Rejection

I’ve drawn parallels between job interviews and online dating in the past. Fundamentally, to achieve broad success in either of these endeavors, it comes down to your ability to market yourself and to give a convincing sales pitch before our date or our interviewer’s attention span or patience is depleted.

This quickly becomes problematic when you realize that for many individuals, this type of staged social interaction is an incredibly unnatural and unnerving ordeal; it could be that you don’t possess a baseline level of confidence, charisma, or social skills, but I would argue that this is often not the case. First dates and traditional job interviews do not simulate anything you’ll actually do while navigating the specific challenges you’ll encounter in your work or the nitty-gritty aspects to maintain long term relationships. All they do is test your ability to:

• Force yourself to socialize and maintain a smooth flow of small talk with complete strangers

• Monologue about yourself for an extended period of time

• Conjure up unnatural answers to equally unnatural questions that you will very rarely get asked outside this context—Tell me about yourself. What are your strengths and weaknesses? Tell me about your typical day. What are your friends like?

Why is it that we never challenge the efficacy of this process? If we understand that there’s little to no correlation between interview performance and job performance, or impressions of a first date and the health of a relationship, why do we continue to implement systems that clearly aren’t measuring what we care about and what we do?

When we haven’t clearly defined the purpose of these methods, the lines quickly become blurred. For almost everyone, the instinct is to feel shame, regret, or embarrassment in the face of rejection. The instinct is to hastily draw the conclusion that we’re irrevocably inadequate, that we could’ve done better, and that we just aren’t good enough. This all boils down to our presumption that these systems are valid ways of determining our individual competence.

But if we operate on the premise that you’ve been fairly judged, why is there so much shame in this act of rejection or separation, when it’s clearly beneficial for both parties involved?

When an employer rejects a job applicant,

When we decide to quit a job,

When we deny the possibility of a second or third date,

When we gather the courage to break up,

It’s just a way of saying, “it’s not for me.”

There’s no reason to remain in an unhealthy relationship if you and your partner have come to that conclusion together already.

There’s no reason to keep an employee that isn’t productive or motivated and has no more room to grow as an individual.

There’s no reason to fret over a lost job opportunity if both you and the company have discovered together that you likely wouldn’t enjoy the job or be able to contribute in a meaningful way.

The issue, then, rests on our ability to fairly judge. But is that the very point of these social filters—to weed out those that lack perseverance? The design and intention matters when we want to determine the efficacy of these social norms. Here are some questions worth asking:

• Is this process of artificial selection—the superficial exchanges that are characteristic of dating apps, the archetypal “let’s sit in my office and chat” job interview—effectively designed to seek the best of the best?

• Are one or two awkward dates enough? What types of interactions constitute the most effective methods to break the ice between two individuals?

• Does the forced process of probing candidates by going down a list of stilted, hackneyed questions measure anything that is actually relevant to succeeding in the position we’re hiring for?

• Do we recognize the cost of expunging so many individuals to the rejection bin and thus the cost of consigning both them and ourselves to an often exhausting, wearisome journey to find the right match?

• Is the shame and awkwardness truly too much to overcome? Is ghosting—the consequence of letting that shame and awkwardness consume our compassion and empathy—truly a necessary evil? Or is it just laziness, selfishness, or a lack of self-awareness on our part?

• Can we be more supportive when we reject others? Can we offer constructive feedback and the patience to aid another human being in their journey? Don’t we have a duty to guide one another, especially when we have the resources to do so?

• Because there's so much shame, we are so inclined to walk away, even if we know a friend who might be a better match. Most recruiters give up on us even if they can be given the capacity to direct us towards other companies that are hiring for the same position. If we choose to pay it forward by having the patience and commitment to understand others in this journey—the very attitude that dissolves this social norm—do we acknowledge how much we have to gain when they’re that much more willing to help us in return down the line?

If we cannot change the process, we can at least change our mindset.

We can together acknowledge that the average date and the average job interview is often a zero-sum game.

We can together acknowledge that finding just the right working environment and just the right level of challenge within a job is a painstaking, yet exigent ordeal.

We can together acknowledge that for virtually all of us, life is an unending, arduous, brute force process of trial and error to find out what works and what doesn't.

We walk a daunting path inundated with an endless torrent of possibility, but at the same time, it is what blinds us; it is what causes us to falter as we stumble over and over again in search of an elusive treasure—a grand outcome when we’ve finally discovered our counterpart and the place we belong amidst an uncertain world.

The least we can do for each other is walk alongside them while we still can, before we become distraught and lose sight of what the world needs us to do. It is about having the patience to understand who we are as individuals and where we each need to go; this is the only means by which we can fairly judge. It is about having the courage, not merely to point them in the right direction, but to lead them along into that path together.

We have no right to be complacent when countless individuals ceaselessly wander our world—often in desperation, often in despair—in search of a true love, in search of a meaningful contribution they can make in the places we live, in search of a reason to live.

We can choose to do better.

Insecurity

The saying “you shouldn't care what others think” is often thrown around as a cheap remedy for the psychological blight of our insecurities. It is a frequent excuse to blithely saunter throughout life ignoring any and all criticism or judgment—to “walk your own path,” as it were—yet it's far from a controversial notion, simply because it's actually true most of the time. But I think it's very much worth exploring this idea and asking why this is. "You shouldn't care what 95% people think," is probably a more honest phrasing for two main reasons:

1. 95% of people are simply incapable of formulating good criticism and it is senseless to heed to their opinion of you.

2. 95% of people you encounter won't be a part of your life; they have no involvement in your success or failure as an individual.

We first have to acknowledge that a vast majority of people we’ll encounter in our lives don't have the patience to understand the nuances of you as a person and your individual situation. And for many of those that do judge you, they neither know how to give good feedback and organize their ideas in a constructive, helpful way, but instead, it is often illogical, incoherent, or with bad intentions.

Most criticism is just people’s convoluted—and often vitriolic—way of saying, “it’s not for me.” The person who goes to a Sichuanese restaurant and subsequently gives a one-star rating on Yelp because the food was too spicy helps neither the restaurant improve the quality of their food or service nor help the consumer determine that quality either. The criticism often tells more about themselves than the person or thing they're trying to criticize. Read enough online reviews, or the average high school or college student’s essays, and you’ll find more than enough damning evidence that the average person you’ll come across—in school, work, and even your family—is incapable of coherently summarizing their thoughts, do not possess any depth of knowledge in the relevant domains, and cannot disentangle their emotions in order to give an unbiased perspective. They will not give you good advice or feedback for what works for you, because they don’t understand you, nor do they care to understand.

The second point is that we need to only worry about the five percent—your friends, family, significant others, mentors, and anyone else that will support you in your journey in life, your bosses that will offer you meaningful work to do, and your coworkers that will walk alongside you as you do that work.

Yet another hackneyed concept is that these people "love you for who you are," regardless of your shortcomings. This is missing the point. Maybe they do indeed love you for who you are, but especially when our current self is clearly inadequate and in need of improvement, those that matter in our lives love us for who we can be; they understand our potential to grow and develop as an individual despite our shortcomings. Your insecurities don't matter to them because they don't share your same tunnel vision and myopic tendency to focus on your faults; they see beyond those trivialities because they've already acknowledged your capacity to overcome them. They have such a deep faith and commitment to your present and future success that it's impossible for them to merely settle for the person you are now.

