quiet.
For most of my life, I’ve thought that something was seriously wrong with me. Thanks to Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking, I now know that there is a lot that is wrong with me, but my introversion is not one of them. Growing up, I was made to feel like I was somehow inferior just because I was a little taciturn. Okay, more than just a little. More like deathly afraid of opening my mouth. Over time, I became convinced I really wasn’t as smart as some of the other kids just because I never raised my hand even though I knew the answer.
I’m glad I’m not alone in this, and especially grateful that someone like Cain took the time to write about it. Reading her book was like talking to a good friend. It was well researched and tackles so many of the issues that introverts struggle with. There’s even a tiny little section on introverts in the evangelical church. So for anyone else that has struggled to embrace their introversion or is just looking for a good read, I highly recommend Cain’s book.
finding meaning in the absurd
Over winter break I re-read Camus’ The Stranger and during finals week I’ve been working on Arthur Schopenhauer’s Studies in Pessimism. On first glance, these books are pretty depressing, especially Schopenhauer’s, with chapter titles like “on the sufferings of the world”, “on the vanity of existence” and “on suicide.” It’s not exactly the first book you would turn to when you’re searching for a little hope or a bit of a pick-me-up.
After a little reflection though, I realized the writings in and of themselves weren’t as tragic as some people think. Really, they’re only truly depressing if you read them from a Christian perspective. One of my favorite quotes from Camus comes as Monsieur Meursault faces the guillotine:
But everybody knows life isn’t worth living. Deep down I know perfectly well that it doesn’t much matter whether you die at thirty or at seventy, since in either case other men and women would naturally go on living— and for thousands of years. In fact, nothing could be clearer. Whether it was now or twenty years from now, I would still be the one dying.
I used to think that people who believed the same things as Camus would just go jumping off bridges all the time or blowing their heads off. After all, if life is really that vain and meaningless, why bother? Why not spare yourself all the hurt and hardship if you don’t believe that anything comes after death? It never made sense to me because I’ve grown up in church. And in church they teach you that your life is meaningless and fruitless unless it’s spent serving God. The last time I went to church was around Christmas time, and the time before that I don’t even remember. Maybe that’s why it finally clicked with me, why people like Camus and Schopenhauer can go on living when they hold such beliefs.
Maybe I do have a certain penchant for sad stories, but I think I’m also attracted by the likes of Camus and Schopenhauer because they remind me to make the most of every opportunity, to enjoy life to the fullest and to make the most of it. When you believe in an eternity, it’s easier to lose that sense of urgency. (but yes, the most eternity-minded people can also make the greatest impact.) After all, you’ve got all the time in the freaking world. Heck, eventually time won’t matter because it will never end. But when you believe that this life is all we have, then you do your best to make the most of every moment. And if you believe that this life is all we have, then making a difference in people’s lives matters— always. You have every incentive to better as much of as many lives as you can. Because that is all they have, and they deserve to experience just as much happiness as anyone else. But when you believe in eternity, and in a permanent place in eternity, then sometimes it doesn’t matter what you do. You can give your time, your money, your love. You can rescue a child from poverty and starvation or a woman from a life of prostitution, and then lose them to an eternity in hell. That’s depressing to me. That’s what can make life meaningless.
On Loneliness & Technology
- FJP: We've been reading different takes on digital social networks and how/if they impact solitude, loneliness, and offline socializing. Here is a mash-up of the conversations we've been following.
- The Atlantic: Social media—from Facebook to Twitter—have made us more densely networked than ever. Yet for all this connectivity, new research suggests that we have never been lonelier (or more narcissistic)—and that this loneliness is making us mentally and physically ill.
- NY Times: New communications technologies make living alone a social experience, so being home alone does not feel involuntary or like solitary confinement. The person alone at home can digitally navigate through a world of people, information and ideas. Internet use does not seem to cut people off from real friendships and connections.
- The Atlantic: We have never been more detached from one another, or lonelier. In a world consumed by ever more novel modes of socializing, we have less and less actual society. We live in an accelerating contradiction: the more connected we become, the lonelier we are. We were promised a global village; instead we inhabit the drab cul-de-sacs and endless freeways of a vast suburb of information.
- Slate: Articles about American alienation may well feel true to those who long for simpler, happier times, but they’re built on fables and fantasies. In fact, there’s zero evidence that we’re more detached or lonely than ever.
