Archive for the 'philosophy' Category

why should I give (for nothing)?

Published on October 21, 2008 in philosophy. 644 Comments Tags: giving, unconditional giving, used.

We’ve all been in situations where we are expected to give. Let’s say I’m in a team project and I’m expected to contribute a fair amount; maybe when I see an elderly trying to cross the street, I’m expected to give a helping hand; even when I want to fill my stomach and go down the convenience store, I’m expected to give money.

On a very primitive level, we can think of the reason that we give is because we’ll receive. If I contribute my fair share in the team project, we all enjoy a good end result. Obviously if I paid in a convenience store for some food I get a satisfied stomach. Yah, even if I help the elderly across the street I’d get a warm feeling in my heart.

And then there are cases where I don’t know why the fuck I’m giving, or giving more than I’m expected. Those are cases where I feel very fucking bad. When for some very weird reason I’m expected to give more than other people in a team, and other people seem to take it for granted.

Don’t get me wrong here. I think giving is generally a good thing. I once thought nothing was more divine than unconditional giving. Jesus Christ is worshipped by many because he gave his life unconditionally to wash the sins of all people, for all of our greater good. But hey, I’m just a human, why should I give more than necessary for other people, when I don’t get anything in return?

…when I don’t get anything, not even some kind words of appreciation, because other people fucking take it for granted?

Giving is a beautiful thing, but it turns into the synonym of “stupid”, “being used” quickly when it is not reciprocated.

I have been thinking very hard about this. I’ve been trying to make this world a better place for everyone, by giving a little bit more. But most of the time, the world has not become a better place for me. So tell me, why should I be the guy who makes more contributions than it needs be? If no one in a group of people is going to take the last extra mile to get something done, then why should I be that guy if nobody will appreciate it? Why shouldn’t I, like everybody else, let the whole thing sink and we all lose?

I have failed to find the answer, and the more I searched for it, the more I’m leaning into that the only rational answer is,

“You shouldn’t.”

we make choices; our choices make us

Published on September 17, 2008 in philosophy. 9 Comments Tags: chocies, positive thinking.

Found an inspirational story on the Web today:

Jerry is the kind of guy you love to hate. He is always in a good mood and always has something positive to say. When someone would ask him how he was doing, he would reply, “If I were any better, I would be twins!” He was a unique manager because he had several waiters who had followed him around from restaurant to restaurant. The reason the waiters followed Jerry was because of his attitude. He was a natural motivator. If an employee was having a bad day, Jerry was there telling the employee how to look on the positive side of the situation. Seeing this style really made me curious, so one day I went up to Jerry and asked him, I don’t get it! You can’t be a positive person all of the time. How do you do it?” Jerry replied, “Each morning I wake up and say to myself, Jerry, you have two choices today. You can choose to be in a good mood or you can choose to be in a bad mood. I choose to be in a good mood. Each time something bad happens, I can choose to be a victim or I can choose to learn from it. I choose to learn from it. Every time someone comes to me complaining, I can choose to accept their complaining or I can point out the positive side of life. I choose the positive side of life. “Yeah, right, it’s not that easy,” I protested. “Yes, it is,” Jerry said. “Life is all about choices. When you cut away all the junk, every situation is a choice. You choose how you react to situations. You choose how people will affect your mood. You choose to be in a good mood or bad mood. The bottom line: It’s your choice how you live life.” I reflected on what Jerry said. Soon thereafter, I left the restaurant industry to start my own business. We lost touch, but I often thought about him when I made a choice about life instead of reacting to it. Several years later, I heard that Jerry did something you are never supposed to do in a restaurant business: he left the back door open one morning and was held up at gun point by three armed robbers. While trying to open the safe, his hand, shaking from nervousness, slipped off the combination. The robbers panicked and shot him. Luckily, Jerry was found relatively quickly and rushed to the local trauma center. After 18 hours of surgery and weeks of intensive care, Jerry was released from the hospital with fragments of the bullets still in his body. I saw Jerry about six months after the accident. When I asked him how he was, he replied, “If I were any better, I’d be twins. Wanna see my scars?” I declined to see his wounds, but did ask him what had gone through his mind as the robbery took place. “The first thing that went through my mind was that I should have locked the back door,” Jerry replied. “Then, as I lay on the floor, I remembered that I had two choices: I could choose to live or I could choose to die. I chose to live.” “Weren’t you scared? Did you lose consciousness?” I asked. Jerry continued, “…the paramedics were great. They kept telling me I was going to be fine. But when they wheeled me into the ER and I saw the expressions on the faces of the doctors and nurses, I got really scared. In their eyes, I read ‘he’s a dead man.’ I knew I needed to take action.” ” What did you do?” I asked. “Well, there was a big burly nurse shouting questions at me,” said Jerry. “She asked if I was allergic to anything. ‘Yes,’ I replied. The doctors and nurses stopped working as they waited for my reply. I took a deep breath and yelled, ‘Bullets!’ Over their laughter, I told them, ‘I am choosing to live. Operate on me as if I am alive, not dead.'” Jerry lived thanks to the skill of his doctors, but also because of his amazing attitude. I learned from him that every day we have the choice to live fully. Attitude, after all, is everything.

