Defining Success

I don't usually write in response to articles, but I was a-stalking Dear Coke Talk (introduced via Facebook a while back and I cannot stop reading) when I came across this article about Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior.  Read that first or else this won't make any sense.  I think that the purpose of this article/book being promoted is really to invoke debate more than actually convince people to raise their children with this sort of vigor, but here's my rebuttal/rant anyway.

I actually don't think I'm very qualified based on my own personal set of values to believe that this sort of parenting is ineffective.  The reason why is because I agree that these sorts of harsh methods are actually effective at getting kids (and people in general) to perform better at whatever the task at hand may be.  I just question why it's necessary.  Medicine is not the only career where financial success is a guarantee.  There's also the issue as to whether financial success can even be called success.  I've had my fair share of Chinese Mother figures, so it's not like I'm completely in the dark as to what experiencing life in a household like this is.  The difference is that the only time when I feel it's appropriate to act like this is when the student (and I mostly think this applies to teaching situations) asks for it.  Being harsh as fuck when it comes to getting a kid (or otherwise) to learn something well is the best method of teaching short of just being really good at getting kids to understand what it is you're trying to teach.  No, it's not very humane, but it works.  Once you thoroughly beat any interest the kid has in learning something out of him, though, there is absolutely no reason to continue.  Parenting, unfortunately, isn't an opt-out job.  And since parents (although they think they might) don't know what their kids want any more than their kids themselves, I don't believe they have the right to force their kids down a certain learning pathway and be total dicks about it.  This notion applies especially well to religion from my perspective, although for many of the more conservative religions folk that's far too hard to accept (especially since their kids are damned for all eternity if they don't love Jesus or whatever), so that entire aspect of "Chinese parenting" isn't exclusively Chinese. 

However, I do respect the idea of wanting your kids to be financial successful.  Money is certainly capable of buying happiness.   It's just that I think choosing the career for your kid while he's still in the womb grossly overreaches the boundaries of a parent in their kids life.  Parents are there to imbue you with the obvious lessons like "get an education and work hard all the way through life" and that should really be enough.  Choosing what activities your kids are and are not allowed to do on the sole basis of whether it's a distraction is downright harmful because it denies kids their ability to pursue something they are passionate about.  Saying your kid will become a doctor will more often than not be translated by a kid as "you're not allowed to love music or art or psychology or philosophy or literature etc." because, honestly, not that many people want to go into medicine.  And for god's sake, it still isn't the only field where financial success is a guarantee.  I'm going into freaking chemical engineering.  That's the third highest-paying college degree in the US right now.  Am I passionate about engineering?  Not particularly, but the financial perks, as I said, are awesome.  On top of that I'm pretty good at math and science (more so than the more subjective/creative areas of study).  It's something that right now I feel benefit me the most, and I know myself better than my parents do.  Every kid knows themselves better than their parents.  Psychologists believe that parents don't even play that large of a role in the development of their kids anymore.  Which is an even larger argument against controlling every aspect of your kids life.

I'll reiterate, though: parents do reserve the right to teach their kids to be successful.  And they reserve the right to drill that harder than anything.  But what is success?  I think it's happiness.  Parents don't fucking know how to make their kids happy.  People don't know how to make themselves happy.  Money can buy happiness but only a little.  Passion is the main source of happiness, and a parent can never give their kids passion.  Passion is something that has to be discovered - granted, sometimes the same passions get passed down through generations, but more of that might have to do with genetics and the same general upbringing endowing kids with the same creative gifts as their parents.  (Yes, I consider creative fields to be the ones to be passionate about, due to my own shortage of empathy - I don't understand how people share passion for things like accounting...)  Myself?  I've found myself lately seeking to become two things: an environmentalist and a teacher.  I don't mean these things so much in the professional sense of the word, but, regardless of how I define them, neither of these general "states of being" (for lack of better words) are known for being a great opportunity to make money.  My parents certainly taught me to strive for success, but did they do that by limiting my academic options to "only the absolute best" and my extracurricular activities to "violin or piano only"?  Fuck no.  I guarantee my parents would have readily supported an education in music had I chosen to do that instead (and I'm under the impression that this was an option, even though I honestly never considered it very strongly).  My parents didn't force me to sacrifice anything for the sake of a grade.  Does this mean that I'm successful?  I'm certainly not happy, so I wouldn't say that I am very successful.  But I think Amy Chua would be able to say I'm only a moderate failure as a child, which is the highest of compliments for someone of my comparatively low intelligence.  And I didn't have to sacrifice any part of who I was or actually wanted to be to get there.  Not that I'm "there" yet, but you get the picture.