- The New Yorker: M.I.T. psychologist Sherry Turkle, takes issue with the basic promises of digital connection. She thinks that togetherness, far from being strengthened by technology, has been crowded out by “the half-light of virtual community.”
- The Atlantic: But it is clear that social interaction matters. Loneliness and being alone are not the same thing, but both are on the rise. We meet fewer people. We gather less. And when we gather, our bonds are less meaningful and less easy. The decrease in confidants—that is, in quality social connections—has been dramatic over the past 25 years.
- The New Yorker: Klinenberg’s research suggests that our usual perceptions about life alone get things backward. Far from being a mark of social abandonment, the solo life tends to be a path for moving ahead, for taking control of one’s circumstances. And, rather than consigning individuals to suffer in their solitude, aloneness may come at a cost to the community. The single life is inherently self-interested: it calls for vigilance on matters of self-preservation both large (financial autonomy) and small (dish detergent), and, in many cases, it frees the solitary from the sorts of daily interaction that help craft a sense of shared responsibility.
- NY Times: The Pew Internet Personal Networks and Community Survey — a nationally representative survey of 2,512 American adults conducted in 2008 that was the first to examine how the Internet and cellphones affect our core social networks — shows that Web use can lead to more social life, rather than to less. “Social Isolation and New Technology,” written by the Rutgers University communications scholar Keith Hampton, reveals that heavy users are more likely than others to have large and diverse social networks; more likely to visit parks, cafes and restaurants; and more likely to meet diverse people with different perspectives and beliefs.
- The New Yorker: Given our digital habits, the question isn’t whether we should use technology to ease our loneliness. It’s how.
- FJP (Jihii): Ah, key question. So, where do we stand? I'll quote Michael.
- FJP (Michael): What do I think about social media? For my personal use it’s a bit of a time suck and I have to remind myself to step away from it, head outdoors and wrap my mind around something more substantive than the flurry of information I find myself in. For professional use it’s integral to the FJP’s ability to build audiences and engage with them. I can’t think of how we would be able to accomplish what we do without it. Societally, I’m a big believer in tools and platforms that allow people to connect, organize and share information. Social media increases the speed with which people can do so more than any other tool in history. This is great. My fear with it though is that people will increasingly build information silos around themselves and only hear and expose themselves to information that they want to hear, and from a partisan perspective from which they’d like to hear it. (http://bit.ly/HsAnMN)
- FJP (Jihii): So yes, the power is in our hands, social media users. How do you choose to use your social networks? I think the key point is to continually check ourselves and reflect on just that.
- PS: Sorry for the lack of links. This post format won't allow it. Here are links to the articles. (Note that both the NY Times piece and Slate piece are by Eric Klinenberg.)
- NY Times: http://nyti.ms/I22q7e
- Slate: http://slate.me/J8BJzY
- The Atlantic: http://bit.ly/I0nwmI
- The New Yorker: http://nyr.kr/InwNEz
Source: futurejournalismproject
don’t do what you love
An interviewer once asked me what the best piece of advice I’ve ever received was. What naturally came to mind was my boss’s constant exhortation to do what I love. But such advice is easily applicable only to those such as the two of us, who are lucky (or weird) enough to actually enjoy pharmacy. But it wasn’t always that way. Before I could reach this point where I could follow those words of wisdom, I had to accept one other bit of counsel— to not do what I love. In retrospect, perhaps this was truly the best advice I’ve ever received.
Because sometimes, the best advice is that which we find the most difficult to swallow. For me, that came at the conclusion of my first semester of college, from my expos teacher. The bane of almost every pre-professional pharmacy student’s existence had been my most enjoyable class. I’d discovered that I not only enjoyed reading and writing critically, I was also pretty good at it. In 6 brief but caustic pages, I’d proven how absurd Malcolm Gladwell’s Broken Windows theory is. (Just kidding. But I do think it’s a rotten theory =P) So in the weeks following that first semester, I confessed my doubts and disappointments as a (pre)pharmacy student. And though he acknowledged my skills as a writer, and encouraged me to continue to hone those skills, he also admonished me to not follow the liberal arts path. A liberal arts education, he explained, is excellent for expanding the horizons of our minds. But it also leads to a life filled with unnecessary difficulty. Massive amounts of accumulated debt for the undergraduate and consequent graduate education that will likely not be paid off until you’re old and nearing retirement, because even with a PhD in the humanities, the average income is modest. The inability to properly support a family, unless you become a gold-digger. So, no, he told me, don’t do what you want to do, unless that misery is what you want— or unless your parents possess some inordinate, undisclosed amount of money to fund your pursuit of intellectually enriching but practically useless knowledge.
