TIM XU
idealist. intellectual. dreamer. thinker. creator.HELLO
I am, at heart, a dabbler. I'm an economics student at Yale University, and I'm fascinated by the world and its complexity. This is my life.HappinessDec 06
I read a couple of articles today, both written from the reports of people reaching the twilight of their lives, that got me thinking. You can find the articles here and here. Both articles highlight the key, generalized regrets of these older people, and, reading them, I realized just how difficult it is to convince yourself to follow their advice. And the problem isn’t with the advice – it’s with us. It’s so hard to sacrifice short-term gains for long-term happiness.
Studies have shown that lower-income families are generally happier than higher-income ones, for a variety of reasons, some of which can be found in those two articles. The mindset, especially of Yalies, of ambition, of working our hardest for that better tomorrow, seems ingrained in our psyche. There’s an endless drive to be better, to be richer, to be more beautiful. But it seems that once we set ourselves upon this path, our standards of happiness rise and rise and we end up never really happy. We’re constantly looking forward, living in the future, never really satisfied with the present.
Many of us are guilty of exactly the things that Ware talked about. It takes great courage to make an unorthodox decision to pursue happiness at the expense of income, to prioritize our personal relationships at the expense of getting ahead, to choose upheaval in the name of greater happiness at the expense of stability. All of those things that might be sacrificed – money and status – are the very things we seem to be wired to want more and more of. But when you pay for it in happiness, is it really worth it?
I also discovered this response to the question “What is most surprising about humanity?,” which is popularly attributed to the the Dalai Lama:
“Man. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money.
Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health.
And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present;
the result being that he does not live in the present or the future;
he lives as if he is never going to die,
and then dies having never really lived.”
The truth of this terrifies me. In our endless pursuit of wealth and status, how much happiness do we lose? Are we forsaking opportunities of present happiness for supposed future gratification? I think we are. But the scariest part is that this decision just seems so difficult. How do you justify the branch of happiness of happiness when it seems like such a nebulous concept, especially when the alternative is concretely better.
I know that I, along with the rest of the Class of 2012, will be faced with decisions like this many times in the next few years. I can only hope that we make the decisions that make us happy.
New Camera!Nov 30
I got a new camera over Thanksgiving break! It’s a Panasonic GF-2, a compact interchangeable lens cameras, and I’m pretty excited to use it over winter break and the coming years. It certainly beats the cell phone cameras I’ve been using for the last two years. Anyway, here’s a few first shots that I took with it in my room.
Mitt RomneyNov 21
There was an interesting article last month in New York Magazine that profiled Mitt Romney and described his past as a consultant and businessman. It’s a fantastic article, a great read, and I definitely recommend it. It was particularly interesting to me due to my recent interest in Romney’s candidacy. In the past year, I’ve definitely become politically independent, mostly due to disillusionment from the inability for Democrats in Congress to do, well, anything. It’s been incredibly frustrating to watch Obama try, and fail, to get anything of worth through Congress as the Republicans and Democrats refuse to compromise. At this point, I wonder if Obama really is faultless – is his inability to push anything through congress due to his own leadership deficiencies?
And so, reading the article about Mitt Romney, I find myself impressed by his history as a businessman and, of course, as a consultant. He seems like the kind of leader our government needs: an objective thinker with a huge appetite for data. While I can’t agree with some of the social policy areas that he is forced to endorsed due to his party affiliation, I really do like his way of thinking and executing, which may be more important with the economy as the focus of the 2012 election. While I haven’t done enough research into his positions on key issues (besides healthcare), his character (apparently he’s a flip-flopper), or his ability to be the leader of the free world (which is becoming more and more an antiquated exaggeration), what I’ve seen so far has been impressive. While I still Obama as a man, I, like many others, have become frustrated by the inaction of the government as a whole over the last few years. I’d certainly like to see Romney win the Republican nomination to see how he stacks up against the charisma of Obama. At the very least, he isn’t as ideologically repugnant to me as the other Republican candidates.
Twenty-one yearsNov 12
Three years ago today, I wrote a post recounting my first eighteen years. I talked about my childhood, and what I thought I knew about myself at the time. Remarkably, I was pretty close. But what I didn’t realize was just how much I would grow in the years since. While I can’t say if college has been the most transformative period of my life, I do know that I’ve learned more about myself in these most recent three years than in the prior eighteen. I’m still not quite done with college, but I do stand on the verge of the next chapter of my life. And so once more, I look back and reflect.
With the power of hindsight, I can confirm that my initial, tentative ruminations about high school were a bit exaggerated. I literally grew up, but not as much as I thought. Three years ago, I thought I’d come pretty close to the person I would be in adulthood. High school certainly brought me out of the awkward shell of middle school and treated me to experiences of responsibility, leadership, pride, love, loss. But what I realize now is that the experiences only provided the framework for future experiences. At 18, I still had no idea who I wanted to be, what I liked to do, and exactly who I was.