Yeah, it's racist.  Bite me.

Realization

This doesn't really count as a post, but I just realized that the seminar that I'm taking this semester called "The Psychology of Interpersonal Relationships" essentially reflects the most popular topics of discussion right here on my blog/online diary.  I realized this while writing a short paper on "defensive communication".  So basically, prepare for more posting about semi-interesting things. 

Also, I'm still kind of on the fence on whether or not I want to take this class or not.  As much as I like this sort of subject it's quite obviously fairly steeped in bullshit and eats up a fair amount of time on my already mundane Wednesdays. (Hey!  That's the name of the blog!)

2010 in retrospect

So I actually like doing these posts - I certainly enjoyed doing it last year, despite saying that I hated reminiscing about things immediately after they happen.  The only problem with doing that is often you're too emotionally involved with what you're discussing that you say things that you don't mean later.  However, that's not necessarily a bad thing, because it allows you to observe how you've changed and grown as a person. 

Unless of course there is absolutely nothing to discuss.  Oh hai, 2010.

(btw this movie pretty much sums up how fucking retarded 2010 was)

In 2009 I predicted that 2010 would "be my year."  That was not true by any extent.  2010 is a year I've described and hopefully will continue to describe as the single most static year of my life.  As I said on Facebook, this is as close as you can get to describing a year as if it were an episode of Seinfeld.  No hugging, no learning.  2009 (and 2008, before I purged all pre-tour posts) were marked by profound personal growth that led me in a giant circle of faux-self-discovery to where I am today, which is essentially the same thing that I was before high school.  Basically, I ended this year the same way it began, which was the same way that I was before those damn hormones decided to kick in:  a hypercritical lonely nerd.  The only difference is that now I've gained a little bit of self-awareness.  Maybe it's not even that.  Maybe high school is about exposing you to all the different types of people and teaching how to deal with them, whereas college exists as nothing more than a really expensive platform to show you what you want to do for a living. 

Aside from a lack of growth, 2010 was also static in that nothing happened to me this entire year.  Nothing.  I started off the year lamenting the fact that I didn't have any very close relationships with people outside of my own family.   I guess I improved on that a bit after graduating, maybe.  I don't know.  Romance?  I'm also aware of how unwise it is to post this information here, but I've definitely failed about three times over (quite literally) with entering a romantic relationship.  Hoo boy.  All three fucking cases involved getting turned down by incredible women not because of disinterest in dating me but because I was too late to ask these women out before they went off with other, universally more attractive guys than me.  In every fucking case.  I told myself not to be bitter about these things, and I'm not actually bitter toward anybody in particular.  It's bitterness directed toward impossibly horrible timing and probability (three times - I couldn't make this up) as well the fact that being turned down for no reason other than "not in the cards for you, buddy" allows zero room for any sort of personal growth, because I'm not doing anything inherently wrong.  Which is my main problem with 2010. 

Music?  I didn't play any this year.  Well, I did.  But I was apathetic about all of it, even whilst playing it.  Safe to say that passion was deftly killed by boredom.  I also lost my mind a few times.  The evidence is in the unpublished drafts in this god damn blog.  Maybe that was also because of boredom.  Who knows?  The brain's gotta keep itself occupied.  Fortunately yesterday I got to play marimba for the first time since May.  For five minutes, mind you, but still enough to be successful.  It felt great.

