Public Perception, The Untamed, Sociology, Etc.

In my last couple of posts I basically argued that the wealthy had enough independence that they could  do what they really wanted. It's a crying shame when instead they go along with and enable crappy behavior.

I don't want to imply that you can afford to ignore other people's opinions all the time, or without consequences, but the topic was too nuanced to get into there so I figured I'd write a separate post.

It also relates a bit to a discussion I had on the Netflix show The Untamed. Which means I'm going to start with that, and I'm going to give out spoilers so read at your own risk.

In the show,  public opinion is practically a character in it's own right. In the very first episode we hear people gossiping and spreading rumors (which we later learn were misleading when not outright wrong), and so we quickly learn that the main character - Wei Wuxian - has a villainous reputation.

His reputation actually plays quite a bit in the story. He uses questionable magic to help his side win a war, and even though many people were uncomfortable with him and scared of him, they mostly just let him be.

Then when the war ended, he discovered that innocent and unthreatening civilians were being treated badly simply because they belonged to the losing side. He's arrogant, inexperienced, and powerful... so he rescues these remnants, but in such a way that he pretty much offends all the powers-that-be. 

Wei Wuxian's reputation starts coming into play here, as many of them assume the worst. Rumors spread that he's raising an army and other such stupid ideas. When another character gets cursed, he blames Wei Wuxian for it. Without any proof or evidence, but people believe it. Because of Wei Wuxian's reputation. Because who else would? So he takes a couple hundred people and ambushes Wei Wuxian, setting off the tragic sequences of events that led to Wei Wuxian's death at the beginning of the story. (He gets better. You also learn that in the first episode.)

I was talking about it with some other fans, or rather talking about Wei Wuxian's attitude towards his reputation vs. his adopted brother's (Jiang Cheng, heir to their sect. Their troubled relationship plays a large role in the story.)

See, back in college my sociology class talked about all the unwritten rules we abide by. How when we walk into a classroom as a student we all know not to sit in the teacher's chair. Rules about what to wear, how we answer the phone, etc. And we had an assignment to break one of those unwritten rules.

And here's the thing - most of the time those rules are about as thin as tissue paper. You can break them with almost no consequence. Except maybe some weird looks. (Though many people find it scary and impossible to do, nonetheless.)

But humans are very social, and sometimes there really are consequences. There are people so upset or offended (like one person said when they wore a winter coat on a bus in summer) that they go out of their way to say something to you, or can even react violently.

As anyone who breaks those social norms can tell you - as gays, and transsexuals, and people who just don't fit in - there are people who for some reason get violently offended by it. (People are weird that way, and I don't really understand it. I'll use the winter coat example since it avoid some polarizing political points. I might find it weird, but it's not like I'm the one being asked to wear a heavy coat in summer, so it's none of my business. And I'm sure you have your reasons, even if I don't know them. So who cares? You do you, wear whatever you want. You can wear galoshes or flippers or a tutu if that's what you want to. I might question that decision if you decide to show up at a conventional work place like that. Then again, the sheer guts it would take to do such a thing and the amusement I'd get at seeing everyone freak out means I might find it absolutely delightful if you did.)

In the TV show, Wei Wuxian clearly seems to know this. He knows that social norms and conventions are as thin as tissue paper, and he ignores them whenever he can do so without bringing down consequences on his adopted family and sect. He has no shame and does whatever he wants. 

His adopted brother Jiang Cheng on the other hand, sect heir and all, is overly worried about reputations. As part of the drama leading up to Wei Wuxian's death he has a falling out with Jiang Cheng. There's a lot going on with that. Jiang Cheng is a new and inexperienced sect leader trying to rebuild their clan after the war, and he's not exactly in a position to challenge the other clans over the treatment of their war prisoners. There's all sorts of parts of their mutual history at play, but what's most relevant to this post was that Jiang Cheng was extremely worried about popular opinion and Wei Wuxian wasn't.

And Wei Wuxian ended up making enemies of all the sects and dying. So... it seems Jiang Cheng's wasn't wrong. Except that there were all sorts of places where things might have been handled diferently, and if Jiang Cheng had decided to protect Wei Wuxian instead of agreeing to cut their connection it might have been enough to turn the tides. 

