I found this in draft mode still from May 2021, I'm just publishing it yolo style now without reading to check if it's fine.
"Writing is easy. All you have to do is to cross out the wrong words." - Mark Twain
The quote I actually learned through Civ 6.
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I've been meaning to write. In my so-far fairly stable period of thoughts and life, the contentment that pseudo-Buddhist philosophy has brought has been laid bare at times when I've felt provoked and quick to anger. I wrote down the topics which have done this. And I finally feel compelled to write.
I suggested Joseph try it to, though I don't know if he'll take it up. Maybe it is only for some people. He has had his own thoughts, and I think they are worth writing down for himself.
There are certain things that I'm afraid of, and they are unconventional. I feel the fear that maybe someone else from a less wealthy family may fear, and maybe it is a fear that is tied to the same philosophy. I think sometimes that maybe my father feared this too, and for the most part chose to ignore it. These are all I think, interrelated fears, but since I've listed them down on my phone separately I'll also write about them separately.
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Fear 1: Thriftiness and Credit scores
All children eventually grow up to understand that their parents are flawed human beings as well.
I grew up taught by my mother to be cheapskate about many many things. In fact, I think I felt (note that in truth I don't even know if it mattered to her) like she was proud of me for spending the least amongst my brothers and living frugally. Till this day, variants of my spending habits translate comfortably to also being generally less wasteful and more eco-friendly. But the truth is I expend a lot of energy into things that probably do not translate, in real dollars, to as much savings as if I cared about "bigger" picture things like how I handle my personal finances or take advantage of deals. I am aware of my own stubbornness. And in fact in writing this I've come to realize what I've learned from my mother basically are all the things that also coincide with two virtues I value which are to live simply and to be at less wasteful, while passing up all the "auntie" street smart things like getting onto as many credit cards as she does, and opening up accounts in many places to get as many discounts and what not. She clearly does both, and for some reason I value one and disdain the other. Maybe these traits are a marriage of my mother's saving habits, and fathers' simple living. It's time I get on a credit card.
Fear 2: Immigration
I've also worded this to Christelle once. I think that I fear a lot of opportunities presented to me because I assume they are not for me, or because I'm unsure if I will lose something in translation. It may not be easy for someone to understand, especially because I speak great English, but there is a primeval fear associated with disassociating from your culture. It is maybe the same fear you might expect a first generation college student would experience, because the young person has to lean their way into the dark, without parental experience. That feeling can be generalized to immigrants that may not be able to rely upon an established community presence like mine. I feel neither here nor there, a common occurrence I'm aware, and fear I'm equipped neither here nor there with the intuition to navigate new situations. It is almost a curse that I manage such a natural American accent, because it arms others around me with expectations of me, outside their control. Yet it might also be my fear of being patronized that I know absolutely nothing, or weird stereotypes of foreigners I'm trying to avoid, that keeps me from seeking help with simple "I'm not from here" statements. It's time I wilt the pride.
Fear 3: Finance
The excuse I've given myself for a time being is... yet I also know there are some unresolved tensions between what I know to be "good for me" and what I value personally as powerful motivators.
Fear 4: Future
In Coach Carter, one of the basketball players recites a poem that it is not our inadequacy that we fear but the opposite, of our own capability. Though I don't recall exactly the lines and could be misinterpreting entirely (especially as it later goes on to talk about how we should let our own lights shine to inspire others to do so as well), that line could read something about fearing we will not achieve our full potential. It certainly scares me. At this point I'm infatuated with being perfectly mediocre (knowing fully that on average in society I am doing well), but knowing it is possible for me, given life circumstances, to achieve more. Of course, there are all the sort of speculation that one never truly knows, which is why I always aim to do "slightly above average". I know that if I buckle down and stress about it now, I can set my own path. I also know I can be happy in many circumstances and don't need to stress about trying too hard. But it has often left me at an impasse between trying hard and not trying too hard.
Fear 5: My family, culture, and Christelle
Recently I reacted negatively to Chris's enthusiastic offer of help to my elder brother. This would not be the first time I react strongly and badly to Chris's enthusiasm for some subject. It's about time I sat down to really think about what that's all about. On the surface, I can honestly say it is cynical distrust. There's no way around it and no point in being euphemistic. What are the root causes and are they rational? Can I change or compromise? I can't help but remember the "curse" my history teacher Mr. Khoo told the class he was bestowing, and the irony that I probably have not strongly questioned his wisdom which is to question things. It's a simple precept which is the opposite of the presumption of innocence, which is not to commit to believing until evidence is provided. But I know aside from that I know most people base their suspicions on their culture and personal experience. It's simply intuition whether right or wrong, personally justified. So when Chris shares her personal family stories with me, I believe them in my head, but I have not accepted them in my heart. This is obviously extremely hurtful to anybody who is sharing a personal story only to be disbelieved. But in my heart, it's simply principle and again, culture and personal experience. I do not come from a family with such a fantastical background. My family were simply immigrants - sure, my grandparents were fleeing the cultural revolution in part, but so have many others - worked largely within the system, and are for the most part, ethnically Chinese. Chris, and here maybe comes some partly American interest in genealogy, or maybe it was just my parents who simply don't find it imperative to share, has English nobility in his ancestry. And not just - she also has indigenous ancestry. I have never met anyone with this kind of background - or else they have never shared - so the matter-of-fact way she talks about it makes it even more incredulous - does she even know how rare and uncommon this is? Or maybe it is not uncommon in the US (for example, some of the slave-owning founding fathers, who likely sexually assaulted their slaves, have large family trees over the generations), or maybe I am unaware of how uncommon it is? Another piece of personal background, perhaps even more contentious was about a mural and painting that her family owned, stolen out of war and with incredible injustice, claimed by someone else as theirs. Perhaps I should not be surprised - injustice like this is apparently well documented in the US, however incredible it may seem today, and still occurs, though maybe more blatantly in the past. But then my history lessons (with Mr. Khoo) kicked in, and it tells me that I should not trust sources that could be biased.
