I've always prided myself on great physical health, which is a great thing indeed to have in America (it's very expensive to get sick or injured in America!), and I'm lucky to have it, but I realized recently that health does not mean just physical health. There are various other types of health, like financial health (MONEY!), social health (relationships, friends, etc.), but more importantly, mental heath. A lesser known but underrated health, I'm super lucky to also have great mental health, never getting too depressed, not having suicidal thoughts, being able to have a positive outlook on life mainly because I'm surrounded by good people and a good environment. Others are not as lucky, suffering often "disease of the mind" in not thinking clearly or thinking deeply about the sadness around them, often driving themselves to attempt suicide. Mental health is as it sounds, a condition of the brain, and you have to feed the brain once in a while, or give it some medicine....it's an issue that cannot be ignored in this day and age.
I read a bunch of seemingly unrelated things this weekend and they all (tellingly) included something about suicides. In the US, about 47,000 people die each other from suicides. JUST suicides! I was taken aback by that number, but it's true, and I can begrudgingly understand why. Just today a Korean pop singer was found in her room dead of an apparent suicide.. another Korean woman was convicted of manslaughter of her boyfriend who committed suicide apparently after she told him to go kill himself. That would be an example of making it worse for an already sick person.Malcolm Gladwell wrote a whole chapter in his book about the poet Sylvia Plath's suicide and how suicides occur partly because the victim associates certain things with taking their own life and would not do it if the situation/ environment were altered. Finally, I watched a video of a man who survived falling off the Golden Gate Bridge, apparently one of the most popular places to commit suicide in the United States. For a guy like me who has it all it's mind-bogging why people would take their own life, even people who have it even better than I do, as I'd thought of it as people making poor decisions and not being strong enough to tough it out on their own. but it becomes more clear after reading more and hearing survivors' stories that it does have to do with combating their own inner thoughts and blaming themselves.
I don't know directly of any people in my circle who committed suicide, a further sign that I'm stuck in my own little bubble blind to other people's problems, but I did go to college once with a girl who eventually committed suicide a few years later. It's really sad to see her Facebook page now, where people still wish her well several years after the event and wish her a happy birthday, as well as some messages like "I would you would have talked to me more about it" or "you didn't have to deal with all on your own." That seems to be a common thread among suicide victims, they blame themselves and keep it all in to themselves, finding themselves worthless or so at blame that they have to take responsibility by killing themselves, or at least ending the pain for themselves. In Japan at least many people take their own life after doing something that damages other people like putting other people into debt if their business went bankrupt, so they feel they have to make the ultimate sacrifice as an apology. There also often is some sort of triggering event that causes someone at risk of suicides to go over the edge, like the famous Sandra Bland case in Texas who was pulled over by an overzealous cop who dragged her out of her car for smoking a cigarette and not obeying the officer's orders. Bland was sent to jail for doing nothing illegal and killed herself on her third day in jail. I think the common thread for this is to improve one's mental health, to train the brain that even when they are beseiged by negative thoughts to overcome and hang on, so improving mental health truly is a lifesaving medical field and endeavor to help someone combat a disease, just as important as finding a cure for cancer and other maladies.
I still think my suggestions of making an at-risk suicidal person laugh constantly or allow them to go on an adventure would work, but it's clearly not that simple, especially when it's hard to even identify who is most at-risk of committing suicide and who needs it. No one's a mind-reader, but one possible clue to identify at-risk suicide candidates is to see who has committed suicide before.......unfortunately those who have the predilection to do it before or at higher risk of doing it again.
Sunday, November 24, 2019
Friday, November 22, 2019
Adventue (모험, 冒険)
After doing thorough self-analysis and reflection, I've found that I am primarily motivated by 2 things: competition and adventure. The former is easily demonstrated through dodgeball, where I get visibly upset if I think someone is better than me and inspires me to pound my chest like a gorilla and try to go get that person out. Fantasy sports, chess, tennis, all are fueled by a competitive drive. However, the motivator that's a close second is adventure: I'm actually a fan of the unknown. Sometimes I'll just go to new cities and ride one of the subway lines to a spot for no particular reason, just because I've never been to that particular spot. As a kid, I played 2 types of video games: sports games (baseball, hockey) and adventure games (Mario, Pokemon, Star Fox) where the story would play out in an epic quest. Learning new languages can be an adventure: I start at virtually zero of a language and then a whole world opens up to me of culture, ways of expressing oneself, different TV shows in the foreign language that I use to learn. Recently, I've applied the adventurous spirit to art museums. Art and aesthetics doesn't inherently motivate me as much as it does some other people like my wife, I see a nice painting and admire how much work was put into it, the level of detail, but my short attention span prods me into moving on quickly onto the next one. For places like the National Gallery of Art and the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., though, where MJ and I went this past weekend, I've developed a new technique: each room of an art gallery is an adventure room of different worlds where I can move to different themed rooms and feel that I've gone to a new dimension, a new reality of different art. I especially like old European paintings/ murals of the countryside or splendid scenery where I can transport myself into that perspective and imagine going to that place. It's really helped my viewing of art, I think. It's helped that recently due to MJ's leg injury I've had to wheel her around, so it's like I'm pushing (more like guiding her) into each room of new worlds, like leaping together into a portal that transports us to Paris in the 1800's, or Spain, rural U.S., each painting tells its own story. Adventurous Bobby is satisfied, and it doesn't hurt that usually art museums are designed in a pleasant manner to appeal to the patron's senses, like I wonder what crossing through the next doorway will bring, or what the sound of the fountain is coming from. And I realize that I don't need to go too far to discover adventure; I can get a little bit of Paris without actually having to go to Paris.
I think people in today's society get a little bogged down and lose their sense of adventure. Sure you can take an adventure on your smart phone and go through all the new videos Youtube is recommending, but people don't step out of their comfort zone as much as when they were a kid. I find things like, for example, running to the Hollywood sign for the first time such an exhilarating experience, or going through all the different levels of Powell's Bookstore in Portland, or exploring the various paths and buildings on the campus of Duke University. Whenever I hear of people committing suicide or losing the will to live I wish that they would watch something funny that makes them laugh 30 times, like a kid laughing uncontrollably, or engage in an adventure (small adventures, doesn't have to be some epic 30-country world tour), like we used to do as kids: laugh a lot and go on adventures. People often talk about what the meaning of life is, like love and reproduction, which are noble meanings, but shouldn't the quest for joy (i.e. laughing) and the quest for adventure be a strong candidate for the meaning of life? They are for me.