It's a really complex story and I could spend a lot of time writing about what happened, where things went wrong, how they could have gone differently, whether it's worth trying to place blame on any of the characters (and if so how much)...

But that's getting a bit too deep in the weeds for this post. What I'll say is this - public opinion, social norms, and other people's perceptions can be ignored quite a bit of the time. Right up until it can't.

Part of the problem is that people have a very poor sense of when it's which. When the consequences are minor or easily tolerated and when they become dire. 

People also have a hard time seeing how they may effect those consequences. How one person speaking out at the right time can shift public opinion, and sometimes fail to do so (and create negative consequences for themselves in the process).

The point of all this... well. I guess what I'll say is that I understand why some people are so socialized that they're afraid of going against the flow, and there sometimes are very real consequences for doing so.

On the other hand, too much of that means too many people afraid of being who they are. Afraid of speaking out and standing up for their beliefs, and ultimately it leads to a rather miserable way of life.

Why Pathetic?

 I figured I should explain my comment from yesterday better, though for most people I think it's pretty self explanatory. Or, well... it's like the stories of politicians who don't know the price of milk.

That is, the majority of Americans are so intimately familiar with something that it generally doesn't bear commenting on, but someone who lives an extremely privileged (and isolated) life may not know, which generally makes them stand out in a 'what sort of bubble do they live in that they don't know that?' kind of way.

So. 

Here's the thing. The median wage in the US is about $60,000. That's median, not average, because the ultra-wealthy with really high salaries will skew the average higher. Median means half the population makes less than this, and half make more. 

Now, the top 1% have wealth in things that are harder to judge than salary - stock, land, etc. That's probably why so many statistics on wealth inequality talk more about the share of the economy or something. But let's say making $488,000 a year puts you in the top 1%. 

$488,000 a year is vastly different from $60,000 a year. I also feel compelled to point out, though, that the true anger is at the .01%. They're level of wealth is as vastly different from that $488,000 a year as $488,000/yr is to $60,000. (Maybe even more). Those people may make $7 million or more a year.

So here's the thing. I said yesterday that happiness is correlated to money only up to a certain amount (though I think I said $70K a year yesterday, and now I'm thinking it may have been $75K. The difference is trivial when compared to $488K or $7M so I won't bother looking it up.)

At $75K you probably have the following - a decent place to live, money for food, clothing, and entertainment. A reliable car. Health insurance. Money and time to take at least one nice vacation a year. 

Some of that takes some work, ofc. Maybe the house isn't as big a you'd like, or you can't get the most expensive clothes, or you're not driving an Audi or Bentley or whatever. But if you manage your budget well enough you can generally get the things that really matter to you, and you aren't generally stressing over the necessities of life. (In other words, you're not worrying about how you're going to eat if you pay the rent that month, or worrying that you'll be evicted if you don't pay the rent in order to pay for food. You may not get the clothes you want, but you can afford clothes that are decent and look nice and you can do so without having to worry that buying clothes will make it impossible to pay for your car.)

Now, I've heard that if you invest money .06% is a reasonable return on that investment... so if someone was making $488K/yr and chose to invest it all they'd only have about $29K a year. Not really enough to live comfortably off of without working... but .06% of that $7M is about $420,000... the ultrawealthy could invest most of their money and live off that investments with a salary that still puts them in the top 1%. Or close enough to be make no difference.

By which I mean, someone making 488K a year can (with time, and smart investments, etc) probably find a way to be financially independent without needing to work. They may not be there initially, but it's pretty doable. 

If they're not doing the whole 'keeping up with the Joneses' thing, and trying too hard to match lifestyles in stupid ways. Like - unless you have a reason to live in a place with a high cost of living, why do it? You can get a perfectly nice house in some place that isn't New York City or Chicago or California at a fraction of the price. Is it your job? Showing off how much you can afford? Associating with people of similar status?