If we can make this distinction of the people that matter and don’t matter in our journey, we can begin to break free of the psychological chains of our insecurity. If we’re inadequate in the eyes of irrelevant people in our lives, why care when they will contribute nothing? And if we’re inadequate in the eyes of those we trust—those that we have recognized as simultaneously able to empathize with our situation and offer constructive feedback—being vulnerable and allowing our insecurities to be privy to those people is precisely the means, and probably the only means, of truly becoming our best selves.

Let this be a reminder that we have to hone our ability to discern who does or does not have good judgment, a kind heart, and the patience to understand your individual situation, because those are the only people that will exhort you to become a better person or do better work. It's incredibly rare for truly successful people to have made it to their peak completely alone and without these kinds of supportive individuals along the way. In the same light, we equally have our own responsibility to hone our ability to have good judgment, a kind heart, and the patience to understand others so that we ourselves are able to support others in their journey with tact and discretion.

Internet Drama

Like many, I'm a pretty avid user of Youtube and Twitch. And from time to time, I will inevitably come across some news or video recommendations surrounding content creators implicated in some form of "drama.” Many infamous incidents have occurred the past several years, some trivial like the Jake Paul and KSI feud, and some more deeply rooted in serious issues, such as the fallout of EDP445 because of accusations of pedophilia or the more recent incident surrounding Adrianah Lee and her allegations of sexual assault.

If you haven't heard of any of these, you're likely much better off not knowing.

While it may indeed be an actual interpersonal conflict witnessed through livestreams, videos, Twitter exchanges, or leaked DM's, this type of content suffers from the same fundamental pitfall of all mainstream media—slow news day or not, the numbers still have to come in.

So it's not surprisingly to find at times that the conflict is completely fabricated purely for content's sake by the analysis of their audiences or by other content creators, e.g. r/LivestreamFail or DramaAlert, who thrive on devising clickbait titles, conjuring up conspiracy theories, exaggerating the known evidence, and making outlandish conclusions regarding the intentions and motives of those involved. On the contrary, content creators such as MoistCr1TiKaL, Philip DeFranco, as well as a myriad of other channels simply thrive off of making mostly unbiased, fair overviews of these situations. Regardless, it's become very clear that internet drama is a highly prolific form of content in this day and age.

If you’re merely a quiet spectator, a keyboard warrior in the comments section or Reddit, or are producing any form of biased or unbiased content surrounding the drama, let’s take a step back and consider a few points:

1. You do not know these people. You never met them. Stop pretending you know them just because you consume their content; someone’s online persona is an extremely poor means of fairly characterizing someone and their intentions. We very well understand that people change when they have to present themselves to an audience. 

2. You have no involvement in the situation at hand. You know nothing about the circumstances, background, and context of what happened. 100% of all evidence is either hearsay or what is already painfully obvious to those involved. You do not bring anything to the table. Your passion and rage-filled comments will do nothing to solve anything. 

3. We cannot conflate criticism with “beef” to artificially produce drama. Just because one content creator criticized another content creator doesn’t mean they have a personal feud. Or maybe they do in reality, and in that case, you wouldn’t be the one to know. 

4. What are you trying to get out of it anyway? Is there really a moral lesson at the end of the conflict? And, as a completely irrelevant, anonymous person on the internet, is it yours for the taking? Surely there are better ways to inform your knowledge about how to conduct yourself in the real world than inserting yourself into the drama of strangers' lives on a whim.

5. Would you personally like it if people you never met and know nothing about you constantly got involved in your personal affairs constantly? A lot of people like to enjoy it as a reality show, but lest we forget these are real people that we’re talking about, not paid actors. If you wouldn’t wish it upon yourself, don’t perpetuate this toxic behavior. 

If you’re a content creator or anyone else implicated in the drama: Leaking DMs, publicizing private information. or discussing people’s personal affairs publicly without consent of the other people involved is wrong. If you are a victim of crime or some form of abuse and are in need of support, going to strangers on the internet should absolutely not be the first source of help that comes to your mind. Go to the authorities. Go to your family. Go to your close friends. In the rare case that those are not effective options for ameliorating your situation, then resort to being a whistleblower, and when you do, always do your best to share your situation from a fair, unbiased perspective and in a professional manner. But let’s be honest, a vast majority of internet drama consists of petty disagreements and misunderstandings; no one's going to be a whistleblower in large-scale, pressing issues for humanity that will make them the next Julian Assange or the next Edward Snowden. 

For a while, it didn't really bother me if you consumed this kind of content purely to unwind or entertain yourself, merely enjoying witnessing the spectacle unfold and the absurdity of it all; it seemed rather akin to watching reality television. And perhaps we’ve approached a kind of meta-perspective of the internet such that there's no way to distinguish if the drama is real or not anymore. Within this social-media-industrial complex, there’s no way to discern anymore if those implicated have conspired to fabricate drama merely to milk their viewership down to the last drop, or if we’re witnessing genuine injustice. It could be that if all of it is so absurd to the point where you might come to the conclusion that because everyone’s just playing an inane game of publicity stunts, then there might not be anything wrong with blithely sitting back, eating your popcorn, and enjoying the show for what it is.

I will argue that it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if it’s real anymore because in every circumstance, nearly everyone involved—from those directly involved in the drama, the news coverage surrounding it, and the spectators—are bad actors. Everyone is complicit in proliferating a fundamentally toxic and morally repugnant social atmosphere within our digital space.

It’s not okay that when we consume this type of content—when we subscribe to these content creators and bolster the viewership and popularity of the spectacle—we enable this entire system to be possible solely because of our selfish propensity to laugh at the expense of others.

It’s not okay when we are promoting lowbrow entertainment and outright unethical behavior that only serves to clutter our headspace and squander our collective brainpower on mindless, unproductive garbage.

It’s not okay when we normalize the publicization of personal affairs online when there was no consent of the parties involved, and when doing so is a poor course of action that is only detrimental to making any progress towards solving the situation at hand.

It’s not okay when we entitle ourselves to the belief that it’s okay to publicly discuss others’ personal lives on the internet and make judgments without actually knowing anyone involved.

It’s not okay when the conflict is very real for those involved, when they receive unwanted attention and unwarranted criticism from strangers that drive countless individuals towards depression and suicide.

You don’t have to personally like content creators. They’re not your friends, let alone acquaintances. Just because you disagree with them about certain things or they act in a non-exemplary way does not make them a terrible person or unworthy of your attention. It makes them normal human beings—not robots that pander to your idealistic worldview. 

The success of this form of content should serve as an example for our complete lack of self-awareness and empathy when we consume any form of entertainment or media. Let this be a disquieting reminder of how the digital space serves to amplify our most detestable tendencies and traits—our proclivity to gossip, to bask in our own pride, to gravitate towards hatred, hypocrisy, and presumptuousness. This is the result of circumventing the balancing forces that are characteristic of normal social interaction—where our actions and words become subject to judgment and the daunting confrontation by very real people in a very real world.

