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“I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness — a real thorough-going illness.” –

The Underground Man, Notes from the Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Is being too consciousness and having too much knowledge and awareness serves in your advantage? Or it does not serve in our way? Is ignorance really a bliss?

This has been one of the topics I have been experimenting myself for some time now.

And there is no better tortured thinker who can answer my question other than Fyodor Dostoevsky.

The 20th century writer Dostoevsky in his book “Notes from Underground” wrote:

… excessive consciousness is a disease.

These words from the underground man got me thinking and I think I found my answers to my quest. Here I present:

I have realized being too conscious about everything leads to analysis paralysis. And not being able to act and make decisions which has become the disease of today’s world. Today’s world full of information has everything in our reach within a matter of seconds. We have answers for everything, and it has never been easier to be conscious than today.

This often leads to making the mistake of questioning the advantages and disadvantages of the any ideas or thoughts and finally end of doing nothing. This also has been the cause of modern day anxiety and stress as too much information is overwhelming us. And being too conscious does not allow us to utilize this information through action.

Often, some of us try to be conscious of our consciousness and still end of not being the man of action. We do know all the time that action is important than just having knowledge for everything. But when it comes to doing we justify our inaction with some façade knowledge that our consciousness arms us with. Dostoevsky writes:

“Destroy my desires, eradicate my ideals, show me something better, and I will follow you. You may say I’m not worth bothering with; in that case, I can say exactly the same to you. We are talking seriously. And if you do not deign to give me your attention, I will not bow before you. I have my underground.”

I was trying to relate this to the business world and came to a book “Built to last” by Jim Collins. Here he argues most of the successful visionary companies tried a lot of stuffs and kept what worked for their business and weren’t too conscious. Visionary companies like J&J, HP, 3M and many other didn’t thought a lot they just went through the principle of ‘Experimental Doodling’. They just focused on evolutionary progress and kept moving. This I believe wouldn’t have been possible had they been thinking a lot and knew anything beforehand.

But here we, most of us, are where we think we know more and calculate the pros and cons of doing something and end up finally doing nothing. Except we do one thing: we end of despising ourselves for having knowingly deceived ourselves.

So is ignorance really a bliss?

I don’t really know whether being ignorant is a bliss, but I do know that it will leads us to nowhere.

Now I think I have lied to you that I said above I have found an answer but, honestly, I really haven’t other than just balancing between the consciousness and the action like the Yin and Yang of the Chinese philosophy.

Pain is unavoidable. Loss, rejection, illness, failure, aging—these belong to the human condition. To be alive is to experience discomfort. No philosophy, wealth, or discipline can eliminate that reality. Pain is the signal that something has changed.

Suffering begins when we argue with that signal. When we say, “This should not have happened,” or “This must go away immediately,” resistance takes root. The event occurs once. The mind replays it repeatedly. What was momentary pain becomes prolonged torment. We fight reality instead of responding to it.

There is a difference between feeling hurt and building a story around the hurt. The first is natural. The second is constructed. Pain says, “This is difficult.” Suffering adds, “This is unfair, permanent, and unbearable.” The more we resist what has already occurred, the heavier it becomes.

Acceptance does not remove pain. It removes the second layer. When we stop insisting that life obey our preferences, suffering loosens. You cannot avoid pain. But you can choose whether to experience it once or relive it endlessly.

Machiavelli

Niccolò Machiavelli, born in 1469 was a political diplomat to the Italian government and when Medici regime took over in Florence, he was sent into prison. He wrote, “The Prince” to dedicate to the Lorenzo Di Medici where he presents his political experience as a philosophy for a new ruler on how to gain and hold power in new territory. Living in the time of great instability and division, he teaches new prince and the ruler on how to unite and liberate Italy. Machiavelli's The Prince is a book that teaches how to be an effective ruler.

15th century Italy and the entire Europe was living with the Roman virtue. “Prince should be honest, at all times with all people.” Cicero wrote. Machiavelli on the other hand challenged this idea; rejected the philosophy of four cardinal Roman Virtue of Wisdom, Courage, Temperance, and Justice. He introduced his own vertu, which is not the Roman and the Platonic virtue but exactly the opposite. He advices to re-evaluate all our values and suggest the end justifies the means – also contradicting the Kant’s moral philosophy.

Read more: Is Machiavelli Good or bad?

