SINCE I HAVE MOVED INTO my new place, where there's a cable TV, I have been sitting in front of my flat screen television everyday, watching shows after shows on my new favorite TV channel, NHK World TV ( stands for Nippon Hs Kykai or Japan Broadcasting Corporation) from Japan (but in English). Growing up reading Japanese graphic novels or manga, I always have a soft spot for Japan and Japanese culture. In fact, I'd to spend some time there -- perhaps the rest of my life.
I like everything about Japan: the art, architecture, food, culture, manga, etc. You name it, and I'll just tell you how much I like it, and why I like it. My friends who know me well would know that I could spend the entire day talking about Japan and Japanese culture. In fact, I have written a few articles and Japan. My first publication was a two-page essay on the Japanese love hotels ( rabu hoteru).
It was this research that I received the honorable title from my Japanese colleagues "hentai sensei" ( ) -- please find out by yourself what it means. The most recent book chapter that I just wrote, and just got published is on Japanese capsule hotels, which in the book chapter I argue that it may be one of the representative form of Japanese socio-spatial structure.
We shouldn't be looking at it from the perspective of an outsider, otherwise we will miss so many interesting things, but to understand it ethnographically from within. My favorite NHK World TV show is The Professionals, a one-hour documentary series that focuses on Japan's best professionals from various fields. When it comes to professionalism, no one can really beat the Japanese.
In the US, Thailand, or elsewhere (where I have lived), it seems as though to be a professional is to be "occupationally engaged" in a specified activity that gets one paid, and most of the time what it means is to be an employee of a company. For instance, in the US, we go to the so-called a "professional school" to become a lawyer, medical doctor, nurse, and architect.
It seems as though to be a professional is to have a stable "paid job." In Japan, if one is passionate about what one does, one can be a professional -- and it doesn't really matter what work it is. You can be a professional grocer, farmer, bartender, coffee barista, dancer, noodle stall owner, (), street performer, and so on.
There is the spirit of kodawari which, since I don't speak Japanese I will largely rely on the translation I found online, " obsession, fixation, hangup, determination, fastidiousness, pickiness about something." The anthropologist Merry White, in her book Coffee Life in Japan, translates it as "the kind of passion that is almost bordering on obsession." Japan has always been a nation where many professions easily find their places in the society no matter how niche-oriented what they do are.
That may have to do with the fact that Japanese people do respect the art, labor, and craftsmanship involved in the process of making consumable products, food, and materials.
In White's book, the coffee barista (Italian for "bartender," which, in this case, is the person who makes coffee for you at the coffee bar in Japan) who she studied in Tokyo were the embodiment of the very core spirit of kodawari -- they're so damn attentive, critical, and ritualistic, about what they do, so much so that most people wonder whether these barista are crazy or not. Believe it or not, all of us are like that sometimes.
When we find something that we really like to do and want to excel in doing it, we will put everything aside, and put all out of our conscious effort it.
After watching the barista making a cup of coffee for you with the utmost performance of kodawari including the very meticulous and multi-layered process of grinding coffee beans by hand, all the way to siphoning it through the finest and most beautiful vacuum coffee maker, whether or not the coffee they make actually taste better doesn't really matter anymore (maybe it does, but how much can we, non-experts, can really tell?).
Anyone who could feel the very core spirit of kodawari could also feel the sensationality embedded in the taste of the coffee. I do feel that actually tastes better when someone is putting the heart and soul into brewing it for you. In fact, I think what makes Japan an interesting country is precisely this kind of respect for professionalism. Professionals from all walks of life, in whatever they do, are respected not only for the expertise they possess, but also the products or services that they deliver.
In turn, the Japanese appreciation for professionalism not only makes these professionals wanting to continue to develop themselves, and pass on their expertise to the next generation, but also make young people want to become professionals -- precisely because they know that there is always a room for growth. This mentality helps to proliferate both professionalism and small businesses. You don't have to have a large sum of capital to pursue what you love.
It's the love and passion (and perhaps some sense of economic feasibility) that make one stand out in the battle between professionals who want to deliver products and services which belong to the best of their class. Philosophers like Karl Marx, Adam Smith, and John Locke would agree that the work ethics of these professionals align well with the essence of human species -- the professionals put their life into the pursuit of perfecting the object, and therefore "own" the fruits of their labor.
By owing the fruit of their labor, they are driven from the inside to deliver high quality products. In a typical capitalist society, capitalism will appropriate these products and services, and place them in the market system that would determine the value of the fruit of their labor on their behalf. If the market demand is lower than the supply of similar products in the market, for whatever reason, the price will go down despite the fact that these professionals may have put no less effort in producing them.
Sooner or later these, as Marx has pointed out, professionals will find no pleasure in producing anything because they would find out that they do not get to own, let alone enjoy the fruits of their labor, and eventually they would feel alienated from the product of their work, and that would be the end of the professionals.
So, professionalism reunites the division of the society that is often thought of as being separated into the entities and belong to two classes: the property owners (the capitalists) and the property-less (proletariat) workers. Marx, especially, thinks that capitalism has divided our society into two entities. I think that we can still live meaningfully in a capitalist society By being professionals in what we all do no matter what it is, we are playing a part in making our society less segregated.
By being dignified professionals, we don't just serve the insatiable demand of the capitalists who just want to make use of and exploit our labor, but we can use our labor in doing things we love to turn the capitalists around and make them see the larger picture of the benefits of meaningful labor force. It's the professionalism in all of us that will save us from the negative consequences brought about by capitalism.
In this arrangement, the the capitalists don't necessarily own the professionals, but rely on the professionals to deliver what they need. Therefore, the professionals don't suffer impoverishment by ways of capitalist exploitation. The professionals also get to enjoy the experience of being reunited with themselves, with their products, with their fellow human beings, and with the essence of the human species. in a Marxian sense, to be a professional is to own the fruit of your labor, and to have the complete freedom what to do with it.
For instance, why would anyone want to make a coffee at home, if right around the corner there is a great cafe with a great barista who would always make a great fresh cup of coffee? Same goes with noodles, sushi, and so on.
What would anyone want to go to the wholesale market and try their luck on picking some fruits from an ocean of fruits, if they know they can rely on the greengrocer next door who knows exactly which are good fruits by experience, and is happy to get them delivered it to the community? I think the functioning society that works in a long-run must be the kind of society that respect professionals.
In the latest episode of The Professionals, Japan's most respected greengrocer Teruaki Sugimoto showed us his passion for selling vegetables. He's known by everyone in his profession as "the greengrocer who knows more than anyone in Japan about delicious produce." In the Kita-Senju neighborhood of Tokyo where more and more people are turning away from the local grocers and toward convenient stores to buy mass-produce vegetables and fruits, the 67-year-old Mr.
Sugimoto was still all about handpicked, artisanal, and high-quality vegetables that he personally inspects, bids, and buys from the wholesales market by himself. To outsiders, he may look like a stubborn old man who has devoted his life to vegetables; but, to his customers, Mr. Sugimoto's passion for selling vegetables lies beyond his interest in making money.
He wants to be on top of his game, which, as he defines, is to serve his loyal and new customers with the highest quality vegetables, as well as in helping the farmers, without whom he wouldn't be able to do what he does. "Always protect the farmers," is his motto. In a way, he's a merchant -- a middleman -- who doesn't produce anything. All he does is just to profit from the farmers whose sweat and blood turn into produce for him to sell.