And as pioneers and explorers of this newfound digital space, we must constantly ground ourselves in the present reality, reminding ourselves of the collective responsibility we have to not hide behind the anonymity of the internet as an excuse to be a terrible human being and forego anything we ever learned about basic decency—to not insert ourselves in the personal lives of strangers that never asked for it, to understand the limitations of our knowledge and our capacity for change, to be kind, patient, and understanding of people that we don’t know, to not do unto others things we would not do to ourselves.

The Job Interview

“What are your strengths and weaknesses?”

This is a hackneyed question that appears on far too many job interviews, and it exemplifies the utter lack of nuance within the reasoning process to hire someone or not within most organizations.

To any interviewer that regularly uses this crude question in their hiring process, I’d love to ask some questions of my own:

• Why are we using a loaded question that presumes that there are generalized strengths and weaknesses, as if we can only choose between being proud of some part of ourselves or ashamed about others?

• Why are we so inclined to bifurcate our personality traits into strengths and weaknesses when clearly our psychology and our circumstances are infinitely more complex than two lazily defined categories?

• Strengths and weaknesses in regard to what? In regard to our personal lives? Our happiness? Our personal definition of success? Our social relationships? Our previous job, which may have nothing to do with our success in a future one?

• Do we measure it against each and every specific task we’ll be doing on the job, or are we measuring it against an oversimplified, crude narrative of what the job entails, because many interviewers or recruiters don’t actually understand or even care to understand the work itself?

• Do we really expect someone to give an unbiased, honest breakdown of all their personality traits, when a “bad” answer would cost them a potential job offer?

• How will we apply this question when we consider that most people lack the self-awareness, humility, and at least halfway-decent comprehension of human psychology that is required to do so?

• And if someone is honest, let’s take a step back and ask ourselves: why are we probing someone’s ability to monologue coherently and confidently about their personality to a stranger?

• Why should we hire someone based on these skills when it has absolutely nothing to do with most jobs?

• Can we really be convinced that this question is such a great opportunity for people to talk about themselves in a fair and meaningful light?

Having hired dozens of people in my career as a manager, I can tell you first hand how little correlation there is between my impressions during the interview and that new hire’s performance on the job. We have to realize that most jobs are rather complex; while they do have their fair share of outright menial tasks, even seemingly basic jobs—cashiers, receptionists, stockers, janitors, servers— possess a variety of responsibilities that, in order to achieve excellence in that position, require one to independently utilize skills or qualities such as planning, multitasking, task prioritization, effective communication, composure under stress, problem-solving, and decision-making. When we want to make any work into an art—an endeavor that requires constant generosity and commitment—more often than not it isn’t absolute whether certain personality traits would be directly conducive toward someone’s individual ability to contribute within an organization.

We should adopt a more nuanced conception of ourselves where we don’t define strengths and weaknesses by the person, but by each trait. More specifically, how each trait potentially contributes or detracts from a specific goal. Only then can we understand how each trait creates a unique dynamic with other traits, and how this on its own has the potential to create yet another unique dynamic with either the work itself or with the people around them. We also have to accept the fact that there is no simple answer when it comes to human personality.

I’m with Seth Godin on this one. Instead of wasting all our time asking pointless, unnatural, and awkward questions and solely probing people’s ability to be confident in job interviews, just have people use that time to do a trial run of the job itself, which also gives them an opportunity to see if the work environment is a good fit for them before commuting to it. If it isn’t a good fit, neither party benefits.

Yes—it’s certainly costly to pay people to do these trial runs, to train and invest in knowledgeable and motivated recruiters to undertake this operation, but what’s even more costly than that is having dead weight in your organization—people that don’t actually contribute anything valuable. And what’s even more costly than that is staff turnover—all the costs of rehiring and retraining new employees, the productivity loss and disruption of business operations, and the cascading effects of declining organizational reputation among employees and customers alike.

The only purpose of this absurd question is to use it to provoke someone who would be repulsed or bewildered by such a blatantly dense conception of personality—someone who dares to challenge the convention and offer nuance in pursuit of truth even when it might undermine their own chances of getting the job. That’s someone that can be truly invaluable to any organization.

Everything’s going to be okay.

Until it isn’t.

Until "okay" just isn't sufficient anymore.

There's seemingly nothing wrong with this self-assurance; if it calms you, if it brings you peace, if it’s enough to save your life, and you can think of nothing better to say, then let it help you. Because the truth is, things will be "okay" most of the time. Despite what we might perceive as tumultuous life circumstances, we always find a way to stabilize, to return to or find a new status quo.

But in some way, are we deluding ourselves? Do we subconsciously lower our standards for our lives by settling for “okay”?

An optimist believes that things will be great, not just okay.

A pessimist believes that things will go south, because that's how most things in life go.

A realist believes that we are unable to discern any outcome as more likely than the other.

We’re none of these when we say things will be okay. We instead become stranded in limbo, suspended in an uncertain state of being where all we want is the pain to go away, and we’ll settle for any outcome where we just don’t have to bear the suffering any longer.

It's "okay" for the people that somehow manage to figure things out.

It's not "okay" for everyone else who didn't.

It allows us to hide from the reality of the fact that we have to make hard decisions. But the relief always quickly fades. And every time something bad happens to us, we can't keep trying to hide. When things are very clearly not going to be okay, we can’t be in denial.

We have to learn to say something else. We have to learn to tell ourselves the truth.

"Everything's going to be okay" is a phrase that shields us from being resolute in our approach to confronting the unknown. We're settling for any outcome our life will throw at us. It is but a temporary relief as we continue to drift across a merciless ocean in search of solid ground—a brief respite from a seemingly relentless storm that will inevitably descend upon the horizon, dragging us back towards the currents. It’s a concession to the winds and the tides to wrest control of our lives.

For anyone who has been afflicted by suffering over and over and over again, these become repulsive, traumatic words of an empty, vain promise of a vague, uncertain future where the best outcome is merely being "fine,” “alright,” or “okay.” For those who have lost the battle, there couldn't have been worse words to have been betrayed by.

Until we decide to be firm and unwavering in our attitude,

until we understand the cause and purpose of the affliction and suffering,

nothing will change,

and we will have no say in our fate.

“Everything will be okay” is the mantra of the survivor

and was an empty promise to the fallen.

Naïveté

During my junior year in high school, I became mired in a quest to figure out what my life purpose was and how to live out a genuine Christian life. I was disillusioned by the superficiality of church. I was disappointed in the failure of my friends, family, and peers to understand me. I was yearning for a truly unconditional love and an unwavering companionship that was so idealized in the Bible. I was longing to know my purpose here on Earth. I was desperate for truth.

I was convinced that I had to find an answer. I had to arrive at a conclusion. And if I couldn’t? Then my life, bereft of meaning and purpose, was no longer worth living.

A few emotionally traumatic experiences and several bouts of depression later, I had stumbled across the Book of Ecclesiastes, and the work of Albert Camus:

7 The light is pleasant, and it is good for the eyes to see the sun. 8 Indeed, if a person lives many years, let him rejoice in them all; but let him remember the days of darkness, for they will be many. Everything that is to come will be futility. 9 Rejoice, young man, during your childhood, and let your heart be pleasant during the days of young manhood. And follow the impulses of your heart and the desires of your eyes. Yet know that God will bring you to judgment for all these things. 10 So, remove grief and anger from your heart and put away pain from your body, because childhood and the prime of life are fleeting.