Someone in that top .01%, btw, doesn't even have to do that level of planning. They could probably quit their job and live quite comfortably off their investments for the rest of their life. 

So - to bring this back to yesterday's posts - why do people with that level of wealth care so much about what everyone else thinks?

At this point I think it's worth discussing something else. That is - why would someone who could happily live off their investments do anything else? Why not buy some island, or ranch, or town, and just f- off and do whatever you want? 

Being President, or becoming a CEO, or pursuing a goal... really shouldn't be about trying to be happy. It's about being able to influence the world in a certain way. To make your mark. You could even say it's about power, though that has connotations that are not necessarily correct.

Or rather, there's pursuit of power and there's pursuit of power. There are people who like to build things, who will build a team that can make great decisions and create an amazing world to live in. And then there are people who just like to boss others around, and be the one who gets to make the big decisions... and they frankly don't trust their people to make any decisions without them, which also means that they have to spend far too much time telling people what to do because God forbid they think for themselves and make a decision on their own. 

(Seriously, that sort of leadership sounds exhausting. I don't want to be bothered with stupid questions you can figure out for yourself. As part of that whole 'team development' or 'teaching' or whatever I may help walk you through the decision-making process so you can see what sorts of things I think about when considering the issue, but that's it. And once you make that decision, I'll back it up and support it... because if I wanted something else I'd have said so, and I'm not about to undo all that work by undermining the decision you made.)

Anyways. The 1%, and the .01% especially are in a position where they can afford to be called 'eccentric' and still live a pretty cushy life. So forget all the peer pressure BS and go figure out what makes you happy. Not many people are lucky enough to have that option, and it's a crying shame that you are and don't choose to do it. 

If you care about that stuff because you want power (or power) then you should probably be thinking more carefully about the world you're helping create, and who you support in the process. You honestly have enough independence and self-sufficiency that you can probably find someone worth supporting, and if you feel like you have to support someone who is immoral, who leads people in negative ways, who bullies and intimidates and blackmails people into supporting them...

Well, why the hell do you think you have no other option? What are you afraid of? What compromises have you made with yourself in order to justify what you are party to? 

And are the consequences you're so afraid of really as dire as you think they are? 

Another Example

Given how close we are to an election, I'm aware of the political implications of stories like this. 

I don't really want to get into a debate on the stuff I'm sure people will judge purely because of their political affiliation, so I wanted to draw attention to some of the minor details that highlight - again - the very different world some people live in. 

Particularly this bit:

"What has the blowback been like for you?

A lot of doors did close to me. There were employers at dream jobs who I’d been speaking with at the time who just ghosted me because of the association with my dad. At the time I was studying really hard for the LSAT. I was working with a counselor who told me that I wasn’t going to get in anywhere because of it. Socially, friends I’d had my entire life were nervous to have me in their house. I was in a relationship at the time, and the private equity firm where he was going to work did a background check and I came up as what they deemed a “reputational hazard,” and he dumped me." 

A background check said she was a liability? Not even hers, but her boyfriend's? And regardless of what you think of her father, she wasn't the one in the public eye. What's all that fuss about media letting Chelsea and Barron not getting thrown into the limelight as children of famous people? At least most everyone heard of them... I hadn't really heard anything about Michael Cohen's daughter.

So, first... Being the daughter of someone infamous is enough for your boyfriend's place of employment to label you a reputational risk. I guess that's the way these people roll, but still... Cowards. 

Second, her boyfriend apparently broke up with her over this. Friends were worried about letting her in their house. Supposedly schools weren't going to admit her... 

Pathetic. 

They all sound pretty pathetic. 

And these are the people with wealth, power, and influence? No wonder the world is going to hell. 

An Example

This is the kind of thing I'm talking about -

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/rosiegray/peter-thiel-donald-trump-white-nationalist-support?scrolla=5eb6d68b7fedc32c19ef33b4

All that wealth and influence, used to make the world worse.

He's really okay with having his name associated with racists? 

It's good to see him distancing himself from that decision now, and good to know there were consequences... 

But was it really not obvious the kind of leadership he was supporting in the first place? 

