Love is not an endless ocean

Love is not an endless ocean
Love is not mere blind devotion

Love is not the tallest mountain
Love is not the Timeless Fountain

Love is not some stalwart castle
Love is not so young, so facile

Love is not a boundless chasm
Love is not pure enthusiasm

Love is not a life's commitment
Love is near and love is distant

Love is ever shifting, moving
breaking, forming, and improving

Love can quake and love and bend
Love can fail and love can end

None of these are love's damnation.
Love's great strength is not duration.

Love does not keep things in cages.
Love's beauty lies in how it changes.

I'm Lost

I'm lost, I said one fateful day, and wondered where I was.
So I went to go and search for me -- mostly just because.

I found myself on mountain vistas, past frigid, icy streams;
I found myself in English classrooms, amidst poetic themes.
I found myself in cheerful places, laughing to my core;
I found myself in grieving places, silent as the morgue.
I found myself in romantic places, dancing, getting kissed;
I found myself in craven places, filled with cowardice.

I'm lost, I told myself, desperate to be found;
Will I find my soul in Heaven? Or deep beneath the ground?

I found myself in tranquil moments, in the quiet of my mind;
I found myself in awkward moments, when the quiet was not so kind.
I found myself in triumphant moments, victorious, adored;
I found myself in lifeless moments, doing nothing, getting bored.
I found myself in wondrous moments, amazed at beauty's grace;
I found myself in filthy moments, in perversion's cold embrace.

Will I ever find myself? I pondered hopelessly.
I was there in all those moments, but was it truly me?

I found myself with kindness, performing selfless acts;
I found myself with treach'ry, breaking sacred pacts.
I found myself with patience, never wearing thin;
I found myself with turmoil, a raging storm within.
I found myself with passion, glowing in my eyes;
I found myself with shame, which I've managed to disguise.

And then I knew the answer, succeeded in my quest;
I found myself at last, at last! -- and I laid the matter to rest.
Where am I really? I asked myself, searching everywhere;
And found myself in all those places -- for I was always there.

I was never lost at all, you see. The hunt was all a sham.
Where I look, I find me. And that is where I am.

Becoming happier, Part 2

Part 1

Rewiring #4: Random act of kindness

Research shows that being kind to other people is one of the things that makes us happiest, and that result fills me with joy. We are lucky to live in a universe where making other people happy is to our own benefit.

The non-zero-sum nature of well-being is why the concept of karma makes sense, broadly speaking. Suffering creatures are more likely to make other creatures suffer; happy creatures are more likely to make other creatures happy. Consequently, the more suffering you generate, the more likely you are to suffer; the more happiness you generate, the more happy you become.

I, along with ~10 other students, teamed up to give one of our favorite professors an end-of-semester gift. The gift referenced an idiosyncratic turn of phrase he often used in class, which was fun, but what was even more fun was the heartfelt note I wrote to go with it. The note included a collection of his best in-class quotations and some words of thanks, and even though it was painfully slow to pen the entire thing in cursive, I still had an marvelous time writing it.

I started volunteer at CU's Restorative Justice center. Restorative justice is different from our national model of retributive justice in many respects: while the latter is solely concerned with punishing the offender, a restorative system focuses on the victim of an incident, and repairing the harms done thereto. Victim satisfaction should be one of the main goals of any justice system, and it's a big reason why I support restorative justice. It feels good to volunteer my time toward something I believe in. A couple offenders I've worked with have even thanked me personally for my involvement, and their comments remain deeply gratifying.

After listening to this podcast, I donate monthly to the Against Malaria Foundation. The facts of malaria are astonishing. Malaria is one of the top killers of humanity, with one estimate saying it has killed half the people who have ever lived, most of whom are children. The worst part of this statistic is that malaria is preventable, treatable, and curable. According to this Unicef article, our best treatment is artemisinin-based combination therapy (ACT), which costs an absurdly low $2.50 for a single adult treatment dose. A mosquito net will prevent an entire family from contracting the disease for the even cheaper price of $2.00. (As a point of comparison, Lindsay Graham spent $1013.74 per vote he received in the 2016 Republican primary.) As such, the dollar-to-lives-saved ratio is extremely high when donating to the Against Malaria Foundation. The podcast I mentioned frames it like this: If you ran into a burning building and saved a child's life, that moment would be a crowning achievement in your life. You would receive immense social validation and personal pride at performing such an act, and you would deserve it. Donating $10 per month to malaria-related causes is like that, except you are saving multiple children, every month, and instead of taking on extreme danger and permanent lung damage, you're sacrificing the monetary equivalent of two cups of coffee.