So, he's grateful for being fortunate enough to be doing what he is doing; hence, he believes that it's important to protect the farmers whose hard labor is the bloodline of his family's career for generation. The blurb on the The Professionals' site summarizes it all: The approach that sums up Sugimoto's way of doing business is "always play offense." And rather than buying everything at wholesale markets, he has developed his own channels for procuring select produce. Sugimoto says, "There are still many delicious things that people haven't tried.
I have to get out there and promote them. That's what a greengrocer should do." Mr. Sugimoto concludes at the end of the documentary that, to him, to be a professional is to "not relying only on the past achievements but to strive to be better and better everyday." The story of Teruaki Sugimoto in the The Professionals got me thinking about what it means, personally, to be a profession. I don't really know what I am in terms of profession.
Am I a student, a teacher, an architect, an urban designer, a writer, or what? Well, I am by and large still a student (a doctoral student) but I also have some teaching experience, so in a way, I could call myself a "professional teacher." In fact, it's the teaching that makes me want to get up in the morning and go to work. That said, it's not fair to use what I like to do to justify my professionalism.
It would be like judging the quality of life in a particular city, only on a good day. We must also take into account the bad days. A true professional also endures the hardship on a bad day, and turns the negative energy into a genuine passion to seize the opportunity that might not be immediately obvious.
There were times when I had to grade exam papers -- what I dread the most in my life as a teacher -- read student papers, prepare for classes, and so on, that were not that pleasant. This time last year, I was grading more than 40 philosophy exam papers. Each of which was 4-5 page-long. I was spending about 30 minutes to one hour per each paper, while my colleagues were spending about 2-3 minutes per paper.
I both wrote comments onto the papers, and typed extra comments for each student. It was madness. I'd spent more than 40 hours grading 40 papers (including printing, stapling the comments onto the exams). Not only was I focusing all my attention on providing the most just grades to the students who deserved them, but also on writing extensive comments to those who hadn't gotten it yet in order to make sure that they would learn from their mistakes.
I felt that I could help them improve themselves in the next exam. What I did was also to help my students in learning how to write in general for their future careers. There was no incentive of anything on my part whatsoever. I could have been drinking, watching TV, going around the city, or even going to bed (because I often had to grade all the way to the very late evening hours).
I could just slack off, and call it a day at 6pm, and then went out for drinks with my friends. I didn't do that because something inside of me was telling me that I could not do that, and that I must provide equally comprehensive and considerably constructive comments to every single exam paper, even though I knww that some students might not even care.
I knew I could have done what most of my colleagues did, which was to simply assign random grades to random students, taking the responsible task of a teacher as lightly as possible, so that I would have more time to pursue something else that they believed they'd rather be spending time on. Why did I do that? I was just doing it because I think it was "my duty" -- the responsible task --to do it for my students.
Professionalism, to me at that time, was to go the extra miles on something, for which I believe I have the purpose in life. So, could it be that feeling content was the main factor that drove me to go those extra miles? It would be misleading to say so, I believe. I still remember how antagonizing I was having to sit down on a desk reading one paper after another.
Some papers were written in such a way that nobody could understand (e,g., illegible, put together poorly grammatically, etc.) -- but I had to try to understand them regardless of how much I would rather brush them off. Every second I that was spending reading those exam papers longer than my colleague, I felt as though I was not making any sense. I was antagonizing over everything as I probed.
So, in that sense, it was clear, to me, that I would be much happier having a beer and watching NHK World News rather than grading exam papers. Yet, I was still going through each paper one by one -- at the slowest possible speed -- in order to insure the carefulness in reading each and every one of the paper. I didn't think that what I was doing was duty?
My duty could end at the official closing time of the office which was 6pm, and I could easily come back and do it the next day. So, what was my incentive for going the extra miles, doing much more work, spending much more time on grading those exam papers? If "incentive" could be defined as something that motivates you to do something, I probably did not have any real incentive then. It was neither the economic incentive, or my expectation for results from which I could benefit.
Was I simply romanticizing my intention to treat teaching and grading as an end in itself? Perhaps. But if we look closer there was actually nothing to romanticize about. To be romantic is to suggest that I could incline toward the feeling of exciting mystery, which I didn't see any.
The end was clear -- that I would be so tired after 40 something hours of work reading and grading, and the consequence was also clear, which was the fact that I could hit the sack as soon as I got the grades in. Why did I work myself so hard for no concrete result? Having said all these, I want to make it clear that I don't believe that doing things just for the sake of doing it "out of duty" is that professional, at least to me.
Professionalism is, in some ways, about duty, but on the other hand what it is really about is the way in which life could be given meanings. Unlike the great philosopher Immanuel Kant who would profess to a room full of empty chairs because he believed that to be in his role as a professional professor, he would need to profess no matter what, and whether or not there's an audience. I get his point, but I simply do not think that it is very useful.
Ok, fine, perhaps by professing to a group of empty chairs he was making a statement about his professionalism -- and one day when I am as wise and as astute intellectually as he was I would understand his rather unique course of action. For the time being, I'd rather save my time to profess to a group of empty chairs to do something else (just a little bit) more meaningful.
So, no, if I know that those philosophy papers won't be returned to the students, who therefore wouldn't get to read my extensive comments, I would not spend a lot of time writing my comments (I would, nevertheless, spend as much time on reading them regardless, assuming that they're written with the intellectual labor of love), because it would be the same as professing to a group of empty chairs. Back to why I want to be a professional.
First, I don't think being content, happy, and pleasurable, is the only things that life needs. So, when I do things that may sound difficult, hard, and demanding, I don't do it because I like it, or because I expect something from it.
I believe that we human beings also need to be straightened, shaped, forced to do things we don't want to do from time to time, so that we'd make the most meaning out of something rather meaningless like getting a job, going to work, and getting out of work, going to bed, and getting up again next day. Second, being true to what I believe is to be true to the very essence of what I do is what gives my life meaning.
In my earlier post I outlines what I talk about when I talk about passion, but passion only cannot explain why I would go extra miles on things that don't present the immediate benefit. The incentive here is, perhaps, my belief that once we have started something we should go all the way to test my limit is what makes my life not as absurd as it would be.
This might be the same feeling that some runners might not compete just to win, but to see how fast he, as a human being, could run. The incentive here is something beyond the realm materiality. I would be a pity if we only do things because we are expecting something materialistic, or economically profitable in return. The most exciting thing in life, I believe, is to be able to evaluate our own limit. Grading exams might not be a good example here, as it's far from exciting.
But for sure the fact that I simply don't stop at glancing through them and assigning random grades is because I want to see how much I could learn from these exam papers about my students -- what they need to learn more about -- so that I could support them where they need it. Being intense and obsessive, it might look as though I am being chained to my kodawari ethics. True.
I might not be free to do whatever I want, but I feel as though am free because I know exactly what I do, and why I do it -- and that I am able to pursue it. So, when I was doing my best in what I believe I should be doing, I was "free from the natural inclination" to take the easy way out.
So, being a professional is to be able to pursue what I believe to be give myself, and my life, meaning, and it is often, if not always, involves pushing the limit of my mental and physic capacity -- sometimes, to perfect the imperfectable. So, it's not about delivering what I can, but deliveingr the best performance regardless of the outcome.
Perhaps, in the similar way that the anthropology Merry White sees the baristas in Tokyo café wanting pursue nothing but "the way of being the masters of their own universes," I am doing what I do, simply, also to be the master of mine.
post Day 33: What Makes Life Worth Living Mon, 28 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000 First of all, let me be clear from the beginning: I don't have the answer for such an impossible question. Second, I didn't just come up with such title to make this blog post sound more interesting than it is. In fact, I may not have anything new to share with you today, in this post.