Politics?  Normally this wouldn't be anything worth noting, but I've just lost all faith in the American political system due to corruption in the process of electing our representatives (campaigns can now be funded by multinational corporations without any sort of cap on the amount campaigns can be given, and campaigns don't have to disclose the identity of their donors), which is also probably part of the reason for the huge swing in favor of extreme conservative candidates with the election.  If we knew who these corporations were, I guarantee that they'd back the campaigns that promise less government restriction on commercial/environmental/whatever activities.  Need evidence of how much corruption was already in place before the election?  Rep. Joe Barton of Texas makes a public apology to BP after Obama urged them (well, demanded) to set up a fund for families whose income was damaged by the big oil spill this summer.  Are you fucking kidding me?  If you're a puppet for environmental-assfucking energy companies, at least make sure you keep that little tidbit a secret, you retarded asshole.  And that's just the tip of the iceberg.  There's also the BP oil spill, carbon emissions reduction failing, the newly GOP-controlled house setting up a massive probe to investigate the "fraud that is global warming", denying 9/11 first responders healthcare coverage, extending tax cuts for the richest people in the country despite an enormous deficit, denying extending unemployment until the aforementioned tax cuts were extended, shooting down a gender-centric pay equity bill (basically just for shits and giggles, no good reason), and most of all just being a bunch of assholes who are completely out of touch with the people they're governing.

College?  Don't really know very many people there.  Got a few close contacts.  It's going well, grade-wise.  One time I was told how much we'd all changed since entering college.  So, so wrong.  The reality is that extrinsic change isn't necessarily determinant of intrinsic change.  Such is the case with college.  You're given a blank slate, but when you're an open book is there any opportunity to change yourself?  Not really.  Well, I tried to give myself a bit of an ego.  Whether or not I'm better off as a result of that attempted change is unclear.

I'm a fairly pessimistic person, you see.  But I'm sort of realizing - though I can't be sure, the idea only came to me two days ago - that my problem stems from a fundamental lack of understanding of the nature of mental illness.  Growing up I had problems with insomnia and anxiety (both of which I've overcome, insomnia especially), and I was put in therapy through the ages of twelve through thirteen.  My therapist concluded that I was fine and sent me off without a diagnosis.  I had serious issues.  Being told that insane amounts of mental agony on a daily basis is completely normal is not a good way to get a kid to grow up happy.  And since I did get over them alright within two or three years, I concluded that therapy and self-help books and all that are bullshit (which I still think they are) and that drugs aren't necessary.  Rejected the notion that I have faulty brain chemistry.  Attributed all my fits of anxiety and depression to whatever the circumstances were at the time.  I never wanted to think I was crazy.  Hell, I probably am crazy.  Mental illness is both a precursor and a prerequisite to craziness.  Am I mentally ill?  I damn sure don't ever want to think it, but with each day that my emotions zip around like a seismograph in Southern California - unpredictably and occasionally ferociously - there's a stronger and stronger case building for it.  The only problem is that I feel that if I can't diagnose it, nobody else can.  Which stems from having either a massive ego or from being ignorant.  Mental illnesses are, by nature, unpredictable and detrimental patterns of thought - but whatever it is that's eating me isn't really capable in my mind of being lumped with the generic clinical depression or bipolar disorder.  This fact also doesn't help my whole argument for clinical psychology being a load of shit.  I'm not really sure what to do about this.  I don't really have the shame to pick myself up and get "help" or whatever it is they call having people put words in your mouth to get you to feel better these days.  And frankly I don't want to have to be told that I'm fine again and that this is normal life for everybody.  This fucking sucks.  All change that matters is intrinsic and that doesn't happen when all extrinsic circumstances do are keep you from changing rather than facilitating it.  But if therapy and/or drugs are what it takes, whatever, I guess.  New year's resolution: Come to terms with this.

The main problem is that I don't even know what I want anymore.  Everything is out of my control right now - essentially, all I can do to make my life better is try to overwhelm myself to the point where my only concerns are outside of the realm of emotion and critical thinking.  Make myself into a god damn robot until the world catches up to me.  Or else keep thinking about until I figure out what I'm doing wrong and catch up with the rest of the world.

Whatever.  Oh, 2011, how I long for your sweet embrace.