Rewiring #5: Make a social connection 

A fact I learned in the course: People usually think talking to a stranger on the bus will be a miserable experience, but when they actually do it, they change their mind. Social interaction is core to our biology and our evolutionary history; in this sense, it's comparable to amazing sex, or a delicious meal.

I spent ~20 minutes talking to a homeless man after buying him some food. I showed him a few card tricks, and he taught me how to vanish a cigarette. It felt thrilling and intrigue-laden, like two magicians swapping secrets. He also told me about his time in the Iraq war, his experience being homeless, and his aspirations to find work, and I told him about my experience as an immigrant and a college student. The only complaint I have about this interaction is that it was too short.

A couple friends from high school and I started a book club. The book we chose was Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo, a fantasy heist novel. I'm a huge fan of the heist genre, but I've only ever seen it in movies (Ocean's Eleven, The Sting, Inception). Reading a heist book is fun; discussing a heist book with smart people is even more fun.

On a recent vacation with some close friends, I stayed up to 4am dancing on the beach and gazing at the stars. The vast ocean and the endless cosmos, in all their grandeur, were still outshone by our revelry in each other's company, our quiet conversations on the sand. Our love for one another rang out in our words, in our silences, in our movements, in our stillnesses. No one could do wrong that night; it was, in a profound Wei, perfect.

Rewiring #6: Meditation

I've already practiced mindfulness meditation daily for over a year, so this rewiring was really just a regular old wiring.

One of the most enjoyable things in life is to witness skill: superhuman athleticism, flawless musicanship, artful deception. We like these things because they are flashy, complicated, rococo, but we often miss the deep mastery of the fundamentals underpinning all such displays. The older I become, the more I come to appreciate the importance of fundamentals. Champion basketball players can bust out ankle-breaking outplays because they don't stop practicing basic footwork drills; virtuoso pianists can bust out finger-breaking melodies because they don't stop practicing basic scales. We often don't think about the almost insane* amount of time these performers have invested into their technique, and we think even less about how much of this time goes into practicing fundamentals -- even when the performer is world-class.

Meditation is practicing the fundamentals of human life. Breathing, sitting, being present: These are the skills meditation teaches you to master, and one consequence of mastering these fundamentals is personal gratification. This gratification is the equivalent of the basketballer's ankle-breaker that comes after countless hours doing footwork drills.

There is nothing more fundamental than the breath. When you reach for it, it is there, a persistent, gentle reminder of the present moment, always by your side. People often think of meditation as an esoteric, difficult act, but as Tibetan meditation master Mingyur Rinpoche explains in this video, meditation is simple. It starts and ends with the breath. I love that video because it captures the elegance of meditation and makes the practice accessible for everyone.

Meditation has made me happier for many reasons. I am less prone to anger, anxiety, sadness, annoyance, and any number of other negative emotions, because mindfulness is anathema to  suffering. Negativity withers in the presence of attention. And in addition to shedding these negative emotions, I have also gained positive ones. After practicing mindfulness, I find myself calmer, more focused, more at peace. I feel more self-loving and self-compassionate, and I've also become more receptive to the love and kindness of others.

Another Mingyur Rinpoche quote: "The only difference between meditation and regular social interaction is that the friend you're gradually coming to know is yourself."

Conclusion

I enjoyed these rewirings even more than the previous set. Everyone should practice kindness, social interaction, and meditation. This blog post was my attempt at communicating that to you. I hope it worked.