At 18, I wanted to be a doctor. Heck, since I’d been a little kid, I wanted to be a doctor. I thought that that was the life I wanted, to help people feel better and to make a difference in the lives of as many people as possible. And so I embarked upon that path quite seriously, choosing courses that were only really useful for pre-med students. But I realized pretty quickly that my motivations in choosing this path were less grounded in fact and more in some deeply-held fancy. By spring semester of freshman year, I still had not committed to any of the pre-med obligations that required more effort. I didn’t want to do research, and I didn’t really want to do any other extracurricular involving science. I justified this by doing something I actually liked, teaching, which I chose as my summer experience after freshman year.
I thought that my love for teaching was a sign that I was meant to be a doctor. Since high school, I’d been tutoring and teaching as a side-hobby. Even to this day, helping others by teaching is something I enjoy. It was natural to think that that love was perfectly transferable to a career in medicine. But the summer after my freshman year, which I spent teaching several SAT classes, I realized that there was one major practical similarity between teaching and medicine that I couldn’t stand – I realized that I didn’t like repetitive tasks. One week that summer, I taught the same math class about geometry three times in a row, and it was dreadful. I taught a total of five classes that summer, all with identical curriculum, and that experience almost robbed me of all my love for teaching. While I liked helping others, I definitely did not enjoy doing so in a overly structured, repetitive way.
And so I returned to Yale in the fall with serious doubts about my chosen career path, but it wasn’t until a weekend at home that I finally decided to change course. That October, I went along with my parents and my brother to his pediatrician, who spoke to me briefly about her career. She told me two things: one, that, as a Yalie, I had the opportunity to truly pursue as many paths as I wanted and two, that her career choice included a long and difficult journey, and that if I wasn’t absolutely sure I wanted to be a doctor, I’d only be miserable several years down the line. Her second point resonated with me, because I really wasn’t sure at that time. Her reminder of the seven years of further schooling and training that awaited me filled me with dread. I knew I would be unhappy if I forced myself through that. Shortly thereafter, I dropped the medical career from my mind.
This decision coincided with another major event, as I entered 2010 as president of the Chinese American Students Association. I’d mentioned three years ago that I probably wouldn’t find another activity or another group that meant as much to me as marching band did. CASA comes pretty close to that status. But more importantly, my year as president showed me the first glimpses of what kind of work I would really enjoy.
What I Wish I Knew My Freshman YearNov 07
On Friday, I was invited to be a senior volunteer for an event at our Asian-American Cultural Center called “What I Wish I Knew My Freshman Year.” And so to prepare, I came up with a list of ten things I had learned since freshman year. In talking about my experiences so far and answering the freshmen questions about those experiences, I discovered that I still don’t fully follow these tips myself. In any case, here they are:
1. Be true to yourself. Do what makes you happy, not what others say you should do.
2. Be genuine, be reliable. The relationships you form at Yale can potentially last a lifetime, so make sure they’re built the right way.
3. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes. The fear of making a mistake takes away opportunities. Instead, make the mistakes and look back and learn from them.
4. Trust your intuition. Don’t stress about the details or over-think the possibilities. Life has its way of working out.
5. Learn how to say “no.” You can’t do everything, so choose the things that mean the most to you.
6. Don’t be too attached and insular. You don’t truly discover who you really connect with until later, so meet new people.
7. Ask for help if you need it. The people around you are more willing to help than you think, so don’t feel like you have to do everything by yourself. The opposite it true as well: don’t hesitate to offer help.
8. Get to know professors! They actually want to meet you, and do care about your life.
9. Party hard, but party smart. Fun times aren’t very fun if you can’t remember them.
10. Don’t forget your family and friends back home. You might want to rush forward with your life, but they’re the only ones who will catch you when you fall.
Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow.Oct 30
Mona Simpson, the sister of Steve Jobs, delivered the eulogy at his memorial service two weeks ago. The New York Times reproduced that eulogy today, and you can find it here. This is one of the most emotionally powerful things I’ve ever read; I’m left absolutely speechless by it.
QuoraOct 25
Over the past few weeks, I’ve discovered a new source of procrastination, one that has come to compete with reddit for my procrastination time. That source is Quora. Introduced to me by my manager from this past summer, Quora is not dissimilar to reddit in that it’s a community of people who post things, reply to things, and can rate up (or down) their fellow members’ posts. The key difference, however, is that Quora is focused on asking and answering questions. Given the fact that there are several members who are quite knowledgeable in their own fields – including some who are CEOs or VPs at startups! – the answers can be very enlightening. Further, because of the reply mechanism, debates and discussions can form around these answers, making for very entertaining reading.