— Ecclesiastes 11:9-10

"You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life."

— Albert Camus

At that moment, I thought that I had found truth. I thought that I had arrived at the final destination of understanding life as it was—realizing that what I needed was to just be able to live in the moment, to spread kindness in our world, to see the genuine happiness and joy I could bring to people no matter how insignificant my contribution seemed.

The reality was that I don't think I learned how to let go of my grief and anger, I don't think I figured out what happiness truly consisted of, and I don't think I figured out how to live a life worth living. Looking back, what I saw then was a vague glimpse of the outlines of a greater truth, a glance at a tattered map toward an elusive treasure, a loose grasp on a semblance of revelation in the midst of doubt, a warm sunlight that phases in and out of a room by the shroud of passing clouds. I stumbled across the exact wisdom that I needed to hear, but I just didn’t get it. It made sense to me, but I was still fundamentally the same person. Grief, anger, regret, doubt, and self-hatred still lingered in my soul. Realizing this and having endured enough of the emotional turmoil of the past, I had given up on answering those questions altogether, and I would continue my life into college continuing to make the same mistakes and living with the same discontentment that plagued me in my adolescence.

The age when we begin to entertain the existential crises in our lives—when cynical and misanthropic thoughts begin to permeate our consciousness, when our souls beckon, no, beg us to dig deeper, to find meaning, to find purpose—is the same age where we least understand these confounding aspects of our lives. At that age, we understand so little about the world, about our own perception of life, let alone that of others. We lack the wisdom that comes with years, if not decades, of experience to inform us about ourselves and our life decisions. We're barely past the stage of being merely oblivious children; we've dabbled our feet into the darkness and the void, but we cannot even begin to bear the piercing light that shines through the cracks—a bravado to comprehend an incomprehensible truth.

But I will argue that neither the Bible or Camus are telling us to give up on the quest to find meaning in our lives and what ultimately fulfills us as human beings. I don’t believe that they are arguing that everyone just give up pondering the secrets to their happiness and life purpose by preemptively acknowledging their ignorance and naivete; in fact, I would say that it is all the more reason to do the opposite—to think about these hard questions as you go and to commit yourself to a lifelong quest to understand.

My mistake was thinking that I found truth, that I arrived at a revelation on how to live my life. What I didn’t understand is that we will never know enough. It is impossible to know the perfect moment for you to begin your search. The key is not to embrace our ignorance; the key is to embrace the unknown. It is not about giving up on yourself in this dip when the unknown hits you harder mentally and emotionally than anything you've ever experienced in your life. It's about accustoming yourself to simultaneously say "I don't know" and "I want to understand," so that you can avoid burning yourself out through desperation. You can still enjoy your youth, but lest we forget that the point of a journey is not to arrive; let your experiences—the days filled with light and the days filled with darkness alike—shape your perception, your worldview, and who you are.

Perhaps we're all wrong about the Christian life—maybe we're missing the entire point when we wait for blessings to come, when we obsess over heaven or hell, when we flaunt our accomplishments in the church or how much theological knowledge we've attained, when we stand around waiting for Jesus' return, when we constantly fixate on each and every possible reward or punishment, when we think that we have to fully conquer our doubts and arrive at a firm conclusion about our faith. Those things neither constitute the point of the journey. It could be that the practice, as Seth Godin argues, is the driving force behind the change we all desperately want to bring to the world. It is the kind of consistent generosity and compassion despite our doubts, the kind of attention and care and genuine desire to understand more, a daily contribution to those around us and thus humanity as a whole, and a patience to know that there are few absolutes in life when it comes to the innumerable paths that each of us have to walk. There is something about the practice of letting yourself be proven wrong, to be in denial, and to think that your life is banal and inconsequential. This practice teaches you something about the human condition and the weight and burden that bears on all of us.

It took me eight years to understand this. It was only in 2022 when I could finally look myself in the mirror, when I could finally dig into the abysmal depths of my being and say that, without regret, I am proud to be the person I am today. If you asked me if I could magically have those years back—those eight years I supposedly squandered on futile self-reflection, self-doubt, all those tears I've shed, all the relationships I’ve torn apart, and all the emotional trauma I've endured—I wouldn't understand what you mean. Because all that pain and strife and turmoil taught me to understand what it truly means to be empathetic and to be a sensitive, compassionate human being. It taught me not only about the darkness that lurks beneath all of our souls, but also the light that lies ever further within those depths.

Resolution

The concept of the New Year is fundamentally a placebo. It's the idea of a new beginning, a fresh start that appeals to so many people, even though there's nothing inherently new or fresh about it. We're 99% the same people as we were on December 31st. For those that actually make something out of their new year resolution, I'm happy that the placebo worked for you to achieve something and better yourself; we need to learn to better embrace healthy placebos in our lives anyhow.

We all know, however, that the vast majority do not keep their resolutions, and this is simply because making a resolution based on an arbitrary frame of time won't persist because it has no relation to who we are, what we believe, what we fear, and what we hope for. It's very hard to be resolute just because it's 2023.

So what does it mean to be resolute?

when we venture to see what lurks within our shadow selves,

when we find the courage to confront what lies in the abyss,

when we've seen the perils of an uninformed and hedonistic lifestyle,

when we've been afflicted of such great suffering,

when we edge ever closer towards finding truth,

when we've been knocked to rock bottom and that the only option left

is to be determined and resolute on your way back up.

You become resolute when you've discovered your reason to live. It means that you've already made the decision to commit yourself to a cause, that you've already answered the hard questions in life—who you're going to be, why you're going to do something, and how you're going to do it. It turns out, the same word that is an antithesis to our all-too-common existential crises is the same word we use to make absurd, arbitrary, shallow goals that almost none of us commit to.

Consider two scenarios:

1. You already had an actual resolution prior to 2023. Why, now, that the mere year has changed, have we decided to recalibrate its path or change it entirely? Just stuck with it.

2. You had no actual resolutions prior to 2023. You ought to look yourself in the mirror and ask yourself, why is it time now, to finally start thinking about how I should progress as an individual and potentially answer the hard questions of life? What is it about me that caused me to postpone such vital help to myself when I most needed it? Answering those questions will reveal far more about yourself than any “new year’s resolution” you set for yourself, successful or not.

We underestimate this notion of a resolution. If there was no severe mental or emotional turmoil involved in those goals that you set, by definition those were not resolutions. Every time we make a new year's resolution, we do a disservice to the actual meaning of resolute; we downplay the amount and severity of toil and strife it took for every resolute person to become who they are. There's simply nothing resolute about it, and we should all stop pretending it is. The very concept that a resolution can be based on an arbitrary frame of time and nothing else belies the actual spirit of being resolute.

If we are so compelled to spur ourselves into action every 365 days, I will cast my first vote to instead only call it new year's goals. But if the idea of a new year, a new beginning was indeed an impetus to be resolute, to answer the hard questions in your life, let’s not put shame to it by calling it new year’s resolutions; the new year doesn’t deserve the credit for your struggle. You do.

