Assorted Notes

THURSDAY, 8 MAY 2014

How many people do you meet every day?

You may be counting on your fingers a few people you meet on the train or at work, or at the pub.

I say, you meet dozens of people if you spend any amount of time on the road.

Do people have the same personalities as road users as in the rest of their lives?

I believe they do.

Now, if I am right, that’s bad news. That would mean a significant percentage of the general public – amongst them people with whom you work and rub shoulders on a daily basis, are alarmingly stupid, disturbingly immoral and of disgustingly low character.

The awful reality: Many people get away with who and what they are on the road, and in the rest of their lives.

An important piece of advice: If you are struggling to accept the existence of this stupid and immoral segment of the population, do not use the road, because that is where their behaviour can get you killed.

As for the rest of your life, you don’t have much of a choice. These imbeciles, these people of wickedly low character are everywhere. You can try to avoid them, but you will regularly fail. You will simply have to learn to live with them.

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FRIDAY, 2 MAY 2014

Trading on the financial markets is a writer’s dream. There is the story that you can (in theory) make money in your own time and in your own workplace. Because the trader does not have to appear to anyone much less try to sell them anything, it is also an honest way to make money.

What one does not always expect, however, is the range of emotions and feelings: disappointment, optimism, hope, and how you feel after making a mistake that nullifies all the small profits you’ve built up over the last hour.

Fair enough, if you experience such a wide range of emotions in one session, you certainly make too many mistakes, and you definitely still have some way to go. But even these mistakes provides the author with good material. Trying to eliminate mistakes and take more and more correct actions is a journey, a process of self-discovery – a tale of cautious optimism.

Throughout this process you learn that the ultimate goal is not just to make money, but to get your emotions under control, to remain calm under pressure and to do what you know is right. It is about building confidence in what you are doing, about knowing why you are doing it and why you are on the right path. It is about knowing why you will eventually succeed, and believing in yourself as an agent who can achieve this desired result.

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WEDNESDAY, 2 APRIL 2014

I am currently reading the book, Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell, published in 1959. It tells the story of the middle-class Bridge family of Kansas City in the 1920s and 1930s, mostly from the perspective of the eponymous Mrs Bridge.

Mrs Bridge’s life revolves around her children and her social life. The social environment in which she moves is described as “unity, sameness, consensus, centeredness”.

Not much dramatic ever happens in her life, although she is sometimes faced with uncomfortable issues such as class consciousness. She also recalls that her one friend once asked her if she also sometimes feels like she is hollowed out and empty on the inside. She remembers this on the day she learns that the same friend killed herself.

According to Wikipedia, the book did not quite garner the attention it perhaps deserved:

By 1962, when critic Michael Robbins proclaimed that Mrs. Bridge answered the question asked by writer and social critic, “what kind of people we are producing, what kinds of lives we are leading”, the novel was already out of print: readers of College Composition and Communication were urged to write the publishers in hopes of getting the book reprinted. In 1982, when both Bridge books were republished [Mr. Bridge followed in 1969], Brooks Landon, in The Iowa Review, commented that “Connell seems to have become one of those writers we know to respect but may not have read”.

One of Mrs Bridge’s confrontations with class consciousness takes place one day in a bookstore while browsing through a book titled, The Theory of the Leisure Class, an actual 1899 book by Thorstein Veblen. The book is described as social criticism about the habits and lifestyle of financially comfortable members of the middle and upper-middle class. It focusses on what is called conspicuous consumption:

Conspicuous consumption is the spending of money on and the acquiring of luxury goods and services to publicly display economic power—either the buyer’s income or the buyer’s accumulated wealth. Sociologically, to the conspicuous consumer, such a public display of discretionary economic power is a means either of attaining or of maintaining a given social status.

Moreover, invidious consumption, a more specialized sociologic term, denotes the deliberate conspicuous consumption of goods and services intended to provoke the envy of other people, as a means of displaying the buyer’s superior socio-economic status.

The article continues:

In the 19th century, the term conspicuous consumption was introduced by the economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929), in the book The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions (1899), to describe the behavioural characteristics of the nouveau riche (new rich) social class who emerged as a result of the accumulation of capital wealth during the Second Industrial Revolution (ca. 1860–1914). In that social and historical context, the term “conspicuous consumption” was narrowly applied to describe the men, women, and families of the upper class who applied their great wealth as a means of publicly manifesting their social power and prestige, be it real or perceived.

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WEDNESDAY, 15 JANUARY 2014

Advice to foreigners if they want to enjoy a comfortable time in a foreign country:

1. Take it easy – no one likes a nervous foreigner.

2. Try to avoid offending the locals. Your behaviour and actions don’t have to be immaculate (see point 1), but it would go a long way if you make an effort to learn some basic dos and don’ts regarding the local culture.

FRIDAY, 21 FEBRUARY 2014

15:15

Caught one of those feelings again that hit you out of the blue: “What am I supposed to do?”

At first I wanted to say, “The answer is probably to make money …”

Then I remembered: Make life worth living for yourself. That is your first priority, your first task, your first responsibility.

20:53

Ask yourself: What have I done today to make my life worth living?

SUNDAY, 23 FEBRUARY 2014

11:37

We tend to get upset every time we’re alerted to injustice, or every time we think someone is disrespectful or unreasonably rude to us.

Ask yourself: “Can I do something about it?”

If not, what good does it do to get upset? You just knock your own wind out, and none of the people you blame for the injustice or the bad behaviour gives a damn about how you feel.

Can you indeed do something about it?

Then do something about it without delay.

And if you can indeed do something about it, and you are doing it, then why bother working yourself up about it as well?

13:06

To know who you are is not the ultimate goal.

To know who you are allows you to belong somewhere, to be part of something bigger than yourself.

To be part of something bigger than yourself and to feel you belong somewhere are also not the ultimate goal.

The ultimate goal is to believe your life is worth living.

To feel you belong somewhere is conducive to believing your life is worth living.

To have a functioning identity (to “know who you are”), is conducive to feeling you belong somewhere.

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