For the next year and a half, it was a struggle to stay the course. I still had doubts and I still thought about quitting pharmacy every few months (or days) or so. But once I finished those waste-of-life prerequisite courses and started the actual pharmacy classes, the doubts faded. Now with ease I find myself doing what I love. But this could only have happened after not doing what I loved, and in the process learning to love what I do.
Someone once told me that high school would be the best four years of my life. That person was a dirty little liar. Someone else told me that college would be the best four years. But standing outside the lecture hall yesterday afternoon, waiting to take another exam, I felt as if for far too many of us, it isn’t true. Or at least, that these aren’t turning out to be the best possible best four years of our lives they could be.
I often hear my friends talk about what they’ve given up, because of pharmacy school— because of the steady stream of exams and quizzes. And every time I can’t help but think that it doesn’t have to be like this, that even though school should be a top priority, it shouldn’t be the priority. I put this idea out there every few months or so, it seems. And if I’m lucky, I get a few “likes.” If I’m lucky, I even get them from my fellow pharmacy students. But it’s as if they’re just liking a good fictional account. Like they’re entertained by the notion, but never really consider that it could be reality. But it is. You don’t have to study yourself half to death to do well.
Last week my boss was giving me some interviewing tips and asked me what defines me as a person. Halfway through my half-hearted spiel about how I’m highly self-motivated et cetera, he stopped me and said, “Yeah, that’s great. But that’s not you. That’s not what defines you. You’re not all just about work and school.” And while I sincerely hope that he’s right, that he knows me better than I know myself, a part of me still remains doubtful. Because the few and far between times that I have to reflect on my life and who I am have been rather dismal. Whenever I get to thinking about it, I can’t help but think that I am much further than I was 8 or so years ago, from the person I would like to be.
Ever since I started college, I’ve been trying to reverse what happened to me during my high school years. I’ve been trying not to make school my top priority. Maybe in some small way, I’ve been successful. There’s a guy (read: “creeper”) at the gym that likes to talk to me about the pharmaceutical industry and my future career plans. The other week he was warning me about the fact that a lot of research and development is being outsourced to places like China and India, because labor is so much cheaper. (I guess so. But I think their work ethic might have just a little to do with it too.) But anyway, his point was that I should try to make my GPA as high as possible so that I can compete with everyone else. And all I could do was sit there, keep pedaling, and smile because I hate disagreeing with people. I knew it was well-intentioned, but I also felt it was misguided. I feel like I’ve been competing with other people my entire life. And I’m sick of it. I don’t think it helps to be comparing myself to others all the time. I think I just need to do my best and that’ll be enough. I don’t need to worry about someone on the other side of the world taking a job from me.
Besides, I don’t even know what that job is, exactly. Some kind of pharmacist, most likely. When people ask me about my future career plans, I feel like I’m in first grade again, making an “all about me poster” with a significant portion devoted to my future career— occupied by a stereotypical image of a pediatrician. Seriously? I couldn’t even spell pediatrician when I was in first grade. But I think the bigger problem was that they drilled into my mind the notion that what you do for a living is the same as what you are. It’s a part of you, but it’s not you. If they asked me now what I want to be when I grow up, I’d tell them I want to be happy. I want to be accomplished. But not accomplished in the sense that I have a fancy degree or a high-paying job or a nice house/car/etc. But accomplished in the sense that I’ve done something with my life, something that has made a difference in someone else’s life.
…whenever I saw a person in trouble, somebody paralyzed by events I decided it was entirely his fault— he just wasn’t trying hard enough. People who complained were just plain lazy. My outlook on life was unshakable, and practical, but lacked any human warmth. And not a single person around me pointed this out… Something was missing in me, but by the time I noticed that gap, it was too late.
where your money is, there your treasure is also
On Saturday, a good friend of mine got married. Afterwards, my family kept talking about how it was the most low-budget wedding any of them have every been to. My dad’s comment was, “They might as well have gotten married in the municipal building.” (Because they wanted to share the occasion with their loved ones, obviously. And if the marriage is wonderful and lasting, the wedding won’t matter. Isn’t it better to have a beautiful marriage than a beautiful wedding?) And even though it probably shouldn’t bother me anymore, I just find it appalling that Christians can have such a worldly view of money.
