Amazon just sneakily announced that you’ll soon be unable to download their eBooks to your system from next week onwards.

The catalogue of 500+ books I’ve purchased from Amazon (i.e. worth £4000+ ) doesn’t really belong to me. I’ve already had scenarios where Amazon have removed access to a book that I’ve previously purchased.

One of the key principles of the indie web is owning your data. Take this blog, its just markdown files on my computer, run through a static site generator. I own all of the content.

This should be the same with all of your digital media.

It took about 40 minutes to download my entire catalogue. I’m out!

TLDR: On koans and thinking about connections.

There is a zen koan that goes :

Why did the clear eyed boddhisatva

fail to sever the red thread?

I came across this koan reading a book by John Tarrant called ‘Bring Me the Rhinoceros: And Other Zen Koans That WIll Save Your Life’. Koans are phrases that are meant to be contemplated upon and in doing so ‘short circuit’ logical ways of thinking.

It uses words to point to concepts or insights that cannot be captured by words. Fingers pointing to the moon.

I’ve been pondering this Koan whilst staying in India. In Buddhist philosophy, there is this concept of ‘Indra’s net’. It describes a vast net that stretches infinitely in all directions; a metaphor for the idea of interconnectedness.

Nothing exists in isolation - everything is defined by its relationships with everything else. We cannot exist without a string of causes and effects. The purpose of the koan is to move beyond a conceptual understand of this phenomena to an embodied/experiential understanding.

I want to explore this insight because at least according to Buddhist philosophy, experientially understanding interconnectedness (dependent origination) is a fundamental part of ’liberation/enlightenment’.

Selves

To understand a network of relationships, we first need to understand the individual nodes i.e. the ‘selves’. The Cartesian model ‘I think therefore I am’ denotes the self as only internally created. Philippe Rochat proposes a more social model of ‘selfing’ where each person is crafting multiple selves that operate in different contexts.

The self is spread out within the minds of the people around you, and each person has a different self for each of the people she knows, the cultural context and the environment.

Identity is created in relation to others and the context, and maintaining a coherent internal model is part of ‘selfing’.

David Chalmers takes this further with his “Extended Mind” thesis, suggesting that our cognitive processes and sense of self extend not just through social networks but into our physical environment. We are, in essence, as much our relationships and surroundings as we are our thoughts.

Personally, we overly identify with our individual self, and often ignore the millions of ‘red threads’ that are connecting us with others and the environment. This leads to a fundamental sense of isolation/loneliness, especially heightened in the West.

Understanding Loneliness Through Connection

When we view the self as fundamentally interconnected, loneliness takes on a different meaning. It’s not just an emotional state but a signal - like physical pain - warning us about fraying connections in our social fabric. Just as pain tells us something is wrong with our body, loneliness tells us something is wrong with our web of relationships.

Modern discourse often frames loneliness as an individual problem requiring individual solutions. “Learn to be comfortable alone,” we’re told, or “Find happiness within yourself.” But this advice stems from the Western independent self-construal - it assumes loneliness is a problem of the individual rather than the network.

If we adopt the interdependent view, loneliness isn’t about being physically alone. You can feel profoundly lonely in a crowded room if the threads of meaningful connection are missing. Conversely, you can be physically isolated yet feel deeply connected if your web of relationships remains strong. This explains why technological connection - despite giving us constant contact - hasn’t solved the loneliness epidemic. We’ve substituted shallow, numerous connections for deep, meaningful ones.

When we experience loneliness, we’re often not missing general social contact - we’re missing the experience of being deeply known and understood by others, of having our internal model of self aligned with others’ models of us. This misalignment between our self-image and how others see us creates a kind of cognitive dissonance that manifests as loneliness.

Cultural Lenses of Self

It’s interesting how different cultures handle the self.

These cultural differences in how we construct the self became startlingly clear during my sister’s wedding in India. While in the West, you may introduce yourself as an individual (‘I’m a software engineer from…’), the introductions I received were entirely relational: ‘This is Rajesh’s nephew, who used to play with my daughter when they were small.’ Each introduction was a reminder that in this context, my identity wasn’t just about my personal attributes – it was woven into a complex tapestry of relationships.

There is a framework called the ’’ independent vs. interdependent self-construal theory’ (Kitayama/Markus) which describes how people from different cultures fundamentally view themselves in relation to others.

Independent Self-Construal (typically associated with Western cultures):

• Self is viewed as autonomous and separate from others
• Identity is defined by individual attributes and accomplishments
• Personal goals take priority over group goals
• Success is often measured by individual achievement
• Example: An American might say “I am outgoing, creative, and hardworking”

Interdependent Self-Construal (typically associated with Asian cultures):

• Self is viewed as connected and interrelated with others
• Identity is defined by relationships and social roles
• Group harmony and collective goals are prioritised
• Success is measured by fulfilling social obligations and maintaining relationships
• Example: A Japanese person might describe themselves in terms of their role: “I am a daughter, a team member at work, part of my neighbourhood community”

These different ways of constructing the self influence cognition/emotion/motivation/behaviour. Modern globalisation is also blurring the boundaries between these two leading to hybrid forms of self construction.

TLDR : Selves are simulated in multiple brains at different levels of granularity. Different cultures likely influence how the self is constructed with Eastern cultures having a self that is more socially constructed.

Interconnectedness

The idea of interconnectedness seems heightened whilst I’m here in India for my sisters wedding, particularly in terms of relationships.

