#152 2021 Ends

Yabi Lali

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Programming Note: Anticipating The Unintended will be on its annual year-end break for the next two weeks. Normal services will resume from Jan 9, 2022. Happy Holidays. This is the last edition for 2021. There’s always a temptation to look back at the year gone and arrive at some kind of things-we-learnt-this-year list. As much as we’d like to do that, we really have nothing insightful to offer. It wasn’t a great year for most part because of the pandemic and it is ending on a foreboding note. Anyway, so what do we have in this year-end edition?  We start with talking about the one overriding emotion that the two of us had through the year. What’s that one constant feeling that summed up our view of most events during the year? We then move on to the predictions we had made at the start of 2021 and see how each of us fared. And we close out with books, newsletters, podcasts or videos that we enjoyed greatly. That’s what is on the menu today. The 2021 State Of Mind RSJ: Through the year my mind went back to the lines from one of my favourite poems, The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats. It is somewhat apposite too. Yeats wrote the poem just after WW-1 had ended and during the Spanish flu pandemic. His pregnant wife contracted the flu and survived after a harrowing time. Yeats paints a bleak landscape of disorder and anarchy with warring factions and a divided world order. The voices of reason lack moral strength because the false convictions of the passionate have taken over. To quote Yeats: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.” That’s how I felt most of 2021.  Funnily enough, I started noticing many variations of these lines over the past months. I guess I lived through <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion#:~:text=Frequency%20illusion%2C%20also%20known%20as,a%20high%20frequency%20of%20occurrence.">the Baader

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