Link of the day: "How to Live Unhappily Ever After"

A few weeks ago, I read this essay by Augusten Burroughs in the Wall Street Journal about how happiness is overrated.

In particular, I like this passage:

The truth about healing is that heal is a television word. Someone close to you dies? You will never heal. What will happen is, for the first few days, the people around you will touch your shoulder and this will startle you and remind you to breathe. You will feel as though you will soon be dead from natural causes; the weight of the grief will be physical and very nearly unbearable.

Eventually, you will shower and leave the house. Maybe in a year you will see a movie. And one day somebody will say something and it will cause you to laugh. And you will clamp your hand over your mouth because you laughed and that laugh will break your heart, it will feel like a betrayal. How can you laugh?

In time, to your friends, you will appear to have recovered from your loss. All that really happened, you'll think, is that the hole in the center of your life has narrowed just enough to be concealed by a laugh. And yet, you might feel a pressure for it to be true. You might feel that "enough" time has passed now, that the hole at the center of you should not be there at all.

I imagine that there are some depressed people out there who simply get better and better at lying, at covering up their darkness, for the sake of maintaining their social life and relationships. Even the closest, most understanding of friends will eventually tire of negativity.

Augusten Burroughs is the famed author of Running with Scissors -- which I have not read.

Claire Danes on long distance relationships

Now that Homeland is over for the season, I have nothing better to do than search for "Homeland Showtime" and "Claire Danes" in Google News. Well, it wasn't a complete waste of time. I came across a transcript of an interview with Claire Danes on the Piers Morgan talk show (CNN).

I found this part interesting, where Claire discusses how tricky it is to maintain a relationship long-distance.

MORGAN: And you've been married what, two years now?
DANES: Yes, two years.
MORGAN: Spent any of that time together or was it basically --
DANES: We've been really fortunate, actually, in the formative stages of our courtship, of our relationship, we -- our schedules were kind of amazingly compatible. Lately, we've not been so lucky. I've been, obviously, filming a series, and he's doing a play in New York right now. So he's stationed there.
But we talk a lot. We text a lot. We send each other photos of our toes. I mean, I don't know.
MORGAN: Your toes?
DANES: I don't know. Dumb stuff. We try to make it --
(CROSS TALK)
DANES: I think it's dangerous when you go into a reporting mode, when you just kind of list the things you've done that day. Sometimes you just have to act as if you're with each other and not say anything terribly significant.

I've done that a lot, where I go into "reporting mode." Maybe I can try what Claire suggests and talk to someone over the phone as if they were there with me.

Link of the day: How to be a good conversationalist

I recently read an outstanding post about "The Art of Conversation: How to Avoid Conversational Narcissism. The authors deconstruct how conversations work. A good conversation has give and take. You try to grab the other person's attention sometimes and other times you support that person. I found this post really useful because my social skills aren't the best. Between being glued to the computer and writing electronic messages, I don't have enough social contact to practice. It's good to be reminded of what we should and shouldn't do in conversations.

According to researcher Charles Derber, one can answer a statement with either a shift-response or a support-response. An example of a shift-response would be changing topics to put the focus on yourself. An example of a support-response is to ask a followup question related to what the person said. A good conversationalist will answer with more support-responses whereas a conversational narcissist will keep throwing out shift-responses until the other person gives in. Conversational narcissism can be even more subtle. The narcissist can withhold support-responses or providing minimal acknowledgement ("uh huh") until the other person feels like they are being boring and allows the narcissist to take the floor.  My discussion is abstract, so read the post to see some good examples.

The point is not to rail about the conversational narcissists you've wasted your time on, but to recognize how easy it is to be a narcissist yourself. We should be careful about our speech and strive towards sharing a good conversation.

Thought of the day: Different kinds of maturity

I've started to think that you can attain maturity through two channels: 1) experience and 2) learning indirectly through media like books, internet discussions, etc.

People who are thoughtful and empathetic but shy and/or anti-social tend to pick up maturity through #2.  I think I fall into this category.  Learning indirectly (method #2) is efficient.  You can learn a lot very quickly.  The problem is that it's very hard to develop emotional resilience by learning about other people's experiences.  You can read about what it's like to suffer a divorce or a life-threatening illness, but that can only prepare you so much.

People like me can be mature and seem exceptionally mature for our age, but when we run into a difficult situation, then our lack of experience is exposed and basically, we're screwed.

However, I'm not recommending that people should stop reading and learning about other people's experiences (method #2).  Direct personal experience is great, but it is very limited.  There simply isn't time to live in different places, travel to every country of the world, try out different careers, etc.  I would be wary of people who claim that experience is king and that reading is a waste of time.

Simply put, we need both experience and learning to become a wise, mature person.

Link of the day: "The Illusion of Asymmetric Insight"

I read a really nice psychology article today about how easy it to misjudge people. As a family friend once told me, you can't truly know a person unless you live with them for an extended period of time.

The first section of the article describes a famous psychology experiment called the "Robbers Cave Experiments."

These two tribes consisted of 22 boys, ages 11 and 12, whom psychologist Muzafer Sherif brought together at Oklahoma’s Robber’s Cave State Park. He and his team placed the two groups on separate buses and drove them to a Boy Scout Camp inside the park – the sort with cabins and caves and thick wilderness. At the park, the scientists put the boys into separate sides of the camp about a half-mile apart and kept secret the existence and location of the other group. The boys didn’t know each other beforehand, and Sherif believed putting them into a new environment away from their familiar cultures would encourage them to create a new culture from scratch.

After finding out about each other's existence, the two tribes each labelled the other group "the enemy." I had never heard of this experiment before and it was very cool to find out about a mild version of Lord of the Flies but a real-life situation as opposed to a famous work of fiction.

The article goes on to talk about people having different personas.

The idea is this: You put on a mask and uniform before leaving for work. You put on another set for school. You have costume for friends of different persuasions and one just for family. Who you are alone is not who you are with a lover or a friend. You quick-change like Superman in a phone booth when you bump into old friends from high school at the grocery store, or the ex in line for the movie. When you part, you quick-change back and tell the person you are with why you appeared so strange for a moment. They understand, after all, they are also in disguise. It’s not a new or novel concept, the idea of multiple identities for multiple occasions, but it’s also not something you talk about often. The idea is old enough that the word person derives from persona – a Latin word for the masks Greek actors sometimes wore so people in the back rows of a performance could see who was on stage.

Then the article hits on a point I like very much -- that we don't know people that well, even our friends.

