Cognitive Capacity - Is It a Myth?

 A few days back, one of my acquaintances asked if I could help him with a few affordable homestays/hotels near Nagarhole National Park. It was on his wishlist for a weekend trip from Bangalore. There is a constraint of budget too, so the ones he found over Google seem quite expensive. As per him, I would be the best one to suggest here, thanks to my inclination towards monthly or bi-monthly jaunts around India.

I told him that unfortunately I had never been to Nagarhole but I would try out the best options available to me. Immediately I called up a friend who lives in Bangalore. He told me the same story- The hotels/homestays near Nagarhole charge exorbitant rates, especially during weekends, so a more affordable weekend destination would be Bandipur.

Next, I did a few repetitive steps I always do whenever I am in limbo. I browsed at Makemytrip and set a filter regarding the budget. Among the results, I checked the distance between the homestays and Nagarhole National Park, cross-checked the same using Google map and read the ratings/reviews. Voilà! I had a list of five to six such places under his budget.

He never informed me later until I asked if that was of any help. This evening, however, I received a ‘perfunctory’ thank you note.

Now, this prompted me to a few retrospections -

1. Are we not using the options/opportunities available to us even if it is a click away? To what extent has mindless scrolling on social media led us that we cannot even access what is available over the internet?

Or am I missing something here? Did I actually perform significant research that is not really easy for any other tech-savvy users?

2. Since it is free, accessible and an open-source medium, are we devaluing its worth and efficiency? Do we do the same in other sectors of life as well - taking friends and family members for granted, never reading the gifted book or not being sincere to cultivate our individual talents as we inherit them without a financial investment?

3. Any ability is specific to a domain - should we concur on this? A good mathematician might well miss the apparent logic while taking a decision on where to park his retirement corpus, ensuring a 10-12% CAGR for the next 20 years, an economist might not seem so wise while taking a trade-off between spending time with his five-year-old kid and going for a trip with colleagues during the weekend or a chess champion might well get trapped into a Hamletian dilemma between his son (considering that he supports wholeheartedly his son’s aspiration) taking a loan to study an MBA from a reputed B school post his graduation or taking a business loan for his start-up to materialise his uniquely sustainable business idea?

4. While taking a lot of free sources for granted, are we being truthful and committed to our emotional brain? Are we forgetting to be grateful for the blessings, professional and personal social connections, and this magnificently man-made accessibility to almost anything possible on the earth?

How much are we really aware that we are born and constantly awarded with certain freebies which we often pass unnoticed until it is gone?