These days, it seems like love and faith and hope and all those intangible things don’t really set Christians apart anymore. Atheists can be just as loving. Muslims can have more faith. Pagans can have just as much hope. Aside from the gospel of forgiveness, what does Christianity offer that the rest of the world doesn’t? This might come as a shocker, and possibly as heresy, but I’m going to throw it out there: money. Money has become somewhat of a taboo in Christian circles. No one really wants to talk about it. After all, it is the “root of all evil.” But Jesus didn’t avoid talking about it. The Bible is ripe with commentary on money. In fact, there are nearly twice as many verses about money and possessions as there are about faith and prayer (See Randy Alcorn’s Money, Possessions, and Eternity).
And yet, I’d dare say the vast majority of Christians fail to grasp the importance of having a biblical perspective when it comes to money and possessions. That, or they choose to twist things for their own selfish purposes. But I guess that’s just human. There are so many variables at work here, but I’d have to write a book to cover them all. I am also just a ranting college student, not even remotely close to an expert in the field. For a comprehensive account of this topic, I’d highly recommend Randy Alcorn’s Money, Possessions, and Eternity. Instead, I’m going to talk about a few statements that are indicative of a poor (aka non-biblical) view of material wealth.
I don’t have enough money / I’m a poor college student
I have to admit I’m guilty of jokingly saying that I’m a poor college student. But it irks me when my peers, especially the Christian ones, complain about not having enough money when they don’t work. Enough money for what? New clothes? New shoes? A new phone? To eat out? I’m not sorry, because you don’t deserve any sympathy. There are millions of people in the world with only the clothes on their back and no shoes at all and just as many who can’t afford to eat at all on a regular basis, much less at an over-priced yet under-nutritious restaurant. While your friends are keeping up with the latest fashion trends and technological developments, and letting hundreds of thousands of kids die from hunger and preventable diseases, what are you doing? The same thing.
I can’t find a job
I find this one difficult to believe, because I pass by “help wanted” signs all the time. I don’t think the problem (for college students) is that there are no jobs. It’s that they think that they’re above the available jobs. If Jesus could wash his disciples’ feet, you can flip someone’s burgers. Besides, making minimum wage is better than making nothing at all.
I am going to do XYZ as a career
Where XYZ is some prestigious job at some prestigious company. One of the comments that my mom made about my friend’s newlywed wife is that maybe she could leave her current non-profit job and go back to working for a hedge fund. After all, she’s a NYU grad. Wouldn’t that be a better use of her God-given ability? But wait a sec. I thought money was the root of all evil. So why bother accumulating more of it? True, not every Christian should go an quit their high-paying job to go work for a charity. But it seems like too many Christians no longer believe that God could “call” us into such work. To them, it’s a “waste.” But to God it’s not a waste; it’s an investment in eternity.
“Jesus Christ said more about money than about any other single thing because, when it comes to a man’s real nature, money is of first importance. Money is an exact index to a man’s true character. All through Scripture there is an intimate correlation between the development of a man’s character and how he handles his money.” - Richard Halverson
Against all reason, and against everything that everyone tries to tell you, and even against what you try to tell yourself, a part of you still wonders. It wonders if there really wasn’t anything you could have done so that things would have turned out differently. It wonders if you aren’t at least a little responsible, even though you know. You know you were just an insignificant landmark on someone else’s march to destruction. No one blames you, but you blame yourself. And even though there was nothing you could have said to alter their course, you replay that moment over and over, trying to figure out what you missed, what you could have done differently… and wishing you could relive that moment so that maybe—just maybe— the ones left behind wouldn’t be left with so much pain and so many questions.
So many people have been talking about how good it’ll feel to be done with exams. It’s a feeling that I’m also looking forward to, but I also wouldn’t mind holding on to this feeling tonight either. Even though I didn’t do well on my exam tonight, and I still have 4(+2) more exams, I am happy. Recently I’ve found myself consumed by inexplicable, irrational emotions— emotions I’d rather not have. But tonight it’s a feeling I wish I could bottle up, and hold on to forever. It might be cliched, but it’s still refreshing to be reminded that it is better to give than to receive. Indeed, that in giving, we often receive so much more in return than we ever could have hoped for or imagined.
