Lifestyle Design – What does it take to be alive – and the perfect Pepsi?

“When you buy furniture, you tell yourself, that's it. That's the last sofa l'll need. Whatever happens, that sofa problem is handled.”

l'd flip through catalogues and wonder... ''What kind of dining set defines me as a person?''

l had it all. Even the glass dishes with tiny bubbles and imperfections...

- Fight Club

I have always liked to write. Considering that fact that I am doing it quite successfully, I'll let you know an insider secret about what I did when I started writing my first blog.

So, I decide to start writing a blog. I asked myself, what application should I use to write professionally, cause I dont wanna get my work going bad because of some sloppy software.

I Google around and find that there are a ton of writing applications suiting several needs. I read and review a lot of these applications and finally settle deeply disturbed over my naivety to choose one.

And then I had an outbreak. I started writing in notepad. That was enough. The problem solved itself, it just needed some time. Over time, I needed some serious word processing power and had to switch over to LibreOffice - a free office suite. From then on, all my posts were written on it. Maybe I'll need more sophisticated software in the future. Tomorrow is another day.

It is in this simple action that life exists. It can be typing in a notepad or typing in LibreOffice, but they do not make a difference. What makes a difference is, whether you are acting, whether you are alive.

What I observed about this event is that there exists a difference between doing things when they are required, and doing things based on future estimated requirements. The latter only succeeds only when the future requirements are identified to a better degree, but in the absence of such factual data, working based on future requirements only serves a futile purpose, and sometimes the opposite of the intended response.

But do we know what we want?

I recently watched a TED talk by Malcolm Gladwell in which he spoke about research and contribution by Howard towards consumer choice. Pepsi approached Howard to identify the correct combination of ingredients for the perfect Pepsi. But Howard was not able to determine that particular Pepsi. His data which he obtained by testing ingredients in various percentages did not point a single combination of the perfect drink.

In the talk titled, “Choice, happiness and spaghetti sauce”, Malcolm Gladwell repeats the line, “There is no one perfect Pepsi, there are perfect Pepsis'”. (As in different groups of people like different Pepsi, containing different combinations of the ingredient).

Sometimes what we want comes right before us and only then do we know that it is what makes us tick.

So how do we make this object, this perfect Pepsi, to reach out to us? Well, all I can say is, keep looking, stay alive.

PS : I originally wrote, “Over time, I needed some serious word processing power and had to switch over to LibreOffice” as, “Over a period of time, I needed some serious word..... “ and the LibreOffice writer plugin Language Tool, gracefully identified it as a repetition. Pretty impressive.