You, actually, might find that this particular post to be the most shallow, content-less, and lack of substance of all of my posts. So, I am warning you. Reading this post might not worth you time. I didn't even come up with a title of this post. Yes, I am a blatant copycat of ideas. It is a title of a book that I plan to read next by Prof. Gordon Mathews, who teaches anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK).
Despite the grandiose title, the book is not about the metaphysics of life as such, but an anthropological inquiry into the ways in which the two groups of people of which Mathews have lived with -- the Japanese and the American people -- (, make of their lives. In Japanese, the term Ikigai pronounced [ikiai]) is a traditional concept, meaning "a reason for being," or as Mathews writes, "broadly, that which most makes one's life seem worth living." In the Japanese society, ikigai is both gendered and generational.
For instance, Mathews presents in an article published in the journal Ethnology in 1996 (which I believe to become a chapter of the book) that most common ikigai of women is family and children, and the most common ikigai of men is work and company -- as well as family. But this concept of ikigai, of course, changes over time, as we become older (and probably wiser, and sometimes, unfortunately, grumpier). Mathew's main argument is there is something socially deterministic about life. We don't have the full control of it.
The society in which we're born into is responsible for the reason that you may think makes your life worth living. That said, the impact of the social determinism of the society into which we're born also varies. Some cultures of some societies have a much more profound on their citizens. I have heard about the book What Makes Life Worth Living? How Japanese and Americans Make Sense of Their Worlds from colleagues who were students of his at CUHK, but haven't gotten around to read it.
Now it's the time, and I'll tell you why I think so. Long story short, I just spent 146 minutes of my life watching a 2010 based-on-true-story film called Cold Fish, which arguably is one of most gruesome yet realistic films in the history of cinema -- about a Japanese family that falls apart in an extremely troubled way because of the social pressure surrounding it (IMDb gives it 7 out of 10 which is a very high rating for a film in this genre).
After having watched the film, I began to think about the connection that I may have with it, since there were a lot of things in (and about) the film that resonate with me, and I found one, which is the fact that it's a film about Japan. That was how I thought of Prof. Mathew's book, since it's about Japan.
As I wrote in my last post, I always have a soft spot for the Japanese culture, so the reason for choosing to watch this film in the first place was because it's a Japanese film.
Then, I tried to think very carefully about the meaning of the film, and extract the message that it tries to send, which I believe to be the fact that not just the unbearable social pressure that has the capacity to drive us to absolute despair, making us feel that the impulse to end the life of our own, or the lives of others, is real.
Quite the contrary, the extraordinarily mundane condition of being that makes us less human beings -- what the novelist Milan KunderaI would probably refer to as The Unbearable Lightness of Being -- a lso has the same effect as the unbearable social pressure. People kill themselves (and others) when the pressure is too much to bare. People also kill themselves (and others) when there is no pressure at all, and life is just an absurd process of the perpetual lack of excitement.
The latter cause of suicide is much easier to prevent than the former one.
In fact, as the French sociologist Émile Durkheim has reminded all of us with his meticulous research on social pressure, we can do nothing about suicide-by-social-pressure as long as modern capitalism still continues to advertise "freedom" as the motto of one's life, produce the false notion of "excessive hope" that only a small number of people could possibly fulfill, generate the overwhelming sense of individualism to undermine the unscientific notion of spirituality, family, and the sense of moral responsibility. Cold Fish is a film about the power of social determinism.
The protagonist, a man who runs a small tropical fish shop, could only do so little to make his life better. Because, at the end of the day, when one is in despair, one just one someone to say "it's going to be alright," whether that someone is a person, a family member, or an imagined almighty God. In despair, we want a pad in the back.
In despair, the last thing we want to hear is "you are on your own." In despair, the only freedom that is available to us is the freedom to take your own life. As the Stoics once famously say, "when it's too unbearable, all you have to do is to turn up your own wrist." The existentialist (Nobel laureate) novelist Albert Camus also observes, quite accurately, that the only philosophical question worth delving into is suicide: There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.
Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. To put it bluntly, nothing is more metaphysical and serious, than the question is whether one wants to be, or not to be. I can sympathize with those who no longer want to be because there are too much pressure in life. That said, this doesn't necessarily mean that I support suicide. Quite the contrary, I don't think suicide is acceptable at all, both on the moral as well as the sensibility grounds.
In addition, since I've lost my father, I have begun to realize how lucky I am to be. My father wanted to live but he didn't get a chance to, so I want to live not just my, but a good life, also on his behalf. On the moral ground, I'd like to invite all of us, again, to revisit what I still believe to be the most succinct expression of reason not to kill yourself by the man, Immanuel Kant, himself.
In The Foundation of the Metaphysics of the Morals, he proposes the idea of looking at the matter of "living a life," not as a matter of choice but the absolute form of duty: Suicide: A man reduced to despair by a series of misfortunes feels wearied of life, but is still so far in possession of his reason that he can ask himself whether it would not be contrary to his duty to himself to take his own life. On the sensibility ground, what's the point of killing yourself?
There are two facts that we are lucky enough to know: the fact that we will die anyway, and a synthetic a priori fact that we "are stronger than we think." Human beings are capable of going through many kinds of hardship.
Some of which we didn't know that we were able to go through until we did so, and then looked back at it -- "I was so silly; why did I think that I won't be able to do it?" So, these are the two knowledge that we know for sure. They, moreover, seem to be supporting each other underpinning the argument that there is no point in rushing to the end process, knowing that we might, or might not get through the hardship anyway.
It's like giving up on an exam and fail it right away, without even try to pass it first. I call this the "sensibility ground" -- or, the ground on which we exercise our ability to appreciate and respond to complex influences by being sensitive to what we really know for certain. So, the goal of this post is to reason why people kill themselves (and others) when there is no pressure at all.
One reason is that such life no longer gives you the Ikigai or the reason for being. Karl Marx would see it the same way, although he would probably not describe it as such, but the losing of what he'd call "species essence" -- a rational being should have the freedom to exercise his or her own mind and thoughts in the way that benefit him or her. Many other philosophers also have tried to identify the condition that makes us lose ourselves, and make us forget Ikigai.
Let me talk about Ikigai for a couple more sentences here, because I think the idea of which is deeply powerful. In the diagram above, we clearly see that Ikigai is about balancing the four towers that are balancing our life. It's clear that only one of them has to do with the things about which we love and passionate about, and all other three polls are pretty much whatever provides us with food, shelter, dignity, and meaning and higher goal to live for.
For those who gets to be in the profession where these four towers are one, they are the absolutely lucky ones. For example, let's think of David Beckham -- he loves soccer, and he gets to play it everyday. By playing soccer, he's inspiring many people in the world, and it, well, for sure give him more wealth than he ever needs in the next ten lives of his.
That is, one day maybe he'll get bored with soccer, or perhaps his body is no longer good enough to play in the professional level; then he would need to find something else to do so that he could continue to maintain his sense of being. There are many athletes who are content when they are on top of their games. Only until when they are retired from sports and having to start doing things that fall outside their immediate realm of passion.
Many of them can't deal with it, and go into sex, drugs, and alcohol, with the hope that they would temporarily help them to get through the lack of the guiding light they once hold dear. Most of us are not not like David Beckham. I, for one, is not like that.
There are things that I love doing, but I am not as good at that as the things that I am being paid for, so no one is paying me to do things that I am passionate about, but instead paying for doing things that I am only semi-interested in.
And I am content with my life because although it's not perfect, I have to compromise, but such a compromise still allow me to extent my being into doing things that pay my bill, make me respect myself, and give me the space, time, and comfort, to think about my higher purpose. In other words, we do things we don't want to do from time to time just to get by, and in my occasions what we do also make us feel deeply sad about our own sense of morality.