What other things motivate me? Well, recently love has played a part in my decision making, whereas previously I hadn't really known what it was. Compassion, thirst for knowledge, morality all rank up there, but I have to admit that the biggest thing out of the rest is probably money. Yes, money does motivate me. The Chinese have a saying for it is like one's heart races faster when money is put on the table. But money is not the meaning of life, it's just a means to life.
I think people in today's society get a little bogged down and lose their sense of adventure. Sure you can take an adventure on your smart phone and go through all the new videos Youtube is recommending, but people don't step out of their comfort zone as much as when they were a kid. I find things like, for example, running to the Hollywood sign for the first time such an exhilarating experience, or going through all the different levels of Powell's Bookstore in Portland, or exploring the various paths and buildings on the campus of Duke University. Whenever I hear of people committing suicide or losing the will to live I wish that they would watch something funny that makes them laugh 30 times, like a kid laughing uncontrollably, or engage in an adventure (small adventures, doesn't have to be some epic 30-country world tour), like we used to do as kids: laugh a lot and go on adventures. People often talk about what the meaning of life is, like love and reproduction, which are noble meanings, but shouldn't the quest for joy (i.e. laughing) and the quest for adventure be a strong candidate for the meaning of life? They are for me.
What other things motivate me? Well, recently love has played a part in my decision making, whereas previously I hadn't really known what it was. Compassion, thirst for knowledge, morality all rank up there, but I have to admit that the biggest thing out of the rest is probably money. Yes, money does motivate me. The Chinese have a saying for it is like one's heart races faster when money is put on the table. But money is not the meaning of life, it's just a means to life.
Wednesday, November 20, 2019
Cutting Out the Middle Man
Over the weekend I was bestowed one of the most important distinctions in my life: more important than becoming a licensed member of the State Bar of California, more important than officially being wed to my wife MJ, this was much more important than those, I became.....a Silver Medallion member on Delta Airlines. It turns out that if you spend a lot of money buying flights from an airline and rack up a ton of miles, they you back as a customer to encourage continued spending of money on those flights, and to do that they make you have "status" so you can feel superior over others and get more privileges over others and get a comfort seat or even better, maybe one day, one day make it all the way to the front of the cabin. Subtly capitalizing on class welfare, it reminds me a lot of the movie Parasite which is still reverberating around in my brain. There are clear distinctions between the way the poor and the rich live in Parasite, but also our society uses the class discrepancies to play off of each other, parading the rich's luxuries to the poor and making the poor work and spend money to become the rich and be better than the other poor. "You can become one of us! You're a Silver Medallion now." Delta literally points these privileged folk out on some flights by thanking flight members with status while the masses (me up to this weekend) watch and envy.
But I'm a Silver Medallion now! Talk about instant gratification, I immediately went from getting all middle seats in the past to getting a window seat on this week's flight and then, lo and behold, the middle person, who would have been me normally, didn't show up to the flight, and the middle seat was MINE.....to share with the aisle passenger, but still, leg room! And I enjoyed every bit of it, sleeping 4 hours out of a possible 5 to get ready for the day. Luxury does have its advantages, especially on flights when you can literally cut out the middle man (passenger). Not the way the phrase is typically used, but most businesses and jobs in America are driven by being the middle man, so I can't really imagine how the economy would function by cutting them out. Heck, I'm a middle man, I work for law firms to provide legal services to companies and take a share of the cut of the wealth. The retailer I buy clothes for is a middle man, the stock trading website I use is a middle man for accepting trades, the apartment complex I pay my rent to is a middle man for the owner of the complex.
On a personal note, I need to cut out the angry man inside me that hibernates most days but when I'm really pressured, comes out at the most inopportune times during the height of an argument. The movie "Anger Management" actually describes very accurately and in memorable fashion how my anger works: I have a lot of repressed anger, which means I don't express my anger/ how upset I am most of the time and just hold it back, letting it build up under the surface and slowly boil into a range that gets uncoiled when it reaches a tipping point that triggers everything to blow up. Hence why Adam Sandler's character in the movie is nice to everyone even when being treated rudely on flights and other areas, but when he is forced to confront a childhood nemesis, all of the emotion comes exploding out as he tackles someone and uses physical violence. I feel a lot like that and it makes everyday situations a little easier where I hold back what I want to say to people who cut me in line (don't cut people in line nowadays, btw, especially at Popeyes) or make an inaccurate statement or TSA treats me unfairly and just get over it, but I suffer a harsh penalty (and MJ does too) when I become uncontrollably angry during an argument with m wife, who gets very surprised and shocked when I act out in rage and start yelling......part of how I've been (wrongly) taught by myself to cope with highly stressful situations. My arguments as a child with my parents would often end with yelling and screaming after a week's worth of being made fun of by classmates or suffering stress from being in high school and my parents would get the brunt of the anger, and it became a negative ritual of sorts of me finally releasing all my repressed anger out on my loved ones, and it's continued into now. I need to learn a bit from MJ who usually speaks out about everything that makes her upset then and there, so she can get it off her chest and at least know that someone has acknowledged the issue she's having (that someone is usually me). I just need to find someone to bounce my complaints and comments off of........MJ is a bit, shall we say, unresponsive to complaints that I have about her, so maybe I can have some sort of euphemism machine translate what I want to say into a nicer, better consumable package of an issue and send it
Anger isn't the only emotion that coils up like a spring inside me: apparently I cry during romantic movies or highly sentimental situations, such as watching "Modern Love" on Amazon Prime the past weekend and seeing stories of love depicted in them. I guess in my old age I get emotional when people have sad stories or stories about loving conquering all or a single mother making it on her own while raising a little girl.
