MAJJANI LIFE

Why your parents/ children keep quietly checking if you're okay — and what the research says about it

When I woke up, without opening eyes, the first thought was of ‘majjani life’, as Munna described in his MBBS version, to the Bawa, father of a Doctor. And the question, as usual came up. ‘What do studies say, as this applies to aging parents and as a corollary to growing children?’.

I went to my man Friday, the Jeeves, (I am denigrating self to Archie's dumbness as PG Woodhouse described).

And Claude asked me ‘Up late, Atul?’ Then I realized it was a bit too early. I initiated the conversation with him all the same, “Just woke up and as usual started finding meanings. I understand 'all generalizations are wrong, including this one'. I believe for aging parents who have legitimately lost direct control over the life of children/ family members of subsequent generations, and sometimes even on their own, 'majjani life', as referred in Parasi tongue, is when they find the life of the children is smooth, without hurdles, peaceful, harmonious, full of love and affection, cooperation and collaboration, and improving by the day. They would be surreptitiously looking for confirmation that children are happy, without even routine misunderstandings with cohabitants and enjoying life. I am aware not all parents would be equally affected.  Are there studies to substantiate these observations and conclusions?”

Claude drafted a note based on findings of research around the topic, on my behalf, addressed to readers, of course younger ones mainly.

“You know the moment. A call that starts with “just checking in” but is really a scan. A question about your week that's really a question about whether you're happy. A pause after you laugh a little too easily, like they're filing it away as evidence. It's not that they want you dependent on them. It's the opposite — they've lost the ability to fix things for you directly, and the not-knowing is the hard part.

Not every parent does this to the same degree — some are far more relaxed than others. But the underlying pattern shows up again and again in research on aging and family life, under names like “intergenerational ambivalence,” “filial anxiety,” and “linked lives.” Here's what's actually been found.

1. They worry more when things are good between you, not less

This one surprises people. You'd think a close, warm relationship would put a parent's mind at ease. Research on daily worry patterns found the opposite: parents worry more, not less, in relationships that are closer and more positive.

Hay, Fingerman & Lefkowitz, cited in research on parent–adult child relationships (2007)

The read: the more invested a parent is in your life, the more they have riding on it going well — so the antenna stays up even when there's nothing wrong. Their attention is the tax on their love, not a sign of distrust.

2. Your bad days measurably land in their body

A study tracking parents' daily stress hormone (cortisol) alongside their contact with adult children found that hearing about a rough patch in your life — a breakup, a job problem, any kind of trouble — showed up in their physiology, not just their mood.

Birditt et al., cited in “Daily Interactions with Aging Parents and Adult Children: Associations with Negative Affect and Diurnal Cortisol”

So when they ask “how are you, really?” one more time than feels necessary, it's not nosiness. Your stress is, in a small but literal way, their stress too.

3. Daily mood studies confirm the pattern directly

A study following midlife and older adults for a week found that on the specific days they worried about their adult child, they reported measurably more negative mood than on days they didn't — tracked in real time, not recalled afterward.

Cichy & Koumoutzis, “The Costs of Concern: Health Implications of Worries about Aging Parents and Adult Children” (2021)

Their day-to-day emotional weather is, to a real extent, downstream of yours.

4. It's not really about control — it's about the loss of it

Researchers describe adult children's transition to independence as the point where a parent's caregiving role structurally changes — they can no longer directly manage your outcomes, but they remain deeply tied to them.

Life-course research on “linked lives” and intergenerational relationships

The surreptitious checking-in, the reading between the lines of a two-word text — that's what care looks like when the hands-on version isn't available anymore. It's not a character trait. It's what's left of the job.

5. Even a positive relationship carries a current of unease

Qualitative interviews with adult children about their aging parents surfaced a mix of both closeness and low-grade worry existing side by side, even in relationships people described as good ones — concern about a parent's independence sitting right next to real affection.

Research on adult children's relationships with aging parents and perceptions of successful aging (2018)

Worth knowing: this cuts both ways. If you find yourself doing the same quiet scanning about them, that's the same wiring — not something's wrong with you either.