*Mastery is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Becoming happier, Part 1

I started taking this course a week ago, and it's been really cool. It has to do with the psychology of well-being -- both the science showing what makes us happy, and how to actually use this information for personal benefit.

One assignment of the course is to do "rewirings" -- activities designed to rewire your habits to increase your overall well-bring. An important part of the rewirings is to write down what you do. At first, I had mixed feelings about broadcasting my rewirings online, for the same reason I have mixed feelings about posting anything on social media: I can't escape the feeling that, as soon as it's shared, the purity of the intention becomes diluted by self-aggrandizement and exhibitionism. (I've refrained from posting many things for this reason.) On the other hand, if this post inspires even one person to do a rewiring, or even take the course, it will have been worthwhile.

Rewiring #1: Using character strengths

The first rewiring was to take a character strengths survey and use my top strengths, the idea being that it feels good to do stuff I'm good at. My top three strengths were love, humor, and gratitude.

These strengths have changed over time; if I'd taken this survey just a year ago, I'd definitely have gotten different results. I credit my current strengths to my wonderful friend group, mindfulness meditation practice, and the simple passing of time. Time is one of love's greatest allies.

 For love, I expressed my admiration for a few of my friends this week. I called my mom and talked with her about my and her plans for the future. I called my brother and planned to watch the new Avengers movie with him (which he is very excited about). I had an intimate conversation with a friend while stargazing. I wrote a poem for myself and posted it on this blog. I enrolled in a science of well-being course to become happier.
"Love" is quite a loaded term in modern society, to both good and ill effect. When people say "love", they usually mean romantic love, which is something I've been guilty of. But that's a shame, because familial love, friendly love, and self-love are just as important, if not more. I want to be more conscientious about these other types of love in my life.
I had an profound conversation with a friend about love recently. I was unsatisfied with the common saying, "everyone deserves love". What does it mean to deserve something? If something is universally deserved, doesn't that cheapen its value? And aren't there people so vile and despicable that they don't deserve love? His response was compelling: Given how beautiful and transcendent love is, it is the most heartbreaking thing in the world that some people don't get to experience it. This conversation really clarified the nature of love for me.
On one hand, I want love to be a big, meaningful word, the kind of word that can be the climax of a movie, the kind of word that lingers on a mind for a year after it's spoken. On the other hand, I want love to be a common, natural term, the kind of term that men can say from without the umbra of toxic masculinity, the kind of term that a woman can say without feeling overly vulnerable. The great thing is, it can be both. Love is not slave to dichotomy.

For humor, have you met me? I'm constantly joking. Sometimes I joke around too much. I did rewatch Brian Regan's excellent standup routine, but I didn't otherwise go out of my Wei to use this strength. I also won't be analyzing humor, as I think it often defeats the purpose (as this article hilariously lampoons). Humor is something that comes naturally to me, and I'm grateful for that. Speaking of which...

For gratitude, I started a gratitude journal, which is Rewiring #3 on this list. Gratitude and love are similar in nature, but you can read more about gratitude specifically in Rewiring #3.

Rewiring #2: Savoring an experience

We often dwell on negative experiences, to our detriment. Savoring positive experiences is the opposite. Mindfully enriching and intensifying a happy moment, in the moment, is an obvious (yet underused) method to increase well-being.

I did a mindful eating meditation via the Simple Habit app, and it was phenomenal. I was reminded of how delicious water is: The texture is crisp when it first hits your tongue, but then it rolls around your mouth with perfect, gentle smoothness. The taste is amazingly pure, bright, and refreshing. I repeated the meditation while eating chicken nuggets -- not exactly a meal to write home about -- and experienced a veritable explosion of flavors and textures. I recommend mindful eating to everyone.

I savored reading the book Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari. I enjoyed running the glossy pages through my fingers and feeling the weighty hardback cover in my hands. I took note of his brilliant writing style, which manages to communicate difficult concepts in simple prose -- the ultimate goal of writers working in this genre. Every couple of pages contained another fascinating, novel idea, and it was satisfying to wrestle with them and discuss them with others.