You can read about an extensive criticism of Google+, why companies might fail at international expansion, or even the reason it’s bad to eat right before going to bed. It’s fascinating to read, and remarkable how people are willing to describe, explain, and debate at such a high intellectual level on the Internet. To me, it’s an alternative to the more basic entertainment of reddit, though I haven’t been able to contribute much in terms of answers, mostly due to my lack of deep expertise in any one topic. I definitely recommend it if rage comics or cute kittens isn’t enough for you.
A good pointOct 16
Even though I think there are reasonable historical reasons why chopsticks came to become so popular, I do wonder this every once in a while. Especially when I’m trying to eat peas.
A Lower Standard of LivingOct 10
I read a New York Times article this morning that reported a pretty alarming statistic: inflation-adjusted median household income in the U.S. fell 6.7% since June 2009. Since 2007, that value has dropped 9.8%. Based on just these two numbers, I’d agree with the conclusion of the study’s authors that the standard of living for American households has dropped quite significantly in the last few years. It was already clear, based on the more visible unemployment rate, that U.S. companies were finding ways to produce more without hiring more. This study indicates that not only are they more productive, they’re doing so while paying their workers less real wages.
Median household income history
Spurred by the article, I decided to investigate the current state of employment in the U.S. Looking through the data collected by the government and found some remarkable things. First, I went through some statewide median household income numbers from the U.S. Census bureau. As of March 2011, real median household income (HHI) in the U.S. has fallen to levels first reached in 1989, and last seen in 1996. In other words, the median U.S. household was making just as much real income the year before I was born as they are today. That’s incredible.
I also looked at it from a state-by-state perspective, benchmarking each state’s change in median household income over the last four years to the national average of -$3,378. Results here were pretty surprising: the states with the highest rate of income growth were all rural (Vermont, North Dakota, Wyoming, Nebraska, and Utah); the states with the lowest rate were more mixed (Minnesota, Georgia, Hawaii, Alaska, and Ohio). New Jersey was 7th, with median HHI remaining flat. Connecticut was 10th, with median HHI dropping only 1.48%.
Characteristics of the Unemployed
I also found the nature of today’s unemployed population fascinating. The government segments unemployment in a lot of different ways including race, gender, occupation, age. Looking through some of these segmented data, I found some interesting nuggets.
-Male unemployment is about 2 percentage points higher than female unemployment.
-African-American unemployment is about 16%, almost 50% higher than the nationwide unemployment. It’s also more than twice the rate for Asian-Americans (7.5%)
-Americans between age 20 and 24 have a 15.5% unemployment rate.
-The unemployment rate for management, professional, and related occupations is 4.7%.
-The unemployment rate for construction occupations is 20.1%.
-About 53% of the unemployed population are those who permanently lost their jobs.
It appears to me that the 9.6% national unemployment is very much skewed towards transitional or seasonal labor. The highest unemployment rates were in occupations like food preparation, building and grounds cleaning, construction, farming and fishing, factory jobs. These are the blue-collar workers that are already living paycheck-to-paycheck. It’s no surprise that the current protests and negative national mood seems to be emerging from the lower-middle class, while the rest of America watches and keeps their heads low.
It’s interesting, though, that there’s a lot of public anger directed towards major corporations. But based on the data, it appears that a lot of these major corporations, especially in the services, healthcare, and management industries, are at, or close, to natural rates of unemployment.
Occupy Wall Street
So what about those thousands of men and women sitting around on city streets around the world? It turns out they’re somewhat misguided. I looked at household income numbers across percentiles, and found that, surprisingly, the income level for the top 5% of American households has remained largely unchanged since 1992, staying around 21.5% of aggregate income. This flies in the face of Occupy Wall Street’s “We Are the 99%” slogan. Unless the 1% has been taking entirely from the next 4%, it’s clear that the income disparity has NOT changed in the last 20 years. Before 1992 is a different story. In fact, between 1982 and 1992, the share for that top 5% grew from around 16.5% to 21.5%. That era was Reaganomics. So while the top 0.01% has grown tremendously due to tremendous growth in CEO pay, the balance of the top 5% of Americans has remained largely unchanged.
I will be careful to note that I don’t mean to disregard their argument against the broader systemic issues with the world’s financial systems. That is best left for another post.
RevivalOct 09
After over a year of not writing here, and after several weeks of procrastinating, I’ve finally gotten around to updating my blog. Now that I’m entering the twilight of a major period in my life and standing at the doorstep of the next great chapter, I feel it’s appropriate that I begin recording my thoughts and experiences again. I also made some minor cosmetic changes to the website and updated some of the pages.
As a college senior without too many extracurricular commitments, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about the future. It’s natural, of course, to think about my own future, but the state of the world these past few months has brought its future to the forefront of my mind. With the Arab revolutions, economic problems in Europe and at home, and the beginnings of popular uprisings here in the U.S., there’s a lot of uncertainty in the world.
And so I’ll be writing more often moving forward. I expect to write less about the happenings in my own life, and more about my musings regarding events that are tangential, or even unrelated, to me.