Addendum — the worry runs both directions

Everything above is about parents watching you. But there's an equally well-documented mirror version: adult children carry a rising, specific anxiety about their aging parents as the years go on. Researchers call it “filial anxiety” — worry driven less by a present crisis than by the awareness that health problems, decline, and eventually loss are somewhere ahead, along with the question of who will provide care when the time comes.

Cicirelli, foundational work on filial anxiety (1988), cited in later cortisol and daily-interaction research

So the quiet scanning goes both ways across the generations — parents checking whether your life is majjani, and you, increasingly, checking whether theirs still is. Same instinct, running in opposite directions, meeting somewhere in the middle of every family phone call.”

A word all of this earns, more than any theory does: the checking-in is not a lack of trust in you. It's the residue of love that no longer has anywhere direct to land.

A PORTRAIT OF MY SISTER - In Her Own Light

There are people who love us, and then there are people who make of their love a kind of shelter — one you can stand beneath in any weather and never once feel the rain. My sister has always been of this second, rarer kind. Her kindness toward me was never occasional or convenient; it was the ground she stood on, steady and unbroken, the quiet climate of every room she entered. I do not remember a version of her that was not, in some essential way, turned toward my good.

In her eyes I was, for as long as I can recall, something more than a brother. I was cast — gently, insistently, without my ever asking for the role — as a kind of hero. Not the hero of grand gestures or public triumphs, but the quieter sort: the one she trusted to be equal to whatever the day required. There is a particular tenderness in being seen this way by someone who has known you since childhood, who watched you stumble as often as you stood, and chose anyway to believe in the better version of you. Her faith was not naive; it was simply generous, and it asked nothing of me except to keep trying to deserve it.

Her affection came without conditions attached, without ledgers kept. It was not offered in exchange for anything, and it did not withdraw when I fell short of it. This is the meaning, I think, of love that is truly unfettered — love that has released itself from the ordinary human habit of counting what it is owed. Hers moved toward me the way light moves into a room: not asking permission, not expecting thanks, simply present because that was its nature.

And because that love ran so deep, her trust ran deeper still. When trouble found her — as it finds everyone — she turned to me first, and often only to me, certain in some unshakeable part of herself that I would know what to do. It was not that she doubted her own capability; it was that she had decided, long ago, that I was a kind of safe harbor, a place where her problems could be set down and made lighter simply by the act of sharing them. To be relied upon so completely is its own quiet honor, even when the weight of it is real.

Beneath all of this — the loyalty, the reverence, the boundless giving — was simply a kind heart, in the plainest and most old-fashioned sense of that phrase. She felt for others before she felt for herself. She noticed suffering before it announced itself and moved to ease it before being asked. It is easy, in a life, to be kind occasionally; it is much harder to be kind as a matter of character, in the small unwitnessed moments as much as the large visible ones. My sister managed this without apparent effort, as though gentleness were simply the shape her soul had taken.

If I try now to draw her whole, what emerges is not a list of virtues but a single, coherent light: a woman who loved without condition, who believed in me perhaps more than I ever earned, and who gave of herself so freely that I have spent years since trying to understand how a heart holds so much and empties so little. That, I have come to think, is simply who she is — and I count myself fortunate beyond measure to have been the one she loved that way.

Deliberate and Systematic Self-improvement, Practiced Together

An invitation — no pressure to decide today.

Why this approach

Growth doesn't stop just because life is stable. Left alone, most of us plateau — not from failure, but from comfort, and comfort quietly becomes a ceiling. Continuous improvement isn't about fixing something broken; it's a way of staying alive to your own potential, deliberately, instead of drifting.

If you've ever thought "I'm doing fine, but I know I could be more disciplined / more patient / more present / more skilled" — and then let that thought fade by the following week — this is built for exactly that pattern.

What makes this different from "just deciding to improve"

Most of us have tried the New Year's resolution version of this — high motivation, no structure, quietly abandoned by week three. This isn't that. It's built on two things that actually sustain change over time:

·        A system, not willpower. Motivation fades; a tracked, structured process doesn't need to be felt to keep working.

