Unto a full grown man. It was the group-chat name for the students (me included) who went for a short winter exchange to China. When I saw it, I genuinely thought it came from a meme, and some funny guy in the group decided to make it the name of the exchange students’ Telegram group. The deliberately idiotic emojis that followed the lines convinced of my astute intuition even further. When I reached the university in China, I realized I was so naive. The line was the motto of the Chinese university we attended. It made the whole thing even funnier.
After the exchange, I cast the motto with a more serious note. Year 2023 was going to end, and turned 21 – legally an adult. Interestingly, transitioning into adulthood is something that humans have heavily stressed in all cultures. Rituals and ceremonies have been built around to clothe the adults to-be with new expectations, promises, and fears, reminding them the complete transformation of their identity. This is not something atavistic. We still do this today – not through obvious customs and religious codes – but through family gatherings, graduation ceremonies, entering military service, getting a respectable job, marriage, losing virginity, ability to drink to death legally, and of course, posting attractive pictures of yourself in Instagram of your grand 21st birthday (I guess one is really ready to mingle).
Jokes aside, most of these cultural rituals appear to be positive and meaningful, but what are they truly celebrating? What is the thing that makes the transformation from child to adult so transformational that it necessitates the cultural attention of all existed humanity? Physical change? Competence? Usefulness? Wisdom? Vitality?
If you ask me the core meaning of adulthood today, I think of the process of understanding the world as it actually is. Not you want is to be, not what others have told you for it should be, but reality in its stark, uncompromising totality. In our pre-adulthood years, we are told half-truths about the world – they are rosy promises of our future, lyrical assertions on the abundance and definitive goodness of the good, along with the remoteness and ambiguous corruptibility of the evil. All of them cover up a territory of uncomfortable truths we dress them as taboos. These hidden truths are things that if we are not lucky or intelligent enough to see them exposed through the advice of good surrounding adults, or the rumours and confessions of our peers and strangers, and taught to appreciate in the way that truths should be appreciated – stoicism, strategy, and controlled optimism – would have to learn it through the painful experience encountering their ugly heads ourselves.
These truths don’t fall down from the sky, they are discovered through the barbs that pierce our skins, the mires we drench ourselves into, walls with which we run against, cliffs that we step over. They are not found within the tendered compounds of our comfortable childhood, but along the journey of adult pursuits and obligations, between the ideal and the current state of our lives, there which lies the wild rainforest of Amazon. Last year, I was proud that I have stepped out of my comfort zone in all the areas of my life, so that I can savour the taste of reality. Interestingly, these experiences had an initial pang of pain and shock, but if you are willing to swallow them into your guts, to have them intellectually, and also emotionally, integrated into your body, they will bring a fulfilling, peaceful aftertaste. They might be wounds and scars in the beginning, I have somewhat made them into postcards and souvenirs. Here are the five truths that I have learnt in 2023.
1. Romance is not real in the way we think it is.
This is for young men. Movies and romance novels have given us the wrong idea that there is the “one”, and that each of us are given a lifelong mission to find the other side of us, to make us complete. For a man, he must make the stubborn pursuit for his human angel through various acts of kindness, consideration, service. If a man is rejected by the women, he must keep pursuing, because eventually, the women will be awaken from the wrongs of her ways, and fall in love for the loyal courtier.
Nothing can be further from the truth. Especially for attractive girls in their early 20s, practicing the advice of the media would set you into countless failures. First, there is no such thing as the “one”. There are good girls and bad girls, depending on the preferences of the individual man. The belief that there is a “one” messes up the mind of men, because it overblows the judgement of the target of interest, making a tendency to emotionally invest on a women too quickly, too easily – which let’s be honest, was fueled by horniness. Women find this approach very unattractive. They don’t want to be worshipped and etherealized, especially in the beginning of the courtship process. Contrary to public opinion, women prefer pursuing men rather than being pursued by them.
I can go on. This is just one of the facts of female nature that most men are not aware of – especially sexually/romantically inexperienced men, or most importantly – “nice” – men. To be clear, my point is to not prove that romance doesn’t exist, but that to cultivate romance and romantic/sexual passion, men have to unlearn the tenets preached by movies and dramas, and see women as they are. In the process and relearning, some of them will give you an “Aha!” moment that would save your future frustrations with women, some would reveal the darker aspects of female psychology that can make you spiteful and vengeful[1]. Don’t be discouraged, understanding women in its totality can save you a lot of time, energy and pain engaging with women.