Happiness and Various Ramblings

 I wanted to talk a bit about happiness, though that's a topic in which every person is unique - and the thing that make us happy are not always what we think.*

Still, there's been some research on this... and there's consistency on at least one thing - close relationships. Oh, money is nice. I think there's a study saying more money tends to make people happier... right up until about 70K a year. After that it doesn't correlate at all. (Probably because people get used to whatever is 'normal', so as long as they're not stressed out about paying bills and making ends meet money isn't actually much of a factor in happiness.)

That's part of it, too. People adapt to what they know. They can learn to be happy with things they originally weren't. Like coffee, which most people find bitter the first time they try it.

I tend to think of adrenaline junkies here. After all, doing something scary (like jumping out of a plane, or going on a roller coaster, or other things) tend to make us hyperaware of the present moment and feel more alive. You can grow to like that sort of thing, to seek it out as much as any drug.

I'm sure there are some people who really do take pleasure in bossing others around, 'winning', and getting their way. I have to wonder, though, how many learned to enjoy it. Just like learning to love coffee.

Happiness is tied to close relationships, though even with that there's room for variation. One person may be content with one close friendship. Another with three or four close friends. Or maybe they vary in what is required to be considered 'close'. Does it mean texting every day? Seeing each other every year? Going camping or golfing on a regular basis? Or calling/texting/messaging whenever something important happens in your life?

My previous post talked a bit about how different life was for the really, really wealthy. And, again, I have no idea how realistic portrayals of their lives are. At least some of the stereotypes are this:

obsessed with wealth and status, always jockeying to 'win', driven, looking down at the poor and those who have less, believing they deserve their privileged status, and so on and so forth.

In other words, they're probably not very happy. 

Close relationships do. But how close of a relationship can you have if you're selecting your spouse for whatever role they can play in your competition for status? How close can your relationships be if everybody you know is a competitor, and you can never let them see you be weak or vulnerable?  How close can your relationships be if you have to deny who you are, pretend to like things you don't and say things you don't mean in order to 'win'?

The focus on 'winning' is pretty short-sighted, too. Not that winning is bad! Or something you shouldn't enjoy! But... there is always going to be someone better. Someone stronger, smarter, better looking. Richer. Even if you're at the top for the moment, you'll grow old and weak and won't be able to stay there forever. 

Striving is good, hard work is good... but I think it should be done for all the reasons we like something. All that science about how we get in a state of flow, how we master things. Joy, passion, hard work - becoming the best we can be. Not 'to beat everybody else', or 'to dominate'. 

When I think of the things that tend to make me happiest, it's true. Most of them are tied with either connections or mastering something I'm interested in. There's a joy in... idk. Learning something new, and doing well on a test. There's a joy in teaching someone else, and seeing them learn to master it themselves.

There's joy in nurturing, growing, developing, and building. Joy in seeing someone succeed at something they've struggled with. Joy at seeing anyone show real talent - whether it's music, sports, law, cooking, cleaning, writing, drawing, coding, building, and more. 

Seeing people reach their full potential is always amazing. Building relationships with people who share your interests, who cheer when you do well and comfort you when you don't, who may help teach you things along the way or be taught by you in turn... that makes many of us happy.

There are a lot of things I'm frankly mad about right now, especially when it comes to the people currently in power. Yet the more glimpses we get of their lives outside the public persona, the more sad and pitiful they seem. Well - when it's not scary. 

How sad, to have all that wealth and power and hardly any real close friendships. To live in a world of users and the used, of alliances for power or convenience. Of spending time with people who are only around you for what you can do for them, and vice versa.

Even worse, they take that worldview and try to impose it on everyone else. Like no - no. I'm not going to feel threatened that some non-white person gets a job, or moves in next door. No, I don't really care what genitals someone has under their clothes. Not unless I'm considering having children with them or something. 

And when you consider how much the truly wealthy make. The 1% who can afford six or seven yachts, and five or six really nice houses, and ten cars, and can take afford to fly off for some awesome vacation whenever they want...

How can they possibly feel so insecure, so threatened, that they create policies essentially keeping poor people poor and making it impossible for them to ever get out of poverty?