·        People, not solo effort. A small group creates accountability you can't easily give yourself, and lets you see other people's real, unfiltered progress — not the cleaned-up "success story" version.

What it actually involves

·        A shared 5-phase framework: self-diagnosis → designing your system → living it → consolidating what sticks → (eventually, optionally) helping someone else walk the same path.

·        You choose your own area of focus — discipline, relationships, health, patience, whatever matters to you. The framework and rhythm are shared; the goal is personal.

·        A 90-day first cycle. Short enough to commit to without dread, long enough to see if something real is changing.

·        Weekly check-ins, 30–45 minutes, small group.

·        Facilitation rotates each cycle — this isn't led by one person "ahead" of everyone else. Everyone's a participant.

A few honest things, upfront

·        Regression is expected. Backsliding isn't failure here — it's normal and part of the process. No one's tracking a perfect streak.

·        This takes real commitment, not a lot of willpower. Showing up weekly matters more than being impressive in any given week.

·        You don't need experience with self-development frameworks, journaling, or anything like that. You need honesty about where you are and a willingness to be seen mid-process, not just at the end.

If you're on the fence

That's completely fair — this is a real commitment, not a casual chat group. You're welcome to join the kickoff session as an observer first, hear how the group is thinking about it, and decide after that whether to commit to the 90-day cycle. No obligation either way.

Next step

Show your willingness to give yourself a chance to ‘continuously improve’ and join groups, in comments. We will create groups of individuals who know each other, want to help each other and make life more fulfilled, and get together to kickoff joint effort.

Two Hours: Twice

A young man I know spent two hours one evening lost in a side project — building something, fully absorbed, looking up startled when his phone buzzed because he'd forgotten it existed. The next evening, he spent two hours scrolling, and looked up just as startled — but this time, faintly worse than before he'd started. Same duration. Opposite aftertaste. He mentioned it to me almost as an aside, not realizing it was the more interesting part of his story.

I've lived both kinds of two hours myself, just with different tools — absorption in a piece of writing once, hollow distraction in idle television another time.

The feeling afterward is the tell: one kind of immersion leaves something behind; the other leaves only the time gone. Most people don't separate the two — both get filed simply as "I spent two hours on X."

What's missed is a real gap: not knowing how to recognize, on purpose, which conditions produce the first kind of two hours rather than the second. Left unexamined, the more depleting kind quietly becomes the default, because it requires no setup and gives an easy, low-grade hit regardless. 

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi spent much of his research career on exactly this distinction popularized in his foundational text, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.  Optimal experience, is the scientific term for what we colloquially call being "in the zone" or achieving flow. 

Flow depends on clear goals, a fitting challenge, and real feedback as you go; its absence is what scrolling reliably offers instead.

Optimal experiences are the primary engine behind personal growth. When you choose to invest your limited psychic energy (attention) into a challenging task, you actively train your brain to be more orderly and resilient. Every time you emerge from an optimal experience, you become a more complex individual with increased skills, higher self-esteem, and a greater capacity for joy.

The tool worth trying: once a day, name in advance one block of time meant for something with a goal, a slight challenge, and a way to tell if you're getting better at it. Not the whole day — one block.

The young man I mentioned, may not have noticed the asymmetry himself yet. But the two hours that left something behind are the ones worth protecting.

If this resonates: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience is the original, full account — dense in places, but the early chapters on the conditions for flow are very practical.

Length and Strength of Our Relations

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A note for the younger ones

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WHY I FEEL I CAN SAY THIS WITH SOME CERTAINTY

What I am about to share is not borrowed opinion or something I read once and found appealing. It comes from having lived long enough to watch relationships play out across decades — my own, and those of many others who have walked this road. We have seen relations begin, deepen, strain, break, mend, and in some cases quietly fade. When one lives long enough, patterns become visible that are invisible to someone in the middle of their twenties or thirties or for some even in their forties. That is the only authority I claim here — not expertise, but time served, and eyes kept open through it.