what you see is what you believe, and what you have done

Published on July 25, 2008 in philosophy. 366 Comments

You’ve probably heard the story about the old fellow sitting on his porch on the edge of his hometown who is approached by two separate individuals at two separate times. The first individual pulls up, gets out of his car, and asks the old man, “I’m thinking of moving into town and I was wondering what kind of people live here?” The old man replies, “Well, what kind of people lived in your old town?” “They were rude and obnoxious. Everyone was only concerned with themselves. No one cared about getting to know their neighbor.” “Well,” says the old man, “I’m afraid you’ll find exactly the same kind of folks here.” Later that day the second individual pulls up, gets out of his car, and asks the old man the same question: “What kind of people live here?” “Well, what kind of people lived in your old town?” “They were pleasant and friendly. Everyone looked out for their neighbor. It was a really great place to live.” “I’m happy to say you’ll find exactly the same kind of folks here,” says the old man.

The bottom line of the story above, as I understand, is what you see is what you believe. But then I also thought it might be a step even further – what you see is what you have done.

Dog training and human training are pretty much the same. What you get in general is what you’ve trained others to give you. Like, if you reward your dog when it does something, it’s going to do that more. That may be kind of reward/punishing mechanism going on there.

In the example above, guy A said “They were rude and obnoxious. Everyone was only concerned with themselves. No one cared about getting to know their neighbor.” Would it be possible that it’s him that didn’t go out to get to know his neighbor? Maybe his neighbor was not initially open or hyperactive, but did you think he proactively went out to meet his neighbor? What most likely happened was he saw his neighbor “looked kind of unfriendly”, and he gave a “kind of unfriendly look” in return. It all ends up in a bad loop.

Now perhaps that sounds like some serious common sense there but I’d say a lot of people don’t seem to fully understand how this works, from what they’re doing. Most people can’t really express what they’re really thinking. Let’s say they got treated shit from their boss from work, typically they wouldn’t do anything about it on the spot but they’d badmouth the boss at the back later.

From the boss’s perspective, the employees responded well to that kind of behavior, so he’d keep doing it. Now sure, if the employee stood up for himself he probably wouldn’t get very good treatment right away, but there’s no denying that it would have “taught the boss a lesson”, no matter how small.

People “reward” other people’s bad behavior when they are afraid of the consequences of standing up for themselves. At other times, however, most people neglect to reward others’ good behaviors. When people do something to cross us, we’ll blame them immediately (if it doesn’t seem to have any immediate bad effects to us). Now let’s say if you get some good treatments from someone, most people would usually not give too much about it but a contrived thank you.

Why care about all this stuff? All the title suggests, what you see is what you have done. So the bottom line is, if you want people to respond well to you, maybe the very thing you can start considering right now is to change the way you respond to other people.

evolution or destruction?

Published on February 12, 2008 in philosophy. 106 Comments Tags: fight club, the matrix, tyler durden.