That is why we shouldn't judge people. And if we decide to attribute fixed traits to a person, we should only do so after an extended period of observation and interaction.

How well do you know your friends? Pick one out of the bunch, someone you interact with often. ... Do you know what they want, what they are likely to do in most situations, what they will argue about and what they let slide? Do you notice when they are posturing and when they are vulnerable? Do you know the perfect gift? ... Research shows you probably feel all these things and more. You see your friends, your family, your coworkers and peers as semipermeable beings. You label them with ease. You see them as the artist, the grouch, the slacker and the overachiever. ... You can, you believe, put yourself in their shoes and predict their behavior in just about any situation. You believe every person not you is an open book. Of course, the research shows they believe the same thing about you.

The author cites research supporting this generalization of human psychology.

• Iceberg experiment: People were to rate how well they knew another person by saying how much of an iceberg they could see above the water. People thought they could see most of their friends' icebergs, but they didn't think their friends could see much of their own iceberg.
  
• Describe a time when you feel most like yourself: When people were asked to describe a time when they felt most like themselves, 78% of the time they talked about "something internal and unobservable like the feeling of seeing their child excel or the rush of applause after playing for an audience." When the same people were asked to name situations that best illustrated their friends' personalities, they only mentioned internal feelings 28% of the time. Typically, they would describe actions like: "Tom is most like Tom when he is telling a dirty joke. Jill is most like Jill when she is rock climbing." This makes sense because we can only infer people's feelings by looking from the outside.
  
• Sentence completion: People were asked to complete sentences. When asked about the meaning of the sentence completions, people stated that most of the time the completions revealed very little about them. Yet when the same people were asked what they thought of other people's sentence completions, they claimed to see bits of the other person's personality. "They looked at the words and said the people who filled them in were nature lovers, or on their periods, or were positive thinkers or needed more sleep."

What conclusions should we draw from these experiments? The author says it best:

The illusion of asymmetric insight makes it seem as though you know everyone else far better than they know you, and not only that, but you know them better than they know themselves. You believe the same thing about groups of which you are a member. As a whole, your group understands outsiders better than outsiders understand your group, and you understand the group better than its members know the group to which they belong. The researchers explained this is how one eventually arrives at the illusion of naive realism, or believing your thoughts and perceptions are true, accurate and correct, therefore if someone sees things differently than you or disagrees with you in some way it is the result of a bias or an influence or a shortcoming. You feel like the other person must have been tainted in some way, otherwise they would see the world the way you do – the right way. The illusion of asymmetrical insight clouds your ability to see the people you disagree with as nuanced and complex. You tend to see your self and the groups you belong to in shades of gray, but others and their groups as solid and defined primary colors lacking nuance or complexity.

Quote of the day: Someone to listen

It is not easy to be supportive, be a good listener, and give good advice. I wish more people realized that. I found this nice essay about this subject, written by Jon Cousins (I think):

Things don't always go as you'd wish. Life's like that.

But when they don't, it can help to talk about them. The very act of speaking about your feelings can help you process them. It can help you rationalize your situation and solve your problems.

Generally we know this.

Unfortunately, who you talk to plays a big part in the outcome of this process.

Tell the right person and you'll walk away from the conversation with shoulders raised and spirits lifted. Tell the wrong person, however, and you might feel worse than you did before you began.

A key to success could be to find someone with that relatively rare combination of patience, good listening skills and the ability to be reasonably non-judgemental (yet of course not so bland that they have no opinions of their own).

Few have these talents, all too many will instead be eager to dictate what you should do. Ask them, and they'll tell you in no uncertain terms.

Better perhaps to hold your breath until you're with that person who lets you talk, while they simply listen.

You know who they are. Cherish them. And hang onto them because they're worth their weight in gold.

Ending it all

It is difficult to understand when someone, who seems perfectly fine on the outside and has so much to live for, takes their own life. The news blurb says, "X was depressed."

Severe depression doesn't have much to do with the much more common feeling of being down, which we also call depression. The symptoms bear similarities, but the underlying causes are completely different. It's a little like thinking that a person with a terrible cough has the flu when they really have lung cancer.

Feeling down is caused by real things happening in the real world. Severe depression is an inescapable, suffocating state of mind where it seems like the simple act of living is a trigger for feeling down. Maybe something bad happened a long time, but it's long past.

Severe depression is a heavy, invisible burden. You can't tell that someone is severely depressed. It's lung cancer that looks like a bad flu. And the sufferer can't tell anyone. It's extremely difficult to understand what's it's like unless you've been through it yourself. Few people understand it. They don't want to hang around with some moody, troubled person who drags them down. But even if a person has supportive, sympathetic friends and family, it doesn't change the hard reality -- the sufferer has to live with painful feelings every hour of every day. Friends help a lot, but they can only carry a little of the burden. The sufferer is mostly alone.

For those people in the news blurbs, maybe there came a time when the burden became too heavy to bear. Unfortunately, it makes all too much sense that any sane person would want to end it all.

What I've learned

1. Physics should be fun, like a video game. When I started doing physics, I thought it was a religious calling and that physics was all about doing important things. Looking back, I realize that I invented the idea of a religious calling because I was afraid of my parents disapproving of me doing physics. I went to an elite college where the professors were all super-competitive and serious about science. My motivation for doing physics was horribly warped. A friend of mine told me that when she was excited about research, she would work enthusiastically all night. She said, "It's like playing a video game."
   
2. Collaborate with a good friend. Science is so much more fun if you can hang out with your friends and do research at the same time! By friend, I mean someone of your level, not your advisor. When I came to grad school, I wasn't used to working with people my age. I had only worked with professors and senior postdocs. Relationships with senior people tend to be very formal. If you want to grow as a scientist, you need to have some freewheeling discussions where anything goes and no one feels embarrassed about anything.
   
3. If you can, find a friend of similar cultural background and gender. This is extremely important if you are a minority. Your cultural majority friends may be the most well-meaning people in the world, but they can't see your whole perspective, only a part of it. It took me a long time to learn this, because I had a very strong ideal that everyone should be culturally neutral, gender neutral, and age neutral. I used to look down on the "women in science" meetings because I thought "these women are bunch of wimps, can't they toughen up?" (The other reason I disliked "women in science" meetings was because the majority of the women were of a different culture from me. So I was a minority within a minority.) The unfortunate reality of the world is that it is much easier for women to be close friends with other women. Similarly, it is much easier for people of the same cultural background to be friends. I was on a hockey team where no matter how much I tried, I never belonged. My teammates were women, but we didn't have anything else in common: different age, different education, different cultural background. Sometimes, a good commonality to bond over is simply sharing the experience of being a minority.
   