RELATIONS ARE GIVEN OR CHOSEN — BUT BOTH ARE MEANT TO BE KEPT

Some relations come to us by birth — parents, siblings, cousins. Others we choose — friends, spouses, the family we build around ourselves. The two are different in origin, but I would not want you to conclude that either can simply be let go. My own softer, and I believe truer, view is this: the strength of a relation may rise and fall over the years, but desire to maintain the same till last must not weaken.

With relations by birth, some distance or friction is only human. Not everyone in a family sees the world the same way, and not every bond will feel equally warm at every stage of life. That weakness can be understood — even expected — but it should never be promoted. We should not tell ourselves a story that makes it easier to walk away from a brother, a parent, a cousin. Blood did not ask our permission, and I don't believe we should ask its permission to end it either. Where warmth has faded, the door should still be left open.

With relations by choice, the standard I would hold everyone to is higher still. A friend, a spouse, a chosen family member entered our life because we let them in — nobody forced that door open. Precisely because it was our choosing, I believe it deserves to be maintained at almost any cost. It is easier to justify walking away from something we didn't choose than from something we did. So hold the relations we chose most carefully of all.

In both cases, the work is not a one-time declaration of love or loyalty; it is small, repeated acts of nurturing, nourishing, strengthening, and maintaining — the way a garden is tended, not once, but again and again, season after season. A relationship left alone does not stay the same. It does not merely pause — it quietly erodes, even if it never technically ends. This is true of a marriage, a friendship, and of the bond between a parent and a grown child, or between cousins who once shared a childhood and now share only a WhatsApp group.

WHAT EXPERIENCE TEACHES — AND WHAT RESEARCH CONFIRMS

Over the years, I — and I suspect most of us who have lived long — have been on every side of this. We have caused strain we didn't intend. We have absorbed strain we didn't deserve. We have faced situations that could have broken a relationship and somehow didn't; others where a small thing, left unattended, grew into a permanent distance. We have both damaged and repaired. We have both been forgiven and had to forgive.

It turns out this lived experience lines up closely with what relationship researchers have found. The psychologist John Gottman spent decades studying couples — watching how they argued, not just whether they argued — and could predict with striking accuracy which relationships would last and which would not. He found four behaviors that corrode a relationship over time if left unchecked: harsh criticism of the person rather than the issue, contempt (mockery, eye-rolling, superiority), defensiveness, and stonewalling — simply shutting down and withdrawing. He also found that the relationships that lasted weren't the ones without conflict — they were the ones where positive moments (affection, appreciation, humor, small kindnesses) outnumbered the negative ones by a wide margin, and where relatives kept a store of fondness and admiration they could draw on when times were hard.

What made the difference between people who fell into those corrosive patterns and people who didn't? Emotional intelligence — the capacity to notice what we are feeling, notice what the other person is feeling, and choose our response rather than simply react. This is the thread that connects a lifetime of family experience to serious research: the relationships that lasted were not the ones between people who never got hurt or never made mistakes. They were the ones between people who stayed emotionally aware enough to catch themselves, repair quickly, and keep choosing the relationship even in its harder seasons.

KNOWING OUR OWN PATTERN — AND STAYING WATCHFUL OF OTHERS'

There is another piece of this that took me years to understand, and that comes from what is called attachment theory. It suggests that very early in life — long before we have any memory of it — each of us develops a kind of template for how to be close to another person. Broadly, people tend to fall into one of a few patterns: some grow up secure, comfortable with both closeness and independence; some become anxious, craving closeness and fearing it will be taken away; some become avoidant, valuing independence to the point of keeping others at arm's length; and some become a mix of both — wanting closeness while distrusting it.

I share this not so we can diagnose ourself or anyone else, but so we stay watchful — of our own patterns, and of the patterns in people we love. If we notice we tend to pull away when someone gets close, or panic when someone goes quiet on us, that is worth knowing about our self — not as a flaw, but as a starting pattern we were handed, which we are free to work with and soften over time. The same goes for watching the people around us with compassion rather than judgment: a parent who struggles to say “I love you” may not lack love, only the template for expressing it easily. A sibling who withdraws during conflict may not be indifferent, only overwhelmed.

