Thoughts triggering thoughts. No label required. Learning on the go. Novel in progress. Public feed: general musing. Private feed: Tokyo diary.
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Joined January 2017
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One of the worst, yet so common, things that happen with people who are trying too hard to be "good parents," is that they sacrifice their own well-being and interests for the sake of their children; and as a result, they ironically leave them with a huge mental burden and the guilt of wondering whether they βruinedβ the lives of their parents. You want your kids to feel joyful, childlike, and free, you need to become such a person yourself first.
Looking back, it's clear that many struggles in life find their roots in bad habits that kids picked up from their parents; if you can simply figure out how to be calm, confident, intellectually curious, emotionally stable, non-judgmental, deeply connected to yourself and entitled to nothing, and manage to marry someone who also strives to be the same, then your kids already have quite a head start.
One of the best gifts that your kids can receive is to simply be able to grow up around parents who have their health, their finances, and their marriage in order.
Not being capable of maintaining a healthy lifestyle that will allow you to become and maintain a high-energy and mentally stable version of yourself isn't just a sign of deep self-disrespect, but also a sign of deep disrespect toward your family, your friends, and all the people around you, who shouldn't be responsible for all your health problems and mood swings that could have been avoided with just a little bit more self-discipline and self-love.
It's not a coincidence that the people who are least capable of taking criticism happen to be struggling with self-confidence and self-esteem, and more generally, with most aspects of their lives.
You can't grow if you take yourself too seriously and are blinded by your reactive ego.
In particular, when someone much more successful than you takes the time to give you any feedback, be grateful and take notes; the older you get, the rarer it will become, because everybody knows that you can't change the mind of most older people, and the older people whose mind could effectively change are already successful enough that they don't need much feedback: their humility and willingness to change is how they got where they are in the first place.
At some point in life, you realize that failure to make progress toward your goal meant that you were not serious enough about the price you know you should have paid.
One day of distraction doesn't feel like much, but they quickly become weeks, and before you know it, many years, and you suddenly look back one day, and you are not thirty anymore, but sixty, nowhere near where you thought you could have been.
Once you've clarified your goal, you need to be unapologetic about protecting its allocated time; we live in a world where most people will have a good idea of how you should be spending your time, in a way that usually benefits or validates them, and if you don't have the courage to be seen as a "bad guy" and say "no" to them, you might as well say out loud that you gave up on your goal already.
The lowest-friction friendships actually happen with busy people because they neither have the mental bandwidth nor the time for any drama or mind game.
But the unfortunate truth is that the real education happens at home, and no amount of public generosity can replace it, and many of these kids actually ended up exposed to a lot of idealistic and hypocritical half-truths, and they never developed the kind of core values required to actually live up to them. They were fed ambition without self-discipline. They were taught how to impress without being actually skilled and good at anything. They were nudged into jobs despite zero financial literacy. They lived day to day with no clear mental big picture of their position relative to society, and developed anxiety, anger, and a victim mentality as a result. And they started hating anyone who came from a similarly unfortunate background who ended up doing much better than them.
Most of my teachers at school probably spent more time shouting "hey, please be quiet, listen, and try to understand, this is for your own sake" than they spent any time actually teaching.
The devious kids would find subtle ways to play dumb, taunt the teachers, distract them, waste everybody's time including their own, until the bell rang and everybody went home with another wasted hour, and another wasted day. And they were proud of it: it was a race to the bottom at the bottom. So when I watch the ongoing events in France from the perspective of a country where people respect each other, value honesty, intelligence, and hard work, and where most people care about being helpful and useful to others, I wonder how many of those kids I used to be in the same classroom with are now in the streets, and whether they are still proud of how they chose to live.
And yet, there was a time when many French people genuinely believed, or wanted to believe, in ideas like diversity; and that the French motto, "libertΓ©, Γ©galitΓ©, fraternitΓ©," literally "freedom, equality, brotherhood," could bring people from many different backgrounds and "colors" together.
We learned how to sing "La Marseillaise" at school, the teachers tried their best to help us "immigrant kids" whose parents barely spoke French catch up with the rest of society, we went to visit the Louvre for free to be introduced to the kind of culture we wouldn't even know existed, and we thought that no matter where we came from, there was the possibility of "l'ascenseur social," aka upward social mobility.
Over the past few days, weβve seen videos of a bunch of stores and streets being looted and destroyed. Those who can't build love to see everything burn. I know where these people come from: I grew up around them, and it was very sad to witness the inevitable happen in slow motion throughout the past decades, and even more as a lot of initiatives to "help poor kids" started with genuine good intentions.
The fate of a country is easy to predict: you just need to take a look at the inflow and outflow of people, and what they bring with them. Tax them, make them feel unwelcome and unsafe, disrespect their time and efforts, and all the wealthy, smart, and talented people will leave. Provide tons of free services and subsidies and shelters to everybody out of "compassion", and all the opportunists will come, and stay, and they will slowly drive away anyone who foolishly believed in meritocracy.
And so I left, a long time ago already, not out of spite, but out of fatigue: at some point in life, you just feel like your time is better spent on contributing to a place where people are reasonable and actually trying to improve things, and not just argue endlessly out of ego.
One of the biggest problems of France has been the inability of many people to take criticism. βDebatingβ has always been a French passion, but itβs only healthy when accompanied by intellectual honesty and actual experience and expertise to back up your arguments.
When you grow up in France, it sometimes feels like a lot of people are not actually seeking the truth, they are just defending their own arguments in a very emotional way, they are just trying to validate their own beliefs.
Sometimes, it becomes almost comical as you point out irrefutable facts, and people will ignore your logic altogether and just complain about how they didn't like your tone, or how you made them feel about themselves.