But I'm a Silver Medallion now! Talk about instant gratification, I immediately went from getting all middle seats in the past to getting a window seat on this week's flight and then, lo and behold, the middle person, who would have been me normally, didn't show up to the flight, and the middle seat was MINE.....to share with the aisle passenger, but still, leg room! And I enjoyed every bit of it, sleeping 4 hours out of a possible 5 to get ready for the day. Luxury does have its advantages, especially on flights when you can literally cut out the middle man (passenger). Not the way the phrase is typically used, but most businesses and jobs in America are driven by being the middle man, so I can't really imagine how the economy would function by cutting them out. Heck, I'm a middle man, I work for law firms to provide legal services to companies and take a share of the cut of the wealth. The retailer I buy clothes for is a middle man, the stock trading website I use is a middle man for accepting trades, the apartment complex I pay my rent to is a middle man for the owner of the complex.
On a personal note, I need to cut out the angry man inside me that hibernates most days but when I'm really pressured, comes out at the most inopportune times during the height of an argument. The movie "Anger Management" actually describes very accurately and in memorable fashion how my anger works: I have a lot of repressed anger, which means I don't express my anger/ how upset I am most of the time and just hold it back, letting it build up under the surface and slowly boil into a range that gets uncoiled when it reaches a tipping point that triggers everything to blow up. Hence why Adam Sandler's character in the movie is nice to everyone even when being treated rudely on flights and other areas, but when he is forced to confront a childhood nemesis, all of the emotion comes exploding out as he tackles someone and uses physical violence. I feel a lot like that and it makes everyday situations a little easier where I hold back what I want to say to people who cut me in line (don't cut people in line nowadays, btw, especially at Popeyes) or make an inaccurate statement or TSA treats me unfairly and just get over it, but I suffer a harsh penalty (and MJ does too) when I become uncontrollably angry during an argument with m wife, who gets very surprised and shocked when I act out in rage and start yelling......part of how I've been (wrongly) taught by myself to cope with highly stressful situations. My arguments as a child with my parents would often end with yelling and screaming after a week's worth of being made fun of by classmates or suffering stress from being in high school and my parents would get the brunt of the anger, and it became a negative ritual of sorts of me finally releasing all my repressed anger out on my loved ones, and it's continued into now. I need to learn a bit from MJ who usually speaks out about everything that makes her upset then and there, so she can get it off her chest and at least know that someone has acknowledged the issue she's having (that someone is usually me). I just need to find someone to bounce my complaints and comments off of........MJ is a bit, shall we say, unresponsive to complaints that I have about her, so maybe I can have some sort of euphemism machine translate what I want to say into a nicer, better consumable package of an issue and send it
Anger isn't the only emotion that coils up like a spring inside me: apparently I cry during romantic movies or highly sentimental situations, such as watching "Modern Love" on Amazon Prime the past weekend and seeing stories of love depicted in them. I guess in my old age I get emotional when people have sad stories or stories about loving conquering all or a single mother making it on her own while raising a little girl.
Saturday, November 16, 2019
The Ten People You Meet at the Airport/ On the Airplane
I've been spending a lot of time in airports and airplanes a lot recently (making round trips every weekend) and I encounter a lot of people on those trips, as well as being on Amtrak trains which have approximately the same kind of people. I used to fantasize about being a business traveler, being in different parts of the world and being busy all the time, those adults always seemed so professional and driven when I was a child. Now.......not so much. I usually want to just get in and out of the plane and the airport as soon as possible. But I usually have to encounter some of these people while doing so.
1.) Candy Crush Guy: this is not exclusively for airplane travelers, but I've noticed it on various modes of transportation.....what is so great about this game? From what I've gathered of watching people's screens while they mindlessly swipe their phones to get the colorful balls to shift the rows and "crush the candy" I can't help but think how mindless the human species has become with these no-thinking games. Candy Crush doesn't involve any outside knowledge, not much logical thinking, no benefit to society......it is just purely a time-waster that leaves you worse off and your mind number than you did when you started it. (I guess I also do fantasy sports, so maybe I'm being hypocritical?) There will be people I sit next to who play the game for all 4 hours I'm on a flight with them. No breaks.
2.) Armrest Hog, aka Aisle/Window Seat guy who encroaches on the middle seat. I'm a middle seat person, not by choice but by necessity: I book last-minute and don't care where I sit because I can sleep anywhere, so I resign myself to the middle seat (usually, sometimes a plane isn't totally full or I just get randomly assigned something else). Middle seaters don't have much rights, but if there's one golden rule middle seaters fight for, it's the right to the 2 armrest spaces. Those are NOT for you, people on the side! So don't be jutting your elbows in there or crossing the line.
3.) Mountain of Luggage Guy/Girl: I'm lucky enough that I have places to stay on both coasts in the U.S., so I travel light (see previous post), but I'd like to have an intervention for the people who seem to bring their entire life as a carry-on onto the flight with them. It's a pain and you're holding up the line. Airplanes can actually get to a destination faster if people take less time to put up luggage at the beginning so that everybody can get seated quickly and the plane can pull out of the gate faster..... doubly true for getting to the destination and getting out of the plane......if everyone can take 10 less seconds to get all their stuff and get out, we could save 10 minutes or so to get out of the airport ASAP and on with our lives (always a top priority), but conversely if Mountain of Luggage Guy/Girl is fumbling with the overhead compartment, need help pulling down their oversized luggage, almost knock someone out swinging their luggage around to the ground, get caught in the aisle while trying to navigate their way off the plane, then it becomes a traffic jam with just one lane available, and everyone is delayed.
4.) Need to Pee Guy/Girl: I have been this person one or twice, but I usually am fine for a flight of five hours or less. It's common sense: use the restroom before taking off. I got on a flight a few weeks ago ready to sleep and drifted off as soon as the plane got into the air but then was rudely and horribly awakened by Neighbor Guy in Window Seat who tapped me on the shoulder to wake me up so he could go pee. Like an hour into the flight. Seriously man, you can't wait to see if I would wake up on my own a little later to go pee? I had a hard time sleeping after that.
5.) Feet on the Footprints Martinet- A strict observer of the rules, the TSA person (like rising from the dead, they appear again in my blog) who tells me my feet are not perfectly on the set of footprints on the ground. Even though I've gone through so many airports with so many sets of footprints and never got yelled at about it before and the metal detector works fine........still.