How can those who have so much be so stingy towards those who have so little?

There's a whole bunch of other things wrong with this, ofc... but this post was about happiness, so I'll ask the following question -

How can such people possibly be happy?

Untitled

I heard about this on social media (https://ruinmyweek.com/relationships/fiance-secretly-rich/) though the post I saw implied that ALL rich people were like that, and...

Idk. If that's true, it's rather pathetic. I understand that you don't get rich without being careful with how much you spend, that you can't give it away like Jesus said you should. (If you're Christian and want to get into heaven and all that), and I also understand that they would be afraid of gold diggers and people that are nice to them just to get their money.

But, like, if you actually cared about someone enough to consider marrying them, I would hope you'd care enough not to make them sell their mother's violin if there was any other option. 

I've heard before about how wealth seems to destroy people's ability to empathize. Idk, it's not like I hang out in those crowds. Still, there's some truth to the fact that people like Jeff Bezos (and others) actually have the resources to make a real difference...

And instead far too many of them seem to be outright making the world worse. 

I don't know how they can look at themselves in a mirror, tbh. Or how they can possibly be happy. Not like 'I just won monopoly' happy, but that feeling of satisfaction, contentment, and bone deep happiness.

I wish the sort of foolishness we're seeing today - the short-sightedness, arrogance, selfishness, utter destruction of rules and norms in a bid for power that destroys all the things making their outsized level of influence tolerable - didn't seem somehow inevitable.

I really hope it isn't.

Ruminations on The Untamed TV Show

The thing about working from home is that breaks are - different. I don't have a coworker in the next cubicle to stop by and ask if I want to go grab a coffee from the break room. Or e-mails to come to the break room for this that or the other thing.

Which means if I'm very, very busy it's all to easy to just... work.

It's part of why I sometimes deliberately stop to take a break. Refresh the mind. Come back better able to focus. (When I'm not dealing with some time-sensitive issue, that is. I think I rather like my job... figuring out what's wrong is interesting, now that I have at least a little bit of knowledge. Still just the tip of the iceberg though.)

Anyways, I'm taking one of those self-imposed breaks and figured I'd blather on about The Untamed again, which is still on Netflix. It's only one season, so it doesn't take near as long to get through as other shows, and I'm still unwilling to leave the story. (Which means I also read the novel, and watched the animated version, and rewatched the TV show. I'm sure some of that is escapism from the stupidity going on in the world today, but whatever. It makes it a lot easier to stay home and social distance.)

I wanted to break down some of what makes the story compelling to me. Fair warning, I'm going to give all the spoilers, so don't read any further if that's a problem.

In the very first two episodes we learn a) Wei Wuxian died, and public opinion was that he deserved it, b) he had been adopted into a family, and some people blame him for the suffering that family went through, c) someone cast a spell sacrificing their lives to resurrect him. (Also, apparently there's an entire Chinese genre dealing with cultivating your spirit to achieve immortality, which leads to some world building with fantastical elements. They're not sorcerers or wizards, they're cultivators. And they're not dealing with magical mysteries so much as spiritual ones.. there's a whole lot of world building that's a bit different from a more Western fantasy.)

Also, the resurrected Wei Wuxian is trying to avoid a few particular people. Lan Wangji and the man raised as his brother - Jiang Cheng, and feels some sense of care for his nephew - the orphaned child of his adopted sister.

There's a lot more to the first two episodes than that, but it already sets up an interesting dynamic. You know that whatever flashback scenes you get are not going to end well. After all, Wei Wuxian dies. You also aleady know that his nephew's parents are dead, which means Wei Wuxian's sister and her husband die.

You already know his first life ends in tragedy, and whatever that tragedy is alienated him from his brother and led to a pretty horrible public reputation.

You can also tell that his reputation is not justified. He's not thrilled at the idea of violence and murder, actively tries to give hidden help to some of the young cultivators trying to solve a deadly spiritual mystery.

There's thus a bit of comedy, both on his own part (a bit of a trickster character himself), and because the difference between his reputation and his actual character is sometimes hilarious.