Suffering

I typically don’t care when people deny the existence of God; I question it myself even. Though there's this particular argument that irks me; atheists and Christians often wrestle over the concept of why there’s so much suffering in the world, despite the supposed existence of an altruistic higher being.

The atheist is naive for thinking that the existence of suffering disproves the existence of God, because it takes even more faith to believe that the premise of an omniscient and omnipotent God created suffering by accident and is powerless to do anything about it.

The Christian is naive for thinking that God's intention is to deliver us all from a life of suffering, because they believe that the point of the journey is to arrive—that we endure suffering solely so we can be deemed worthy of the eternal reward of heaven.

Both believe fundamentally that suffering is "bad," and there's nothing wrong with this belief; in fact, it shows that you're not a psychopath. But the mistake that both the atheist and the Christian make is coming to the conclusion that because it is "bad", it's something that shouldn't exist.

I want to posit this idea that in the grand scope of the human condition, perhaps suffering is the point. This is not to say that we should be sadists and constantly make a conscious effort to embrace the suffering as it happens, or that we should entertain this absurd notion of introducing more suffering in our world to bring about more meaning. From a metaphysical standpoint, suffering is not "good" or "bad"; it simply just is. It is a fundamental dynamic in our world that is inextricable from the human condition and our desire to be better than we were yesterday.

So that leads us to another question: As humanity, have we gotten better? Namely, at reducing the amount of total evil—the amount unjust suffering inflicted on other humans—as time progresses? Are we able to fairly measure the amount of suffering in the first place? Can we reliably quantify how much good or evil is present in our world currently? There remains this harrowing notion that as human civilization advances, as we become more and more capable of saving and improving human lives, we become equally as capable of causing terror, unjust suffering, and death.

On one hand, advances in agriculture, pasteurization, public safety and health, medical technologies like vaccines, antibiotics, surgery, and blood transfusions all have contributed towards theoretically saving billions of lives. We've been able to spread knowledge, art, culture, and awareness of pressing issues at an unprecedented rate through the internet. We’ve greatly expanded the scope of philanthropy, introduced clean water to innumerable communities, opened countless numbers of schools, hospitals, and other invaluable institutions across the world. The standard of living and income across all strata of social class and all parts of the world has increased drastically.

On the other hand, we've killed hundreds of millions of people just within the last century. We've invented weapons of mass destruction that can wipe everyone off the face of the earth within minutes. We're causing irreparable damage to the Earth through pollution, habitat destruction, loss of biodiversity, and climate change. Hundreds of thousands of people are murdered every year just from homicide. Millions more die due to hunger, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, respiratory diseases, and automobile accidents, all precipitated by the outright negligence of the effects of smoking, air and water contamination, obesity, alcohol abuse, and poorly managed car-centric societies. Hundreds of millions of people are subjected to soul-crushing, mind-numbing work, poverty-level wages, and an abhorrent work-life balance because corporations choose to value short-term gain and profits over the welfare of its employees. Mental illness, depression, drug abuse, and suicide rates have reached unprecedented highs across the globe.

The big question is: will there be a breakthrough point where we somehow surmount the final barrier of our human tendency to gravitate towards evil, and have a world where we perpetually gravitate towards less and less unjust suffering? If you solely looked for trends in the past ten thousand years of history, the answer is very clear—no. Over and over again we have proved that we never learn from the mistakes of our past; in fact, it seems to only get worse over time. Through the events of the past century, we make the perpetrators of atrocities of the distant past look like rank amateurs compared to what we’ve done in recent memory. Do we have any reason to believe that humanity will have a sudden change of heart in the future?

With some of the darkest chapters of human history—colonialism, the Holocaust, the two world wars—most of us feel a burning sense of indignation. Even passive events with no apparent cause or reason—someone’s child that suffers an incurable disease, or earthquakes and floods that have taken the lives of millions—drive us to want justice and redemption. Cause and reason aside, perpetrator or no perpetrator regardless, whatever tragedy befalls us fuels something within the human spirit nonetheless.

Perhaps we're trying to answer a futile question. Perhaps there is no breakthrough point, and the pathway towards the center of everything we do and everything we are is lined with suffering. The human condition is fundamentally a balancing act between good and evil. It’s ultimately the medium through which we can even begin to understand the metaphysical, the elusive concepts of meaning and purpose, and the idea that we can have something worth living for.

"It's possible that without the possibility of evil, there cannot be good. Good requires the possibility of evil, and maybe good is so good that the fact that it requires the possibility of evil is acceptable—maybe it's even desirable."

— Jordan Peterson

Given the choice to live in the matrix and indulge in hedonism, it seems that many of us still choose to live with the suffering of reality. And for us, the reason is very clear. Can we even comprehend or make sense of a life without suffering? As humans, we have an innate propensity to create and write stories, to make something of our life, however imperfect and chaotic. Without suffering, our stories cease to be stories. There are no protagonists without antagonists, no heroes without villains, no plot without tension, no resolution without conflict, no good without evil. And without stories to write, we have no reason left to live.

On Work

I spent the last five years in the retail and foodservice industry, where I’ve spent the majority of my career as a manager. More importantly, however, I’ve spent over two decades as a consumer, and if you've lived in the US for any extended period of time, you'll likely share at least some of my sentiment of being absolutely appalled at the soullessness, mediocrity, and laziness of the service industry.

When they accidentally mix up your coffee order with one that has almond milk, but you have a nut allergy.

When you want to ask a question about a shirt you want to buy, they ignore you because they're in a rush and there's a line of customers to the door that they have to deal with.

When you spend over an hour on hold to speak with a customer service representative, and that phone call takes yet another hour to finish because they have to go down a checklist of what they have to say as instructed by the manager instead of just helping you get what you want.

When they forget the reservation cake for your five-year-old son's birthday party, but you're already running late, and rudely tell you to wait one hour, and after an hour, they forget to give you candles or a knife. And when you open the box, your son's name is misspelled.

Dealing with these situations is infuriating. Often we can’t expect to receive even decent service, let alone something we might call good or great, so many of us lower our standards and expectations; we're conditioned to think that mistakes on our order is normal, that rude or apathetic staff is normal, that subpar products and services are normal, that being frustrated when you go out to do your daily routine is normal. Something that is as integral to modern society as grocery shopping, eating at a restaurant, getting your morning coffee, or buying clothes is undermined by carelessness and negligence. I think we can all agree that the people that work in these industries are doing important work. So, why then, is it reduced to being the most miserable, lowest paid work in the entire country? Why has it regressed into a robotic, soul-sucking slog that eats away at the welfare of our society?

Unless you're part of the 1%—a high-level executive or a significant stakeholder in a company—the rest of us are playing a zero-sum game.

Mid or low-level managers within a dysfunctional organization become mired in what Zeynep Ton describes as the “vicious cycle of retail.”