The Prince

Machiavelli’s The Prince is a book on power, politics, and how to gain and hold power as a ruler. The entire book teaches the art of manipulation, deception and is also a self-help book for rulers on how to govern. He advices the new rulers to live in a constant flux as the world is a dynamic and so the ruler must be ready to adapt and transform themselves to suit the situation. He suggests the ruler should be bold, should cease opportunity, deceive, and act ruthlessly, if necessary, use violence judiciously and control how they appear in public.

Machiavelli's The Prince: Chapter I to Chapter III

Machiavelli's The Prince’s Chapter I through Chapter III discusses the different types of principalities or states. Here he presents four different types of principalities:

• Hereditary, which are inherited by the ruler.
• Mixed principalities that are annexed to the ruler’s existing territory.
• New principalities, which may be acquired by one’s own power, by the power of others, by criminal act or by the civils’ will.
• Ecclesiastical principalities belonging to the Catholic church.

Machiavelli's The Prince: Chapter IV to Chapter XIV

Machiavelli through chapters IV to XIV offers practical advice on variety of affairs, including the pros and cons that attends various routes to power, how to acquire and hold the new states, how to deal with the internal insurrection, how to maintain strong military and how to make alliances. Here he advises that the prince must always pay close attention to the military affairs if he wants to remain in power and presents four different types of armies:

• Mercenaries, who are dangerous and unreliable.
• Auxiliaries, who are loaned from other rulers and are still dangerous and unreliable.
• Native troops, which is composed of one’s own citizen and are more reliable.
• Mixed troops, which is the combination of above three.

In Chapter IX, Machiavelli suggests prince should base their power on the lower classes rather than on the aristocracy. He believes that lower classes are more loyal, easily satisfiable and are more forgiving, while the aristocrats are insatiable to desire to dominate others and are hard to trust.

Machiavelli's The Prince: Chapter XV to Chapter XXIII

From Chapter XV to XXIII, he focuses on the qualities of prince himself. Here, he presents the appearance of virtue is more important that the true virtue itself. Through these, Machiavelli recommends the following characters for the princes:

• Better to be feared than loved.
• Better to be cruel than merciful.
• Have the character of both lion and fox.
• Wiser to have the reputation for meanness than to be compelled for seeking reputation which begets hatred.
• Should choose wise advisors and avoid flatterers.

In chapter XVIII, he writes a there is two ways to stive for master: 1. By the law and 2. By force and it is necessary to have both, and one must use it accordingly. He further suggests prince to have the character of both lion and the fox. He writes:

“The lion cannot defend himself from the traps and the fox cannot frighten the wolves. So, one must be fox to recognize the traps and the lion to terrify the wolves.”

Furthermore, in chapter XVII, he suggests one has to be more feared than loved as fear will make you safe and hold power while love will make you weak and eventually lose power.

Machiavelli's The Prince: Chapter XXIV to Chapter XXVII

The final section, from chapter XXIV to XXVII, the book focuses on the Italy’s disunity and suggestions to unite Italy. Here Machiavelli recommends the following to Italy’s ruler:

• Italian rulers have lost their states by ignoring the principles that Machiavelli enumerates.
• Fortune controls half of the human affairs, but free will controls the rest.

In chapter XXV, Machiavelli writes fortune is changeful and so it is better to be adventurous than cautious.

In chapter XXVII, the final chapter, “An Exhortation to Liberate Italy from Barbarians”, he advises the rulers of Italy to be ready to change to suit the circumstances and those who are unable to transform themselves to the circumstances are bound to be outmaneuvered by their rivals.

Overall, Machiavelli’s Prince suggests being bold, courageous and cunning. He also suggests mastering the art of appearance by providing the historical examples. Machiavelli advises that a prince should wear a mask to deceive, when necessary, completely going against the Roman souls. He writes that the noble Roman emperors, who showed great qualities of soul lost their empire or were killed through conspiracy.

Most of us are physically in one place but mentally in another. We replay old conversations, anticipate future outcomes, imagine what is missing, and carry unfinished thoughts into moments that could have been lived more fully. Because of that, we are often absent from our own life while trying to improve it.

This absence creates a subtle kind of suffering. We stop noticing what is already here. We lose the depth of ordinary moments. We work without fully being in the work. We rest without truly resting. We speak without fully listening. The mind keeps moving, but the self is not fully present where life is unfolding.

That is why presence must be practiced. It is not merely a mood that arrives when things become calm. It is a discipline of bringing attention back to what is here, what is real, and what is actually being lived. Presence does not solve every problem, but it changes the quality of how we meet them.

A better life is not built only by planning well for the future. It is also built by learning how to be here now without constantly escaping the moment we are in.