4. Don't work through deep depression. It's true that when something bad happens, you should keep going to work and keeping up the routine. But don't do this for deep depression. It's the equivalent of trying to run a 10K race on a broken leg. You only make things worse. Not only do you fail to accomplish anything, you will end up destroying your confidence.
   
5. When you are in trouble, make sure you talk to people who can *actually* help you. These seems kind of obvious, but when you are in a panic, you usually go to whoever you feel most comfortable with. That person may not be someone who can actually help you. If you are having problems in the workplace, you need to talk to people at your current workplace, not your old workplace. If you are having problems with family, you need to talk to people who know your family well or have the same cultural background as your family.
   
6. If you are have a multi-cultural heritage and/or unconventional upbringing, life is even more confusing. My nationality and ethnic background are very different. This is a classic American problem. In addition, I have a gender related problem (hard to explain). My mom was not a good role model for me, so I adopted my dad as a role model and tried to imitate him. I feel uncomfortable around conventional women, but I don't quite fit in with the boys either.
   
7. Lay down your burdens. Bad things happen to everyone, but we have to let go of the past and forgive people. I think I always knew this lesson pretty well, but I mention it for completeness.
   

[Additional note: One of my friends said my post made me sound biased towards certain types of people. I don't want to make it sound like I can only be friends with women or Asians. If I see a Hispanic male walking down the street, I don't think to myself, "Well! There is no way I can be friends with that guy." I strive to be gender-blind, race-blind, orientation-blind, age-neutral, etc. I simply notice that in hindsight, among the friends I gravitate towards most, we seem to have some strong common connection. It's almost possible that I went through a phase where I found it hard to fit in and decided out of bitterness to construct a theory to explain my troubles.]

Link of the day: Looks, 1/f distribution, myth of meritocracy

First, an old link from months ago that I forgot to post: Your looks and your inbox. OK Cupid, an online dating service, does cool statistical analyses of how your profile affects response rate. One idea to take away is that women are very harsh on men's looks. Ouch.

One of the key ideas in my research is quantum noise. So it's neat to find an article claiming that modern movies have a cut frequency that follows a 1/f distribution.

Finally, via Cal Newport and a few links, I enjoyed the following New York Magazine article on why kindergarten admissions tests are worthless. The single most interesting takeaway message is how unreliable intelligence tests are for 4 year-olds.

I wrote to [University of Iowa psychologist David] Lohman and asked what percentage of 4-year-olds who scored 130 or above would do so again as 17-year-olds. He answered with a careful regression analysis: about 25 percent.

Link of the day: How to declutter your Facebook homepage

An essential link for heavy Facebook users -- "How to De-Clutter Your New Facebook Homepage." I didn't know about the feed preferences page. There's a person who posts updates that I'm not interested in, but I don't want to hurt the person's feelings by de-friending him. So I went to the feed preferences page and put him in my "less about these friends" list.

Kristin Chenoweth on success

I've suffered greatly from a lack of female role models in my life, not just because I happen to work in technical fields. I notice that I used to idolize older men, both in media and personal life. I liked older British actors, in particular, like Sean Connery, Anthony Hopkins, and Alec Guinness. In real life, it was male teachers as father figures and mentors.

Now that I'm out of college, no longer under the pressure of constant deadlines, I take in a lot more pop culture. I find myself gravitating to young female actresses as role models. (Sadly, I just haven't found many female physicists that I connect with.) I admire Sarah Michelle Gellar (Prinze) of "Buffy" fame and more recently, Broadway actress-singer Kristin Chenoweth. They seem hard-working, grounded, and ambitious.

I enjoyed this New York Times interview with Chenoweth from 2006. A few choice bits:

She drew further criticism when she appeared in a parade of tiny bikinis in the March 2006 issue of FHM... “I’m a young woman, I like men, I’m not going to pretend to be what I’m not,” she said. “Anyway, I’ve finally graduated from the college of I Don’t Give a Hoot.” But “hoot” was not her first choice of words.

Go Kristin! I'm finally starting to get this concept but I have a lot of work to do.

“Last night,” she said, “it was this line from ‘The Apple Tree’: ‘The Really Real Acting Academy has shown me that all my films, alas, are naught but tinkling trivia, sugary, shoddy, shallow shadows. Schlock.’ How am I going to say that? How am I going to make that funny? It’s so frustrating because people say, ‘It comes so easily to her,’ or ‘She’s just playing herself.’ Well, I work my butt off. These ideas don’t come from nowhere. You have to think them up. Sometimes I think until I think my head might explode.”

I don't understand why so many Americans think that success comes easily. There is technique and practice behind everything, whether it's sports, acting, or science.

“I BeDazzle everything,” she said. “It’s a sickness.”

Apparently, Chenoweth applies stick-on rhinestones to everything. I just threw that quote in, for amusement.

“People could be so awful,” she said. “I remember once I was in the bathroom, and this basketball player girl came in and said, ‘I just want to punch you out.’ When I said, ‘How come?’ she said: ‘Because you’re happy all the time.’ And I said: ‘You know what? I’m not happy all the time. I’m human. And I’d really like to leave the bathroom now.’ That’s when I realized: Oh my God, they’re mad at me because I’m talented. Because I do something they don’t do. But they have their gifts. Why do they envy mine?” Ms. Chenoweth said she now resolves this sort of thing by cutting off contact “the minute something goes awry with me and another female.”

I don't understand why people can be so cruel. And I completely understand the statement about female drama. A female friend of mine recently told me that she wanted to only work in labs dominated by men. She had had horrible experiences with the other women in her lab.

She had experienced that star-making moment when alienation and empathy, both formerly experienced as painful, fuse into ecstatic pleasure and thus a lifelong mission. You are lifted up but also away. “I hate to say it made me a loner,” Ms. Chenoweth said, “but I did learn that there’s nobody else to rely on but you.”

I haven't become famous or successful, but I already feel like working in any competitive, creative field makes you somewhat of a loner. Creativity requires long trains of deliberation and solitude, honing your craft.

Text messaging and other forms of personal communication

Recently, I tried text messaging (for real, not for goofing around). It can actually be useful, contrary to its image as a youthful American fad (I'm told that Europeans and Asians text all the time regardless of age).

I can think of several different methods of personal communication.

• One-on-one in-person conversation
  The best way to talk to someone, but it can hard to arrange a meeting especially as people get older and busier. Also, this can be confrontational and intense, which is not desired in every situation. Examples: having dinner with a friend, taking a walk with a friend, traveling on the train with a friend.
  