It’s incredibly demoralizing to witness high turnover rates, good and bad employees alike leaving your organization left and right, a hapless sense of perpetual disorganization and instability. It is hard to not be distraught when your workers are brought down by low morale, constantly suffering, being disrespected by customers, and working long, grueling hours for a poverty-level wage that you didn’t decide on. These lower-level managers become powerless puppets to upper management, being assigned absurd deadlines and arbitrary targets for sales or productivity. They become scapegoats in corporate’s obsession with P&L's and audits amidst ear-chafing, repulsive buzzwords like the "bottom line" and the "best practices,” which are never characterized by a genuine desire to improve the service or product at hand nor the working experience for those involved. It’s no surprise then, that these managers get burned out themselves, only making the lives of workers and customers worse as they’re not able to properly do their job of leading teams and ensuring smooth operations without losing their own sanity.

Frontline workers have to endure horrible, oppressive working environments—poorly designed, dirty, and disorganized workspaces, a lack of essential tools or supplies, inconsistent schedules, insufficient staffing and training, and absurd, nonsensical workplace rules or conventions created by wholly incompetent or just unmotivated, burnt out managers. Furthermore, there is often a complete lack of investment into the working conditions or benefits for these frontline workers. You know there's a problem when you have to ask permission from someone in corporate to justify the purchase of a $2 countertop dusting brush because it affects "the bottom line." Then try asking for a raise.

However, chances are, if you asked most retail workers what the worst part of their working experience is, they will likely tell you it is having to deal with entitled customers, people that have somehow simultaneously attained moral superiority and the audacity to forego any standards of human decency or respect from the moment they walk through the door. It is this unconscious—though often conscious—bias against minimum wage workers that denigrates your worth and thus your commitment to the job. The social norm is that retail jobs are part-time, throwaway jobs that you use to get some side cash to help you pay for college and get a "real job." And the people that want to do the work full-time often are as underpaid as their disposable brethren, and they still suffer from that same ridicule and social perception that they just aren't smart enough or are just too poor to go to college and pursue a decent career. You're at the lowest rungs of the corporate ladder, and everyone will make sure to remind you of it.

As consumers, we have just as much to lose. It's not fun to interact with soulless zombies on your weekend trip to the mall or cafe. In fact, it's deeply saddening and can kill the vibe of your experience. And it certainly doesn't inspire confidence that your order will be made with care and attention. It's not fun to have to deal with frequent mishaps—wrong items, directions not followed, items not to standard, packaged or shipped poorly, etc. On top of this, the market has fewer and fewer products and services that are exceptionally well-built or meticulously well-executed, because it takes both generous, motivated employees and a company culture that is willing to sacrifice profits to uphold standards. We have a marketplace filled with mediocrity, not excellence. Instead of investing back into the product or service towards making improvements, or back into the employees that made the business possible in the first place, we are lining the pockets of corporate executives and shareholders.

Can we just agree that this is a plague on our society? Why are we accepting this as a fact of life? That this is just the way it's always been? Every day that we choose to live with the status quo, we are perpetuating unkindness and needless suffering to millions of people. Have we lost all compassion, let alone respect, for ourselves and the rest of the society we live in?

We've been tricked our entire lives into thinking that we should hold back—the notion that if you give it your all, the industrial system, solely interested in productivity, is just going to ask you for more. And so evolved this nonsensical notion of “keeping work and life separate,” wherein it is believed that at all costs we should avoid overcommitting ourselves to work to save time for our own happiness and enjoyment of life. This bifurcation of responsibility is a toxic, backwards belief that undermines the value and impact of our work; it makes us complacent, and it distances ourselves from the responsibility we have to take against profligate corporate greed. I’m not saying burn yourself out or think about work constantly; we should know that overworking is not productive or conducive to a sustainable career. I’m saying that regardless of the type of work we do, all work has an impact on the welfare and functioning of society as a whole and the specific communities we are a part of.

We spend half of our waking hours at work; when we consciously suck the humanity out of what we’re doing, when we make what we do soulless and selfish—solely as a means of making money or status for ourselves—we make half of our lives essentially meaningless when we could've contributed towards something greater. We need to stop being afraid. We are afraid of a change to our way of life, afraid to lose our job, afraid to lose our income—the same income the corporatists want us to squander on their mediocre products. We can’t just walk through the office door and decide today that we’re going to shut off part of our brains and forget that we had any responsibility as human beings. Our attempt to draw an invisible boundary with our work doesn’t actually extricate us from this human responsibility—to be kind, to be compassionate, to be understanding, to service one another in our quest to find happiness, fulfillment, meaning, and purpose.

Parallel Worlds

I’m at a certain crossroads in life. Having just quit my job, I’ve consequently been spending a great deal of time contemplating my career options. Naturally, I’ve caught myself many times imagining how great it would be if any of my hobbies (or past hobbies) could’ve formed into a genuine professional career. Before I began my first (and only) job at Paris Baguette, I was really into Olympic weightlifting, drumming, and learning Chinese—all during different epochs of my high school and college life. By now, I thought, I would’ve likely reached a highly proficient level had I just stuck it out and had just a little more determination and commitment.

I didn’t quit because it got difficult or because it took up too much time; I quit because I had too much self-doubt, and, above all, an unshakeable compulsion to be certain that what I was doing was my passion and my talent, that all the time and energy invested would be worth it. I wanted to prove to everyone that I could achieve something in life and do at least one thing that I could say I was better at than anyone else around me. This was an obsession with an outcome—to be certain that what I was doing would inevitably guide me towards professional success, approval, fulfillment, and joy. And so I began my quest to prove myself—an inane quest to gather proof and evidence to show everyone else that I was on the right track.

I wanted to prove that I was stronger than everyone else. I wanted to prove that I was doing the most technically difficult lifts compared to anyone else in the gym. I wanted to prove to my parents and friends that this was about improving my physical health. I wanted to be certain that one day, people would admire my physique, strength, and determination.

I wanted to prove that I was not like all the other supposedly aspiring who haphazardly and inconsistently practiced. I wanted to prove that I could land a gig. I wanted to prove that I was authentic, just for authenticity’s sake. I wanted to be certain that I could become a professional musician and I could make a living from this so my parents wouldn’t pester me about my career.

I wanted to prove that I wasn’t like all the other Chinese-Americans around me who never diligently studied their language and heritage. I wanted to prove to everyone that I was capable of memorizing how to pronounce and write thousands upon thousands of characters. I wanted to prove that dropping out of college was justified and not because I was lazy. I wanted to be certain that I could one day express myself perfectly in Chinese and blend in seamlessly with everyone else in Taiwan.

But proof and certainty weren’t what I needed. When I began to hit more and more roadblocks, all this mindset did was help me experience failure in advance. I gave up because I was not certain. And the moment I lost certainty was the moment I lost all motivation to continue. It wasn’t the outcome that mattered—it was the practice. The practice of engaging with the art itself.

By searching for (and then embracing) a practice that contributes to the people we care about, we can find a path forward. That path won’t always work, but we can trust ourselves enough to stick with it, to lean into it, to learn to do it better. The alternative is corrosive.

When we begin to distrust our own commitment to the practice, we’re left with nothing but fear. When we require outcomes as proof of our worth, we become brittle, unable to persist in the face of inevitable failure on our way to making a contribution.

- Seth Godin, The Practice: Shipping Creative Work

Why become stronger when you can grow stronger together with others? Why didn’t I find friends or others who would’ve been interested in training together and eventually going to lifting competitions together?