On the flip side, understanding female psychology can clarify the value of the man himself, help to elevate their self-esteem and sexual confidence. Let me give you one example, some men have this distorted romantic thinking which among other things, tries to shame their own sexuality. Men love sex, just as women. Men just desire sex more regularly than women. When I hear my peers proudly announce that they truly “love” their crush/girlfriends, and never harbor any glimpse of sexual desire on her, I know they are talking bullocks – I said that when I was younger, and at the back of my head (which one?) was thinking the opposite. Sex is not dirty. Sex is not base. Sex is not a sin. If your girl complains about your passion for sex to you, she is not making a damning verdict on the core of your masculinity, she is giving you feedback that you have either pick the wrong girl (sexual incompatibility) or that you are not doing it right (outside or inside the bedroom, or both). She won’t directly tell you this because how can she know? No culture that I have observed seem to openly teach women the reason for their disengagement and sometimes disgust, to sexual advances even to their boyfriends. [2]
The predominant culture offers something extremely unhelpful to this problem particular to men: since men have this romantic notion that women are angels, the rejection for sexual advances to the person who should be the one who they are socially accepted to have sex with really cripples the deep core of their sexual identity. The divine has spoken, what your protest and exasperation can amount in face of the incontrovertible judgement from the heavens? Young men who faced this horrifying outcome, or anticipated such, fear to broach this subject again, and slowly and tragically, see their masculine self-esteem corrode silently in their private misery, or find sexual fulfilment elsewhere. Let’s get over that romance as we know it is true. It not only ruins sexual/romantic relationships, it ruins men even more.
2. Adults are not adults who I thought they should be.
When I was younger, I upheld the romantic assumption that adults are generally worth admiring and emulating. The image of adults that have had can be described as this: competent, self-aware, disciplined, self-controlling intelligent, knowledgeable, genuine, courteous, caring – generally a good force for the world. The bad, socially awkward, superficial, proud, impulsive adults in the world are caricatures irrelevant to my immediate experience. All adults are not pesky, naive, and egoistic babies. They have became a full grown man, physically, emotionally and intellectually. This general reverence towards adults would make me listen to most of the adults around me: the compliments, the accusations, the judgements, the disappointments, the instruction, the well-meaning advice. When going to conferences or conventions, I would assume that all the people around me are worth listening and learning from, with respect to their experience, knowledge, common sense and social competence.
That is not true for most of the adults I know. Talking to many adult strangers, I felt that I was talking to my peers in university. They are not adults as I make of them to be. Many of them are quiet, nervous, timid, brash, impatient, impolite, jealous, shallow and egoistical. I guess many adults don’t grow out of their university days. Therefore, many adults are not worth my time taking advice from.
My go-to method of filter out the advice from adults is this: would you want to become someone like him/her when you were in his age? If no, then you found your answer. Conversely, if that adult is someone you aspire to become in the future, I would try to probe into his/her career, what was scarified and what was prioritized, what level of commitment was poured into the craft, what degree of social network must be attained. What qualities the adult have to make him/herself reach to this point of life? Collecting a number of these specimens would give myself a better picture if I am willing to trod a similar path just as the adult had.
3. If you are mad at people, it means that you don’t understand people – and yourself.
For those who are shy, it takes some time to be confident socializing. When I forced myself to be more sociable and lovable as a person, I stepped out of my narrow social circle, and got to know way more friends than I had in the past. At the same time, I became weirdly mad against my friends. In the beginning I was mad once a day, and after that, I got mad more often. I sensed that something is not right, and sat down to process my emotions. What I found that I generally have high expectations on people. I feel disappointed and also a little arrogant when I realize my newly befriended peers don’t fit to my high expectations. They may be too quiet for too good, they may be sexually skittish (for men), they may be lazy, weak, anxious, stupid, unhygienic. Along the process, you face the bizarre experience when you discovered the types of people the you privately mock at becomes your friend. This disapproval and belittlement was manifested through my body language and tone of voice. I might pretend to not notice them; I might be curt with my replies; I might display a general glance of pity, or just throw burning darts of rage, shame and disgust in my eyes.
This of course slighted my friends/peers, and soured – or at least cooled down – the relationship. When it happened once, you might feel proud of yourself from cutting off a connection with a supposed inferior. But if this situation continues on, it is not a pleasant feeling. More often than not, it makes you an angrier person. Pride is cold company.
I do believe in the virtue in having standards when bringing someone to have a human relationship with you, and talk to those who are deem “unfit-for-friendship” when it is only necessary. Nonetheless, to some degree, if I get mad at people 90% of time when they fail to meet the expectation I imposed upon them, safe to assume that I will get angry 90% of my life interacting with people. And I certainly don’t want that kind of life.