• In-person conversation in a group setting
  The good thing about this method is that at least you can see the person's facial expressions. The bad thing is that there are a lot of things you can't say directly when there are people around. I find it difficult to say anything serious in these situations, so I end up making jokes. Examples: hockey locker room, waiting for a meeting to start, mingling at an apartment party.
  
• Phone conversation
  This is a very good substitute for one-on-one in-person conversations. Unfortunately, it can be just as hard to get a hold of someone on the phone as in-person. I find that the phone can be a little problematic if I'm speaking to someone who talks fast and doesn't like to be interrupted. I can't throw visual cues to get the person to slow down (actually this happens for me in in-person conversations as well).
  
• Email
  Email is mainly great for short, non-emotional conversations or for getting things done (e.g. scheduling). You don't have to interrupt someone's schedule like you do if you talk to them in person or on the phone. In fact, if you are trying to talk to a busy, unavailable person, email is the only way to get in touch. If you are having weighty conversations and email is your only means of communication, be aware of the potential for feelings to get blown out of proportion. It's altogether too easy to project things that aren't there onto skeletal words. For this reason, fights over email are horrible. My problem is that I frequently ramble over email because I'm a better writer than speaker. The flip side is that I find it easier to express how I feel over email.
  
• Text messaging
  This is a lot like email, but since people check their cell phones a lot more than email, they are more likely to pick up the message sooner. Text messaging can be very useful for check-up messages like "Did you pick up the milk?" or "Did you get my email?" If your friend is very busy and her computer is also broken (this really happened to me), text messaging is the only option. Text messaging is less intimidating and obtrusive than calling a person's cell phone. I hate to pick up voice mail sometimes, but I have no problem reading a text message. Also, it looks less rude for me to glance at my cell phone than to hold it at my ear. The downside of text messaging is that it's hard to write long messages. If you have access to a computer, you can send a text message via email.

The upshot is that when you pick a communication method, think about what you want to accomplish, think about your strengths and weaknesses as well as for the other person, and think about how long you want the conversation to be. Sometimes a 15 minute phone conversation is worth ten emails.

Next time, I'll write about public communication, including tools like Facebook, Flickr, blogging, and forums.

Update on "The disadvantages of an elite education"

Previously I composed a personal response to William Deresiewicz's piece on "The disadvantages of an elite education." In addition to my post, I also wrote directly to Dr. Deresiewicz. (I call him doctor and not professor, because he's no longer with Yale.)

Here is the text of my email sent on 29 July 2008.

Dear Dr. Deresiewicz,

I'm currently a [university name] physics graduate student and I read your essay "The Disadvantages of an Elitist Education" with great interest.

For those of us who don't want to turn into elitist zombies, what do you suggest? Your essay discusses the problems of an elitist upbringing with incredible thoroughness, but you don't propose any solutions.

Travel? Read great literature? Go camping, Thoreau-style? Take up hobbies that bring us into contact with non-elitists? Protest? (hopefully, not with GESO)

Sincerely,

[name]

Note: GESO is a Yale graduate student union which is infamous for conducting pointless protests against supposed mistreatment of Yale graduate students.

Here is Dr. Deresiewicz's response dated 2 August 2008. [He tried to respond by email, but it didn't work (?), so he sent a letter to my department mailbox!]

Dear [name],

My e-mail kept getting bounced back, so I'm sending this the old-fashioned way.

I'm glad you found my piece interesting. Your question is not easily answered. Graduate school, especially, can feel like a little bubble, and I think you need to make an effort to get outside it, maintain social and intellectual interests that go beyond your specialization. Your proposed answers are actually not bad. Obviously, knowing there's a problem and keeping your mind open are already the beginning of a solution. But it's a long-term project. I wish I could be more helpful, but I think everyone needs to find their own answer.

Yours,

Bill Deresiewicz

Link of the day: "The disadvantages of an elite education"

I recently read an essay called "The disadvantages of an elite education" written by a former Yale English professor, William Deresiewicz. The essay is a thorough and damming harangue on the Ivy League university system.

Many of the author's major points are familiar. Yale and other elite colleges are just a mill for taking the children of upper-class parents and turning out more upper-class citizens. The purpose of going to a school like Yale is to develop connections to other powerful people (Yale's Master Teas with celebrities come to mind). The students grow up to become people who can't relate to anyone who doesn't have an Ivy League degree. They are, in fact, taught that if you didn't attend an elite university, you are not worth meaningful conversation. Deresiewicz cites how at age 35, after 14 years in the Ivy League, he was unable to communicate with his plumber. Moreover, undergraduates at elite colleges are pampered and coddled to the point that they feel entitled to such treatment for the rest of their lives. The pampering naturally engenders a strong allegiance to the school brand, so that alumni donate millions and keep the system going. I'm sure there will be Ivy League alumni who take exception to these broad characterizations (and they should), but I think there is probably substantial truth to these statements.

What is my personal response to this? I went to an elite university, too, but it was an elite science and technology school. Scientists tend to be much more down-to-earth, so we avoid some of that "elitism stuff" but not all of it. In retrospect, I've noticed that quite a few of my undergraduate professors believed that their institution trained the best scientists/engineers and that other places were "lesser schools." (Yes, a professor actually said that.)

Can I talk to non-elite people? Yes. Do I feel entitled? No. I think that's a product of my family upbringing. My mom and dad always made it a point to pay attention to mail carriers, receptionists, and all the people who keep our society glued together. As for entitlement, my parents have a typical immigrant outlook which is you can always lose what you have, don't stop working. So non-entitlement was drilled into my head for years.

Deresiewicz does have some thought-provoking ideas that go beyond the usual elitism rant. These are both interesting and relevant to me.

I never learned that there are smart people who don’t go to elite colleges, often precisely for reasons of class. I never learned that there are smart people who don’t go to college at all.

I've always been surrounded by elite people. I grew up in an elite, highly-educated part of the country. I went to an elite undergraduate institution. I attend an Ivy League graduate school. It wasn't until I got to graduate school when I started to meet people who went to places like University of Kentucky. I found that there are many people who went to state schools who are smarter than people who went to elite schools like me. The reason is that people from "lesser" institutions have to work much harder to make up for the disadvantage of not having an elite degree. I also learned that it can be pretty intimidating for these same people to go to graduate school and find themselves surrounded by people with elite undergraduate degrees.

