Category: Old age of my youth – 2015

FRIDAY, 30 JANUARY 2015

For a long time I believed joy and happiness to be luxuries that can only be enjoyed by people with no problems in life. I tried to convince myself that it is okay to be happy – that I won’t be committing a mortal sin and risk being hit by a bolt of lightning if I walk around with a smile, being nice to people and making jokes and generally feeling positive about life.

Eventually I started believing myself.

Alas, I tend to fall back into old cognitive grooves way too easily. Time and again I catch myself thinking once more that only ignorant people, children, psychopaths and fools can get away with experiencing happiness and joy as a normal existential condition.

The truth, as many people already know, is that happiness and joy form the first wall that protects you against the onslaughts of life; happiness and joy are also the tree out back where you will take your last stand to keep yourself alive, and more or less healthy.

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WEDNESDAY, 28 JANUARY 2015

I have been fascinated for quite some time by the difference between successful and less successful people. My attention always sharpens when someone enters my attention field that I think would be a good case study – in flesh and blood, in a program on TV or in a movie. I observe how these people behave, how they enter a room, how they greet people, how they listen to other people, how they dress, even what vocabulary they use.

Twenty years ago my role model – the person I most wanted to be like – was the ascetic. I dreamed of being able to withdraw from society and to live in an abandoned fort at least three days’ walk from the nearest town – and with no easy access to any kind of vehicle.

This interest in the successful person reflects an unsurprising ambition: I want to be successful. I want to behave like a successful person; I want to talk like a successful person, think like a successful person, and over time expect to succeed when I embark on any kind of project or endeavour.

Have I finally undergone a transformation? Has the one who wanted to become an ascetic become tired of standing alone? Has he started to wonder how it would feel to be one of “them”?

The truth is, the ascetic is successful, although students and imitators of conventionally successful people won’t necessarily see it. The ascetic does not speak apologetically. The ascetic does not wear an expensive suit, but he is comfortable in the material he drapes over himself. The ascetic is not poor, though he has little money.

The ascetic is successful because he does what he wants. He goes his own way. He does not make apologies. He does not ask for acceptance. He does expect to live in peace, to feel good about who and what he is, and to finally die in peace.

Most people certainly want to be successful at the end of the day, but you have to ask yourself: successful as what, and as whom?

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Read about Richard Withers, a hermit living in the “modern desert”.

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TUESDAY, 20 JANUARY 2015

In his book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell explains how Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were at the right place at the right time in their teenage years. Interest in computer technology, good schools, and access to computers paved the way for them to become iconic figures in the tech industry years later.

I am also to some extent fortunate regarding my writing. A few decades ago there were writers like me who also wrote material about their own lives, and about their ideas about life. Little of these people’s writing has probably been read by more than ten people, and many eventually died without much recognition.

Likewise, there are other people alive today whose lives are similar to mine, and who write about similar themes in ways that will also probably never lead to any commercial success.

Here is where my luck kicks in, my being at the right place at the right time. I have had a computer for my exclusive use continuously since 1999, with stable, fast access to the internet – a privilege I did not enjoy before I came to Taiwan. Particular conditions in Taiwan have also made it possible for me to make enough money to survive and save some for the future without having to give up more than thirty hours per week of my life. Throw in my desire to make money from home that exposed me to internet marketing, and within a few years I had acquired a critical mass of knowledge and experience in the field of self-publishing.

I can therefore afford to spend time on my writing projects, I know how to publish this material on my own websites and on a growing number of other platforms and in other formats, and I know how to distribute this material for maximum exposure.

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SATURDAY, 3 JANUARY 2015

For a long time I thought of a lot of my writing as lectures, even sermons. Now I understand that most of my pieces are part of a conversation. Someone else reads it, thinks about it, and decides they agree with it or they don’t agree with it. Great. That is how it should be. Then my writing is part of a conversation, even though I can’t be there most of the time to respond.

TUESDAY, 6 JANUARY 2015

It is good to be confident and to say what you think, but few people doubt the value of modesty – to voice your opinion and then to listen to what someone else has to say.

What you said or wrote may touch on some good points; it might be a good argument; it may compel someone to think about something they have never thought of, or to think about it in a different way. But the likelihood is very strong that you did not consider all sides of the story, that you didn’t cover all the angles. It is at this point that a reasonable person would realise that when you make a statement, or risk an argument, verbally or in writing, you make an attempt at dialogue rather than trying to convert the other person to your cult or ideology.

I thought of the blog of cartoonist and author, Scott Adams, his interesting articles, and the contributions readers leave in the comments section which are sometimes equally interesting, but the reader might be taking an opposing position.

I also thought about the conversations I have with adult students. I will make a statement, which I would think is more or less accurate. After making the statement I will step back, and the students will respond one after another – some of the responses are clever, others not so much. Whether or not my original statement was accurate is certainly important, but not as important as the fact that we are having a conversation on a particular topic. This, in my opinion, is much more valuable than any lecture or sermon I can attempt to give.

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