Niccolò Machiavelli was born at Florence on 3rd May 1469. He served as Italian Renaissance political philosopher and statesman after the fall of Medici in 1494 until their return in 1512. He was then accused of conspiracy against Medici, imprisoned, and put to question by torture during which he wrote "The Prince", one of the moving books of 16th Century. Eventually, The Prince was published in 1532, five years after Machiavelli’s death. Over the centuries that followed, the principles it espoused would trigger outrage as well as admiration and establish Machiavelli as a controversial and revolutionary political thinker. In 1559, all of Machiavelli’s works were placed on the Catholic church’s “Index of Prohibited Books.” The recently formed Protestant Church also condemned The Prince, and it was banned in Elizabethan England. Although the light of almost five centuries has been focused on "The prince", its problems are still debatable and interesting, because they are the eternal problems between the ruled and the rulers.

In "The Prince", he talks about how to be politically successful and how to achieve power by giving examples from the history. But some people take it as a cold-blooded blueprint for how to gain and hold onto power. According to Machiavelli, the ends always justify the means—no matter how cruel, calculating or immoral those means might be. Machiavelli’s guide to power was revolutionary in that it described how powerful people succeeded—as he saw it—rather than as one imagined a leader should operate. In one straight sentence, he teaches about how to be an effective tyrant. He believes that in the core of every human soul, there exist a beast, an untamed animal which wants only the satisfaction of its desires just like Nietzsche's view of will to power late in 19th century

Machiavelli argues that the leader must be shrewd. He writes,
The fact is that a man who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous. Therefore, if a prince wants to maintain his rule, he must be prepared not to be virtuous, and to make use of this or not according to need.
One of the most moving words of Machiavelli is when he said it's better to be feared than loved. His notion about being loved or feared is very clear. He says: It is good be both feared and loved at the same time, but when you have to choose one, it is safer to choose fear than love.

Machiavelli believes goodness will bring downfall. So, teaches to become treacherous. According to him, liberality exercised in a way that does not bring you the reputation for it, injures you. So, it is wiser to have a reputation for meanness which bring reproach without hatred. Machiavelli's notion of virtù requires the prince to be concerned foremost with the art of war and to seek not merely security but also glory, for glory is included in necessity. Virtù for Machiavelli is virtue not for its own sake but rather for the sake of the reputation it enables princes to acquire. Virtù  here is not the Platonic Virtue but the complete opposite. Moreover, he also believed that when leaders are not moral, it’s important they pretend they are to keep up appearances. “A prince must always seem to be very moral, even if he is not,” he wrote.

He also believes and tells that the person who wants to become a successful leader should always avoid flatterers. He writes,
A prince ought to choose both the fox and the lion. Lion cannot defend against the snares and the fox cannot defend himself against the wolf. So, it is necessary to be a fox to discover the snares and a lion to terrify the wolves.
He teaches how to deceive others and how not to fall in the trap of flatterers. According to him he who seeks to deceive will always find someone who will allow himself to be deceived.

It is true that Machiavelli would be blamed for inspiring Henry VIII to defy the pope and seize religious authority for himself. William Shakespeare would cite Machiavelli as “the murderous Machiavel” in Henry VI, and many of his characters would embody Machiavellian traits. Philosopher Edmund Burke would describe the French Revolution as bearing evidence of the “odious maxims of a Machiavellian policy.” In the 20th century, some would point to Machiavelli as playing a role in the rise of dictators like Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. In 21st century same applies to Vladmir Putin.

So, is Machiavellian trait good or bad?

The world is unpredictable and its full of tyrant and it is always advantageous to have Machiavellian trait to be safe and not fall in the trap of other tyrants. Just Like Machiavelli said:
Anyone who tries to be good all the time is bound to come to ruin among the great number who are not good. Hence, a prince who wants to keep his authority must learn how not to be good, and use that knowledge, or refrain from using it, as necessity requires.

The modern world would be completely unrecognizable without Moore's Law. It is the invisible engine behind the digital revolution, transforming computing from a niche scientific tool into the fabric of everyday life.

Coined by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965, the observation states that the number of transistors packed onto a microchip doubles roughly every two years, while the cost of computers is halved. It is less a rigid law of physics and more a legendary business prediction that became a self-fulfilling prophecy for the semiconductor industry. For decades, this exponential growth held remarkably true, explaining why a modern smartphone has millions of times more computing power than the room-sized mainframes NASA used to send Apollo 11 to the moon.

Since Moore's Law is an industrial trend rather than a physical tool you can pick up, "utilizing" it comes down to a fundamental shift in mindset: expecting and positioning yourself for exponential change.