When one of three towers that is not about your passion is taking too much time of your life, that's usually when you are losing the sense of Ikigai, or the guiding light to being. So, what exactly makes life worth living? I sincerely don't know if my life is that worth living. But since I know for sure that suicide is, and will never be, an option, and that I am "stronger than I think," I don't see the reason to emancipate from it.
As I wrote in the previous posts (On Aging, I believe), I am experiencing something new every day, and that's absolutely exciting. That, for me, is enough to make me want to continue my life.
That said, the question "what makes life worth living?" is different from, and therefore not to be confused with the question, "what is a reason to live?" You could say that your family is your reason to live -- you have to pay their bills; you have to send your daughter to school; you have to take care of your parents -- but that doesn't mean that your life is worth living. Many existentialist philosophers would argue, even, that anything that you "have to do" is bad for you.
You should be free to do whatever you want. On the one hand, you could take it at face value, and as such, by saying that your life is something you can't change, and therefore the reason to live is the same as what makes life worth living.
For those who know me well, they probably know also that whenever someone says that to me I often, if not always, give them words of wisdom from Jean-Paul Sartre: We are in "bad faith" whenever we tell ourselves that things have to be a certain way and shut our eyes to other options. It is bad faith to insist that we have to do a particular kind of work or live with a specific person or make our home in a given place.
On the other hand, this is why you need something beyond what matters in the physical world would help answer this question. For the philosopher Immanuel Kant, what lies beyond the physical world is, what he calls, the noumenal world, in which everything there is a thing in itself (the German's translation of this is das Ding an sich, or thing- in-itself ).
Human beings cannot access the noumenal world, yet, because we use our practical reasons—i.e., the capacity for acting as a moral agent— to make sense of the world. These practical reasons include, of course, paying bills, following social convention, doing what's considered "filial," and so on; but, none of these falls outside of what Jean-Paul Sartre calls "bad faith." The fact that matter here is that these things are considered "practical" because you prescribe such value to it.
It may be practical to you because you happen to have no ability to see it otherwise. Yet, you shouldn't confused your inability to change things with the nature of the world, as such. After having watched Cold Fish, I must say that I am more certain (than ever!) that living an extraordinary life that only pays bills won't do it for me.
For one reason -- and spoiler alert -- I don't want to end up ending my life in front of my family like the protagonist does in the film. I still believe that being poor but following your own passion is better than being affluent but "unextraordinary" like the man in Cold Fish.
A short (and lame) answer to the question What Makes Life Worth Living would be something about finding joy in the process of balancing the four towers to which you have to divide your time, attention, and space in order to sustain your life. This answer is lame because, as you also know, it's easier said than done. So, instead of that, I would like to offer my answer. What makes my life worth living is the fact that I know that I am free.
By being free, I don't have to hold on to what Jean-Paul Sartre calls "bad faith," or to what the society believes to be good for me. I am free to decide whatever I think is more meaningful for me to engage in; therefore, I don't have to live my life in an unextraordinary way. True. I also have to pay bills. Ideally, I would like to live in the woods like Henry David Thoreau.
I can, actually, and I will probably do that soon (I am actually looking for the right woods at the moment). As of now. I am still content with paying bills, because it also means that I am being responsible for my own action. Being free doesn't mean you have to have the full control of your physical life and therefore have the natural right to do anything you want.
"Being free" means you are free to do anything you want as long as you are content with, and will take full responsibility for the consequences of your own action. Immanuel Kant, again, frames freedom as the right to have the full autonomy over your own self, which, the philosopher Michael Sandel in his bestseller Justice describes it as follows: When we act autonomously, according to a law we give ourselves, we do something for its own sake, as an end in itself.
We cease to be instruments of purposes given outside us. This capacity to act autonomously is what gives human life its special dignity. It marks out the difference between persons and things." In a big city like Shanghai, now that I come to think of it, I am free, as an autonomous being, to do many things I want to do because I have the consumer society to support me.
I don't have to harvest my own agricultural produce, and don't have to cut down trees by myself so that I won't be freezing to death. So, the law that I set for myself is the law of reciprocity, gratitude, and responsibility toward not only my fellow human beings but the environment as a whole. I want to be able to also support it so that it will continue producing consumer's products and services that would allow me to be even freer -- therefore, I pay my bills.
What makes my life worth living is simply because I always make everyday of my life different from the precious days. The secret here is to be thankful to have another in life to live, and see how you evolve, as a reciprocal, gratitous, and responsible being. I don't rely on what I think I already know, and I don't simply stick to what I think I already know. If I can change, things can change too.
If things can change, then why stick to the same old methods of comprehending the world around you? Every day of my life is all about being humble to new ideas, considerate to new opinions, and respectful to others who always something different from what I know to share. What makes my life worth living is the fact that I know that I am free to learn new things every day.
My life is worth living because I don't have to tolerate people, or things, that don't make sense to me, especially the people who treat me as means to some ends. I have the full autonomy to walk away from them, and live my life with and for whom my life has a larger meaning.
What makes my life worth living is that I know that, not to sound so Kantian today, I am free to take everything as an end in itself, rather than as a means to an end. It's the feeling of being free from any social conventions that could dictate my action. I am free to not having to follow things that don't makes sense. I don't have to live in bad faith.
I am an "autonomous being" who can make rational choices, even though if those choices are prearranged for me -- nothing is wrong with choosing the prearranged choices as long as they work with the law that you have set for yourself to follow. It's not the case that everything prearranged is bad for free will. I think it's misleading to think so, in fact.
Free will is our ability to exercise our reason "freely." What it means by "free" is not the condition of not being under the control or in the power of another -- we still have to force ourselves to accept the fact that we can't escape the law of gravity, the absolute governing maxim of nature, and so on.
Being free also doesn't mean that we can simply act or be done as one wishes -- the absolute free will is to have the respect for the dignity of the existence and presence of other human beings. Even though if I am free to kill other people without having to bare any consequences whatsoever, I, still, will not do it. That law that you set for yourself to follow, as Kant argues, is the law that predicates on the absolute respect for human species.
That law is the genuine moral knowledge -- or what Kant would call a synthetic a priori knowledge, or the knowledge that is not bound by the inert definition, and does not require our unreliable subjective experience to come to grip with it. What makes my life worth living is the fact that I have people for whom I want to live -- the people who don't treat me as a means to an end.
In other words, what makes my life worth living is the fact that I am living it.
post Day 34: Waking Life Tue, 29 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Probably one of the most difficult films I have watched lately, Waking Life is. As a response to my last post, one of my students suggested this film. He probably knew a little about my obsession with dream interpretation. The film is visually fascinating. The story line is pretty straightforward -- a man got hit by a car, and then transferred into the state of unconscious, in which he lived in perpetual lucid dreaming.
What make the film utterly interesting is how his lucid dreams are not just random collages of his previous random encounters, but very specific meetings, conversations, with people from whom he then learned about the meaning of life. Beginning with the importance of existentialism from a college professor whose lecture he was attending, neither he or us viewers realized yet whether this was a dream, and that many of them were to follow.
Only until he was no longer himself, but was living in someone else's female body talking about "identity" that he -- as well as us -- began to realize that this couldn't be real. At the beginning, it seems as though he could have been a curious student going around the city in Texas knocking on the doors of former professors' houses who could educate (or re-educate) him about the meaning of it all.