I also never learned that there are smart people who aren’t “smart.” The existence of multiple forms of intelligence has become a commonplace, but however much elite universities like to sprinkle their incoming classes with a few actors or violinists, they select for and develop one form of intelligence: the analytic... But social intelligence and emotional intelligence and creative ability, to name just three other forms, are not distributed preferentially among the educational elite. The “best” are the brightest only in one narrow sense.

The other forms of intelligence matter more and more to me as I get older. I find that I like people best when they have more than just the standard "analytic" ability. My favorite people are the ones who can talk to both the elite and the plumber, the ones who can talk to both humanists and scientists, the ones who are both outstanding scholars and charismatic leaders, the ones who can both unravel long trains of analysis and yap some down-to-earth, practical talk.

The first disadvantage of an elite education is how very much of the human it alienates you from.

I worry about this a lot. If I spend all my time being busy and working to keep up in the rat race, I have no time to talk to my family or meet new people or even see people who are my friends. In grad school, your job is to produce work and papers, so you feel constant guilt about not working. If you're not working all the time, you feel like you don't deserve to be in grad school.

If one of the disadvantages of an elite education is the temptation it offers to mediocrity, another is the temptation it offers to security. When parents explain why they work so hard to give their children the best possible education, they invariably say it is because of the opportunities it opens up. But what of the opportunities it shuts down? An elite education gives you the chance to be rich—which is, after all, what we’re talking about—but it takes away the chance not to be. Yet the opportunity not to be rich is one of the greatest opportunities with which young Americans have been blessed. We live in a society that is itself so wealthy that it can afford to provide a decent living to whole classes of people who in other countries exist (or in earlier times existed) on the brink of poverty or, at least, of indignity. You can live comfortably in the United States as a schoolteacher, or a community organizer, or a civil rights lawyer, or an artist—that is, by any reasonable definition of comfort.

It sounds really stupid, but I feel the burden of an elite education sometimes. What my parents say if I wanted to become a homemaker? (They would probably kill me.) What would my parents's friends think if I wanted to become a social worker? I know someone who got a law degree from Harvard and consequently decided she'd rather work with horses. The career track to becoming a physicist is very regimented, cut-throat, and self-absorbed. Is that really what I want? Do I want to pay my dues for 15 years and then finally have the freedom to say, do, and think what I want?

Because students from elite schools expect success, and expect it now. They have, by definition, never experienced anything else, and their sense of self has been built around their ability to succeed. The idea of not being successful terrifies them, disorients them, defeats them. They’ve been driven their whole lives by a fear of failure—often, in the first instance, by their parents’ fear of failure. The first time I blew a test, I walked out of the room feeling like I no longer knew who I was. The second time, it was easier; I had started to learn that failure isn’t the end of the world.

The professor who supervised my master's thesis said that he had students break down in tears during his undergraduate physics lab course. I have a strong fear of failure, too, and I know it comes from my parents and the environment I grew up in. Failing is hard for me, but I'm trying to learn from it. It's hard for me not to think that failure is a reflection of my character. It's not, but I think it is. Failure in my career is a major worry, but a more subtle area where failure shows up is in my relationships. Sometimes I'm afraid to make my friend unhappy, for example, asking for their help or calling them out on behavior that made me unhappy. This is an area I'm working on -- having the courage to take risks with people and not worry about the consequences as much. If the relationship breaks, it probably wasn't a very strong one in the first place.

Of all the people I know, my mom is the one person who is terrified of failure. She hikes tall mountains to prove to herself that she's strong. As she has gotten older and her body has declined, she's turned to Buddhism as a way to find peace of mind. The whole situation seems overblown to me.

But if you’re afraid to fail, you’re afraid to take risks, which begins to explain the final and most damning disadvantage of an elite education: that it is profoundly anti-intellectual... Being an intellectual means more than doing your homework. If so few kids come to college understanding this, it is no wonder. They are products of a system that rarely asked them to think about something bigger than the next assignment. The system forgot to teach them, along the way to the prestige admissions and the lucrative jobs, that the most important achievements can’t be measured by a letter or a number or a name. It forgot that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers.

Exactly. But how do you stop the hoop-jumping and more importantly, the worrying about the hoop-jumping? I'm under so much pressure; saying you should stop worrying about your career is much easier said than done.

My friend Peter has taught introductory electromagnetism several times. The classes are bi-weekly and 90 minutes long, so he usually allows for a five minute break halfway through. He told me that when he stopped class, the students would just sit in their chairs obediently. Almost no one got up. Peter also told me about a student who emailed him at the beginning of the semester and asked for a list of assignments, saying that he needed to finish all the work early so he could presumably take care of his numerous extra-curricular activities. Unbelievable. I guess this guy is not in college for a love of learning.

Being an intellectual means, first of all, being passionate about ideas—and not just for the duration of a semester, for the sake of pleasing the teacher, or for getting a good grade... Being an intellectual means thinking your way toward a vision of the good society and then trying to realize that vision by speaking truth to power. It means going into spiritual exile. It means foreswearing your allegiance, in lonely freedom, to God, to country, and to Yale. It takes more than just intellect; it takes imagination and courage. “I am not afraid to make a mistake,” Stephen Dedalus says, “even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake, and perhaps as long as eternity, too.” Being an intellectual begins with thinking your way outside of your assumptions and the system that enforces them.

Deresiewicz later suggests that going to a "second-tier" college or liberal arts college may be a lot better for a young person's human spirit. I imagine that the student body would be less "competitive," so you could spend less time on required work and more time on personal growth. I wonder if that's true. If I had chance to do it over again, maybe I would have opted for a liberal arts college. Still, I think I did pretty well as an undergraduate.

I remember finding out for the first time, in college, that I loved science. Before that, I had just been programmed by my parents and society to study. I treated math and science competitions as a competitive sport. Even with that heightened awareness, I found that it took a lot of work to have independent thoughts. My time was so consumed by problem sets that I traded socializing for deep intellectual thoughts. By deep thoughts, I mean that I would go through my lecture notes a second time and try to understand the bigger picture. Doing this made my studies so much more meaningful and as a nice side benefit, really impressed my teacher. No one told me to put in this extra time. I just knew in my gut that if I really loved physics, this is what I needed to do.

My teacher Bob was a big influence on me. He's the best physics teacher I've ever had, but that wasn't the only thing that impressed me. The campus newspaper published an interview with him. I learned that you shouldn't be afraid to "empower" yourself and seek allies to do things you think are important and true. I learned the principle of "it's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission." It's a powerful life lesson that I still use today. Using these ideas has led me into many leadership projects. I started the tradition of having undergraduates invite a colloquium speaker once and a bimonthly happy hour in my graduate department. I also tried to start an undergraduate physics study group where we think about big ideas in physics. It was only semi-successful, but I'm glad I did it.