An aside - there is another area in which I am to relax what I try to apply as standard skepticism across the board that I think I have yet to truly grasp intuitively, which is that we should always trust sexual assault victims. At first this was hard (because why should we believe someone without knowing the full story or evidence?) but in actuality the bias is against them, and so on the flipside this made it easier to accept this tenet (because the fact that they are claiming this, when there is bias against them not to do so societally, makes it more likely it is true).
So is it the same case here? I am not sure. Maybe from experience, Chris has never found it difficult to get people to believe her, or maybe it's the opposite and it's because she trusts me - making my skepticism more disgraceful. The fundamental problem is that it conflicts with one of my values - which is to treat everyone equally, even my SO. This means if a stranger or acquaintance were to tell me the same thing - I would not immediately believe them either. Yet I think she expects me to - because I'm her boyfriend? Or because she thinks it's normal for people to trust immediately? What is an average level of skepticism in America? Is it different from Singaporeans?
Here comes the more irrational parts. Part of my distrust comes from behavior I tend to associate with people who should be distrusted - but are they really correlated? For example, Chris likes to talk about her dreams. That's fine - but sometimes I get a sense that she believes they have some greater meaning (the latest science gives a pretty clear no) - or is it that she just finds them fascinating? Maybe it is me that just finds them not fascinating because they are so random and ultimately meaningless? To be fair, Chris finds many things meaningful where I do not (and vice versa sometimes), and I feel like I am disappointing or a mood-killer when I do not share the same enthusiasm. In fact it is a skill I think I should learn - which is to find joy and fascination in many many more things - which seems to come naturally to her. My mind on the other hand has been acclimatized to optimize and remove distractions - and things that she finds interesting, I sometimes find distracting from bigger picture things. So comes my own cognitive dissonance - I respect and admire valuing simply things, and am beginning to disdain "big picture" type people - yet I don't do it myself! Fuck me. Another thing I'm uncertain on is Chris's generally disorganization in some areas, and complete organization in others. I think some article said this was a sign of very smart people - hmm. Chris "gives me the impression" of someone who believes everything on the internet - but this is certainly and patently untrue. In fact she has probably whipped my own intellectual laziness quite a bit in terms of fact checking. One area in which I find difficulty is that she likes talking about news that are essentially still rumors - and she knows this, so why talk about it? - is what I find hard to understand. Maybe it's because I have given up myself - I don't like "following" news until they are certain, I think it's clickbait.
So back to the impetus for this section of the post - my reaction to her wanting to help my brother. This subject might be one of the grayer ones too. It's about culture. Essentially Chris sometimes gives me the impression that she doesn't understand, doesn't get, or doesn't care that I'm foreign - and this is not a bad thing, generally speaking! For one, I am familiar enough with American culture and perform my own automatic-translations (literally, in the case of Fahrenheit to Celsius).
One common stereotyping of Americans that Europeans and Asians share afaik is that Americans often fail to see how "American" they are, or that they presume certain commonalities across cultures that are simply false. This can be very irritating to foreigners, in foreign places, though obviously that's not unreasonable in the US aside from stressing immigrants out sometimes. To be fair, for Americans it might be both easy and difficult to understand or perceive these differences. Then comes a problem that is probably universal - people mistake what are individual characteristics as cultural phenomenon. Surely I am guilty of this. For one, I've come to the realization, too late at times, that when I talk to my elder brother, the discussion we have or jokes we make kind of exists in its own culture and understanding that does not translate, at least for my brother, to his other interactions. I guess I just assumed I was always talking to the same and true person - I was, but that wasn't the whole picture. Unlike me (or perhaps just like me), he keeps his mannerisms separate. Why is this relevant? Because we often make fun of Americans or other non-Singaporean places for various reasons. And so when Chris offered to talk to him directly, I was afraid some of her mannerisms would not be taken or understood well by my brother, who has not had the same experience as me in the US. But on introspection I realize this is not true, and that he may very well be keeping the jokes between us or perhaps he healthily chooses to keep an open mind anyway even if he has some underlying prejudices.