The climax was when he was talking to a guy at a pinball arcade, who told him a story of writer who managed to write a bestseller so fast that he himself was scared of the fact that the story line may not be a direct product of his brain, but was given to him by someone else. A few months he then realized that the story line was, in fact, his own future. How did he access it?
Something must have bent the space-time continuum that enabled him to live in the body of his future. This was the climax of the film, and the very zenith point of the protagonist's search for his destiny. There was not any, the answer was, but the fact that he was learning so much about how might he have lived his life differently was, rather, meaningful.
The irony, however, is that he was learning about the meaning of it all in his dream, and no matter how corporeal the knowledge he was acquiring through meeting these random people was, he wasn't going to get to use them because he might have been killed by the car accident and therefore he was not able to wake up into his physical life. This was not the first time someone made an awesome film about dreams.
The television show Lost, the films Mulholland Drive and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind are some of the most remarkable. For Lost, which is also one of my favorite shows of all time, it was great because it was such a long TV series (many people, though, got really upset at the end when they all realized that the whole thing was a story of souls struggling to get out of the purgatory; I was okay with it and thought that was pretty clever!).
The Matrix is one the classics. When Keanu Reeves -- I mean, Neo -- got stuck in the underground metro station after trying to bypass between the real world and the Matrix, he was in the same state of pergatory that the protagonist in Waking Life was in. But, in fact, we could also argue that the entire trilogy (Matrix, Matrix Reloaded, Matrix Revolution) was all about dreams. After watching Waking Life many may question their own existence. Are we dreaming? Are we dead?
The French philosopher René Descartes, back in the seventeenth century, has dealt with this question. Is there anything at all that we can be sure of? Skeptics of his time said no -- there's absolutely nothing we could be sure of, and that even their consciousness could have been deceived by an evil demon who wanted to make use of us for their own benefits.
The entire Matrix trilogy was about human beings trying to emancipate from the deceptive consciousness (the Matrix) that this evil demon (the machine) has created to make use of our bioenergy (heat from human body), and proving the existence of reality outside of the Matrix. Descartes is credited for coining arguably the most memorable quote in philosophy and the study of consciousness: Cogito ergo sum or "I think therefore I am." This quote, unfortunately, is also one of the most misinterpreted quotes of all time.
It sounds pretty straightforward, but, the same way we should not allow the evil demon to deceive us, we sure should not let the face-value simplicity of the quote mislead us. Descartes coined the term to defend philosophy against the skeptics of his time who were making the universal argument that we weren't capable of coming up with anything philosophically meaningful simply because we just couldn't trust anything -- the evil demon was winning. By telling these skeptics "I think therefore I am," he's saying they're wrong.
If Descartes spoke English he may have said, "we can question anything, but the only thing that we can't question is simply the fact that we are questioning. " So, for Descartes, we know that we are not being tricked because we are still able to question our existence. An evil demon wouldn't allow us to undermine their authority like that. So, what would be the instance or situation in which we usually don't question the reality? I can think of one: In our dreams, we don't seem to question.
Anything could happen in your dream. People who have long past could be walking on the street and you won't even think that's weird. You could be in another person's body talking, and you would not even think that's unnatural, and so on. But something of a quandary is the fact that we also don't seem to exercise our ability to question that much neither.
So, perhaps, the skeptics should be skeptical about their dreams, in which they don't question anything, rather than the reality in which they are questioning just about everything. In this sense, the father of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud is, perhaps, right that dreams could tell us more about reality than the reality itself -- simply because we tend to question, censor, and problematize reality too much. Often what is important is something we don't have to question or censor.
When we question things or censor things, we also question and censor our own existence, and that could be a useful exercise to understand the use of reason. But when it comes to using the medicine to solve the mystery of human's consciousness in order to cure hysteria, it's much easier for the clinical psychologists and the psychoanalysts to know exactly about those things that you don't question, rather than the things that you question. Whoever knows me well knows that I used to keep a dream diary.
I did so until the summer of 2013 when I started doing my fieldwork in Shanghai, and I had to decide between spending the precious morning observing and studying the urban neighborhood on which my doctoral dissertation was based, or writing my dream diary. Anyone in their right mind would probably prioritize writing about work over writing about dreams, I thought to myself. My decision? I decided to do both.
I could not make up my mind to give up writing my dream diary completely, so whenever I got up in the morning I tried to write down as much (and as fast) as I could by hand onto a piece of paper before I got interrupted by the social activities in the neighborhood that demanded my attention.
Years of writing down dreams have taught me that the best way to capture the memory of the dream before it disappears is to try not to move my head at all while writing. This may not be the best way to get up in the morning according to science. I began to write down my dream in a hardcover Moleskin diary when I was a student at Oxford. It was there that I developed my own techniques of capturing my dreams.
One of them was to doodle, draw, and write whatever came to mind as much as possible without concerning about the coherence of the story line, and the construction of the narratives. The memory of the dreams faded very fast, and the more I moved my head around the faster it faded. So, the best way to capture it was to write while my head was still laying down on the pillow.
So, I had a diary right next to me with a fountain pen, which was the only instrument I could write comfortable with.
As soon as my consciousness woke me up in the morning, and that I realized that whatever situation I was in was a dream, I would try not to clear my mind but to use as little energy as possible to grab the fountain pen on the side of my pillow (my head was still on the pillow) and while I was still side-sleep on the pillow I would write down as much as I could on the diary.
Usually, I would doodle, draw, and most importantly, write down a few keywords, which would be anything, ranging from the people I saw in the dream, places that I was in, situations or events, or whatever, because those were just about enough for me to recall parts of the dream, and writing them down as fragments allowed me to move on quickly to write something else. Dreams are never meant to be reconstructed neatly.
They're always fragmented, and since space and time do not matter when you are inside of your own, the law of causality and transition do not apply. When I just started to write, I made a rookie mistake by trying to connect fragmented stories in my dream through a series of transitional narratives.
For instance, I thought there had to be something that transitioned myself from one dream to another, say, from talking to my diseased grandfather in front of my own house, to being in a bowling alley with President Carter. There was no connection between them. The fact that I could talk to my diseased grandfather without me reasoning that he was already dead was already a clear sign that time and space worked differently — if they're such things at all — in dreams.
What's worse was that the more I tried to reconstruct the transitional narratives, the more other, usually more important, parts of the fading memory that were still able to be recalled fades. So, instead of being able to write down a few of those fragments, I was able to write down two of them, at most, and that was because I wasted so much of my conscious energy to reason to unreasonable.
When I sat down and wrote my daily fieldnotes at night, which was my ritual before I went to bed, I would flip through the handwritten notes about my dream that I, drew, doodled, and shorthanded down in the morning. I would then try to incorporate them (as much as I thought would make sense) into my fieldnotes. Freud once said "dreams are the royal road to the unconscious," which has the potential in revealing what I might have spotted while in the field, yet egregiously censored by my consciousness.
Since I was studying thee phenomenon that my consciousness allowed me to perceive, I thought it may be useful to try to think about whatever lied beneath that. I had a true hope that I would get at something by doing so. After having shared the early draft of this post with the student who suggested me this awesome film, I was bombarded with some great questions.
One of them was "have you ever tried lucid dreaming?" This was an interesting question because it seems as though being able to exercise your imagination -- and feel very real about it -- is something we all want to do. That said, after having spent some time thinking, I responded to him "Not intentionally. I am pretty content with my waking life.
Everything I ever want to do I can do it in my waking life (smile emoticon)." In fact, there is nothing that I really want to do that I can't do in my waking life. I mean, I don't want to fly. I don't want to be the richest man in the world who can buy anything. I don't want to travel through space or to the moon and back.