Of course, I don't want to rest on my laurels. I expound a little amateur philosophy on my blog now and then. I've always been interested in trying to become a better person, perhaps the bildung ("upbuilding of the soul") mentioned in the essay. Maybe when I get out of this grad school rat race, I can return to some of my "trouble-making."

There’s a reason elite schools speak of training leaders, not thinkers—holders of power, not its critics. An independent mind is independent of all allegiances, and elite schools, which get a large percentage of their budget from alumni giving, are strongly invested in fostering institutional loyalty. As another friend, a third-generation Yalie, says, the purpose of Yale College is to manufacture Yale alumni. Of course, for the system to work, those alumni need money. At Yale, the long-term drift of students away from majors in the humanities and basic sciences toward more practical ones like computer science and economics has been abetted by administrative indifference... The liberal arts university is becoming the corporate university, its center of gravity shifting to technical fields where scholarly expertise can be parlayed into lucrative business opportunities.

I bemoaned the trend towards universities as corporations in a post last year. It's disturbing to see Yale and Harvard throw tons of money at building new science facilities. I can't help thinking that the only purpose is to get more grant money, which will keep the wealth engine going. You may recall an infamous quote from the president of Harvard:

"One thing we all must worry about — I certainly do — is the federal support for scientific research. And are we all going to be chasing increasingly scarce dollars?" says Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard's new president. Not that Faust seems worried about Harvard or other top-tier research schools. "They're going to be—we hope, we trust, we assume—the survivors in this race," she says. As for the many lesser universities likely to lose market share, she adds, they would be wise "to really emphasize social science or humanities and have science endeavors that are not as ambitious" as those of Harvard and its peers.

The most interesting section of Deresiewicz's essay comes at the very end, where he discusses the reactions of undergraduates in his literature classes to philosophic questions.

What does it mean to go to school at a place where you’re never alone? Well, one of them said, I do feel uncomfortable sitting in my room by myself. Even when I have to write a paper, I do it at a friend’s. That same day, as it happened, another student gave a presentation on Emerson’s essay on friendship. Emerson says, he reported, that one of the purposes of friendship is to equip you for solitude. As I was asking my students what they thought that meant, one of them interrupted to say, wait a second, why do you need solitude in the first place? What can you do by yourself that you can’t do with a friend?

Is this really true? If so, what a bizarre cultural phenomenon. Hmm, I'm not sure what to say to that. Being a scientist requires lots of solitude, both to get your work done and to concentrate on long trains of analysis. If anything, I have too much solitude.

However, I know a lot of people who want to live in an elite, rich community like Seattle, Boulder, the San Francisco Bay Area, Boston, or Manhattan. That's where many elite undergraduates end up. Sure, the culture there is ten times more rich than other places, but if you want to live in such a place, you must have money. And you earn that much money you have to join the elitist, careerist rat race. What's wrong with Kansas? (Pure speculation, as I've never lived in the Midwest.) I do think people need to find the courage to create and live an independent life, rather than perpetually hanging out with a crowd raised like themselves. It's not the end of the world if you don't live in San Francisco. A disclaimer here: There's nothing wrong with wanting to live in New York City or Boston. Of course, I want to live in those places, but I'm open to living somewhere else, too.

In some further analysis, Deresiewicz goes on to say:

“To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion?”: my student was in her friend’s room writing a paper, not having a heart-to-heart. She probably didn’t have the time; indeed, other students told me they found their peers too busy for intimacy. What happens when busyness and sociability leave no room for solitude?

I'm not sure that all the sociability is bad. Of course, that comes from me, a loner who doesn't socialize much. I've always had some disdain for small talk and want to leap into deep philosophical one-on-one conversations. But I've come to realize that sometimes it takes a long time to get to know someone. You have to be patient.

The busyness is a huge problem for me. If you're on an elitist career track like me, you're automatically surrounded by people who are too busy running the rat race to help you. This is why people have to go into therapy. Their friends and family are too busy and self-absorbed to help them, so they have to pay someone to listen to their problems.

That ends my quote-by-quote analysis of the essay. So, for those of us who don't want to turn into elitist zombies, what do we do? Deresiewicz discusses the problems of an elitist upbringing with incredible thoroughness, but he doesn't propose any solutions.

Travel? Read great literature? Go camping, Thoreau-style? Take up hobbies that bring you into contact with non-elitists? Protest? I'll keep thinking about it.

Eat Drink Man Woman review

Eat Drink Man Woman has become one of my favorite movies. Or shall I say Drink Eat Man Woman since that is the literal translation of the Chinese title <<飲食男女>>?

The movie is about a father, Mr. Chu, and his three daughters living in Taiwan. The father (as typical in many Chinese families) is not very good at verbal communication. He only knows how to show his love through cooking. Even though his three daughters are adults, they still live with him and they are required to be home for a special Sunday dinner every week. As time goes on, one daughter after another leaves her father's house and becomes independent. That's all I can say without giving anything away.

I really enjoyed watching a film that depicted modern Chinese society. I was frequently struck with the feeling of seeing my own family on camera. Chinese people tend towards stoicism and this aspect was emphasized in the family interactions. I can relate to the way that the Chu family struggles to communicate. Asian families don't hug or express verbal affection. Just doesn't happen much. They express their love through actions like Mr. Chu's cooking or the second daughter's criticism.

Eat Drink Man Woman has often been called a food lover's film because there are extended scenes of the father cooking extravagant meals. He uses all the freshest ingredients including fish out of the tank and chickens from the coop. It's almost as if the passion is focused on the food in the first half of the film, rather than on the people, who seem repressed. In the second half, this dynamic flips around and we see people's emotions boil over. Another great foodie film is the German movie Mostly Martha. The food aside, it's also an outstanding movie overall.

Eat Drink Man Woman is a funny movie and even more so to me, because I have the personal experience of growing up in a Chinese family. In one scene, Mr. Chu worries about his friend's elementary school aged daughter. He doesn't think the girl has a proper lunch, so he cooks a hot lunch for her and swaps this lunch with the lunch prepared by the girl's mother. Of course, the girl's mother is a terrible cook, and Mr. Chu ends up having to eat it. I can see my own father doing the exact same thing. The final kicker is that the girl starts "taking orders" from her classmates and sells her lunch to them for extra cash. Another scene I really like is when Mr. Chu goes to the bedrooms of each of his daughters and wakes them up in the morning. In particular, he tells the second daughter not to sleep at her desk because it's bad for her posture. My dad did the same to me when I was growing up. Although this was not supposed to be funny, I liked how the sisters talked while washing the dishes by hand. You know it's a Chinese family, when there are only human dishwashers. There are many other humorous scenes, but these three are the ones that were most personally relevant to me.