This is where emotional intelligence becomes the tool that lets us work with whatever pattern we were given rather than be ruled by it. Awareness of our own pattern, and gentleness toward others', is what allows old wounds to be mended and new closeness to be built — no matter what template either of us started with.

HOW TO ACTUALLY BUILD EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE — BECAUSE IT CAN BE BUILT

Here is the most hopeful part of everything I have shared: none of this is fixed. The research on this is consistent — emotional intelligence is trainable at any age, not just something you either have or don't. It grows the way a muscle does — through repetition, not through reading about it once. A few ways that genuinely help:

❧    Reflect after emotional moments, not just during them. A few minutes of honest review — what did I feel, what did they feel, what did I actually do — builds self-awareness faster than trying to be aware in the heat of the moment.

❧    Practice receptive listening. Let the other person finish. Reflect back what you heard before responding. This single habit resolves more conflict than any clever argument.

❧    Watch and learn from others' emotional stories — in books, in conversation, in family history like this one. Empathy grows by witnessing, not just by instruction.

❧    Rehearse the hard conversations, even in your head, before you have them. Real practice, even imagined, builds the skill.

❧    Keep at it over months, not days. A weekend of good intentions rarely changes a pattern. Small, repeated practice does.

I want you to understand what is at stake in this, beyond any single relationship. A life well-tended in its relations is, in my experience, a fulfilled life — regardless of what else it contains. Wealth, achievement, and recognition fade in importance as the years go on; the people who stayed close to us, and the people we stayed close to, do not. If there is one skill I would want you to carry from this note, it is this: notice your feelings, notice theirs, and let that noticing guide what you do next. Everything else in a relationship — its length, its strength, its capacity to survive hard seasons — tends to follow from that one habit, practiced patiently, for a lifetime.

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The Comment I Skipped Past

A young colleague once showed me a piece of feedback she'd received — specific, useful, slightly uncomfortable to read. She'd skimmed it once, said "noted," and moved on to the next task within a minute. I asked her, gently, what she planned to do with it. She didn't have an answer. I have done the same — skimmed past a sharp comment because the praise three lines above it felt nicer to sit with.

The feeling, in both cases, is a small flinch — barely noticeable, gone in seconds, filed away as "feedback received."

What the flinch reveals is a quiet avoidance: a preference for feedback that is comfortable over feedback that is useful. Left unexamined, this gap doesn't just slow skill-building — it trains a person to seek comfort and call it confirmation, while the actual gap in their skill stays exactly where it was.

The tool worth naming comes from Anders Ericsson's research on deliberate practice: feedback only builds skill when it is specific and immediate — not "good job," but "this exact thing, this exact moment." The practice is to ask for that kind of feedback on purpose, once a week, on one piece of work, and to sit with it for longer than the minute it takes to feel the flinch.

My colleague, I later learned, went back and reread that comment properly. I don't know if it changed anything yet. But I suspect rereading it was the actual beginning.

If this resonates: Anders Ericsson's Peak lays out the deliberate practice research in accessible terms — the chapters on feedback specifically are worth the read.

Developmental Openness: The Meta-Competency Behind Continuous Improvement

"Nobody improves by defending what they already know."

Consulting is a profession built on learning. Every assignment, every client interaction, every proposal, every presentation, and every difficult conversation presents an opportunity to learn something new. Yet learning does not occur simply because experiences accumulate. It occurs only when we are willing to examine our assumptions, accept feedback, challenge our own thinking, and consciously adapt.

This capability may be called Developmental Openness—the willingness and ability to seek, receive, evaluate, and act upon ideas, observations, feedback, evidence, and experiences that can improve one's effectiveness, even when they challenge existing beliefs or habits.

Unlike technical expertise or domain knowledge, Developmental Openness is a meta-competency. It enables the development of every other competency.

