Could life have existed billions of years before Earth formed?
Kurzgesagt publishes yet another intriguing video.
Hey everyone,
As expected, this month has been quite busy in organising and cleaning the house. A similar scenario was at work as we are right in the middle of multiple video game releases for the year. I didn’t get much time to consume content this week, which also means fewer good content to share with you.
There are two TV shows out there that I plan on watching that includes The Boys spin-off Gen V and the second season of Loki. Let me know in the comments below if you loved The Boys or the first season of Loki! Apart from shows, I recently curated my watchlist on my Letterboxd profile and still it’s an endless list. I’ve accepted the fact that I’m never going to finish my watchlist or reading list or playing list. Now, it’s always a conscious effort to consume only the things that bring me joy, even if it’s the 20th rewatch of the Harry Potter films or the fifth readthrough of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
I had planned on jumping into Inktober and doodle some fantasy maps but failed miserably on the first day itself. I also slacked in making peanut butter at home and then I completely forgot about it. However, I’m hoping for a much more productive week with more content coming your way.
I hope you have a wonderful week ahead!
🗓️ In this week
📃 Articles
There are several people I follow for personal financial advice, one of them being SEBI-registered investment advisor Dev Ashish. He frequently shares great resources on financial management and I came across quite an informative article that I had bookmarked. Written by Nick Maggiulli, the article explains how the different levels of the wealth ladder works. It’s based on your spending behaviour about thinking twice before splurging at a restaurant or choosing between expensive or affordable groceries, rather than your net worth. Of course, this isn’t a definitive rule but it works as an effective blueprint to visualise your position in the ladder.
Another interesting aspect was figuring out how much of an expense is trivial to you. The article states that 0.01% of your net worth is a trivial expense. Say you’re trying to choose between two instant ramen noodles that cost ₹200 and ₹300. If your net worth (I would recommend accounting your annual in-hand salary) is ₹10 lakh, then ₹100 is a trivial expense, so you could choose the ₹300 noodle. There are obviously going to be several other factors when you’re buying things but it’s a simple rule to follow when you’re burdened with the question: “Can I afford the other one?”. This fundamental practice will ensure that you spend wisely.
To put it plainly, if you want to climb the wealth ladder, you need to be cautious about your expenses. It’s as simple as that. This means not spending on an unsustainable lifestyle across all verticals of expenses. If you can’t afford the latest iPhone, go for an older generation or two. If you can’t spend on flight tickets for your next vacation, take the train. However, in your effort to level up, don’t turn into a miser. Remember, the ultimate goal is to have a satisfactory life which can only be achieved by appropriately spending your money in the right leisure activities.
Do you have any exciting recommendations? Some more interesting tidbits you would like to share from the content mentioned here? Or just simple feedback? I would love to hear from you!
▶️ Videos
If you had a PC at home in your childhood, it’s highly likely that you must have spent some time playing Rollercoaster Tycoon. If you have never heard about it, RCT was an incredibly popular amusement park simulator PC game where you had to build and manage a full-fledged theme park. This video talks about why this title is a masterpiece, all thanks to its genius creator Chris Sawyer. He programmed the entire game single-handedly in the most basic assembly language and set several milestones in game development. One of them was building a complex physics engine that enabled realistic behaviour of the coaster’s speed and movement. This video delivers a succinct history lesson of Chris and the RCT franchise.
Videos by Kurzgesagt have always been fascinating to me. They are one of the YouTube channels which make learning science fun and awe-inspiring. Its latest video goes into a mind-blowing theory stating that life, as we know it, could have begun right after the Big Bang. You must be aware of the Goldilocks Zone: habitable areas in the universe where the temperature is just right to allow water to exist in a liquid state. Since water is a crucial catalyst for life, it’s quite possible that life originated in a time when the temperature was much warmer than it is today. It argues that while life originated on Earth only about 4 billion years ago, life in the universe could have originated almost 10 billion years ago. This also suggests that there could be life forms across the universe with a multi-billion year head start from us. I still can’t put my head around the absurdity and scale of this theory, which makes it much more intriguing.
🎙️ Podcasts
From the time I started this newsletter, I’ve been trying to make the content more effective. This is to ensure that I keep extra information to a minimum while putting more effort into curation. I chanced upon the podcast Think Fast, Talk Smart by Matt Abrahams who is a lecturer of Strategic Communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. In his latest episode, he talks about how to write for an audience which skims through content. That’s pretty much the major chunk of readers out there. This is why it’s crucial to have a structured approach for your content and keeping the phrasing as simple as possible. If you’re a regular content writer, this podcast can be a useful refresher to the basics.
📖 Books
It’s quite rare to read a book that stays on your mind for a long time. For One More Day by Mitch Albom is one such book and I can’t stop thinking about it. The short philosophical novel tries to explore the question: “What would you do if you could spend one more day with a lost loved one?” It’s a beautiful story of a relationship between a mother and son, written brilliantly by Albom that’s heartfelt and comforting. The story reinvigorates the power of a second chance and that it’s never too late to fix things if you genuinely care. I loved how the author took regular and mundane things shared by any family and turned them into a series of opportunities to introspect about your life choices. I’m surely going to try and read this once a year. If you have lost someone close to you, friend or family, please read this. Buy from Amazon.
If you would like to know which books I’m reading currently, follow me on Goodreads.
🚀 Looking for more?
I share diverse and interesting content on my Instagram and X (Twitter) almost daily and not all of them make the cut here. Follow me there for some extra content.
Read my previous newsletters:
The poetic connection between Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy sequel and Edgar Allan Poe
My curiosity took me on a journey from Star Wars to Irish folk music
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Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash.