Today’s self-assertive culture is all about stating clearly your desires and wants, and expecting to fulfill them. We have allowed ourselves to imagine we have a right to get whatever we want; this creates a sense of entitlement that makes us selfish and self-centred, blurring needs from wants. It is important to define the tipping point at which a want becomes a need and to understand well the reasons for allowing this walkover. We all wish to cater to our needs, but it is essential that we understand what they are and how important these are to us. Sadly, most of our needs are dictated by someone else. We wish to acquire that bigger mansion, that fancy car or those expensive trinkets all in an attempt to outdo others and prove we are no less than anybody else. What a waste! These are precisely the ‘wants’ that masquerade as ‘needs’.
For a need to be genuine, it has to rise from within, be a growl within the system, something that is a must for inner happiness, our very growth, or maybe a one-off that fuels the rest of life! Need is not about others, it is about one’s own self. So whereas it is acceptable that many of yesterday’s ‘wants’ are today’s ‘needs’, one has to be cautious and alert enough to recognise the difference. What are the requirements to satisfy, to complete one’s own self?
When David Karp was 14, he was clearly a bright teenager. Quiet, somewhat reclusive, bored with his classes at the Bronx High School of Science. He spent most of his free time in his bedroom, glued to his computer.
But instead of trying to pry him away from his machine or coaxing him outside to get some fresh air, his mother, Barbara Ackerman, had another solution: she suggested that he drop out of high school to be home-schooled.
“I saw him at school all day and absorbed all night into his computer,” said Ms. Ackerman, reached by phone Monday afternoon. “It became very clear that David needed the space to live his passion. Which was computers. All things computers.”
Awareness and exposure have widened our horizons, which in turn have expanded our list of needs — and there is no going back. Living the life I do, I do not define my cellphone, laptop, a decent wardrobe, books and car as ‘wants’; they are very much needs as I cannot function without them. And an indulgence gives me the high that makes me feel better about life, so why not? Having established that, it is up to each individual to decide towards which end of the stick he likes to lean — between asceticism and overindulgence. I need a phone, sure, but do I really need a top-end contraption? The same goes for the car, the house and the wardrobe. Each of us needs to set our limitations at both ends as per our comfort and proceed within these set parameters, without guilt.Life is like a book; if you don’t travel, meet people or enjoy its varied experiences, you have read but one page of it,” said a friend. “I have always thought of life as a dream,” said another. “All that we experience and live through is but a dream”. “Or a nightmare…,” piped up the third.
This exchange had me turn to social networking for more responses, and I wasn’t disappointed. The debate got deeper and richer on Facebook. Here are some nuggets. For Anil Kumar, life is “a journey full of dreams and nightmares; meaningful and meaningless moments.” Vinod Dhir calls it “a blessing of God … a journey with ups and downs that you enjoy as they come.” Sakshi Bhardwaj says, “Life is neither a dream, nor a nightmare. It is reality – it is what I make it!” Surabhi Awasthi calls life “a journey which has planning, accidents, dreams, nightmares, meanings, emotions and feelings.”
“No, no, no,” said Jyotirmaya Sharma across continents. “Life just IS. Full stop. We overload meaning and significance to life. Do we ever ask a dog or a cat if their lives have any significance?” Sri Velagalketi agrees, “Life is not a serious phenomenon. If we take it seriously, we will go on missing it!” Khuman L Rathod says there is no meaning to life per se. It is an empty canvas that we can fill up as we please.
Interesting to realise each of us has our own confident take on this question that has been the topic of much scientific, theological and philosophical debate over the ages. For Plato, the meaning of life was to attain the highest form of knowledge. For Aristotle, life’s objective was to attain the “highest good”. Epicureans defined it as a seeking of modest pleasures and freedom from fear. Nihilism suggests that life is without objective meaning. For pragmatic philosophers, a practical understanding is far more important than seeking abstract truths of life. Existentialists opine that each of us creates the essence of our lives. Absurdist philosophy finds disharmony between our search for meaning and the meaninglessness of the universe! And Confucianism suggests that we can realise the ultimate meaning of life in ordinary human existence.
And that is perhaps what I was trying to do with this exercise – discover what we ordinary human beings think of life, as we go along our everyday living. What does life mean to most of us, apart from the philosophical, scientific or theological discussions? Do we pause to think about the purpose of living? Or should we even do so? Are we overloading meaning and significance to life? Or are we not ascribing it enough significance? Difficult to figure out, particularly if one decides to consult the vastness of material available from thinkers, theologians and scientific minds, not to talk of poets and writers.
Hence, let us rely on our instinct and experience. Most agree that we want to be happy. Then comes the need for fulfillment and contentment, which will come from a feeling of self-esteem. This leads to the quest for spiritual benevolence and exaltation, which may be defined as the ultimate goal.
Clearly.
Now 26 years old, Karp never finished high school or enrolled in college. Instead, he played a significant role in several technology start-ups before founding Tumblr, the popular blogging service that agreed to be sold to Yahoo for $1.1 billion this week. With an expected $250 million from the deal, Karp joins a tiny circle of 20-something entrepreneurs, hoodie-wearing characters like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley, who have struck it rich before turning 30.
“When I first met David he was 20 years old and wearing sneakers and jeans,” said Bijan Sabet, a general partner at Spark Capital, who was one of the first people to invest in Tumblr. “But I knew he was one of these rare entrepreneurs that grew up on the Web and who could come up with an idea, build it himself, and then ship it that night.”