Why didn’t I document my daily practice routines and post them on YouTube, not only so that I could analyze my own work, but be generous in sharing ideas and struggles with others learning to drum as well?

Why didn’t I talk to and play with other aspiring musicians instead of grinding in the practice room alone all day, when I could be creating actual music? Why didn’t I find a study partner to learn Chinese, someone who was already fluent and was trying to learn English, thus enabling us to be generous with each other?

“Do what you love” is for amateurs.

“Love what you do” is the mantra for professionals.

- Seth Godin, The Practice: Shipping Creative Work

Having given up on all my previous hobbies by 2018, I was basically thrown into working a retail job at a local bakery chain after being prodded by my brother and my parents to be more productive with my spare time. Little would I know working as a cashier and eventually a manager at Paris Baguette was the best thing that ever happened to me. It wasn’t perfect by any means—far from it if I was honest, but I learned to love what I do regardless. The thing is, there was never a day I woke up for work and said, “I’m going to do this to be a better person, or so I could make more money, or get a promotion.” I always woke up, organized my daily to-do list, and contemplated how I could best contribute today; I was constantly brainstorming ways I could tackle a specific problem, how I could make the working experience for those around me just a little bit better, whether it was through redesigning workspaces to make them less frustrating to work in, rethinking workflows to save time and energy, or equipping each team member with the specific tools or knowledge they needed to succeed. Most of all, I always looked forward to sharing moments, however transient and insignificant they seemed at times, with both coworkers and customers alike. Day after day, this changed me. Realizing my transformation over time—gradually becoming more social, more confident, more brave, less cynical, less pessimistic—helped me understand that it is the practice that matters in and of itself—not the outcome. Focusing on my daily contribution—not obsessing over whether something was “worth it” or not—ultimately led me to become a person I can be proud to be. Could I have said the same, had I followed my heart, and “did what I love”?

Sometimes we like to think that there are alternate universes—parallel worlds—where if something was just a little different, everything would’ve turned out differently. But the only problem is, no one or anything is making it just a little different; that’s not the way the world works. There was no omniscient force that would trigger some event or spontaneous revelation in my life based on a whim. The circumstances and my state of mind at the time led me to those decisions. There is no parallel world where I magically mustered the willpower to continue weightlifting amidst the loneliness and disillusionment of high school, a world where I somehow put all my self-doubt and purposelessness behind me during college to continue drumming, or a world where, completely by blind luck and good fortune, found the confidence, maturity and determination to stay in Taiwan and continue learning Chinese. If parallel worlds exist, it certainly would not look like those.

I choose not to have regret because these experiences were all part of my life nonetheless. Who knows the person I would’ve become—much rather, the person I would’ve continued to be—had I stuck it out. It is the path I took, and this path—worn through by countless failures, despair, and uncertainty, and paved by self-forgiveness, generosity, and faith in the practice—led me to this point where I even have the wisdom and capacity to come to this revelation in the first place. Why would I take that all back?

These what-if scenarios exemplify our obsession with outcome; we never think about the process, while we obsess over the result—the person I could’ve been, the girlfriend I could’ve got, the career I could’ve had. But what about all the steps you took to get to that place? What about how that practice shapes you? No—I don’t wish I was an amazing weightlifter, a prolific drummer, or a bilingual prodigy. Because in each of those versions of myself, under an ostensibly great career hides a stagnant and still weak, close-minded, cynical, self-consumed, pessimistic, and naive self that would have remained unchallenged for years.

This mode of thought merely constitutes our self-fabricated narrative, a make-believe story to extricate ourselves from the shame and naïveté of our past, imagining the best versions of ourselves when we were actually at our worst.

No, Don’t Ask Me to Vote

I don't want to involve myself in politics simply because I know nothing about it. I don't want to be involved in any important, society-altering decision-making process, for that matter, if I'm not extremely well-versed in the relevant fields. Does that make me strange? Does it make me strange for not wanting to make rash, biased, ill-informed, and emotionally-charged decisions for other people?

Political issues are incredibly complex, and often require a very profound understanding of history, geopolitics, psychology, sociology, science, moral philosophy, among many other things. I, and most certainly not most people, do not possess this level of comprehension in these topics to make any informed judgments whatsoever. And it's not just the average person; it's even those in the upper middle or upper class, those that have attended prestigious colleges and have had their path paved ahead of them. The problem isn't only that the people are retarded, it's that on top of that, they're also entitled—the type of thinking that voting or any form of political involvement can come for free, that it's a privilege, and that we can use it just because we can. To be honest, it's no surprise, considering the educational philosophy of public schools and most universities that value conformity and compliance over anything else, where from a young age we're constantly drilled into following directions to gain a reward. We're not taught to think, to know how to effectively communicate and create productive civil discourse, to be self-aware enough to proudly say that you don't know. But instead we're ridiculed and deemed a failure if we say we don't know. So, when none of us are being held to a standard, we hide behind a façade of knowledge and self-appointed moral superiority. And being conformists, we don't have a problem with this, since that's what everyone else is doing.

I don't have a problem with people having their opinion. It's when you decide that your mere opinion should decide how other people should have to live their lives and how society should be run, regardless of whether or not you've done the intellectual heavy lifting and spent the long hours of research, reading, and discussion. No—this is not a discussion regarding what political structure is optimal; I don't know the answer to that question and I'm in no position to answer it. What I'm contending with is that, regardless of the present political system we live in, why is no one being held to a standard of knowledge or comprehension? Why is it that so few people actually know how to create productive civil discourse? Why is it that we perpetuate and embrace a culture that values being "right" over being truthful, a culture that is characterized by polarization of beliefs instead of a communal pursuit of human welfare? Do we just not care anymore?

Following a barrage of news surrounding the Itaewon crowd crush back about two months ago, I've begun to visualize the crowd crush as a microcosm of our political climate, and thus as a stark warning for us all to realize the dangers of a mass of people. Just as panic sets a crowd into a frenzy, pushing one another more aggressively and trampling one another to the point of death, we can in the same way drive our nation into chaos, forcing each and every one of us against our will down a path fraught with immorality, corruption, and both the very real consequence of death and the figurative death of our nation and what we stand for. No one blames the individual for the casualties in a crowd crush. Why is that? After all, in a crowd, we're the ones doing the pushing. Because we do it for our survival. We do it because there's no other path but forward. We understand that the individual becomes powerless in such a situation; they unwillingly become part of a force that compounds to eventually suffocate someone down the line. The fact of the matter is, if you want to avoid death, you avoid crowds entirely, because you understand the inherent power a crowd has—it has become not the sum of its constituent elements of consciousness, but an entire beast in and of itself. Sure, you can put all your trust and faith in the government or the event organizers to be well-prepared for such an event, but the risk always remains; it is—at the point of no return, the point at which you become part of an uncontrollable tide—the risk of losing all individual freedom to decide your fate.