6.) Bad Gas Passenger: An unidentified culprit, but you know it and dread it if you sit near him or her: they just let out silent bombs the whole flight and my nose is permeated with what they had for dinner last night in the form of heavy gas attacks.......but I can't accuse any one directly because there's so many other people around. Hiding in plain sight, a cowardly but effective strategy
7.) Squeeze-through Bandit: guy who jumps out of his seat when the fasten seat belt sign is turned off upon landing to try to get off the plane sooner. I've never seen this work for anybody to gain more than 3 rows before being stopped by the blockage of people. So basically you just cut like 15 people, gained like 2 minutes........but you're still stuck behind everyone else who all just watched you do this and are now upset at you. I know the back of the plane sucks but unless you have a pregnant spouse or similar emergency, just stay where you are and wait your turn.
8.) The Talker- insists on spilling his entire story to their neighbors and letting the entire plane hear them.
9.) Premature reclining seat guy: I personally never recline my seat (push it back) because I just don't want to shove my whole body at the passenger behind me...but I get why people do it. Just don't do it before the flight takes off. Slow your roll. Closely related: Guy tapping his TV screen (which also happens to be connected to the back of my seat) so hard that I can feel it thumping into my skull. Please recognize that there's a whole live human being sitting in front of you who has to bear the brunt of your browsing of all the available movies the flight has to offer.
10.) The guy pushing your stuff away at the security check to get to his own stuff. I usually take my laptop with me, and it is NOT OK for someone to push away my stuff to get to their stuff; it might damage my laptop or other things. And while you're at it, pick up the empty luggage cartons off the conveyor belt....it's not like the TSA agents are going to do it like it's their job or anything. TSA Agents who are just sitting around chatting with other TSA Agents acting like passengers aren't there or yelling at passengers.........while luggage cartons are causing a traffic jam in the conveyor belt. C'mon guys.
-Robert Yan
1.) Candy Crush Guy: this is not exclusively for airplane travelers, but I've noticed it on various modes of transportation.....what is so great about this game? From what I've gathered of watching people's screens while they mindlessly swipe their phones to get the colorful balls to shift the rows and "crush the candy" I can't help but think how mindless the human species has become with these no-thinking games. Candy Crush doesn't involve any outside knowledge, not much logical thinking, no benefit to society......it is just purely a time-waster that leaves you worse off and your mind number than you did when you started it. (I guess I also do fantasy sports, so maybe I'm being hypocritical?) There will be people I sit next to who play the game for all 4 hours I'm on a flight with them. No breaks.
2.) Armrest Hog, aka Aisle/Window Seat guy who encroaches on the middle seat. I'm a middle seat person, not by choice but by necessity: I book last-minute and don't care where I sit because I can sleep anywhere, so I resign myself to the middle seat (usually, sometimes a plane isn't totally full or I just get randomly assigned something else). Middle seaters don't have much rights, but if there's one golden rule middle seaters fight for, it's the right to the 2 armrest spaces. Those are NOT for you, people on the side! So don't be jutting your elbows in there or crossing the line.
3.) Mountain of Luggage Guy/Girl: I'm lucky enough that I have places to stay on both coasts in the U.S., so I travel light (see previous post), but I'd like to have an intervention for the people who seem to bring their entire life as a carry-on onto the flight with them. It's a pain and you're holding up the line. Airplanes can actually get to a destination faster if people take less time to put up luggage at the beginning so that everybody can get seated quickly and the plane can pull out of the gate faster..... doubly true for getting to the destination and getting out of the plane......if everyone can take 10 less seconds to get all their stuff and get out, we could save 10 minutes or so to get out of the airport ASAP and on with our lives (always a top priority), but conversely if Mountain of Luggage Guy/Girl is fumbling with the overhead compartment, need help pulling down their oversized luggage, almost knock someone out swinging their luggage around to the ground, get caught in the aisle while trying to navigate their way off the plane, then it becomes a traffic jam with just one lane available, and everyone is delayed.
4.) Need to Pee Guy/Girl: I have been this person one or twice, but I usually am fine for a flight of five hours or less. It's common sense: use the restroom before taking off. I got on a flight a few weeks ago ready to sleep and drifted off as soon as the plane got into the air but then was rudely and horribly awakened by Neighbor Guy in Window Seat who tapped me on the shoulder to wake me up so he could go pee. Like an hour into the flight. Seriously man, you can't wait to see if I would wake up on my own a little later to go pee? I had a hard time sleeping after that.
5.) Feet on the Footprints Martinet- A strict observer of the rules, the TSA person (like rising from the dead, they appear again in my blog) who tells me my feet are not perfectly on the set of footprints on the ground. Even though I've gone through so many airports with so many sets of footprints and never got yelled at about it before and the metal detector works fine........still.
6.) Bad Gas Passenger: An unidentified culprit, but you know it and dread it if you sit near him or her: they just let out silent bombs the whole flight and my nose is permeated with what they had for dinner last night in the form of heavy gas attacks.......but I can't accuse any one directly because there's so many other people around. Hiding in plain sight, a cowardly but effective strategy
7.) Squeeze-through Bandit: guy who jumps out of his seat when the fasten seat belt sign is turned off upon landing to try to get off the plane sooner. I've never seen this work for anybody to gain more than 3 rows before being stopped by the blockage of people. So basically you just cut like 15 people, gained like 2 minutes........but you're still stuck behind everyone else who all just watched you do this and are now upset at you. I know the back of the plane sucks but unless you have a pregnant spouse or similar emergency, just stay where you are and wait your turn.
8.) The Talker- insists on spilling his entire story to their neighbors and letting the entire plane hear them.
9.) Premature reclining seat guy: I personally never recline my seat (push it back) because I just don't want to shove my whole body at the passenger behind me...but I get why people do it. Just don't do it before the flight takes off. Slow your roll. Closely related: Guy tapping his TV screen (which also happens to be connected to the back of my seat) so hard that I can feel it thumping into my skull. Please recognize that there's a whole live human being sitting in front of you who has to bear the brunt of your browsing of all the available movies the flight has to offer.
10.) The guy pushing your stuff away at the security check to get to his own stuff. I usually take my laptop with me, and it is NOT OK for someone to push away my stuff to get to their stuff; it might damage my laptop or other things. And while you're at it, pick up the empty luggage cartons off the conveyor belt....it's not like the TSA agents are going to do it like it's their job or anything. TSA Agents who are just sitting around chatting with other TSA Agents acting like passengers aren't there or yelling at passengers.........while luggage cartons are causing a traffic jam in the conveyor belt. C'mon guys.