Whether you are designing business systems, managing a portfolio, or optimizing your daily habits, you can exploit the ripple effects of Moore's Law by operating under the assumption that hardware will always become radically cheaper, faster, and more ubiquitous.

So the real question is not whether we use technology. We already do.

The question is whether we use it consciously. Here is how I think we can apply that leverage across every layer of life:

Externalize Your Brain (Task Management)

Because digital storage and search processing are virtually free, wasting cognitive energy trying to remember minor details, lists, or dates is an inefficient use of your biological hardware.

The Strategy: Adopt a "Second Brain" methodology. Use digital tools to immediately dump every task, random idea, and document into a single, searchable digital archive. Let cheap silicon handle the heavy lifting of organization and retrieval so your physical brain is entirely freed up for creative thinking and execution.

Swap Physical Clutter for Digital Space

Moore's Law has effectively shrunk room-sized filing cabinets, photo albums, and physical media stacks into a tiny corner of a cloud server that costs pennies to maintain.

The Strategy: Whenever physical friction outweighs sentimental value, digitize it. Scan tax documents, old records, and receipts, then shred the paper. Reclaim your physical living space by exploiting the dirt-cheap, highly secure nature of modern digital storage.

Protect Your Focus (The Real Scarcity)

Because computing power is so cheap, companies can afford massive processing density to run highly optimized algorithms designed entirely to capture your attention. Your focus is the scarce resource they are mining.

The Strategy: Treat your attention like a premium asset. Turn off non-human notifications by default, use strict app timers, and create physical boundaries with your devices. As digital abundance scales up, the ability to sit quietly and focus deeply for uninterrupted blocks of time becomes a rare, high-value superpower.

Outsource the Mundane via Automation

Tasks that used to require manual sorting, tracking, or budgeting can now be handled by automated micro-scripts running invisibly in the background of your apps.

The Strategy: Spend 15 minutes setting up "set-it-and-forget-it" systems for your routine life. Automate your bills, establish recurring grocery deliveries for household staples, and use simple conditional rules to auto-sort your email inbox. Let the cheap silicon handle the routine maintenance of your life so you can focus on what matters.

Build for Tomorrow's Hardware (Product Design)

When building software, platforms, or digital systems, a common mistake is optimizing strictly for today’s hardware constraints. To exploit Moore's Law, you must design for the infrastructure that will exist two to three years from now.

The Principle: If a feature like local AI processing or complex data rendering is computationally expensive or cost-prohibitive today, don't strip it out completely. Assume that by the time your product scales, the processing power required to run it will be significantly cheaper. Historically, the companies that won big built for the next wave, preparing their architecture right before the hardware caught up to make it viable.

Anchor on First Principles (Career & Skills)

Specific software tools, programming languages, and frameworks have a short half-life because hardware shifts constantly rewrite what is technically and economically possible.

The Principle: To stay resilient in an exponential environment, anchor your personal development in foundational systems thinking, architecture, and core logic. By mastering first principles rather than fleeting tools, you can position your skills just ahead of the curve, ready to ride new waves the moment hardware abundance democratizes a new field.

In an era dictated by exponential scaling, the ultimate competitive advantage isn't the tools you use today; it is your capacity to adapt. We cannot alter the velocity of Moore’s Law, but we can absolutely adjust our sails to its wind. By learning to ruthlessly adapt, look ahead, and best utilize the powerful digital infrastructure available to us right now, we turn a daunting tech curve into our greatest personal leverage.

Enough is one of the hardest things for a human being to understand.

Most of us live with the hidden assumption that more will finally solve the restlessness within us. More money, more success, more praise, more possessions, more comfort. But the more we chase without reflection, the more we strengthen the habit of dissatisfaction. The mind keeps moving the line. What once felt like enough becomes too small the moment we get it.

That is why enough is not merely a condition. It is a discipline. It takes awareness to know when a desire is healthy and when it has become endless hunger. It takes maturity to enjoy growth without becoming consumed by craving.

Enough does not mean we stop building, improving, or striving. It means we stop asking every new gain to rescue us from ourselves. A fulfilled life is not built only by getting more. It is also built by knowing what is enough, being grateful for it, and refusing to let endless appetite govern the soul.

The first story our mind tells us is not always the truth. Most of the time, when something happens, we are too quick to give it meaning. A delay feels like rejection. A mistake feels like failure. A criticism feels like insult. A loss feels final. But in reality, what hurts us most of the time is not only what happened. It is the story we immediately build around it.