Hundreds of people approached me, each weaving their thread into the tapestry. They were at my mothers wedding, or had seen my sister/me grow up, or knew the family in some way. Each introduction wasn’t just information—it was an activation of the network, a strengthening of the red thread.

This bottom-up social organisation stands in stark contrast to Western society, where person-to-person networks are more and more being replaced with person-to-institution relationships. We increasingly interface with corporations and governments rather than neighbours and extended community members. The result? A fraying of the social fabric that has traditionally supported human flourishing.

The transformation of these social networks isn’t limited to the West. South Korea offers a stark illustration: in just a few generations, the country went from deeply interconnected rural communities to a highly digitized urban society. The traditional extended family networks that once provided emotional and practical support have been replaced by competitive individualism and institutional relationships. The result? Despite (or perhaps because of) being one of the most technologically connected societies, South Korea faces an epidemic of loneliness and one of the world’s highest suicide rates.

Even so, the red thread becomes harder to see, but never truly breaks.

Perhaps now we can return to our koan with fresh eyes. Why did the clear-eyed bodhisattva fail to sever the red thread? Because even the attempt reveals a fundamental misunderstanding. The thread—our interconnectedness - is inescapable. It cannot be cut. It is the very essence of reality.

This short post was inspired by reading : The Essence of Peopling. One of the best things I’ve read online recently.

It’s only by being alone that you realise that you’re never alone.

I love all of Pico Iyer’s books. His writing is like poetry. These are a few beautiful sentences I liked.

His most recent books to me tackle the question how to live with ‘joyful participation in a world of sorrow’.

“I wonder if beauty always has to carry a trace of mortality” I try, and my two friends are wise enough not to say a word, looking out over the charred hills to the promise all around

Sound, now and then, of surf, sidling in and receding among the rocks below. Flows the colour of blueberry icecream along the way. Such a simple revolution: Yesterday I thought myself at the centre of the world. Now the world seems to sit at the centre of me

She smiles in recognition. The point of being here is not to get anything done; only to see what might be worth doing

And contemplation, I come to see, does not in any case mean closing your eyes so much as opening them, to the glory of everything around you. Coming to your senses, by getting out of your head

How to put words to it? As easy to catch sunlight inside a jar

My house burned down, I can now see better, the rising moon (Masahide)

Anyone can sit in a Zendo, a monk down the road as written. The trick is to sit in the world

He clings “like a miser to the freedom that disappears as soon as there is an excess of things”

Now I’ve been coming back for eighteen years. ‘You’re a Catholic?", “I wasn’t then. Now-” Ree pauses - “Now I’m a Roman Catholic Buddhist. But I’m beginning to think that’s not broad enough’”

AS SOON AS I’M SAFELY in my cell, I’m an impulsive child again, stepping out into the starlit quiet and spinning myself round till I feel dizzy. Nothing feels forbidden here because there’s no one I’m supposed to be. Then I walk up towards the chapel, following the small beam of my flashlight, and shiver as I see a dark figure, approaching from the other side: myself, I realize, reflected in the flashlight’s glow. Inside, the place is shriven, chaste; on the floor, I spot a tiny scrap of paper. I bend down and make out words scribbled in a very small hand: “I wish to know and be kinder.”

“HOW ARE YOU TODAY, PICO?” the prior had asked me at lunch. “Well. Too well.” “Don’t worry,” he said, smiling broadly. “We can fix that.”

SOMETIMES I WONDER—and friends keep asking—how spending all this time in silence has changed me. I can hardly count the ways, now that joy seems the opposite of pleasure and freedom arises out of an embrace of limits; it’s impossible to take so seriously the self that huffs and puffs along the highway. When I find myself in a crowded airport terminal, I’m drawn, as if magnetically now, to a quiet corner in the sun; as I wait for Hiroko to come back from work—will it be twenty minutes or ninety?—I turn off the lights and listen to Bach. Some nights, of course, I still wake up in the dark, unable to sleep. I worry about that cough nearby, fear for Hiroko if I should go before she does. Chaos and suffering seem endless. Then I recall the sun burning on the water far below and feel part of something larger in which nothing is absolute or final.

Almost as soon as I enter his simple room, he asks me, as on every visit, whether I’m married. I am, I say, as always, and he shakes his head. “That’s the real training. Sitting on top of a mountain in a meditation hall is easy by comparison.”

I spend time with monks and nuns, I realise, because they’re giving themselves full-time to the essential practices: learning how to love in the midst of loss. And how to hope in the face of death.

At night, sitting alone in our small apartment in the dark, waiting for Hiroko to come back from work, I turn more often to Leonard Cohen. His dense, unsparing songs refuse to believe that the world is soluble or any transport permanent; they push, unflinchingly, into bafflement and betrayal, even sin, the order of punishment he never shies away from. Here, I think, is Buddhist practice: simply, systematically picking apart every inconstancy to remind us that we cannot count on anything other than a mind that is prepared to live calmly with all that it cannot control.

“You can’t dwell on things,” Fu agrees. “That’s the heart of Zen practice. Not dwelling.” She cites a line from the thirteenth-century teacher Dogen: all he knows is the sound of black rain on the tiles of the roof. “And even that doesn’t last,” I say.

“Do you have a definition of God?” the host suddenly inquires. “Reality,” I say, not thinking.

Every kind of certainty is dissolved.