-Robert Yan
Thursday, November 14, 2019
Psychology (心理学, 심리학)
Recently on my way home from work I've started reading Malcolm Gladwell's new book, "Talking to Strangers." Gladwell's books are interesting in themselves but also help me understand current events and some news stories or historical events that I didn't really delve into or care about. This particular book looked into the Jerry Sandusky (and Larry Nassar) child molestation cases, Bernie Madoff, and even episodes of Friends. It delves into human beings' interactions with strangers, and takes a fascinating look into the psychology of lying as well as trusting strangers and why people get deceived so easily by strangers like Madoff (hint: it has to do with our default settings of trusting others implicitly and thinking that we can judge people based on their facial expressions like we're conditioned to when watching Friends). The psychology using real-life examples is so well articulated that it kept me turning the pages faster than any mystery novel or sports autobiography (some of my favorite genres) ever could.
My first exposure to psychology was in high school, when I was trying desperately to get into the best college I could and take as many AP classes as possible, so I took AP Psychology in senior year hearing it was a relatively easy class, only to surprisingly actually like the class. Psychology was about human stories, about how one thinks and feels and interacts with others, and I liked all the theories and experiments in how practical they could be: someone does this to someone else, they react this way. It was a cross between science and social skills, and I being the nerdy kid at school but with aspirations of becoming popular and being friends with people, loved the class as a way to understand how most people think.
In college at University of Illinois, there were these experiments I signed up for to get extra credit or some very low monetary value......but I thought they were fun and was willing to be a test subject (after reading about the Stanley Milgram experiment of test subjects inflicting pain on others by supposedly sending electric shock waves, what could go wrong?) and signed up for various studies around campus. (Secretly it was kind of like signing up for blood donations, I went to a different place each time and was an excuse to go into buildings I'd never been in and have a new experience). I specifically remember in one experiment, I was asked to join a group of other test subjects in a room to discuss how to solve some problems around campus, like a student wanted to quit smoking, or a student wanted to avoid getting the freshman fifteen but didn't know how, and the 3 other students in my group and I were supposed to debate. The discussion was fine and we actually came up with some ideas, but at some point I did notice that one or more of the other test subjects seemed to dismiss my ideas the 2nd time around, or reject my idea just because it was my idea. I didn't think about it at the time, but now that I've read "Talking to Strangers" I suspect that one or more of the other participants were planted as part of the experiment to see how I would react to being shot down. As Gladwell notes, this often happens in psychology experiments where the objective of the study is not what is stated, but actually testing something else that isn't revealed until later, or never at all. Now I'm really curious about those experiments I participated in but also psychology in general.
Lying, according to Gladwell, is all about the psychology of the person being lied to, and their willingness to believe someone UNTIL there's a lot of factors that lead to a conclusion of this person's lying and going over the threshold of doubt. We want to believe other people, life is easier when things turn out to be true. But everybody lies at some point. And it's actually hard to tell lies, even for veteran police officers or counterintelligence officers trained to do this stuff. If someone's really good at lying, they can get away with it and prepare an answer for everything. On the flip side, for me at least lying is kind of hard. I'm always worried about if the interrogator will ask more questions, I feel like I will make a mistake........and honestly, it's hard to remember and keep track of all one's lies. It is really just easier to tell the truth.....if the truth isn't that bad. Anyway, if one wants to learn more about actual cases of lying, read the book, and the one piece of actionable advice I got from it was.......society should as a whole believe things to be true as a default, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try to verify if something isn't a lie, and don't be fooled by a stranger who doesn't seem to be lying.........you can't really tell.
By the way, if you really want to see if someone's lying, you can tell a lot about someone by where they are and tracking their location. The FindFriends app on your smartphone lets you do that, and that certainly cuts down on a large portion of lying, which is lying about where you are or what you are doing at the moment. Since MJ is almost always at home nowadays recovering from injury, I don't get any information about her whereabouts and what she is doing, but she gains all the information about me like where exactly in the world I am as well as if I'm "on the move. 'It's a tracking device that I can turn off if I turn off my phone, but that would raise even more suspicion. You really need to trust someone to share your location with them on FindFriends, and I wonder what would happen if that got into the wrong hands, and even what Apple is doing with knowing my location at all times........kind of scary. No lying to the machine I guess about where you are, it knows EVERYTHING.
My first exposure to psychology was in high school, when I was trying desperately to get into the best college I could and take as many AP classes as possible, so I took AP Psychology in senior year hearing it was a relatively easy class, only to surprisingly actually like the class. Psychology was about human stories, about how one thinks and feels and interacts with others, and I liked all the theories and experiments in how practical they could be: someone does this to someone else, they react this way. It was a cross between science and social skills, and I being the nerdy kid at school but with aspirations of becoming popular and being friends with people, loved the class as a way to understand how most people think.
In college at University of Illinois, there were these experiments I signed up for to get extra credit or some very low monetary value......but I thought they were fun and was willing to be a test subject (after reading about the Stanley Milgram experiment of test subjects inflicting pain on others by supposedly sending electric shock waves, what could go wrong?) and signed up for various studies around campus. (Secretly it was kind of like signing up for blood donations, I went to a different place each time and was an excuse to go into buildings I'd never been in and have a new experience). I specifically remember in one experiment, I was asked to join a group of other test subjects in a room to discuss how to solve some problems around campus, like a student wanted to quit smoking, or a student wanted to avoid getting the freshman fifteen but didn't know how, and the 3 other students in my group and I were supposed to debate. The discussion was fine and we actually came up with some ideas, but at some point I did notice that one or more of the other test subjects seemed to dismiss my ideas the 2nd time around, or reject my idea just because it was my idea. I didn't think about it at the time, but now that I've read "Talking to Strangers" I suspect that one or more of the other participants were planted as part of the experiment to see how I would react to being shot down. As Gladwell notes, this often happens in psychology experiments where the objective of the study is not what is stated, but actually testing something else that isn't revealed until later, or never at all. Now I'm really curious about those experiments I participated in but also psychology in general.
