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I do not believe for a moment that this has anything to do with competition. I have lived in China and kids there are booked fully. Their parents sacrifice eve

I do not believe for a moment that this has anything to do with competition. I have lived in China and kids there are booked fully. Their parents sacrifice everything for their only child but at the same time they put a very high burden on them booking every space of their lives. Just letting the kids fool around, experience what interest them, play and make mistakes is inadmissible. Usually the parents work all day and only grandparents could take care of them, so making them go to some class or another is a way to have their kids busy all day. Because they have only one child, the child needs to be perfect all the time, and the bet must be risk free. This creates children than don't really know what they really want, and with zero creativity, incapable of making mistakes or take their own decisions. Also when they don't have external pressure they just laze, because they lack internal motivation. This particular person is happy on the work because he is told what to do, I suppose he works at Microsoft. Only when he is free to do whatever he can do he feels uneasy. Like adult people(over 40) in Russia when Soviet Russia collapsed, they felt uneasy when there was no one taking all the decisions for them. They just had not the training to deal with freedom. As a kid, when I finished school, I was free, My friends and I decided what we wanted to do all the time. If I joined a competition, I did not tell my parents. Over time you make lots of mistakes,exploring new territories, experiences and dangers, but develop autonomy and learn to deal with chaos. After university I had the opposite problem to this man's, I could not stand people at work telling me what to do, specially when I considered they were taking bad decisions, so I started working on my own.

sweetcheekz 6y ago
There are a lot of pretty grand overgeneralizations here. Black and white thinking at best, racist at worst.
- shortandsweet 6y ago
  I value the input, speaking from their experience. A comment on a post from a blog. How you infer racism is beyond me.
- ctr_ctr 6y ago
  Education in China works exactly like that. Buxiban until late night for _all_ kids (like wearing a cap in korea years ago)... 0 over-generalization. I'm really sick of this "chinese-cultural-relativism free pass" (with a little paimapi拍馬屁 included)
curiousllama 6y ago
I agree with your points, but would just point out that the upbringing - ennui connection you make isn’t as firm as you imply. I had a very laissez-faire, American upbringing and identify with this blog post. A friend with the opposite upbringing (Indian, IIT, only child) never did - she was immediately freed and happy when hitting the same points that left me listless. I think this has much more to do with internalization if external reward systems, which is tremendously complex.
analyst74 6y ago
I wouldn't go as far as calling racist, but you did make some pretty grand generalizations with seemingly detailed explanation about how "Chinese kids" and society work. Maybe the people you surround yourself with treat their children like that, but I don't think they, and in turn, your observation can be generalized to all of Chinese. Same with your generalization with your personal experience, not sure if you're American, but there are plenty Americans(or whichever country you're from) who put a lot of pressure on their children to perform well in what they do, maybe you are just not one of them.
- swoshthrowaway 6y ago
  > Maybe the people you surround yourself with treat their children like that, but I don't think they, and in turn, your observation can be generalized to all of Chinese. I think the experience described is pretty typical for the middle class. The claim that all Chinese lack creativity etc is clearly wrong, but I do think this upbringing is a big downward force on such traits. Many will surpass those challenges and get past their childhood experiences eventually, but some don't. My wife for example had a pretty typical upbringing, studying 24/7 basically. Imagine no weekends off since middle-school, not allowed to read books (except for course literature), studying until 11pm every day since high-school etc. Now, she's a high achiever, but needs the structure, without which she doesn't know what to do with herself. It's been a slow process undoing that damage, including a lot of therapy. Being very involved in the Chinese community, this is much more common than in Europe (don't know about US).
Barrin92 6y ago
>They just had not the training to deal with freedom. China is just more open about it, the phenomenon is universal. Nobody, China, West or anywhere else really has something approaching authentic freedom. Over here we can argue we have freedom, but the freedom we have in our choices is like going to Westworld (relevant Bruno Macaes piece[1] from yesterday). We are encouraged to go backpack to Australia, participate in a protest, and then we are supposed to 'grow up', get a family, and so on. There's no point in that process in which you actually do something that amounts to more than simulating freedom, there's no point where you actually might get hurt. In that sense if anything a lot of cultures like in China are just more honest, they tell you to sit your ass down and do rote memorization for 10 hours, whereas we get a ping pong table in the office and free smoothies and Disneyland, there's really no difference at the end of the day. [1]https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/history/articles/what-comes-after-liberalism https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/history/articles/what-com...

sweetcheekz 6y ago

There are a lot of pretty grand overgeneralizations here. Black and white thinking at best, racist at worst.

shortandsweet 6y ago
I value the input, speaking from their experience. A comment on a post from a blog. How you infer racism is beyond me.
ctr_ctr 6y ago
Education in China works exactly like that. Buxiban until late night for _all_ kids (like wearing a cap in korea years ago)... 0 over-generalization. I'm really sick of this "chinese-cultural-relativism free pass" (with a little paimapi拍馬屁 included)

curiousllama 6y ago

I agree with your points, but would just point out that the upbringing - ennui connection you make isn’t as firm as you imply. I had a very laissez-faire, American upbringing and identify with this blog post. A friend with the opposite upbringing (Indian, IIT, only child) never did - she was immediately freed and happy when hitting the same points that left me listless. I think this has much more to do with internalization if external reward systems, which is tremendously complex.

analyst74 6y ago

I wouldn't go as far as calling racist, but you did make some pretty grand generalizations with seemingly detailed explanation about how "Chinese kids" and society work. Maybe the people you surround yourself with treat their children like that, but I don't think they, and in turn, your observation can be generalized to all of Chinese. Same with your generalization with your personal experience, not sure if you're American, but there are plenty Americans(or whichever country you're from) who put a lot of pressure on their children to perform well in what they do, maybe you are just not one of them.

swoshthrowaway 6y ago
> Maybe the people you surround yourself with treat their children like that, but I don't think they, and in turn, your observation can be generalized to all of Chinese. I think the experience described is pretty typical for the middle class. The claim that all Chinese lack creativity etc is clearly wrong, but I do think this upbringing is a big downward force on such traits. Many will surpass those challenges and get past their childhood experiences eventually, but some don't. My wife for example had a pretty typical upbringing, studying 24/7 basically. Imagine no weekends off since middle-school, not allowed to read books (except for course literature), studying until 11pm every day since high-school etc. Now, she's a high achiever, but needs the structure, without which she doesn't know what to do with herself. It's been a slow process undoing that damage, including a lot of therapy. Being very involved in the Chinese community, this is much more common than in Europe (don't know about US).

Barrin92 6y ago

>They just had not the training to deal with freedom. China is just more open about it, the phenomenon is universal. Nobody, China, West or anywhere else really has something approaching authentic freedom. Over here we can argue we have freedom, but the freedom we have in our choices is like going to Westworld (relevant Bruno Macaes piece[1] from yesterday). We are encouraged to go backpack to Australia, participate in a protest, and then we are supposed to 'grow up', get a family, and so on. There's no point in that process in which you actually do something that amounts to more than simulating freedom, there's no point where you actually might get hurt. In that sense if anything a lot of cultures like in China are just more honest, they tell you to sit your ass down and do rote memorization for 10 hours, whereas we get a ping pong table in the office and free smoothies and Disneyland, there's really no difference at the end of the day. [1]https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/history/articles/what-comes-after-liberalism https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/history/articles/what-com...