I don't want to see the whole horizontal plain of the earth turning vertically (like what we saw in the film Inception). And I don't want to have unlimited casual sex and ultimate orgy with beautiful celebrities. These seem to be a few things that most of us aspire to achieve lucid dreaming when they go to bed at night, and I don't want any of them.
In fact, if I ever arrive at lucid dreaming, I'd probably just do nothing, because doing nothing in one of the few things that I cannot do in waking life. I live in space and time -- and I have to pay my bills -- so I have to, at least, breath. Doing nothing would mean I get to live outside of space and time. Isn't that kinda cool? The other reason why I am not that interested in lucid dreaming is because I am only interested in the unconscious.
Lucid dreaming, unfortunately, won't serve as roads to the unconscious. The scenarios one come up with in lucid dreaming is still pretty much based on our understanding of the space and time in which we live in our waking life. We'll still think about the cause and effect, and the consequences of the action that we, in our waking life, would think about.
Our mental illnesses are all results of our inability to act according to our instinctive nature, simply because we, as Freud explains in the Civilization and its Discontents, are being forced by law, social norms, etc., "to be conscious" about the consequences of our action. So, living the world that consequences won't matter won't allow the layers of free association to be revealed, allowing you to connect the dots leading to a treasure map to the unconscious.
That is, in a lucid dream, we will still be exercising your consciousness to think about scenarios who wish to be in, as opposed to those that you may not be able to think that you would like to be in but actually, and deeply would make you really happy.
post Day 35: How I Come Up with a Topic about Which to Write Wed, 30 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000 I must admit that I didn't expect to receive so many comments from anyone at all about this blog. In fact, since I started this blog as a little writing project only for myself, I didn't think anyone would be reading it at all, let alone finding it worth following, or their time to spend reading it.
So, when I was notified by the system that there have been more than or thousand visitors to this blog, I couldn't really begin to express how I felt. I was happy, of course, that my writing was accessible enough for a thousand people to want to read it. I was also surprised that what I had been writing had any value at all outside of my head.
So, I'd like to thank you -- yes, you, who are reading this right now -- for supporting me and wanting to know what I think about what I think about things (pun, indeed, intended). Now, I'd like to say something about how I come up with topics to write about.
A colleague of mine said to me the other day that she thought this blog was just about my dissertation writing process, and therefore it would only include things that were directly related to my dissertation, such as random data from my field research -- and some boring academic stuff. When she found out that it was not a blog about my boring data as such, she got interested in reading it, which I thought was interesting for two reasons.
First, she wasn't wrong about the fact that this blog was meant to be a blog about how I write my dissertation -- at least that's my initial plan and that was how it was conceived. Had what I had in mind then be the idea about writing a blog about all kinds of things like what it has evolved to become, I would probably not even want to start writing it.
I would have believed, without any doubts, that it would not be a good use of my time, since I should be placing my dissertation writing above everything, and therefore should not be so generous with my time in doing other forms of writing. How this blog got swayed and became a blog about all kinds of things? That's the topic of the post today. Second, I was surprised that this colleague of mine found my blog interesting.
I was surprised that she thought that someone like me would have something to offer in terms of ideas. I never thought of myself as a thinker, scholar, writer, or anything whose work is mainly about conveying great ideas through writing. The truth is having spent a lot of time with myself during the writing process -- as I wrote in my very first post on why I write -- I have been taking full advantage of being alone.
As the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer one said, loneliness is not always a bad thing: A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free. Schopenhauer is not a particularly optimistic person, but everything he has said has some truth in it.
My colleague Mike once made a remark (before he deleted it), "of all the great philosophers who ever walked the face of the earth, you choose the most miserable one to guide you!" I couldn't agree more with Mike. One of the reason I find Schopenhauer's ideas very appealing is because his way of thinking is rather close to that of the Buddha - in the sense that Schopenhauer is making his main metaphysical point very clear that life is really is about suffering.
Life is about suffering not because he is looking at life from the perspective of the pessimist, but because he realizes how easy it is to be sad, simply because sustained happiness is not something that we, as human beings, are capable of having. Like the Buddha, Schopenhauer was surely also one of the most pessimistic human beings -- but we can also think of him, and also of the Buddha, as being, simply, realistic.
Therefore, they were the ones who arrived, before anyone else, at the stage of content -- which is the state of not being too happy, or too sad. There's a danger of being too happy, or too hopeful.
We might be happy because we have just won something (e.g., an award, a lottery, a scholarship, etc.), but once the excitement dies down, or when we no longer possess what makes us happy, we, again, become discontent simply because of one lingering question, "why can't this happiness last longer?" In the classic sociological study of the French scholar Emile Durkheim, one of the root causes of suicide in the late nineteenth century France was the fact that individualism failed to prepare modern citizens to deal with failure.
Excessive hope was another root cause -- modern society wanted us to be hopeful and everything is in our own hand because God is dead -- that we can do this and this and that. But, that said, once we find out that we can't do this and this and that as we had hoped for, waiting for us is also the excessive dreadful feeling of individual "it's our own fault" responsibility. Modern society left us with no space to rescue ourselves from sinking to the bottom of melancholy.
One might argue that Durkheim and Schopenhauer are dead, and that there thoughts might not apply to people like us who are living in the twenty-first century. Well, there's a point in that argument, but there are quite a number of contemporary social scientists and thinkers who are wrestling with the idea of happiness in the direction that is quite similar to that of Durkheim and Schopenhauer's. For instance, the sociologist William Davies believes that "Happiness is all the rage" right now.
In his new book (which I have not read but heard about it from one favorite Podcast program Philosophy Bites ) The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Wellbeing, he argues that "real happiness may be getting left on the side of the road choking on clouds of neuro-marketing and touchy-feely excess in the pursuit of happiness." In other words, we today are too careless about how we use the term happiness, therefore making it overrated.
When asking most people what it means to them, the answers are either something rather simplistically materialistic (like having a nice car, or a new iPhone) or physical (such as having sex), or something rather abstract - too abstract to the point that even the people who talk about it themselves have no idea what they are talking about. That's exactly the point that makes Schopenhauer's words resonate with me deeply: I don't believe that life is about seeking happiness.
I believe that life is about seeking the point (or place) where you feel content with, and there are different ways of getting there. The "three key points" which I think would help us to realize this fact and arrive at the point where you feel content about you life, which, according to me, are: first, to realize that we already have everything we need right now to be happy; hence, longing for more (especially material objects) will make you feel unhappy.
That said, an exception can be made about longing for more non-material productive sentiments, which, according to the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, could actually be good for you and make you a better person. Second, it is also very crucial to realize that, if you don't care about what other people are saying or thinking about you, what they are saying or thinking about you cannot affect you in any way, so, don't give a f*** too much about what other people think about you is one way to go.
An exception, of course, is that we should also constantly evaluate and re-evaluate ourselves. Some of what other people are thinking and saying about you, though might not sound very nice, might help you to become a better person. All wise women and men value the quality of positive, and constructive criticism. Would you rather be an unwise woman or man? Finally, the feeling of wanting to possess, and hold on to things is the primary source of discontent. Think about it, what can we really owe? Our body?
We'll have to let it go at some point. Our friend? Well, saying a wrong word one time could also destroy it? Material objects? Come on; gimme a break. You get the point. One could achieve these three key points by becoming a monk, or being an outcast; but one could also achieve them by constantly reminding oneself that they are critical to the state of sustained contentment.
Many readers have shared with me that the reason they find my blog interesting to read is because they can expect all kinds of discussion from it.