I savored walking. I took great pleasure in seeing my destination far away, only to arrive at it moments later by doing nothing other than putting one foot ahead of the other, repeatedly, in tiny increments. I noticed how my foot hit the ground with the perfect amount of pressure, whereupon the foot behind it immediately rose into the air with quiet ease. I enjoyed how my feet navigated the terrain even while I didn't so much as glance at them. I wiggled my toes around in the comfortable fabric of my socks. I relished the feel of springy grass and durable concrete alike as the sole of my shoe met them.

Rewiring #3: Gratitude journal

Gratitude was already one of my character strengths, so this tied in nicely with Rewiring #1. But damn, do I love gratitude. It's one of the most positive, selfless emotions on the wide spectrum of human experience. This is the same reason why the idea behind Thanksgiving is so appealing to me: In a cavalcade of other holidays drowning in consumerism and excess, a day dedicated to simply giving thanks is refreshing.

I feel and express the emotion of gratitude often, but writing down what I'm grateful for adds another dimension to the experience. Psychologists have shown that keeping a gratitude journal can have unexpectedly long-lasting and resonant effects on our well-being. Here are some entries from my personal gratitude journal.

I often express gratitude toward my friends and education, but there are so many other things to be thankful for. One of these is my body, which somehow knows how to produce the right amount of insulin, red blood cells, and stomach acid through processes that mystify me. Similarly, the dexterity of my hands amazes me. Even as I type these words, I am astonished at how effortlessly they glide across the keyboard. I am lucky to be able to feel, taste, smell, see, and hear the world; many people lack these privileges.

I am thankful for temperature control in buildings. I recently heard an interesting perspective: mere centuries ago, even the richest kings, as they lounged in their opulent palaces, had to deal with their water pitchers freezing over during winter. In modern times, "a roof over my head" is more than protection from the rain; it's a level of comfort someone who lived 200 years ago could not even fathom.

I am thankful for the countless strangers in my life abiding by implicit societal norms: Obeying traffic laws, holding doors open, being respectful of personal space. I tacitly benefit from untold centuries of conventions designed to smooth over interaction on every level, from interpersonal to intercontinental. It's a miracle that my mind can navigate this labyrinth of unspoken rules without conscious thought.

Conclusion

A big theme of the course is how bad we are at recognizing what makes us happy -- and even when we do recognize it, we are bad at actualizing the knowledge. It's one thing to understand that using our strengths, savoring experiences, and recording our gratitude will have positive impact on our lives, but another thing entirely to actually do these things. I hope reading my personal rewirings has convinced you to do some yourself.

Part 2

I will

I will be young.

I will be cool, hip, chic.
I will be full of vibrant, youthful energy, free from the tribulations of this world.
My step will spring with a swagger untouchable by tedium.
I will see the world through eyes overflowing with curiosity, joy, and wonder.
New trends will spring forth from my body like melodies from the fingertips of a pianist.
I will blaze the trail to unexplored frontiers with the lantern of my impulse and the compass of my creativity, and there I will revel in sights unseen and sounds unspoken.
I will dance under the moonlight just because it makes me happy.

I will be old.

I will be dutiful, seasoned, venerable.
I will value maturity, discipline, tradition.
I will sweat under a million sequential sunsets to build a bottomless well of wisdom brick by brick, and I will flood it with the oceans of my experience.
I will summit the mountain of perfection using my mistakes as footholds.
I will temper my decisions in the furnace of my responsibility.
I will bask in the moonlight of the centuries as they wax and wane before me, and I will understand the significance of time.

I will be quiet.

I will be mindful, contemplative, observant.
My mind will settle like water in a still pond, and I will be at peace with my reflection on its surface.
I will listen to others with rapt attention, and their insight will be the sweetness of ripe fruit bursting on my tongue.
I will treasure the input of my peers as my own child.
I will understand the Dalai Lama when he tells me, "When you speak, you are only repeating what you already know. But if you listen, you may learn something new."

I will be loud.