The 1st episode of The Matrix was pretty explicit in the author’s attempt to criticize the today’s world of “walking dead”. Are we really consciously living, fully understand what we’re doing? How many of us are truly aware of the fact that we’re nothing but a tool to help the society evolve. For a “greater good” of our collective human race.

I thought it is a pretty new concept people started to think about recently. However, as it turns out, time and time again writers have warned us of our path to doom.

In Fight Club (1999), the Narrator lives a “walking dead” life as a car company consultant. His every day is the same as every other day, he goes to work, buys his satisfaction from IKEA furniture as a consumer. He never really thought of what he’s doing, not until he met Tyler Durden. Who enlightened and brought him out of his rat race, but not in the society accepted ways such as giving him wealth and materials. He introduced him to the Fight Club.

Without further spoiling this magnificent story, I can make the point I want to: How many of us can NOT identify with the protagonist’s life? We go to school, get a job, buy stuffs, get a family, get old, finally die. That is nothing but the life of a “walking dead”, a cell supporting the life of The Matrix.

What shocked me most was the miserable fact that the whole human race have no signs whatsoever to stop “evolving” for the society. Back in 1955, the movie Rebel without a Cause also criticize the exact same thing about the modern societies.

Years later, consumerism has grown stronger than it has ever been. People are now working even harder to achieve the intangible. Just as global warming is at an alarming stage, so is our consciousness as individuals. Perhaps this is not to be surprised, as awakening from the Matrix can be very daunting:

All the above probably makes no fucking sense at all to some people. To people who understand it, however, it should have a profound meaning. So, can you truly say you’re know what you’re doing? If not, are you ready to shake it off and man up, or you’d rather stay unconscious and follow the crowd, for “our greater good”?

what’s more imporant: the shell or the egg?

Published on January 22, 2008 in philosophy. 748 Comments Tags: cuhk, eliza sucks, resume.

One of the homework this week is to write a resume (CV) of myself later to be sent to my potential employer in my summer internship. First of all, the school has required all resumes to be written in the “standardized format” (read “boring outdated format”), which has required the students to reveal their cumulative GPA and all bunch of boring details like education, etc. That got me wondering why the school didn’t go ahead and do the work for me instead of having me fill in all the information the school already has access to. Now, I thought one of the few things I remember from the management classes is that “personality matters”. Interestingly, the “standardized format” doesn’t even give you a hobbies/interests field to fill in. Apparently the school doesn’t really want to know about me as a person.

On the contrary with my school’s direction, the market seems to think that the shell of the resume is probably more important than the content. Some time ago I came across a very outstanding resume that serves to prove this point. Moreover, a simple Amazon search for “resume writing” turned up 4,000+ results. This raises a pretty interesting question: “If the resume writing skills can improve my interview results, given my resume content is the same, then why the heck do I have to work so hard for the resume content?”

So what are the resume content? It would be your college degree, your cumulative GPA as included in my “standardized resume”. These are the things that we’ve been working so hard for since at a young age. Then, if there are so many “instant ways to get your resume noticed in today’s crowded job market”, why don’t we just do the “instant ways” instead of having spent probably hundreds of thousands of money to get that little degree title which occupies probably 3 – 5 lines of text in that little piece of paper? Isn’t the shell more important than the egg?

As abstract as it may seem, those titles, college degrees are actually also part of the shell. Then what is the egg? It’s your personality. (I hate to use this term because it sounds like those professors, but that’s what it is) There are hotel CEOs not having a degree about hospitality. That more than serves the point that the degree really doesn’t make too much of a difference, no matter what the society tries to make us believe.

I had a conversation with a friend of mine about this topic a couple of days ago, and he said one thing that explained this stuff pretty well:

After we graduate and come into the society, we all have to start learning from the ground up anyway. It is naive to think that more than 10% of what you’ve learned at school actually applies in the real world. What truly matters is your own capabilities.

This brings us back to the same old question: what’s the point of wasting so much resources getting part of the shell, learning about a bunch of useless stuffs so you can get past the exams? That is a big waste of resources. People feel more proud when they are in the quantitative finance program more than in the engineering program because they had higher admission grades. Welcome to reality; the world of package/tags; the world of absurdity.