The whole discussion on Schopenhauer and Durkheim above is a pretext to the part about why I think loneliness is helpful. Yes, I am a master of tangent. Yes, loneliness is helpful, because it gives you the sense of sustained contentment, because when you are alone you do not except other people to be responsible for your contentment.
You, therefore, take full responsibility for who you are and what you do. As for myself, when I am alone I often read books, watch television, go biking, and so on. These are activities that make me feel content with myself. For Schopenhauer, the worst form of happiness is sex, as the writers of David L. Norton, Mary F. Kille describes in their book The Philosophy of Love: Orgasm is known as the "little death"...Orgasm ends sexual desire, which in turns end the illusion of love.
Schopenhauer writes about how we fall in love in order to have an excuse to have sex. The ultimate sexual pleasure of sex is orgasm.
But once we have reached that point, Schopenhauer observes, "we could hear the devil's laughter in the rather scary lonely moment just after orgasm." Schopenhauer feels deeply sorry for us not only because "we are all just like animals" in one sense, but also because most of time just to reach that short moment of "happiness" we lie, deceive, trick, beguile, or even physically hurt other person. How pathetic are we? Schopenhauer wonders, and I agree with him.
For that matter, by being alone I also keep myself away from sex. This post, again, was supposed to be strictly about how I come up with topics to write about, and for some reason the past few paragraphs have been about something else completely! In short, loneliness is good for intellectual incubation. It keeps you away from wanting to long for the unnecessary; it also keeps you away from wanting to hurt other people.
But what it says, also, is the fact that I have been learning about so many things that I would otherwise may not even notice while being alone writing my dissertation. For instance, my feeling about the kind of love that I would like for myself?
I had never had the brain energy to think about it, until I had to write a chapter in my dissertation about the meaning of romantic love in urban Shanghai that I began to think about myself in relation to the informants whom I had spent time observing and interviewing. So, when I discovered that what I had been writing did have something to offer, I was extremely delighted. It was a feeling of surprise, mixed together with honor, pleasure, and warm satisfaction.
I have a feeling that you understand what I mean. So, how did I come up with various topics to talk about in this blog?
So far, we have a few posts on love, a couple of the debate over which of the dominating forces between emotion and reason govern us rationale beings, a couple posts on existentialism, quite a few (here and there) on Freud and Rousseau, also quite a few on Stoicism, a couple of writings on traditionalism and modernity, and most recently, an essay on a film and how I think about what I "perceive" in my dreams (as opposed to "see" since my eyes are closed).
Everyone of these posts represents what I really think. There's no one telling me what to write, and no moral reasoning or divine power to censor me from expressing my true thoughts (except my ability to write, perhaps, since English is not my first language). In other words, I open myself up as though I am (literally in this sense) open book -- an open blog.
I always live this way anyway in my waking life, so it's not a really big deal for me actually to write about some of these mentioned unconventional (and at times controversial) issues. Often, someone would ask me a question about he or she is curious.
Being me, I would put forward my initial thought on the subject (as I also appreciate my own intuitiveness) and then, also being me, I would retract, back off, a bit, once my passionate intuition has done its job, to really start thinking rationally about what I just put forward. That's when I sit down and write my blog.
So, for instance, when a friend asked me about love -- "what is love?" -- I immediately answered "it is a feeling, and therefore it is not something external, or materialistic to us." Unlike "things," "objects," "facts," "rules and norms," love is internal to us because you simply can't point to it and say "there it is -- love." It is inside of you, and because of that not all of us understand love in the same way.
Some might think of it -- feel it -- as the essential pretext of sex (so that they can deceive themselves to believe that the painful, smelly, and unhygienic intercourse that they engage is not so meaningless). Some might think of love as the part of a whole traditional norm, or a precondition of marriage. Some may think of it as a biological chemistry that makes you want to go extra miles in convincing yourself that your life has a meaning after all.
Some -- especially the stupidest of all -- may even think that love is materialistic -- "you can feel it when someone is buying you a new iPhone," for instance. These were things that I later on discussed in my own head, with sometimes helps from Internet research and conversation with friends (in which case, I'd credit their contributions of they would let me).
As I mentioned before, even those who are not my friends can also be my teachers because I can also learn from them how not to be so mindless, or, simply stupid. So, in short, in writing a response to questions that make me feel as though I want to dig deeper, I get to explore my own intuition, and do more research into reasons in relation to my own sensibility. This, that's how I come up with the topics. P.S.
I just want to add a few more thoughts here. As a lifelong Buddhist and someone who found Schopenhauer's ideas resonate deeply with me, I am not a particularly pessimistic folk to be around (am I?). I have actually heard the opposite. For me, I think their ideas are not meant to be thought of as social, but virtue ethics centered around the development of an individual.
I believe in their ideas because they make me want to get up in the morning, give my all to my work, and get back home at night to recharge so that another day to give it all to what I love could conveniently arrive. It gives me the meaning of living in the present.
post Day 36: Worst Mistakes People Make in Their 20s Thu, 31 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000 My colleague Mike -- yes, the same Mike with whom hitherto engaged regarding our different understanding of Schopenhauer and the Buddha in my last post -- shared an interesting article on his wall today, and that is about, as the title of this post suggests, the worst mistakes people make in their 20s.
In my last post, I put forward "the three methods" to be content with life: be happy with what you already have, don't care too much about what other people say or think about you, and avoid possessing anything or becoming a possession -- an object -- of anyone at all. Now that I get to think about it, however, the first and the third methods are related. To be happy with what you have, in a way, is to not want to take in more materialistic stuff.
Anyway, I failed all of these when I was in my 20s. During the years 2002 - 2012 (my 20s), I thought my life was far from being respectable.
So, I would do whatever -- even to go extra miles without thinking about the moral consequences of my action -- to gain other people's respect either by possessing what they believed a respected person should possess, or by doing (now I think of it, totally meaningless) things that those guys somehow believed to be the benchmark of a successful life of a man in his 20s. I was totally wrong.
So, my debate with my colleague Mike on Facebook, this time, was less fierce, because both of us could somewhat agree that we both did not do very well in our 20s. I, in particular, would like to go so far as to say that had philosophy been a part of my life earlier (i.e., in my 20s), I'd be much more careful with how I'd spent my life then.
For instance, I didn't know what it mean to be "free," and I simply thought to be free was to be able to do whatever I wanted. That's deadly wrong. Doing whatever I wanted was not good for me, and because my parents and people around me also wanted me to exercise my freedom, they did not save me from myself. I did all kinds of bad things. I lied to people just to take advantage of them without thinking about consequences of my action (I was free, yah?).
By thinking that being free was separate from being moral, I may have destroyed a few people's lives (which I actually don't know since I have not been in touch with them). In short, I did so many things that I have been regretting about, -- and am still regretting today because I thought "I was free." I do not want to be free from morality.
I wanted people -- who know more than me -- to tell me what was right, and what was wrong even if that would mean that I would be following orders external to me. These people don't have to be philosophers or anything. They could either someone older than me, therefore had seen more, or simply someone more knowledgeable because they did not spend so much time taking detours in life mistakenly thinking that those detours were freedom.
But I was young then, and therefore (almost by definition) stupid, I thought being free meant to listen to no one and to exercise my freedom by doing the opposite of what the society tried to tell me to do. Sometimes, I must say, that the society was not 100% right and in that case I was happy that I didn't just follow what it told me to do.
On the other hands, many estvalished norms were there because they were helpful in creating a society in which its members could interact with one another with respect and could trust each other. To be free, now I know, is to chained to moral values. We only kid ourselves that we are free simly because we act in whatever we want. That's not free -- that's being chained to stupidity, immaturity, and the lack of moral sensibility.