I will be boisterous, enthusiastic, assertive.
My ideas will bubble up and cascade over my tongue like a waterfall, and its deluge will submerge the streets.
My convictions are a pack of wolves, and I will not let them hunger.
The tree of my certitudes will not wither in some forgotten darkness; it will thrive in the sunlight of my voice.
I will fire the missile of self-expression off the launchpad of my confidence, and its explosion will put the stars to shame.



Heinlein was right: specialization is for insects -- but I am human, and my humanity reveals how a thing contains its opposite.
Whitman was right: I contain multitudes -- but I do not contradict myself, for the dualities within me are not in conflict; they are dancers, in flawless harmony.

I will not be slave to dichotomy. But then again -- I will.

On Sarcasm

Sarcasm is terrible. Here are four reasons why.

1.) Sarcasm is not clever. Anyone can come up with a sarcastic response, at any time. The formula is so lazy and non-creative, most people master it before their teenage years. This is a reason why sarcasm is popular: you can deploy it instantly and brainlessly. Sarcasm is always at your disposal. But this cheapens its value to the point of worthlessness.

2.) Sarcasm ends conversations. It oozes haughty disdain, which is grueling to engage with. This is another reason why sarcasm is enticing: it is an instant power transfer, wherein the person being sarcastic is able to signal their superiority over their interlocutor through exaggerated insincerity. But an imbalanced power dynamic is not conducive to conversation; it shuts conversation down, leaving only silence.

3.) Sarcasm shuts down intimacy, because it is disingenuous by nature. This is yet another reason why sarcasm is attractive: It allows you to hide your true feelings, without risk of being vulnerable. When you are sarcastic, you never have to say how you truly feel; you rely on coy implication to communicate. But implication is not an effective form of communication -- quite the opposite. Effective communication is clear and detailed, leaving no room for confusion or doubt -- which is literally the definition for explicit. So while effective communication is critical to intimacy, sarcasm is hostile to it. Sarcasm is therefore hostile to one of the most compelling, meaningful aspects of the human experience.

4.) Here's my biggest issue with sarcasm: I can't think of a single situation where it's the best way to communicate something. There's always a funnier comment, a smarter comment, a kinder comment -- but there's also always a more insincere comment, a more hurtful comment, a comment that will end the conversation more effectively. This is a death knell for sarcasm. So when you feel tempted to make a sarcastic comment, challenge yourself to think of something better to say. It will dramatically improve the quality of your conversations.

Black Mirror, Cynicism, and Political Satire

Black Mirror

I recently watched Black Mirror season 1, episode 2, entitled "Fifteen Million Merits". It's about a man who, after having his sole dream crushed by a cruel dystopian system, delivers an epic rant about how inauthentic and soul-destroying and numbing and unchanging the system is. Immediately after this rant, he succumbs to greed and peer pressure and participates in this grotesque system he so hates in an even more perverse, inauthentic, soul-destroying way. In the end, nothing substantive changes.

I felt a lot of things when I watched this episode. The actors all delivered compelling performances. The story was smart and poignant, with clever foreshadowing and stunning twists. But one feeling I can't get away from is my dislike of the overwhelming, crippling cynicism of the episode. For a show that's clearly an acerbic satire of all the hollowness and inauthenticity of modern life, it left me feeling more hollow and inauthentic than ever.

Cynicism is paralyzing. It chokes us with a cloying sense of helplessness. It's seductive in this way. What effect can I have on a system so powerful, so evil, so massive? And besides, it's all pointless anyway. Nothing ever changes in the end. And so, freed of responsibility or agency, I do nothing, change nothing. The myth perpetuates itself, and in so doing, becomes reality.

Then there's the irony of it. Black Mirror is all about the corrupting influence of technology. Our screens stifle us, it says. We are captivated by an endless stream of trivial nonsense manufactured for the sole purpose of captivating us. Our attention is precious, and to let such meaningless content capture it is to let it rob us of genuine, worthwhile endeavors, like human interaction and connection. But Black Mirror -- so named for the look of the "cold, shiny screen" omnipresent in modern life -- itself strives to capture our attention, to keep us glued to the screen. It certainly kept me glued.