[Spoilers below]

The main source of tension between the three daughters is who gets to leave home and who has to stay behind and take care of the father. I expected that the eldest daughter (the spinster, religious schoolteacher) would be the one who stays at home and takes care of the father. In fact, it's the rebellious, independent-minded second daughter who ends up staying at home. She realizes how much she has in common with her father (she loves to cook) and how much she loves him. The ending scene where she cooks dinner for her father is especially touching.

"The meaning we make does not always have etiologic implications"

I've always wondered about electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and while I was looking for information on the topic, I ran across this website run by Dr. Ostroff at Yale. The site contains a link to an interesting essay called "Depression: An Overview with a Focus on ECT."

No, I am not interested in getting ECT, but I was surprised to learn that ECT is such an effective treatment for depression even though it has a reputation as "cruel" punishment or as a last resort. The author suggests that people should consider ECT earlier in their treatment.

But I'm digressing. The real reason I wanted to write the post was because I found the first page of the essay very interesting. It begins:

Depression is an illness and like any illness, it has an impact on biological, psychological and social functioning. Individuals may experience job difficulties, interpersonal difficulties and a variety of physical symptoms that may mimic other conditions. It is common for the patient to attribute the experience of depression to a life event, for example, the failure to get promoted or marital stress. It is human to make meaning of our experiences. It is important for clinicians to remember that the meaning we make does not always have etiologic implications.

I am reminded that coincidence does not imply causation. As a scientist, I am pretty careful to avoid that fallacy in my own work, but this quote cautions me that I can very well make the same fallacy in other areas like in the way I judge people.

As an example, the author tells the story of how he diagnosed a man with Hodgkin's disease. The man became convinced that he had "caught" Hodgkin's disease from walking outside on a damp, cold night because his first symptoms of Hodgkin's started around the same time.

The essay goes on to link the Hodgkin's case to patients with depression.

Like my Hodgkin's patient's experience of cold and coryza that felt like an ordinary flu, patients with depression often experience it as the outcome of immediate life events. Social and psychological events are closer to everyday human experience than neurotransmitter dysfunction in the central nervous system and are readily identified as causative agents.

I don't think the author is trying to say that depression is simply a chemical disorder that should be medicated at every opportunity. Here's my interpretation. Some people are genetically pre-disposed to depression. The other people were healthy individuals who suffered stressful events and the "bad" chemistry has persisted long after the inducing events. The external environment plays a big role, but it's not the entire story.

[Aside: I'm not sure if I believe this view completely. I used to think that everything is just "in your head," but I'm gradually coming around to the view that depression is a complex illness involving interactions between mind and body.]

Towards the end of the essay, the author discusses the implications of meaning and etiologic reasoning on the friends and family of the depressed individual.

Unfortunately, family members of the depressed individual struggle with a concept of illness that is unique to depression. Unlike illnesses that exist in the body in ways that give the appearance of being markedly discontinuous from the patient's emotional environment, such as rheumatoid arthritis or coronary artery disease, depression gives the impression of being related to, if not caused by the patient's emotional milieu...
... Since the depressed individual does not give the impression of being physically ill and a cardinal symptom of their illness is their mood, there is an almost irresistible tendency on the part of their loved ones to try and alleviate their mood. The family wants the depressed member to "snap out of it" or "cheer up" and will go to great lengths to achieve this end. Whereas the coronary patient's family won't let him mow the lawn or shovel snow, and the arthritic's family encourages them to avoid stressing their joints, the depressed patient's family will actively pressure them to change their mood...
... Because the cardinal symptoms of depression often involve emotion states, the family is posed with the problem of understand that emotional states can occur independent of internal or external environmental factors... The family of the depressed patient must understand that the depression is not a reaction to them, but rather a state that arises because of a physiologic problem that requires treatment.

The author notes that misguided family efforts can have significant real-world impact.

If there is a consensus that some external factor caused the depression, there is an overwhelming tendency to eliminate the external factor. I have repeatedly seen families and patients assign etiologic significance to school or work and decide that quitting the situation would eliminate the depression. A significant part of helping the family and patient recover is educating them to not make significant life decisions until recovery is well underway.

This discussion is very useful to me, since I have tried to help depressed people in the past and I will probably be trying to help someone in the future. I have to repeatedly remind myself "the meaning we make does not always have etiologic implications!"

Take notes on your family and friends

Here's an interesting idea I read about on Parent Hacks via Lifehacker. The idea is simple: take notes during phone calls with friends and family.

Usually, I'm very good at remembering details, but I seem to forget some details when I talk to my parents over the phone. Maybe it's part of the child wanting to separate themselves from their parents aspect of growing up, but I'm just not a very good listener when it comes to my parents. It's easy not to listen because I talk to them on a regular basis. I don't feel the same urgency as when I get in contact with a friend who haven't spoken to in a year. I think it might improve my relationship with my parents to take notes. I've started a text file on my computer called people-notes.txt. I'm sure that businesspeople already do this kind of thing for their clients and collaborators.

I still can't remember what day of the week my dad goes to calligraphy class. Of course, my dad has no trouble remembering details about my life...

Company review

I finally saw a real production of Company on PBS's Great Performance series. This production was from the 2006-2007 Broadway revival. Company originally debuted in 1970 on Broadway.

Company was one of first shows where Stephen Sondheim wrote both the music and lyrics for the songs. The idea for the music came about when George Furth showed Sondheim a bunch of one-act plays he had been writing about marriage. Sondheim consulted his friend director/producer Hal Prince who told them, "Gentleman, it's a musical!" So in the end, Company became a series of sketches about five married couples who are friends with the perennial bachelor Bobby. The sketches are tied together by the emotional development of Bobby. He goes from being a bachelor who is skeptical of marriage to being a man who realizes how much he needs somebody and how commitment is part of what makes a person alive. Historically, Company is considered one of the first (if not the first) "concept" musical. There is no clear plot, but the music and dialogue are centered around a theme. In fact, it's not clear if the events are real or if they are going on in Bobby's head. Bobby blows out his birthday candles three times. Have three birthdays really occurred or does Bobby have a dream about his birthday?