My rage was also caused on my binary understanding of people. I had a strict standard on the people I talk to. Those who fail to pass the test were deemed as unattractive and bad, those who do would be seen as an equal. Now I teach myself that this is a childish understanding of people. Humans cannot be neatly categorized into a hero or a villain; they are people with a mix of the good and the bad – because they are human. One might be extremely quiet yet smart, another might be pompous yet competent. One might be shallow yet sociable, another might be insecure yet funny. One might be incredibly handsome but terrible at writing jokes in his blog (eh-hem). Also, in general, the unattractive traits and the attractive ones mutually depend on each other. It makes me size up other people more objectively, and hence more calmly.
In deeper thought, I realized I am not very different from any other person in the world. When we were young, some of us has the tendency to think we have a golden touch, and that our thoughts, words and actions has is a priori invaluable, sui generis – a natural excretion of our mystical genius. If one has done some honest comparison of their own psyche with others, it doesn’t come unnatural for us to realize that we are quite similar to each other. We might be carved in different motifs, but we are made the materials the same. We are in different shades and compositions of envy, indolence, insecurity, passive aggression, self-righteousness, selfishness, flightiness, rigidness, conformism, melancholy, ignorance [3], cowardice, discontentedness, superficiality and deceptiveness. We turn testy when we are tired, self-denying when ashamed. We go blank when trying to give an impromptu speech, douse off when someone harp on a boring subject, and are nervous on our first dates.
A group of people will always see themselves special and act aloof to all others. A group of people would never care of the consequences of their actions. A group of people would always cover up their incompetence or skittishness with airy self-talk. A group of people would always like to show off in less obvious ways. A group of people just like to hate on the rich and powerful. These people may and may not have sound justifications for their behaviors, either way I won’t allow myself to be provoked with rage. This advice resonates even deeper for those who have managed to wring off some of the less flattering aspects of their personality along the way, and saw their past on other people they encountered in the present day. Because they would think to themselves, “how would someone else 10 years ahead of me think of me at-the-present?” We are not gods and angels and we make ourselves to be. This self-understanding gives people humility and self-awareness, and also, an attractive common touch.
If my imagination is exhausted to soothe myself against the peculiarities and shortcoming of individuals, I would tell myself to just shut off your inner monologue and pay attention. Put off your cynical, misanthropic mentality on human beings, and just accept what the person in front of you is offering. Do not project, do not set any judgement too quickly to stone. Be open, be welcoming, be warm, be loving. They can smell your sincerity and they would automatically reveal their individuality that done repeatedly, colour your social life. Maybe you would learn something interesting from them, maybe they make you see and feel in the way they never had, maybe you help you learn to someone you want to be, and someone you don’t want to be. Be they a fool or devil, creep or bore, your time with them is at least a pleasantly memorable one.
4. Pain and struggle results in a pleasure that no comfort can provide.
Pleasure is good, pain is bad. It seems to be such a truism that no one ever tries to refute this fact. They are main foundations of our ethics, economics, and they guide our choices of relating, doing, and maintaining. We like things that gives us pleasure and comfort, and dislike things that inflict pain and agony, so we normally tend to avoid the latter and chase the former. In the macro scale, human civilization is basically a history of constant avoidance and amelioration of suffering.
While this thinking about pleasure and pain is generally not inaccurate, I think it lack a depth of understanding necessary to have a good life. I have countless experiences doing something that give pleasure but no satisfaction. I feel empty scrolling through hours of social media; I feel like a useless mush of jelly idling on the bed playing video games. I have bouts of experiences giving in to the impulse to drink a sweet cup of bubble tea, pop in junk food in my mouth, or search on some silly things on the interest for the sake of doing it, and the feeling sucked. In all of these situations, I sought for these things because they are offering some sort of instant pleasure. Everyone has their own way to stooping into instant pleasure, and you know that while it feel good for a while, it leaves quickly as it arrives, and you have to double down on what you do to keep the good feeling coming.
This is what I call shallow pleasure. They are coping mechanisms that our unique culture provide us to get some quick high when a little pain and unpleasantness becomes too uncomfortable in our lives. Porn, video games, gambling, excessive food, window shopping, drugs, sex, alcohol, rom-coms, romance, attention, parties, social media, rubbish information. They have immense power over us, because they are portable pleasure capsules that allow us to look away from the reality of life full of ennui, pain, and frustration the moment it comes at us; in other words, they are addictions. Advertisers studied this facet of human nature so deeply that they convinced us to buy things we don’t need, social media platform engineers utilized this knowledge so that they can bait our eyeballs to what they want us to see, religious or secular self-help gurus and intellectuals softens us in sweet, thawing speeches and aphorisms want us to feel, not to act – save for paying their courses and seminars. “Life is pain. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something,” I guess the quote from The Princess Bride is right.