Political Satire

Another thing that has kept me glued against my will is political satire, which I find boringly predictable, rankly partisan, and horribly childish -- yet, to my own disgust, I still watch a lot of it.

To vent my concerns on the genre, I present this video from Vox's Carlos Maza explaining why modern political satire is good. I disagree with nearly every point he makes.

First, he says political satire has a "low tolerance for bullshit", whereas the mainstream media is burdened by the need to take everything seriously. I agree with the latter claim; major news networks' portrayal of Trump's egregious lies, featuring extensive back-and-forth debate from both sides, spread the illusion that there's something to debate, when actually there's not. A complete falsehood, stated with no evidence (and often, with easily verifiable evidence to the contrary), should not merit any kind of debate. It does, however, merit serious discussion.

Political satire is not serious discussion. It is flagrant derision and mockery, lacking just as much substance as the thing it's mocking. Political satire constantly makes fun of people on the basis of their appearance, their demeanor, and countless other meaningless traits devoid of substance. It converts an extremely serious issue -- the fact that the American president is a shameless, pathological liar -- into a series of breezy punchlines. Maza lauds this aspect of satire shows, because it gives more time to cover different topics. In reality, these rapid-fire one-liners diminish the full impact of the situation.

When the punchline of a joke hits, I laugh, the joke is over, and I don't feel any compulsion to do anything. Laughing is the end of the conversation. In this Wei, political satire has a lot in common with the paralyzing effects of cynicism in "Fifteen Million Merits". Maza even suggests things have gotten so ridiculous that the only response is to laugh at them, as though (a) laughter is somehow a solution in its own right, and (b) it is the sole solution. This is precisely the kind of seductive-yet-numbing effect cynicism can have, and it is far from the truth. Mocking laughter doesn't cause change. Genuine change is the result of hard work, resistance, often tedium. Genuine change is a fight.

The problem is, I don't want to go out and fight after a satirical joke because it seems like the joke was the fight, a clever bullet wryly fired into the heart of political evil. How chastised and excoriated Trump must feel in the wake of such incisive satire, I gleefully think. Of course, that's not what happens. The only thing such contemptuous mockery does is to make people like myself even more rigidly sure of my preexisting beliefs.

Worse yet, mockery of this sort also galvanizes the other side. Being ridiculed and laughed at has never caused anyone to change their mind, only incited them to more vehemently oppose the ridiculer. Maza claims political satire is good because "it trains your brain to think critically", when in fact it does the opposite. By lulling you with formulaic entertainment, satire more firmly entrenches you in your own opinions. It trains your brain to think condescendingly.

"Fifteen Million Merits" seemed inauthentic due to the irony of it being a television program. By making it, its writers had to buy into the notion of television in some way, thereby undermining their criticism of it. Political satire is also stained by insincerity, but for a different reason. While I have no doubt that the writers and performers believe the things they say on air, the constant influx of news content, and hence the necessity to make jokes at such a rapid pace, renders their jokes inert and predictable. They are all regurgitated freak-outs, tenuous analogies, references to youth culture desperate to be cool. They feel all too familiar, the joke you heard a second ago about one hideous Trump surrogate isomorphic to the next joke about a similar villain. There is no life in this comedic wasteland.

Satire -- specifically, late-night television political satire -- is a bad vehicle with which to confront the current state of American politics because it is cloying, divisive, and substanceless (I'm talking about the satire, here). It's yet another cheap, hollow contrivance engineered to keep you glued to the screen.

Conclusion

I don't like political satire, and I consider it terrible television, yet I still watch it. On the other hand, I didn't like "Fifteen Million Merits", but I consider it fantastic television. These paradoxes caused another, more personal irony to surface in my mind: For all I was supposedly paralyzed by Black Mirror's cynicism, for all my cynicism towards it, it absolutely compelled me enough to write this entire blog post. And I don't know what to think about that.



Other Stuff

I listened to this podcast recently, which was why I watched that episode of Black Mirror. The creators' heartfelt takedown of a specific instance of satire in the academic community is what enabled me to verbalize my own long-held distaste toward political satire.

For political commentary I think is valuable, check out this other podcast.