Settling In and Starting Anew

On Tuesday I moved into my new apartment in China. Like everything I’ve experienced since coming here, the apartment pleasantly surprised me. Even though my rent is about a tenth of what it was in Philadelphia, I enjoy a similar standard of living. There are some areas in which this apartment is worse — it has no stove or oven, and no drying machine — but in others it is better. This apartment has a better shower, a television, a far superior desk (I always enjoy a nice desk) and, most stunning of all, a staircase. Yes, my apartment is a loft with the bed and desk on a separate level from the kitchen and living area. Maybe I’ve been watching too many brainrotting Home Design videos, but I think that’s the coolest thing ever.

The Pièce de Résistance

I’ve spent the past few days settling in and going out drinking with my landlord’s family, who are incredibly kind. They’ve invited me to dinner at their home twice now, and they refuse to let me pay for anything or even help them wash the dishes. The food is excellent, of course. The alcohol isn’t — they often drink 白酒 (pronounded baijiu; it means “white alcohol”), which is more than 50% ABV and tastes like motor oil. But my landlord’s boyfriend gave me a bottle for free, which would have otherwise cost about two days of my salary. All this in spite of the fact that, due to issues with international transfers, I’m living here on credit. Tomorrow is Monday, so I hope that I get money deposited into my bank account and I can finally pay these people.

This is how the family eats every night: roast meat for a main course served with vegetables and a stir-fried dish. The night before this meal, our main course was snake.

I would not call this week “uneventful” by any stretch, but I can’t imagine readers being interested in the bureaucratic crap that’s taken up most of my time. Instead, I’d like to take this week’s update as an opportunity to introduce one of the main reasons I started this blog. In 2020 I met a coworker at my summer camp for whom I developed limerence. If you’ve never experienced limerence before, you might not understand how devastating it is. I consider that summer to be the most painful period in my life, even worse than my expulsion from high school. The following semester of college I experienced what is best described as a “nervous breakdown,” and although I think I effectively hid it from others, internally I exhibited a number of symptoms I never had before — notably, a preoccupation with death and an inability to focus. Over the course of that semester something in me shifted, and I went into 2021 as a radically different person. I recognized that for my whole life up to that point, I had always taken the path of least resistance. I guess because I had a reputation as a child prodigy, I never felt compelled to put any effort into anything; I was already done. Consequently, I barely scraped by in school and ended up in college with no real talents or skills, studying the arts because everything else seemed too difficult and tedious. I didn’t know what I would do after college. I had existed for my whole life, but I hadn’t executed any agency. I hadn’t really lived.

For the first time in my life I thought about ethics. I realized that every moment of my life was a decision, and I started to wonder which of those decisions I should make, asking questions like “which action is most moral?” or “what are my values?” or “what sort of person do I want to be?” I was starting from absolutely nothing, so you can imagine it was an involved process. I am embarrassed to admit that I called it “Project Renaissance,” which is totally pretentious and self-important but also did embody the theme of self-becoming I was going for. I wrote, rewrote, and binned idea after idea. I also started reading seriously in this time; you won’t be surprised to learn that I read a lot of philosophy, especially philosophy of ethics and politics (which is just applied ethics) and, I’m ashamed to say, a bit of self-help literature. After much deliberation and many setbacks, I finally developed a theory I’m comfortable with.

Despite the cover, this one is actually pretty good.

I won’t get too into the weeds here; I could write a book on this topic. The  core ideas that I must explain are as follows:

1. The greatest virtue is achievement.

2. Achievement grows from excellence.

3. Excellence is multifaceted.

Many people equate virtue with kindness. Our western conception of morality is that a man is good if he is polite and humble and says nice things to people. I cannot deny that such a man makes others feel good, and that he is pleasant to be around, but he does not substantially improve the lives of those around him. To truly make the world a better place, he must take some sort of action after which others live better than they did before. This is what I call an “achievement,” and the best example of achievers are inventors, but philosophers, scientists, world leaders, and artists also qualify (there are certainly other groups I could name, but can’t think of right now). Consider, for example, the automatic washing machine: the inventor is anonymous, and we know nothing about his temperament. He may have been kind or he may have been cruel. This is immaterial to the fact that his invention improved the lives of billions of people. Compare this to the kind man; he might offer to wash your clothes for you one day, and that is certainly agreeable, but he hasn’t actually solved the problem. Next week your clothes will be dirty again.

The virtuous man, then, is one who achieves. Obviously it follows from there that the most virtuous behavior is to achieve something — but no one can just choose to do so. Achievement is difficult. Return again to the washing machine: to design and construct it demanded engineering skills far beyond the average person’s. As such, the inventor had to undergo rigorous training to attain the skills and knowledge necessary for his achievement. I call the state that he enters when he is capable of achievement excellence. Because our virtuous man must achieve, he must also become excellent, which is the antecedent of achievement.