The mind is very fast at making conclusions. It wants to explain everything quickly so that it can feel in control. But the first explanation is often emotional, narrow, and incomplete. We mistake our first reaction for reality. That is where many of us go wrong.

Not everything means what it first feels like. Some setbacks are redirections. Some pain is instruction. Some silence is not rejection. Some endings are not the end. But if we become too loyal to the first story, we trap ourselves inside an interpretation that may not even be true.

That is why we must learn to pause before believing the mind’s first verdict. We must question our first conclusion and look again with more patience and honesty. A better life often begins when we stop treating the first story as the final truth.

When we negotiate too often with ourselves, we slowly weaken our own foundation.

At first, it may look small. We delay something important. We excuse one shortcut. We make one compromise with what we had already decided. Nothing seems broken. But something changes inside us. We begin teaching ourselves that our own standards are flexible whenever comfort becomes more attractive.

This is where many problems begin.

The issue is not only the missed action. The deeper issue is that we start losing trust in our own word. If we repeatedly say we will do something and then bargain our way out of it, our mind stops taking our commitments seriously. After some time, even good intentions lose their power.

Discipline becomes difficult when every decision is reopened by mood.

There are moments in life when reflection is necessary. We do need to adjust, rethink, and correct ourselves. But that is different from constant inner negotiation. Constant negotiation is not wisdom. Most of the time, it is avoidance wearing the language of reason.

A person becomes stronger when certain important decisions are settled in advance.

If something truly matters, then it should not have to fight for its life every day against comfort, laziness, distraction, or temporary emotion. The more we keep renegotiating with what we already know is right, the more we delay becoming the person we say we want to be.

In the end, self-command is not proven when life feels easy. It is proven when discomfort arrives and the standard remains.

We can't talk about Capitalism without bringing 18th century Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations." In this book, Adam Smith talks about the division of labor to strengthen the economic system and the importance of capitalism in the development of society. We should not also forget Marx's political theory when we're talking about political capitalism. In 19th century, Marx saw various problem with the Capitalism arguing that the capitalism is making the modern work alienated and insecured as he believed people were having some sort of disconnection between what they do all day and who they feel they really are.

In "The Communist Manifesto", Marx mentioned the following: No private property or inherited wealth, steeply graduated income tax, Centralized control of banking, communication and transport industry and free public education. We also shouldn't forget that this communism was the main cause of revolution in Soviet Union is in 1917 and the growth of Chairman, Mao in China in 20th Century, both resulted in the death of millions.

Throughout the history, the biggest threat to Capitalism has been Socialism. Capitalism was at one extreme and Socialism was at another extreme. But in 21st Century, the data and the history doesn't show that pattern. It turns out that there is a new economic system in the market; it's called the Political Capitalism and it is totally different from the capitalism.

Before talking about the political capitalism, let's define the Capitalism from Max Weber's perspective. According to his definition, following criteria must be met to consider any society a Capitalistic society:

a. A society should be such that most of its production is conducted using privately owned means of production.

b. Most workers are wage laborers. and

c. Most decision regarding production and pricing are taken in a decentralized fashion.

Political capitalism might meet first two criteria, but it lacks third to an extreme.

So, what is political capitalism?

Political capitalism is an economic and political system in which the economic and political elite cooperate for their mutual benefit. It is an economic system in which business controls government more than government controls business. The decision regarding the production and pricing is made by the people has both economic and political influence not by the people who just has an economic influence. This has become the biggest threat to Capitalism.

China has adopted political capitalism since 1990's and Donald Trump becoming president in 2016 is also the sign that America trying to adopt this economic system as well. Not to mention, political capitalism has made China one of the important and strongest economies in the world in 21st century as the data from 1990 to 2016 shows that the annual rate of GDP in China was 8%, while that of America was only 2%.

Does that mean the economy thrive on Political Capitalism?

Not necessarily. Data also suggests that country who shifted from communism to political capitalism benefitted from it like China and Vietnam. We shouldn't also ignore that the rise of fascist (Nazi's in Germany) and world wars due to the political capitalism. This economic system might be good for the developing and underdeveloped countries like the south Asian or African countries, but this might be a really bad game for developed countries. But there exists the biggest challenge to this system which seems to be the corruption as the political party officials being involved to more lucrative jobs as they hold more power to the economic system. If only corruption is eliminated from political capitalism, I think it will be a game changer for small economic and developing countries like Nepal and other South Asian nations. But for the developed countries, is it the biggest threat or the only system for the modern-day economy?