Never giving satisfaction to the rat running on the hedonic treadmill.

This doesn’t just apply in the large corporate sector, I’m afraid. Sometimes we just get stuck. And being stuck in one place, doing the same thing every day for days, months or years, makes us a victim of the gloomy vicious cycle as well.

Having good habits are good. They add a virtuous cycle into your living time. But even that, it troubles me to say isn’t completely enough. We must be capable to break any chain to form a better one. Because, at the end of the day you’re not looking to make a habit of everything. You’re looking to improve on whatever your actions may be. Habits are good, but it’s important to be able to make some progress on the things you do everyday. Because at the end of one year of doing something consistently, you don’t want to be at the same level of that skill-set, the way you were some 365 days ago. You desire improvement and progress. For that, even if you don’t need to break off the chain, you need to bend it a little. Make gradual progressions. Having any kind of loop, any kind of cycle or chain in life is necessary to be accompanied by having possessed the powers to break it off to actually live to our fullest.

And if you have a negative cycle going on, then you’re just depleting your so important life, giving away all your energy and time on doing just a single thing which isn’t even helping you and you don’t want to be doing. You wouldn’t want to be stuck in there any longer. Break the chain.