"[A] crowd in its very concept is the untruth, by reason of the fact that it renders the individual completely impenitent and irresponsible, or at least weakens his sense of responsibility by reducing it to a fraction.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

I find it particularly interesting that many of us like to speak about the horrors of the 20th century as if they were the dark ages of humanity, as if we're somehow past that harrowing chapter of human history, that we've learned from our mistakes and we're far more enlightened and intellectually informed now than we were then. But seven or eight decades ago, in the grand scope of human history, is very recent history, and I think we don't realize the weight of this notion fully. And it is the idea that fundamentally, as humans, we're not all that different from who we were when we wiped hundreds upon hundreds of millions of people off the face of this earth. Yet we don't act like we live with that kind of danger, yet we are the ones that are capable of carrying out the atrocity. We are the ones that are complicit if it happens.

Jordan Peterson, in one of his lectures recounting the origins of the nationalist socialist movement in Germany in the 1930s, remarked,

"It wasn’t only stupid people who got tangled up in this. It was pretty much everybody who got tangled in it. And one of the things you might think about is: if you were there, for any one of you, there is a 90% chance that you would have got tangled up in it. You wouldn’t have been a person who rescued the gypsies, forget that."

Look at how we talk to one another, the way we find joy in trampling our political "opponents," how little we think for ourselves and instead just take a side, and how low our standards are for not only the people that we elect to lead this nation, but more importantly, for each other as citizens.  There is the proof that we haven't come that far. When we normalize and perpetuate this behavior, we don't realize that this is the same exact behavior that precipitated the complete and utter catastrophes of the 20th century. Only now, we have more tools of destruction at our disposal.

So am I wrong for thinking that this intellectual negligence and dereliction of our duty as citizens is gravely immoral? That when we allow the brute force of a crowd, a panicked mob, to dictate the path of our nation, we ourselves become capable of unjust murder? When you consider the political blunders of the past, how corrupt or inept politicians have led us astray and squandered billions of dollars? When you consider the abysmal state of living that millions of Americans still endure to this day? When you consider the atrocities and the hundreds of millions of people killed in the last century because people had no courage to stand for what was right, or the intellectual capacity to even comprehend what was right? When we instead let our emotions drag us to blindly follow ideologues and tyrants, people, that above all other considerations, merely make us feel better? Have we learned absolutely nothing from history?

Don't encourage each other to vote. Encourage each other to think.

Love and Circumstance

I've always thought that our perception of love is incredibly circumstantial. There's a certain scenario I like to envision in my mind—imagine yourself as the main protagonist of your top ten favorite romance novels, movies, or television series. Now copy-paste any potential romantic partner, particularly ones you might deem incompatible or presume to be way out of your league, into the role of the primary love interest in any of those stories. Now, in each of those iterations, I want you to honestly ask yourself: do you really think, in each of those scenarios—with all the ridiculous coincidences and contrived plot events characteristic of romance stories—you and your partner would never see anything in each other? Or imagine you and your partner together tomorrow, where suddenly everyone on earth except you two just spontaneously vanished, and you had absolutely no choice but to coexist together for the rest of your lives, where you both have the opportunity to learn about each other through trial and tribulation, to be privy to all your attributes, both good and bad. Would nothing ever happen between you two?

I went on a Hinge date earlier this year in February. Long story short, neither of us really felt anything for each other, and we didn't really seem to have any natural chemistry. But what left the biggest impression on me from that date was this persistent notion that had we been in different circumstances that would've enabled us to better get to know each other and start with a baseline level of comfort, we might've made something happen from it. I mean, after all, we did end up matching and she did end up agreeing to a date, so we did come to the date at least somewhat optimistically. At least from my perspective, she was much like me in the sense that we felt that the premise of a Hinge date was stilted, unnatural, and was surrounded by too many expectations, whether we'd like to admit it or not. We were neither the type to get along with strangers super well, and if I imagined ourselves in a romance drama, or even something not as absurd and more commonplace like being classmates that got stuck together for a group project, it would've been far easier for us to ease ourselves into a more natural emotional bond.

Nobody writes a plot for a romance novel or movie where the two main characters meet in a dating app, and if they do, they always meet, and then something else unexpected happens; there's nothing remotely interesting or unique about using the app itself. Nobody's going to write a story about swiping left or right on your phone at midnight, having the most stale and generic text conversation before agreeing to a date, and then slogging it through the ritual of small talk.

Romeo and Juliet, Pride and Prejudice, Beauty and the Beast, The Titanic, The Notebook—the vast majority of the great romance stories we all know primarily center around surmounting the odds and the circumstances, overcoming the strife and struggle leading up to a relationship, not the relationship itself (or sometimes there is no relationship at all). By using dating apps, there is no strife. There is no struggle. There is no story. You simply meet, and that's it. Despite our cultural fascination with romance, we seem fine with foregoing the opportunity to write our own stories without a second thought. Dating apps optimize their way out of the story—the "hard" part—leading up to a relationship, But stories were never meant to be optimized; we don't suggest that Tolstoy should've used more concise language when writing Anna Karenina, and we don't recommend anyone to go to SparkNotes to skim over a one-page summary of it instead of actually reading it.

Dating apps are gamifying something that was never meant to be a game. Despite the predominant cultural perception surrounding the notion of love and relationships, these matters are quite serious, as sexual desire, emotional connection, and marriage are all deeply rooted in the survival of our species. And when we're forced into this dehumanizing, inane game of cycling through human beings as if they're NPCs in a role-playing game, many of us unsurprisingly feel disingenuous. We perceive that something just isn't right when we constantly meet one person after the other and trick ourselves into forgetting they ever existed, over and over again. These feelings are disconcerting, a poignant reminder that what we're doing is inherently unnatural and cruel, desensitizing and detaching ourselves from the innate, humanistic desire to pursue connection and to thus create stories. This isn't a problem for everyone, obviously, but for people like myself who cherish and embrace human connection in a profoundly emotional way, it makes life on dating apps grueling and exhausting.

With online dating, finding love is no longer achieved with the means by which you can write your own story—the nuances and intricacies, the magic that happens when we clash two personalities amidst perfectly imperfect circumstances—is no longer relevant. Instead, it has been consigned to the principles of modern-day mass marketing. Before online dating really even took off, Seth Godin wrote in 2003,

"It’s no longer good enough to be good enough. With 100,000 singles out there, and 10 million resumes, the only people getting what they want are the ones exceptional enough to stand out."

The ability to market yourself to an audience is highly determinant of your success, starting from the creation of your profile, your approach to texting, and how you choose to present and sell yourself on your first date. Unfortunately, a lot of us, including myself, are terrible at marketing, especially when the thing we're trying to sell is ourselves, which makes it only feel more disingenuous. And considering most people's attention span nowadays, you're going to have to present yourself hastily and convincingly; barely anybody wants to go through the trouble of actually getting to know you, especially when the next candidate is a couple swipes and a few texts away.

I'm convinced that online dating will remain a niche—a shortcut for those who want a shortcut. The proof is in our culture, in our obsession with the idea of romance for millennia. But more fundamentally, the proof is in humanity itself; I'm not inclined to believe we will ever be able to extricate ourselves from our fascination with stories and our predisposition to write them. Especially with something that is so integral to humanity as love and relationships, stories of utmost struggle and of triumphant redemption—the nuances and intricacies of human interaction, the fateful magic that takes place when we clash two personalities amidst perfectly imperfect circumstances—are far too compelling for us to let go of.