Lying, according to Gladwell, is all about the psychology of the person being lied to, and their willingness to believe someone UNTIL there's a lot of factors that lead to a conclusion of this person's lying and going over the threshold of doubt. We want to believe other people, life is easier when things turn out to be true. But everybody lies at some point. And it's actually hard to tell lies, even for veteran police officers or counterintelligence officers trained to do this stuff. If someone's really good at lying, they can get away with it and prepare an answer for everything. On the flip side, for me at least lying is kind of hard. I'm always worried about if the interrogator will ask more questions, I feel like I will make a mistake........and honestly, it's hard to remember and keep track of all one's lies. It is really just easier to tell the truth.....if the truth isn't that bad. Anyway, if one wants to learn more about actual cases of lying, read the book, and the one piece of actionable advice I got from it was.......society should as a whole believe things to be true as a default, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try to verify if something isn't a lie, and don't be fooled by a stranger who doesn't seem to be lying.........you can't really tell.
By the way, if you really want to see if someone's lying, you can tell a lot about someone by where they are and tracking their location. The FindFriends app on your smartphone lets you do that, and that certainly cuts down on a large portion of lying, which is lying about where you are or what you are doing at the moment. Since MJ is almost always at home nowadays recovering from injury, I don't get any information about her whereabouts and what she is doing, but she gains all the information about me like where exactly in the world I am as well as if I'm "on the move. 'It's a tracking device that I can turn off if I turn off my phone, but that would raise even more suspicion. You really need to trust someone to share your location with them on FindFriends, and I wonder what would happen if that got into the wrong hands, and even what Apple is doing with knowing my location at all times........kind of scary. No lying to the machine I guess about where you are, it knows EVERYTHING.
Monday, November 11, 2019
Timing (时机, 타이밍, タイミング)
It's a unique word, "timing," an -ing word in English that's not a verb derived from time but not exactly meaning time, more about opportunity and chances. Or it can be about a musical piece and being on the beat (not rushing or dragging- I was never very good at it in the orchestra as I would often get too excited or get lazy and not keep the beat). Timing is such an important concept that the Asian languages also have the term, so if you just say "timing" in Korean and Japanese they're sure to know what you mean and the nuance of it. Most philosophers, economists, stock traders, etc., all agree: Timing is everything.
Timing matters in almost every facet of how we live: just the mere fact I am alive today writing this on an online blog is a matter of timing: no chance I would have this opportunity if I was even born 30 years before. Had I been born in any other time of human civilization my life would be completely different, I might have suffered from so many uncured diseases by now, and who knows how many years mankind has left in the future. Being born in 1987 and living the life I do now might be the best, fortuitous timing I could have asked for.
But timing can be controlled: you just have to know when the opportunity is the best. You can choose to travel on a trip on Monday morning when all business travelers are traveling from their real homes to their work homes, or you can choose to go against the grain a bit and travel on Tuesday, where Tuesday and Wednesday on normal weeks are the slowest travel days and you can get the best deal. It's kind of an amazing magic trick that the world can turn something into gold at one time (maybe a packed Olympic stadium for the Rio Olympics) where you can't even buy your way in for thousands of dollars, but fast forward one month and it's an empty shell of itself where no one wants to even go.
Timing is everything in investments: the time value of money. Owning Amazon stock at $3 in 1997 is quite different than owning Amazon stock at $2000 in 2008, or even in the short term, owning ROKU stock at $26 11 months ago versus $150 around this time. (That's a 6x, sextupling of the stock if you're keeping track at home).
Recently I was having a discussion with my co-workers about what's really important in achieving success, and most agreed it was knowledge. Reading about business trends, knowing the market, knowing what customers want, knowing what the next big thing is going to be. True, for sure, but I would counter knowledge with timing.......being at the right place at the right time to use that knowledge, to be able to act when you are ready......that's something that's priceless.......but often you can't just obtain like knowledge. Timing is a mix of luck, external factors, but also a little of your own doing.....If you can put oneself in position and be ready when the moment is right, timing can work in your favor to lead to success.
Timing also works with romance and finding the love of your life: finding each other when both people were looking for someone to fall in love with, who were emotionally ready, who needed one another. That can be a beautiful thing, timing, when two people at the right time in their lives (both single, both within proximate location of one another) whereas in other situations they might not find each other attractive or not even notice one another or be seeing other people. The right timing can overcome everything else and catapult the connection into epic heights. That's really how MJ and I found each other: The universe aligned at the right time and placed us into the right place at the right time for both of us, where our paths wouldn't have even crossed. Or we met each other 5 years earlier, when I was certainly not emotionally ready and MJ might not have been attracted to me, or I was still in law school, or this and that. All I know is that at the particular time of when we met, the timing was right and we were able to love each other.
Fantasize on and Happy Veteran's Day and Chinese Single's Day! (It's weird timing that these 2 special days are forever intertwined with each other now, as both are on 11/11). Always be stuck with each other on the same day.......because you know, timing.
Friday, November 8, 2019
Stormy Stock Market of Emotions
It's amazing how much practical knowledge can be gained over 2 years: I feel like that looking back at where I was 2 years ago, I knew nothing about relationships and the stock market, and now I feel like I can write a little playbook about each of them with tips and tendencies about each. It takes a lot of self-reflection and assessing who I am as a person, how I react to certain things, tendencies I do, and what works and doesn't work.
I've found that one of the many weaknesses I have (in addition to loud voice, heavy steps, not properly washing things the right way, etc.) is that I tend to let emotions control my actions, not in a very obvious way where I'm screaming and yelling (although, that does happen in extreme cases, I admit) but it definitely shapes my mood and how I act and affect others. When the stock market tumbles, I feel lost, confused, betrayed, disappointed, disheartened, not to mention less wealthy, so many negative emotions all bundled into one that it makes me lose faith in myself and press the sell button, when really that's the time to fight my emotions and buy low, where a much more reasoned and practical approach is to realize that it's still the same company that I bought the stock at at a higher level, and I'm actually getting a price now so I should be buying into this lowered price. But all my scrambled emotions gets me riled up and makes me miss this very important point.
