A life ordinary by Amit Sarkar - Issue #5

Hello friends,

Welcome to another edition of my newsletter.

I hope you are enjoying the things I am sharing every week.

This week I celebrated my birthday by having a wonderful Eritrean dinner at Adulis in Brixton and then taking a walk at the Battersea Park. The Eritrean food was amazing and I had been craving for their food a long time. The best thing was they had a full vegan meal which I was really happy about.

I must also urge everyone to please be very careful, as the new variant (another one 😞) of coronavirus is now spreading very quickly. Please take care of yourself and your families.

Live long and prosper 🖖.

💼 Work

This week was amazing since my company, Go Instore, powered the 1st livestream event on Boots website. Through our solution, any website can stream a live event, allow users to shop products, make a video call to an agent and chat with a real person, all using a single user interface.

🚀🛰️ 📡 Spaceport

I read a very exciting news this week about UK's first satellite launch from Spaceport Cornwall.

But you might ask what is a spaceport and how is it different from an airport.

Well the word spaceport has a clue in it. It's a ground-based launch facility used by spacecrafts for various missions. In the future, space tourists wanting to visit space would come to a spaceport. They would board a spacecraft and then launch into orbit. It would be flying at a whole new level. Or if I may, an out of earth experience 🙂.

For now though, it will be used for launching small satellites into space.

Currently, UK has identified various sites for these spaceports as outlined in the article below. It's my childhood dream to fly to space before I die and spaceports would soon make that a reality for ordinary humans to realize that dream.

A guide to the UK's spaceports: Launching rockets and satellites into orbit for the first time from UK soil

📃 Article

I read this amazing article by Lawrence Yeo from his More To That newsletter this week and it really resonated with me.

What is the meaning of life? Turns out the answer to this big question is actually... quite absurd.

There are timeless questions like - What is the meaning of life? What is it's purpose? Why do we exist? What roles do humans play? How should we live our life? - and many more such questions.

I always think that at the most fundamental level, the purpose of life is to reproduce, to survive, to evolve, increase entropy, or whatever else you like!!!

At the time-scale of the universe nothing really matters. But at the time-scale of a typical human life (roughly 80 years), the meaning of life is more important for us.

The article says

the source of so much unhappiness in the world is our relentless hunger and quest for meaning. Society tells us to grab our life by the fucking horns, direct it toward the center of gravity known as “human purpose,” and do everything in our power to get there before we die.

Instead if we can focus on things that we already have then it would bring us more peace and make it meaningful for us.

we like to search for the meaning of life by looking over, beyond, and ahead of our existence, instead of realizing that it’s been there with us the whole time.

The thirst for more sounds comically absurd when you zoom out and see that nothing matters, so it’s about going deep into the zoomed-in life you already lead. Your health, your loved ones, your work, your interests, your desire to help others, your values, your existence.

🎙️ Podcast

This week I heard an eye-opening episode from the podcast Feel Better. Live More. by Dr. Rangan Chatterjee. Dr. Rangan interviewed the author of the book Metabolical, Dr Robert Lustig, in this episode.

I must say my wife recommends some really good podcasts for me to listen.

This talk was an eye opener and made so much sense.

Most of the chronic diseases we have in our society, today, can all be attributed to high sugar intake through ultra-processed food. Diseases like obesity, type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome, heart disease, fatty liver, etc. are all related to over-consumption of highly processed food, which mostly has a lot of sugar.

As humans we evolved eating food in its most natural form. We then, over the centuries, processed the food we grew through cooking, heating or baking. But over the years food has become a factory produced object, like many other things in the world. And this assembly-line way of making food is the reason for these chronic diseases.

Dr. Robert talks about a food classification system called the Nova system. This system is very generic but it gives an idea how we can classify our food. Dr. Robert suggests that Group 4 food is the one we need to avoid at all costs.

Sugar has a lot of other side effects for different organs in our body and the below chart shows that nicely.

Taking a lot of sugar is akin to drinking a lot of alcohol. Which was an eye-opener for me as I never viewed drinking alcohol with taking sugar.

Alcohol is formed when yeast ferments (breaks down without oxygen) the sugars in different food. For example, wine is made from the sugar in grapes, beer from the sugar in malted barley (a type of grain), cider from the sugar in apples, vodka from the sugar in potatoes, beets or other plants - Source

Our bodies can cope with sugar in small amounts. But in excess it will end up in the liver and ultimately trigger us to get sick.

There are various symptoms that can alert us whether we have high or low blood sugar levels as outlined below in this beautiful infographic.

I must say this was a podcast with mind-blowing facts and made me reconsider some of my own food choices.

Thank you so much once again for reading my newsletter this week. Please feel free to Buy me a coffee if you are enjoying what I am sharing.

Until we meet again next week, please take care, be safe and stay happy.

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