Had I begun my quest to be free by asking the most fundamentally important question: "to be free from what?" Then, the meaning of being free could be very well different from simply to be able to do whatever I felt content with doing.
My answer to that question is the same as that of the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant, and the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre (Rosseau also writes something interesting, but when it comes to something interesting about freedom I prefer the systems that Kant and Sartre have developed). That is, I want to be free, but only from my natural inclination -- the natural drive to lie, hurt, deceive, and trick people just to benefit myself.
I, moreover, want to be free from the thinking that things have to be a certain way, and shut our doors to other options, or what Sartre calls "bad faith." Being free from this way of thinking would need a little more courage, but it's well worth it, my dear readers. I want to also be completely free from the myth that somehow the universe will solve the problem for me.
I want to live a life that is "meaningfully free," because I am free to set up a moral system by which I would like to live my life, and able to follow it. The other way to support it is to be extend the notion of freedom into what free beings often don't do, which is to "live my life to serve others." In short, we tend to think of freedom as something rather individual and indepedent, but that is a selfish way to think about freedom.
I also believe that the absolute form of freedom is to be free to help others. We don't have to be chained to the ideas that our lives are only for ourselves. Before I get to that point, let's talk about the list that Richard Feloni, The Independent columnist, has complied. Here's the list (and I think it's worthwhile, especially if you are in your 20s to go through each of the item on this list one by one).
I will also add my thoughts to those I think I may have something to add. 1) They neglect their health. My father died one year after he had retired from his day to day job, at 62. The reason? He didn't care about his health when he was young. He was a chronic smoker; and he may have realized that was not healthy, and quit by the time he was 40 -- but that was too late.
The lasting effect of which to his body made his life miserable for the next two decades. I remember so well how frequently he visited a hospital every week. How much he coughed, and how much he felt uncomfortable in his own body because he sometimes couldn't sleep because of the thick saliva in his throat that he couldn't get rid of.
Growing up in the same house, I knew very well how painful it's to suffer from not being able to breath (and in the sense, the most fundamental aspect of having a life is breathing, isn't it?) thanks to my father. So, by the time he got to 50 year of age the doctor had to begin to prepare him for the worst, which came just eleven years after that physical diagnosis that his lungs and heart were failing. 2) They equate happiness with money.
And therefore, as many (including Dalai Lama ) have said doing all kinds of things that are bad for their health and their time to make money, just to find out that they won't actually have the chance to turn them into happiness.
I was like that too, until I realized that I couldn't use the money I had to buy happiness - which, to me, when I was in my 20s was to take my father on a trip because he liked to travel -- because by the time that I had accumulated enough money to do so, my father was already dead.
So, I had wasted so much time making and saving money for the person whom I loved, just to realize, in a hard way, that I could have spent those time with him and be happy right away. Now that he's dead, it doesn't matter anymore how much money I have. 3) They give up when things get tough. I guess I don't have anything to add to this because I never give up.
I don't take things for granted when they are easy, and I don't give up when they are too hard. I solider on to test the limit of myself. Moving on. 4) They let others define them. Right. This is the true kiss of death. Young men and women, please don't let anyone tell you what you should be or should do, who you love or should love, and what to do with your own body.
By letting yourself being succumbed into others' object of deliberation, you are subjecting yourself to "bad faith," and that will be the end of it -- I mean, the end of your life since it will no longer be meaningful. You will no longer see the need to be free, and will be spend the rest of your life doing things that will only lead to slow death. Also read Day 28: I Was Just Lucky. 5) They are impatient. I was young, and I was impatient.
I thought I had everything, including the privilege to not having to wait. The attitude costed me a fortune. At one time, when the global economy was still doing okay, I thought I could "bypass" all the rites of passage to get at where I'd like to be, simply by taking out loans. Many people had spent years to earn enough to go abroad. I didn't have that patient, and decided to take out a lot of money from the bank to pay for my own path. The result?
The economic downturn hit the whole world very badly (in 2008) and my debts increased threefold. I had to spend almost 5 years after that to pay off my debts. 6 +7) They try to please everyone + They think all friendships can last forever. Yes. We can't please everyone. That's just not possible. Even if we think are can, we can't, and that's because we are not in control of what other people think. As simple as that.
The only mind that you are in control of is your own, and the best advise is to stick to what you believe is the best way to follow your own system of morality. Some people might not understand you at first, and they might never will, but that's the path that you have chosen. It could be that it's their false -- it's their loss -- to not be pleased by you, and they might or might not know that. But there's nothing you can do about it.
Friendship, also, doesn't last forever. Sometimes we come to the point that we can't agree. I have all the tolerance of differences, as long as it's the beliefs that are not egregiously in direct conflict with my own moral standards, which is actually not that high actually. All in all, I can be friends with anyone who believe that we might not be able to change the world, but we can do our part to make it better." That's the foundation of my moral standards.
I did "unfriend" (in real life) a number of people who did not share with me this very basic foundation. So, friendship is important, but you shouldn't let yourself sink that low neither if the way in which your friend thinks about his or her role in the society is in direct conflict with yours. Sooner or later, either both of you will do whatever just to serve your own self- interest, or you will no longer be friends. By the way, do savor, and keep the good memories though.
So, live by your own moral standards, play by your own moral rules. Also see Day 35: How I Come Up with a Topic about Which to Write. 8) They think moving somewhere new will solve their problems. Maybe it can; and maybe it can't. I actually think it can. It depends on the nature of your problem.
I have been moving around a lot -- not to run away from my problem though -- and every time I am in a new place, the way I think about my problem changes. I believe there's a merit in getting out of the place with which you feel familiar, and move your body and soul into a new terrain that might make you feel as though your problem isn't that intense, bad, or difficult. So, in fact, I have to disagree with this point.
I think moving somewhere new could help solving your problem. It might not change the problem, but it could change the way you see the problem and that could mean a lot. 9) They create bubbles around themselves. See Day 31: Why Modesty is Bad for the Society. 10) They see things in black and white. Yes, you shouldn't. Most of the things we see in the world aren't in black and white, so why should you be seeing them in black and white to begin with?
The true answer, usually, lies in the grey area. In one episode of the Philosophize This podcast, the narrator Stephen West talks about the two opposing viewpoints of Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine on how society should progress and implement change. While Burke advocated the slow and gradual "don't fix it if it ain't broken" kind of change, Paine only accepted "fast pace and all at once" revolution-styled kind of change as the only way to solve any kinds of problem.
They are both right, despite the fact that only Burke was thought as being "on the right" then (pun, yes, intended). Paine here represented "the left" who couldn't see that as the solution because most of the problems, to him, are deep-rooted and therefore the only way to solve them is to re-do the entire foundation. The thing is we are both left and right depending on the situation we are facing -- well, we have both the left and the right hand. Each hand has their use.
Sometimes we'd like gradual changes, and sometimes we believe that re-structuring the whole problem is the only way to fix the problem in long-term. Yet, even though sometimes we know that we need a structural change, but still prefer the slow and gradual change because we don't have the means (e.g., money) to go ahead with the face pace one, so we do whatever we can and work with whatever we have.
And sometimes we know that slow changes are better, but we have to go ahead with the face pace program because most of the people would not buy the idea of the slow changes. Also see Day 34: Waking Life. 11) They look for their "soul mate." See Day 15: All About Nana 12) They try planning years in advance. See Day 26: On Death. 13) They think they're the only one of their friends struggling. You are not. We all have our own problems.
Of the Standard of Beauty