MJ, my wife, is a lot like the stock market! She has her ups and downs, she has very high days, and also very low days when she dips, but over time the stock market has always been going up, just like our mutual love has always been going up steadily. Not in a straight line; we have many fights that often feel like taking one step forward but 2 steps back, but somewhere along the way we manage to build up some love equity and get dividends of nice moments with each other along the way (She's a dividend AND growth stock!) But the one thing I have to remember is that when MJ gets really down and depressed and complains to me about things (often things involving ME) I can't get wrapped up in my emotion of getting upset......I have to act like the stock market's having a down day or week and actually buy low by comforting her, make her feel loved because that's the time when she needs to feel loved the most, and the returns can be so much higher of getting her back to her normal lovely self or maybe even pushing past those previous highs. I usually am too bitter and self-absorbed about my own happiness being disturbed in that moment by MJ's complaining that I also start getting cranky and edge on towards a fight, in essence selling low (which can actually start a panic in socks too which push stocks lower) and causing both of us to get more upset. Many times I've tried to tell a joke or something to change the mood, but it sometimes backfires; I think the important thing is to make MJ feel loved during her times of weakness and not contribute to that bad feeling, not pour more fuel onto the fire.
Does it work the other way, when we're at the highest in our relationship, sell high? Not really......we just let it run and enjoy the ride as long as we can! The only thing maybe is to create some guidelines for how to avoid future large dips in the future by talking out how to deal with those situations when we're both happy, but that doesn't really prevent the dips; they will come and we need to be ready, both in the stock market and in a relationship.
I've found that one of the many weaknesses I have (in addition to loud voice, heavy steps, not properly washing things the right way, etc.) is that I tend to let emotions control my actions, not in a very obvious way where I'm screaming and yelling (although, that does happen in extreme cases, I admit) but it definitely shapes my mood and how I act and affect others. When the stock market tumbles, I feel lost, confused, betrayed, disappointed, disheartened, not to mention less wealthy, so many negative emotions all bundled into one that it makes me lose faith in myself and press the sell button, when really that's the time to fight my emotions and buy low, where a much more reasoned and practical approach is to realize that it's still the same company that I bought the stock at at a higher level, and I'm actually getting a price now so I should be buying into this lowered price. But all my scrambled emotions gets me riled up and makes me miss this very important point.
MJ, my wife, is a lot like the stock market! She has her ups and downs, she has very high days, and also very low days when she dips, but over time the stock market has always been going up, just like our mutual love has always been going up steadily. Not in a straight line; we have many fights that often feel like taking one step forward but 2 steps back, but somewhere along the way we manage to build up some love equity and get dividends of nice moments with each other along the way (She's a dividend AND growth stock!) But the one thing I have to remember is that when MJ gets really down and depressed and complains to me about things (often things involving ME) I can't get wrapped up in my emotion of getting upset......I have to act like the stock market's having a down day or week and actually buy low by comforting her, make her feel loved because that's the time when she needs to feel loved the most, and the returns can be so much higher of getting her back to her normal lovely self or maybe even pushing past those previous highs. I usually am too bitter and self-absorbed about my own happiness being disturbed in that moment by MJ's complaining that I also start getting cranky and edge on towards a fight, in essence selling low (which can actually start a panic in socks too which push stocks lower) and causing both of us to get more upset. Many times I've tried to tell a joke or something to change the mood, but it sometimes backfires; I think the important thing is to make MJ feel loved during her times of weakness and not contribute to that bad feeling, not pour more fuel onto the fire.
Does it work the other way, when we're at the highest in our relationship, sell high? Not really......we just let it run and enjoy the ride as long as we can! The only thing maybe is to create some guidelines for how to avoid future large dips in the future by talking out how to deal with those situations when we're both happy, but that doesn't really prevent the dips; they will come and we need to be ready, both in the stock market and in a relationship.
Wednesday, November 6, 2019
Indonesian (印度尼西亚, インドネシア, 인도네시아)
This may be a surprising observation, but the No. 1 easiest language for native English speakers to learn as a second language may not be Spanish, or French (normally considered similar to English due to their romance language roots), but many consider that distinction to go to Indonesian, a language with the exact same alphabet and a much more simplified grammatical structure. The one thing that has always been a roadblock for learning language for me and I'm sure others, is the conjugation of verbs.... so many different tenses, so many different ways to express a similar meaning: future, present, present participle, present progressive, etc., etc., it can make one's head numb learning all the rules, especially when you realize native speakers don't even need to figure it all out, it's intuitive. Chinese doesn't have so many tenses as just putting extra words around verbs to indicate their tense, and Indonesian follows a similar principle: just keep the verb as it is, and add dressing around it to indicate which tense it is. I think all languages should do that instead of the Japanese-Korean-Spanish-French way. Anyway, Indonesian is pretty cool, and it uses the word "guru" for teacher, which makes a lot of sense and which I appreciate as the namesake for this blog.
I don't have any particular interest in Indonesia and didn't know much about it before I started delving into the language a little bit, I knew its capital was Jakarta and that its language is actually spoken by quite a few people (it's like the 5th most used language in the world), and I vaguely heard about a dictator named Suharto that ruled the nation with an iron fist. I actually had to look up where Indonesia was on a map. I feel like a pretty ignorant American. I can count all the non-American countries I've ever been to on 2 hands, which is not a lot considering I was born in a different country. I've been pretty isolated I guess, and didn't do any study abroad programs in college, and haven't been to 2 prominent continents that many do go to: South America and Africa. It's been pretty educational and engaging to learn about other cultures while learning their language: If I get anything out of all of the language learning I've been doing in the last several years, at least I have that broadening of horizons to fall back on.
As the old Chinese proverb goes, A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, and the journey of learning a thousand (more like tens of thousands of words) of a language begins with a single word. I remember first picking up a Japanese dictionary or looking at a page of all Korean Hangul and just being completely overwhelmed, but it really is laying brick by brick, like a wall (unfortunately for President Trump, his wall apparently is not made out of brick and can be drilled through easily).
Similarly, a blog of a thousand posts begins with a single word! This blog's 1000th entry is coming up! (Blog anniversary!) But more importantly, I inspired my wife MJ to start a blog as well! Maybe that's the magic of writing, it's contagious! It's a stress relief, a recording of feelings, and an exercise in grammar all in one! I can look at a picture of past events and it can say a thousand words, but I don't necessarily remember exactly how I felt during the day without a blog. I hope MJ gets as much value out of her own blog as I do this one.