Interestingly, all the people and corporations don’t tell you a kind of pleasure that although cannot be accessed in an instant, is deeper and more fulfilling than any conceivable drug and narcotic. [5] I call this deep pleasure. If shallow pleasure is the hollow feeling one gains from a pack of chips, deep pleasure is the fullness and sublimity one feels from a healthy full-course meal. The pleasure results from a series of drudgery, frustration, disappointment, awe-inspired moments, and it redounds far more satisfaction than any addiction can provide. It is the cathartic feeling when one has finished a months-long project, the relaxation after an intense workout, the energizing pleasure of having lovely, inspiring friends around you, the realization when one is able to spend a week trip on the savings of your work, the excitement of understanding a subject decently well after months of research and cross-checking, the peace of mind when you have the freedom to choose your career options down the road. More and other, you find the monotony, pain, the confusion is a prelude to a flush of feelings that you never forget, and you will keep coming back for more. Deep pleasure is a kind of addiction is a healthy, consistent and glowing to everyone.
From another view, addictions are not necessarily bad. In fact, addictions that you and I normally think of is a decoy addiction, something that you are duped into taking for the short-term pleasure it offers. If you are addict, you are not immoral, you are just misguided, normally due to weakness, including fear, timidity and anxiety. Addictions are means by which we avoid from the things we want, but too cowardly to get it due to the pain that stands between us and us dreams. To solve addiction, it is crucial to look at what your addiction is – your addiction might give a clue on what you are missing in life. It might be a lack of purpose, a general anxiety about the future, a pang of sexual frustration, low self-image and self-worth, procrastination on some important task, and so much more. Whatever it may be, one must marshal some courage, break the cycle, and address the elephant in the room. Because unless you want to see yourself as a failure until the rest of your life, there is no other way to break prison of addiction to get what you really want. [4]
5. No one can really save you.
This is perhaps the most important thing one should learn early in their life but this took me the longest to comprehend the significance of this truth. Raised as the youngest and treated like a pampered child, it might take a few electric shocks from the world to tell you that all the resources, connections, assistance, environmental conditions you are privileged with are a mirage. When it comes to success, they are important indeed, but nothing is more important than how you hold yourself accountable, the effort to invest in what you strive for, the pain you are willing to endure, the rejection you are willing take on. Ultimately, nothing is given, everything is earned. And everything acquired needs constant maintenance and care. As I realize myself, things will never be alright if you don’t have a system or the alertness to solve it when it goes south.
As I have written in my other post, everyone, even if they are aware or not, have their own agendas in life. They have their own things to worry about, own affairs to run and maintain, and own careers and relationships to pursue. Many times, their goals will oppose to your goals. There will never be a magnanimous mentor who will micromanage your life apprehensions, there will never be a white knight or mysterious women who will come in and set your life to order, there will never be a brilliant professor who will pave a clean shortcut to your professional success. Conversely, expect to cross paths with more enemies than friends. Maybe you are lucky enough to have good people around who can prop you up, but they are still people with selfish needs, and you still have to take the majority share of responsibility to get down the business of life yourself. To believe otherwise is childish and lazy.
Maybe it is just me, because no one really told me about this in my face. I was expected to grow into this realization by myself, which thankfully I did. And just like I have to teach myself to be disciplined, masculine and attractive, I learnt to clarify thoughts which are my own against those which are not, debate on my values and goals, legislate my own policies to keep my actions in line with my values and goals – most people would simply violate them if you let them so. I need to learn to pay attention to my inner monologue and my health because it is the key determinant my focus and success. While the advice of my peers can be valuable, most of them are mere regurgitation of the fads of culture that has no palpable insight about myself as in individual. Practicing these things long enough, this way of life really make you think that your life in a crowded metropolitan borders a life of a lone hunter in a vast fields of Savannah. It is you versus the world. The world is a unpredictable, uncontrollable, haphazard thing that you must live with. In the face of it, you can either your greatest enemy, or your greatest ally who can brave you all these through, and make you thrive. You are lone in this fight. It can be scary, but also simultaneously exhilarating.
So this is what I have learnt growing up in 2023. It makes me curious what will 2024 be in store for me. Fortunately and unfortunately, one doesn’t have to wait for too long to find out.
Footnotes:
[1] These less flattering, sometimes straight up revolting traits, are not something shared by a minority of women. All women have that tendency, because these natures originated from deep evolutionary process, not social conditioning.
[2] Although this section address the issues of young men, it is important to understand that sexual rejection can happen to husbands. This ignorance of female sexual psychology sadly leads to sexless marriage, a despondent phenomenon suffered by vast majority of married men.
[3] It the moment when you start to work that you realize you know so little!
[4] Young people find it hard to do it because they tend to be more impatient. Older people find it equally hard to do because they are more set with their ways and tend to be more rigid and hate to change.
[5] In my experience, addiction is not driven by strong emotions. You can seek addictive behavior’s even if you don’t have the strong impulse doing it.
Randolph Yew 
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