So we have tragedy, comedy, mystery... also romance, in that the novel is a Chinese boy love story. The TV show had to get past Chinese censors so it's never explicit, but there's clearly a strong connection between Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji.

Some of the things I find compelling -

His relationship with his brother, Jiang Cheng. In the flashbacks (and The Untamed combines all the flashbacks in the story into one really, really long one... which means after the first two episodes you go back to the past for a very, very long time) you see how much they cared for each other, though they were never good at actually saying it.

You only learn towards the end of the show that Jiang Cheng let himself get captured in order to save Wei Wuxian. You do learn in the extended flashback that when he's captured he loses his 'golden core' (the spiritual core they cultivate. In a western show we'd probably say it's the core of their magic or something.) There are hints and clues, but we don't definitely learn that Wei Wuxian gives up his own core, transferring it to Jiang Cheng.

They cared about each other so much. And their relationship becomes horribly broken by the end of Wei Wuxian's first life.

You can argue about why and how that happened, but quite a bit of  it was because of secrets. Or rather, one particular secret. Wei Wuxian thought telling his brother what he did would devastate him, and did everything he could to hide what he'd done.

Which meant that even though he could no longer do 'magic', he pretended he could. Rather terribly. He started cultivating resentful energy, which seems a bit like 'using dark magic', i.e. necromancy and the like. Which also gave him a horrid reputation and made everyone around him fearful.

So as the tragedy unfolds, you have these two brothers who once risked everything for each other grow so distance that Jiang Cheng is widely believed to be the one who killed Wei Wuxian.

You also have Wei Wuxian's relationship with Lan Wangji... which is kind of the classic trope of a chaos gremlin and ice king. Or the wildly creative outside-the-box thinker and the rigid type who lives and breathes the rules. I've realized I rather like that combination, since together they've got all. the. options. If a situation requires creativity and originality, you've got your chaos gremlin. If it requires more orthodox solutions (and the hard work and knowledge required to master a particular topic) you've got your expert.

So you have Wei Wuxian - trickster, wild and untamed, perfectly willing to break all 3000 of the Lan clan's rules, whether it means drinking alcohol or breaking curfew. And you have Lan Wangji, who was raised to abide by all 3000 of those rules. Who starts off rigid and inflexible and thinking that everything is black and white. (And who is very, very disturbed by his attraction to such a complete wild child as Wei Wuxian.)

In his first life, they never become a couple. Lan Wangji is too rulebound, too uncertain, too concerned about the dangerous path Wei Wuxian follows.

And Wei Wuxian? He's got a lot of other things going on. There was giving up his core (and trying to keep it secret), and a war...

And then the victors of the war went overboard in how they handled their defeated enemy, and Wei Wuxian wound up throwing everything over in order to protect those remnants. I would say 'his former enemies', but he got drawn in because a brother/sister of the other side had aided him back then (the sister was the one who actually did the core transfer).

So we have this 'almost lover' relationship (that's a great song, btw, that captures how painful it is when someone's an almost.)

Lan Wangji never really connects with Wei Wuxian. It started out with Wei Wuxian cheerfully imposing, and Lan Wangji denying. Then crap happened, Wei Wuxian stopped being the one to reach out, and the tables flipped. Except Lan Wangji rather sucks at reaching out, and didn't know what was really going on, and was too concerned about the dark path Wei Wuxian was choosing. So he mostly came across as scolding.

And then Wei Wuxian died, vilified by pretty much everyone. And Lan Wangji had 16 years to mourn and ask himself what went wrong.

When Wei Wuxian comes back, Lan Wangji seems willing to throw over everything and completely and utterly spoil him. Not that Wei Wuxian realizes (he's fairly oblivious through most of the story.)

He once dueled with Wei Wuxian over sneaking liquor in. 16 years later Lan Wangji keeps a secret stash on hand. Just in case.

There's a lot more to the story than that. Questions of blame, of the harsh world they lived in during their youth. Of family, found and lost. Of justice, and the lack thereof.

But this has already gone far enough for a quick break, so I'll leave it at that.