Fantasize on,
Robert Yan
I don't have any particular interest in Indonesia and didn't know much about it before I started delving into the language a little bit, I knew its capital was Jakarta and that its language is actually spoken by quite a few people (it's like the 5th most used language in the world), and I vaguely heard about a dictator named Suharto that ruled the nation with an iron fist. I actually had to look up where Indonesia was on a map. I feel like a pretty ignorant American. I can count all the non-American countries I've ever been to on 2 hands, which is not a lot considering I was born in a different country. I've been pretty isolated I guess, and didn't do any study abroad programs in college, and haven't been to 2 prominent continents that many do go to: South America and Africa. It's been pretty educational and engaging to learn about other cultures while learning their language: If I get anything out of all of the language learning I've been doing in the last several years, at least I have that broadening of horizons to fall back on.
As the old Chinese proverb goes, A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, and the journey of learning a thousand (more like tens of thousands of words) of a language begins with a single word. I remember first picking up a Japanese dictionary or looking at a page of all Korean Hangul and just being completely overwhelmed, but it really is laying brick by brick, like a wall (unfortunately for President Trump, his wall apparently is not made out of brick and can be drilled through easily).
Similarly, a blog of a thousand posts begins with a single word! This blog's 1000th entry is coming up! (Blog anniversary!) But more importantly, I inspired my wife MJ to start a blog as well! Maybe that's the magic of writing, it's contagious! It's a stress relief, a recording of feelings, and an exercise in grammar all in one! I can look at a picture of past events and it can say a thousand words, but I don't necessarily remember exactly how I felt during the day without a blog. I hope MJ gets as much value out of her own blog as I do this one.
Fantasize on,
Robert Yan
Sunday, November 3, 2019
Horoscopes (星占い, 별자리, 星座运势)
As a new month arrives and there's only 2 months left in 2019 (The Year of the Pig! Great fortunes in Chinese culture!), I'm reminded of how many people still rely on horoscopes, palm reading, fortune-telling, or other mystical, scientifically-unproven techniques for predicting one's future. I get the allure of it, that somehow which month you where born in has something to do with how you should approach your love life or confess to your secret crush, or whether a line on your hand means you will be lucky in business and finances, when the idea of months and years was an artificial construct created by humans anyway. I personally think each year should be more than 365 days as the summers seem to drag on longer and longer into August and September (it's FINALLY getting cold here on the East Coast). I just watched an episode of Shinya Shokudo (or Midnight Diner), a Japanese TV show, where a guy who writes horoscopes under a fictitious name uses his horoscope writing to manipulate a girl he likes. It's amazing that in 2019 there are still people gullible enough to believe in such things, or they just want to believe in something. Then again, I'm writing in this blog shortly after reading a fortune cookie line that said, "There are 4 fundamental necessities in writing: Simplicity, brevity, creativity, and humanity." Which caused me to write. And darn if I don't open a fortune cookie sometimes hoping beyond to hope to read "new riches are coming your way" or "a new business opportunity is just on the horizon" or something generic like that.
I don't like to admit having problems, which is a big cause of fights between my mom and my wife MJ because neither of THEM like to admit their faults neither, causing friction and drama, but I will admit to a problem I've noticed recently: I fall asleep too easily even when I don't want to. When I was younger I would feel sleepy and start to have my eyes close but would always be able to fight the Sandman and somehow stay awake through a boring class, a boring movie, but I guess as an adult my body has changed, and sometimes at work I do fall asleep just for a quick minute or two. I know because I wake up and time has elapsed. I feel a whole lot better after that brief minute or two and it actually helps my productivity later in the day as I don't feel that sleepy anymore like my brain just "restarted," but for that minute or two I'm actually asleep, which is very bad if a coworker, or worse, my boss were to walk in. I call it Yan Disease (as my dad and sister both suffer from varying levels of needing to sleep right away, so it might be in the genes). On the flip side, because I fall asleep so easily, I can get on a plane right away or any other moving vehicle and like succumbing to the waves of the ocean, I will drift off.
Yan Disease, though, is particularly dangerous when I'm the one driving that moving vehicle, and it's soon after I just had a meal, or I'm particularly tired from not getting great sleep on previous nights. Especially on a long road trip, Yan Disease has made it difficult for me to drive on the highway because there's a lack of moves I have to make: my body doesn't think it needs to think and can just draft along like an airplane at the same unchanging speed. Which makes me think I probably avoided a risky proposition by not driving my car all the way from LA to the East Coast this summer. Luckily, there are medically proven cures to Yan Disease with limited side effects: it's this wonderful thing called coffee. Use in moderation because I don't have much of a tolerance to anything like coffee or alcohol, so it can keep me up all night if I use too much of it.
Fantasize on,
Robert Yan
I don't like to admit having problems, which is a big cause of fights between my mom and my wife MJ because neither of THEM like to admit their faults neither, causing friction and drama, but I will admit to a problem I've noticed recently: I fall asleep too easily even when I don't want to. When I was younger I would feel sleepy and start to have my eyes close but would always be able to fight the Sandman and somehow stay awake through a boring class, a boring movie, but I guess as an adult my body has changed, and sometimes at work I do fall asleep just for a quick minute or two. I know because I wake up and time has elapsed. I feel a whole lot better after that brief minute or two and it actually helps my productivity later in the day as I don't feel that sleepy anymore like my brain just "restarted," but for that minute or two I'm actually asleep, which is very bad if a coworker, or worse, my boss were to walk in. I call it Yan Disease (as my dad and sister both suffer from varying levels of needing to sleep right away, so it might be in the genes). On the flip side, because I fall asleep so easily, I can get on a plane right away or any other moving vehicle and like succumbing to the waves of the ocean, I will drift off.
Yan Disease, though, is particularly dangerous when I'm the one driving that moving vehicle, and it's soon after I just had a meal, or I'm particularly tired from not getting great sleep on previous nights. Especially on a long road trip, Yan Disease has made it difficult for me to drive on the highway because there's a lack of moves I have to make: my body doesn't think it needs to think and can just draft along like an airplane at the same unchanging speed. Which makes me think I probably avoided a risky proposition by not driving my car all the way from LA to the East Coast this summer. Luckily, there are medically proven cures to Yan Disease with limited side effects: it's this wonderful thing called coffee. Use in moderation because I don't have much of a tolerance to anything like coffee or alcohol, so it can keep me up all night if I use too much of it.
Fantasize on,
Robert Yan
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