But this just kicks the can down the road. Sure, now we know to become excellent, but how do we do that? I anticipate most people would answer “by studying whatever area in which we hope to achieve.” This is a part of excellence, but it is not all. The trap here is that specialization poisons excellence. It seems intuitive that, if our end goal is to achieve something, we ought to put all of our efforts into that one thing, because time we spend on anything else ends up wasted. In fact, however, substantial evidence supports that great men exercise excellency in many fields, not just their most dominant one. Charles Spearman put forth the theory of general intelligence when he noticed that students who did well in one school subject also did well in another; and, indeed, his experimental testing revealed that there did exist some quality people have that makes them better or worse at cognitive tasks of all kinds, not just some or others. The implication here is that excellence doesn’t stick to one domain, and that excellent people are, to put it colloquially, “good at everything.” We see this in actual historical figures; great men of history are usually known for only one thing, but rarely constrain themselves to that alone. Einstein was a sailor and violinist in addition to a physicist. Goethe was a poet, but that didn’t preclude him from achievement as a statesman or scientist. My favorite example is the Founding Fathers, who represent something pretty close to my ideal men. They had great skill in political leadership, for sure, but they were also soldiers, philosophers, writers, polyglots, scientists and artists. It follows, then, that to become excellent, one must not restrict himself. He must strive to be great in many fields.

That is my highly abbreviated theory of ethics. As I said, every moment is a decision, and now I knew that the right decisions were the ones that made me into a capable, multifaceted person. I decided then on the domains in which I would pursue excellence, and I came up with these five:

1. Career: I want a job in which I can substantially improve the lives of many people.

2. Creative Work: I want to create art that enriches the world.

3. Personal Development: I want to maintain my multifacetedness by pursuing competence in other fields.

4. Social and Family: I want relationships with others so I may enliven my passion.

5. Financial: I want the wealth necessary to affirm my life.

When I raise my status in these domains, I not only improve my own life but also my capacity to improve the lives of others. That is the right life, and the life I aim to live.

Every week I review the state of my five domains using this table:

The x-axis has the domains themselves, and the y-axis has various time periods. At the intersections, I write a goal I want to achieve for that category within that time period. I think we all know what a year, month, and week are. An “Olympiad” is a four year period, which is particularly germane to my life because I spent four years in high school, then four years in college, and I plan to get a four year PhD. If I do it immediately after I get my Master’s degree, then there will have been a four-year gap between my undergraduate and postgraduate education. A trimester is roughly a third of a year, which makes sense for me to use because I work in schools, and an academic year divides into three parts in that setting (two semesters and a summer vacation). I set my long term goals at the top, and successively smaller and easier goals as I go lower. In this way, I can effectively bring myself closer to my ideal lifestyle every week.

This is a travel blog where I write about my experiences in China. It is also a literary blog where I write about books. Neither of those things will go away. However, one of my main motivations in writing this blog is to use it as a productivity journal, to hold myself accountable in my journey to live an ethical life. Expect to see me intersperse these travel updates with information on my progress.

I don’t expect readers to fully understand the chart above. That’s fine; it’s for my reference, and I only posted it here as an example. Still, because this is a productivity journal, I will go ahead and explain this week’s goals so I can tell you whether I achieved them next week. My career goal is to write a statement of purpose, which is the last thing I need before I can start applying to Master’s programs. My creative goal is to finish building the website on which you’re reading this very post, which still has some typos and “Under Construction” signs hanging around. My personal development goal is to figure out a plan to pursue my avocations. In Philadelphia, I focused on weightlifting, violin, and cooking. Here, I can practice violin whenever I like, but I need to find a gym before I can get back to lifting weights, and I can’t really cook in my barren kitchen at all; I think I’ll replace that one with Chinese language learning, which I hope to acquire largely through immersion but also plan to take classes for. My social and family goal is to go on a date. I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m looking for a lover. Not only would it make me happy, but a girlfriend is a prerequisite to a wife, which is a prerequisite to children and family. My financial goal is to put together a budget, because I now have a new job with a new salary and I need to figure out how I can enrich myself and enjoy myself on that salary.

Tomorrow is the first day of school. I am very excited. If I find the work pleasant, then I would be able to confidently say that my life in China is a holistic improvement over my life in America. While I’ve gushed over China thus far, I haven’t outright said “everything about China is better” because I wasn’t yet certain that I’d enjoy my work life here more than there. Next week I’ll come back with an answer for you. Remember to check it out.