Company is one of my favorite Sondheim shows so far (the others being Sweeney Todd and Sunday in the Park with George). It's a show that requires good acting and showcases outstanding acting. The ensemble numbers are beautiful. The Original Broadway Cast recording sounds very 1970s-ish, but John Doyle has updated the music to sound modern and classy. The musical has three of my favorite songs: "Being Alive," "The Ladies Who Lunch," and "Getting Married Today." The show is funny and witty, but it carries a strong message, too. Marriage, in fact any kind of commitment, is a compromise. It sucks that when we choose one path, we close many others, but that's what life is about. Life is about making choices. There's nothing wrong with Bobby being a bachelor. The problem is that it's all he knows. He's never tried anything else. He's never made a choice; he's always waiting to see what other people do. Joanne's stinging number "The Ladies Who Lunch" reminds Bobby (and the audience) that you can sit around wasting your life pretending you're actually living it. Delusion is insidious. There are so many ways to waste time, whether it's going to fittings, taking in high art like Mahler symphonies and Pinter plays, mocking other people, surfing the internet (wait, that's not in the musical...) [I have too many interests and it's so hard to commit to doing just one or two. I'm trying to wean myself off this Sondheim craze, so that I get some research done.]

In the end, Bobby realizes that he can't put off the inevitable. He wants to live a real life and feel real feelings. Hence the song "Being Alive." In a touching finale, he hides from his married friends, blows out his candles, and makes his own wish. He doesn't need his friends anymore. He's had his party and he knows that it's time to leave.

Some people find Company bitterly pessimistic about marriage. I think that's a misconception. First of all, we are seeing the married couples interact from Bobby's point of view. There are never any scenes where the couples are alone on stage (except "Poor Thing" where the couples are commenting on Bobby's non-married state). As Larry (Joanne's husband) says, his wife likes to grandstand in public. She's actually wonderful in private. Of course, since Bobby is a perpetual bachelor, he's looking for reasons why marriage is bad. Second, even though we see marriage depicted in a negative light, it's clear that Sondheim and Furth think that being a playboy is even worse. If commitment at its worst is still better than staying on the sidelines, it's clear what the best choice is.

As for the PBS broadcast, I loved Raul Esparza as Bobby. He played a very calm, sweet guy who gradually becomes more and more distraught about being as an outsider. The New York Times review described him as being icy like the drink perpetually glued to his hand and that as the show went on, he thawed until he exploded at the end. In the second act opening, Raul has a broad smile on his face as he watches his friends march around party-style. Towards the end of the number, two of the couples play solos on their instruments. The husband plays and the wife answers. When it comes to Bobby's turn, he attempts a few notes on a kazoo but no one is there to respond. He just stands there glowering for the rest of the song.

Raul's performance of "Being Alive" is my favorite so far (better than the recording on the original cast album by Dean Jones). I wasn't too crazy about the other performers. They were good, but not outstanding. The New York Times critic (name?) thought that since the the rest of the cast was slightly bland, that it gave more attention to Bobby (in a good way). I could see that. It was a bit disappointing to see my favorite songs "The Ladies Who Lunch" and "Getting Married Today" not come off as the showstoppers that they are. Still, who can top Elaine Strich's "Ladies" (one of the most legendary Broadway performances ever) and Madeline Kahn's "Getting Married Today"?

The Company revival was yet another John Doyle production. Doyle's trademark in recent years has been to take old musicals and redo them with the actors doubling as the orchestra. He pulled off this concept previously in the revival of Sweeney Todd to great critical acclaim. I enjoyed the doubling of musicians/actors. It wasn't as gimmicky as I thought it would be. I was amazed that some actors played two different instruments! How do they play with no conductor??

The fact that the instruments were onstage gave the musical a cabaret feel (not that I've ever been to a cabaret show, this is a guess). The cabaret feel was enhanced by the simple, black costumes and mostly bare set. Marriage and relationships are an intimate topic and the intimate setting works wonderfully. The piano was used very effectively. I liked seeing Marta sing while sitting on top of the piano. I liked watching Bobby clumsily climb on top of the piano (emphasizing that he's still a boyish voyeur). I liked how the actor stopped playing the piano and closed the keyboard case just as Barbara Walsh was finishing "The Ladies Who Lunch." I enjoyed seeing the actors walk around marching-band style in "Side by Side by Side".

However, having the actors play instruments wasn't good in all cases. I don't think they added anything to "You Could Drive a Person Crazy." I thought they were downright annoying in "Have I Got a Girl for You." Why would John Doyle have David play the cello while singing "have I got a girl for you"? What was Doyle thinking??

If you missed the PBS broadcast, don't worry. The broadcast will be available on DVD in a few months. I'll certainly be in line for it!

Notes on Fisher Files, Sequence II, Episode 2 - Screwed!

Here are my notes on the Fisher Files episode entitled "Screwed!"

• Stick up for yourself when confronted with a conflict. Don't get walked all over. If you don't deal with the conflict, it becomes emotional baggage later. Not good.
  
• One way to resolve a conflict is to talk to the perpetrator. But be careful. First, meet at neutral ground (e.g. tell the person, let's get coffee). Find some way to approach the issue indirectly, rather than attacking the person or forcing the issue. If the person feels relaxed and not-defensive, you are more likely to get his/her real perspective. Keep the conversation from degenerating into a battle. It only gets ugly from there.
  
• A good thing to do before you confront the person or the issue is to seek the advice of senior people. They have experience with such matters and take the long-term view.

Sick of selfishness and self-importance

I thought I'd use this blog post to complain. I'm tired of people who are self-absorbed. I feel like most of the people I talk to just automatically launch into what's important in their lives. They don't even bother to let me into the conversation. I'm tired of everyone being too busy and constant scheduling (although I have to say that I sometimes use the excuse of being "busy" too). Nowadays, if you ask someone for their time, they mentally scan their schedule and decide whether you're worth their time. These are people who are just in school, behaving like CEOs. I understand that everyone is busy, but I don't like being treated like a number in a queue. I'm tired of people who treat email like junk mail. They don't respond timely; sometimes they don't even respond at all. Well, I don't treat email like junk mail. I put time and thought into what I write. Maybe I just start sending people written letters instead. I'm tired of parents who treat their children like investments. I understand that in modern society, families only have 1-2 children and spend a lot of money on them. But children shouldn't be expected to turn around and pay interest or face constant emotional guilt-tripping. The point of having children is to raise emotionally healthy, independent adults.

Maybe I'll just move to a small town or move to a cabin in the mountains.

On a side note, one of my friends sent me an article about cheating in school from the San Francisco Chronicle magazine. Pretty depressing.