Since founding Tumblr six years ago, Karp has been admired for his programming skills and Web site design acumen but at times has been a polarizing figure in New York tech circles because he so often blogged about his personal life and party-hopping. He has popped up in the New York Post’s Page Six Magazine, and has been a recurring target for the gossip Web site Gawker, where he was labeled a “fameball,” a derogatory term for someone who has an unquenchable desire for fame.
Tall and willowy, with a mop of brown hair and piercing blue eyes, Karp typically dresses in jeans, a T-shirt and sneakers. He speaks at a rapid clip and, often, for minutes without stopping. Technically, he never graduated from high school, which he cracked in an interview is “hopefully not a condition of Yahoo employment.”
After dropping out and working for a time in small New York tech outfits, Karp made his way to Tokyo, where he worked for several months for a start-up. He returned to the United States and became the chief technology officer for UrbanBaby, an Internet message board for parents. CNET Networks bought UrbanBaby in 2006, and Mr. Karp took the several hundred thousand dollars he made from the sale to start his own company, called Davidville. One of Davidville’s projects was a simple blogging service called Tumblr.
Karp’s run at Tumblr has not been without problems. He had trouble hiring in Tumblr’s early days, unsure how to even interview recruits. He often thought large companies were too big for their own good, proclaiming he could manage Tumblr with a team of four.
But Karp stepped out of the party scene and started dating his current girlfriend, a graduate nursing school student at New York University, four years ago. He also appeared to get more serious about his company as it grew from less than a dozen employees to more than 175 today. “David has grown up in Tumblr,” said Mark Coatney, who oversees Tumblr’s relationship with media companies.
Still, Karp’s unsure footing led to discussions about his taking a different role at Tumblr, according to two people who worked with the company and who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity. Because revenue was not growing as fast as they would have liked, investors considered putting Mr. Karp in charge of Tumblr’s product development and finding a more seasoned chief executive.
Karp denied in an interview that there was a plan for him to give up the chief executive’s job. He said that when Tumblr’s chief operating officer left in the middle of last year, filling that job and other critical roles like head of marketing was “top of mind,” but he said there was no plan for him to step aside.
Like many who run so-called social Internet companies, Karp can teeter on reclusive. In an interview last year at the F.ounders conference in New York, he said he preferred to come to the office early to work alone, avoiding other people.
“Where I feel the most productive and engaged is when I’m buried in code, buried in some project, tweaking some designs,” he said. “I’m certainly introverted. Fred Seibert, a television producer who was MTV’s first creative director, first met Karp in 2000 while he was still in high school. His children attended a private school on the Upper West side of Manhattan called the Calhoun School, where Karp’s mother was a science teacher. “My wife and Barbara became very friendly,” Seibert said. “Over coffee, she was describing how bored David was in high school and my wife said, ‘Fred really likes teenagers, you should send him over.’ And that’s how I met him. He was 14.”
Karp arrived at Seibert’s offices on Park Avenue and said he wanted to “learn about engineering and become a good engineer.” At first, Karp came to the office a few days a week. But then, one day, Karp announced that he would be coming in every day.
“I asked him if his school schedule changed,” recalled Seibert. “And David said ‘No, I’ve dropped out!’ “
Seibert said it wasn’t long before Karp became invaluable. He asked him to build the site for his new company, a Web video production outfit called Next New Networks.
“He comes in two weeks later and he hasn’t done it,” Seibert recalled. “I thought he was being a flaky 19-year-old. But he said, ‘No, no, your idea is just so 2000.’ “
Karp pulled out a Sony PlayStation Portable gaming device and told him that soon, Apple would be releasing an iPod with video capabilities. “He said, ‘This is the way people are going to watch video and you really ought to be there.’ ” Next New Networks was one of the first video products on iTunes and was eventually acquired by Google for around $50 million.
“Because of his prescience and timing, we were ahead of the curve,” Seibert said. Seibert eventually became an investor in Tumblr and sits on the company’s board.
Karp, who lives in a $1.6 million one-bedroom loft in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with his girlfriend and dog, said he is staying put in New York and with Yahoo. He intends to “figure out something” with philanthropy. And one day he might even go to college.
“At least I should be able to afford it,” he said.
The board of Yahoo has agreed to a deal to purchase the popular blogging platform Tumblr for $1.1 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday.
Yahoo did not immediately return AFP’s calls for confirmation, but CEO Marissa Mayer has scheduled a news conference in New York on Monday at which the company said it will unveil “something special.”
Reports last week said Yahoo is eyeing the move to attract more users from the key 18- to 24-year-old age bracket, and that the Internet pioneer sees the fast-growing Tumblr as one of the “coolest” sites with young Internet users.
Yahoo has been looking at a range of acquisitions since Mayer took over as chief executive last year and vowed to revive the company, which has faded in the face of competition from Google.
Founded in 2007 and headquartered in New York, Tumblr says it has more than 107 million blogs, 50 billion postings in 12 languages and 175 employees. The website ranking site Alexa lists Tumblr as number 32 in terms of global popularity.
If the acquisition takes place, it would be the biggest for Yahoo under Mayer and come in the wake of other pricey deals for startups, such as Facebook’s acquisition of the photo app Instagram for stock worth $1 billion at the time.