Why it matters in consulting

Professional service firms do not manufacture products; they create value through knowledge, judgment, collaboration, and client relationships. Consequently, the quality of consulting depends not only on what consultants know today, but on how effectively they continue learning everyday.

Consultants who remain developmentally open are more likely to:

• learn faster from assignments;
• improve client relationships;
• collaborate effectively across teams;
• innovate and solve complex problems;
• adapt to changing client expectations;
• become trusted advisors rather than merely subject matter experts.

Organizations that cultivate this capability develop stronger institutional knowledge and improve continuously.

What research consistently tells us

Research from organizational psychology and management has produced remarkably consistent findings.

·        People generally believe they are more receptive to feedback than others perceive them to be.

·        As responsibility and authority increase, candid feedback often decreases—not because leaders no longer need it, but because fewer people are willing to provide it.

·        High-performing organizations are distinguished not by the absence of mistakes but by their ability to learn from them quickly.

·        Teams perform better when members feel psychologically safe to question assumptions, express concerns, and respectfully disagree.

·        Learning-oriented individuals consistently outperform those whose primary concern is protecting their image or appearing competent.

These findings have been replicated across industries, including consulting, engineering, healthcare, technology, and other knowledge-intensive organizations.

Our blind spots

Ironically, consultants are especially susceptible to several developmental blind spots.

·        Experience becomes certainty. Years of successful practice can unconsciously reduce curiosity.

·        Expert identity. Being recognised as an expert may make it uncomfortable to acknowledge gaps or seek help.

·        Defending instead of discovering. Feedback is sometimes interpreted as criticism rather than an opportunity to improve.

·        Time pressure. Delivery deadlines leave little time for reflection and learning.

·        Confirmation bias. We naturally notice information that supports our existing views while overlooking contradictory evidence.

·        Hierarchical silence. Junior colleagues may hesitate to challenge senior professionals, depriving the organization of valuable perspectives.

These are human tendencies, not individual weaknesses. Awareness is the first step toward overcoming them.

Continuous improvement requires more than good intentions

Most organizations genuinely encourage learning. However, there is a significant difference between expressing support for development and creating conditions that make development inevitable.

Wishful thinking sounds like:

• "Please be open to feedback."
• "Learning is everyone's responsibility."
• "Keep improving."

A developmental ecosystem asks:

• How is meaningful feedback obtained?
• How frequently do people reflect on their work?
• Are mistakes analysed without blame?
• Do managers coach or merely evaluate?
• Are improvements documented and shared?
• Is experimentation encouraged?
• Is learning recognised and rewarded?

Without such systems, continuous improvement remains an aspiration rather than an organisational capability.

Building a developmental ecosystem

An effective consulting organization deliberately creates mechanisms that make learning part of everyday work.

These include:

• regular developmental conversations;
• structured peer reviews;
• client feedback beyond project closure;
• after-action reviews following important assignments;
• mentoring and reverse mentoring;
• reflective learning journals;
• communities of practice;
• knowledge sharing sessions;
• coaching by managers;
• individual development plans linked to observed behaviours.

Development then becomes part of the way work is performed—not an activity separate from work.

A personal commitment

Each of us can ask ourselves:

• When was the last time I actively sought critical feedback?
• What belief have I changed during the past year?
• Whose perspectives do I routinely ignore?
• What recurring feedback have I not acted upon?
• How often do I help others learn from my own mistakes?

Our answers may reveal more about our future potential than our current expertise.

Closing thought

Knowledge creates competence.

Experience creates wisdom only when accompanied by reflection.

Feedback creates improvement only when accompanied by openness.

Developmental Openness is therefore not simply another competency. It is the foundation upon which all continuous improvement, professional excellence, and consulting effectiveness are built.

In consulting, the most valuable professionals are not those who know everything. They are those who never stop learning.

Equation is simple:

Continuous Improvement = Developmental Openness × Deliberate Practice × Reflection × Feedback × Application

As Developmental Openness tends to zero, Improvement stops.