Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

The "Happy Birthday" posts on Facebook seem to be sparser than usual. As the average user of the social media platform becomes older, it has become more and more difficult to keep them engaged and communicating with their equally older friends. After all, older people are busier. They have children to attend to, subordinates to manage, and more responsibilities at work to ponder over. What is more, with more of a stake in work and private life, they are much more cautious about their public image, and try to avoid leaving digital footprints. So many of them have Facebook profiles that stay the same for years.

The recent Barbie movie has in many ways caused a (positive) uproar among the world's feminists. The movie portrays the world of the titular character in which women hold all the powerful roles, while men (the many "Kens") are relegated to positions of mere "boyfriends" whose identity is defined solely by their relationship with the Barbies. The protagonist Barbie's belief in the superiority of the system, coupled with observations about, unlike in the Barbie world, many females remain lowly in the real world, serves as a powerful reminder that female empowerment still has a long way to go but is a worthy dream to pursue.

"I don't think I have anything unique to say about myself..." I get this comment a lot when I speak to teenagers . Not that I am surprised. Not only did I not know what the future held when I was a high school student, I could not confidently that even now, 35 years old and half a dozen jobs later, I can clearly pronounce my passions in professional or private life. Scary as it might be, even more than twice as old as some of my students, I am often not in a position to provide them the one thing they are looking for – a simple, straightforward answer to narrow down their career choices based on their existing interests.

Strategic plans on Word documents, business analyses on spreadsheets, colorful PowerPoint presentations...my image of white-collar work, based on the various past jobs I've had, had always been associated with written materials. Plenty of internal and external communications, through phone calls and meetings, certainly did take place, but ultimately, the results were reflected in written form, to be submitted to the higher-ups as email attachments, easily digestible and transmittable to a wider audience both inside and outside the company.

"I'm gonna go to Harvard." It is almost every day that I come across a student with such ambitions in this job. Replace the name "Harvard" with some other top-ranked, well-known university in the US and the UK, and the sentiment practically describes every student I speak with. There are different reasons that students aspire to a spot in one of the world's elite educational institutions. Some are grounded in the cold, hard logic of high financial returns, while others are bound by the emotional belief of pride and prestige. Whatever the reason, the goal remains noble, motivating, and worthy of encouragement.

When my wife first showed me that Worcester sauce goes well on a meat bun, I was a bit skeptical. A classic sauce of England on a classic snack of the Orient. It sounds like too much of a clash of civilizations without hard evidence on the palate. But with the first bite, I was surprised. Yes, we know that Worcester sauce goes well on grilled meat, but even through a soggy steamed flour covering, the sauce can still evoke the satisfaction of a (thankfully much healthier) steak. Defying culinary categorization at the get-go, the combination transcends international boundaries of what tastes good.

I've never been a purveyor of novels. Their often made-up stories simply did not sit well with my interest in facts, expressed through news articles and research reports analyzing the ins and outs of contemporary affairs. Novels, and their focus on the emotions of individual protagonists, just felt so small, maybe even irrelevant, in the larger trends of our world, represented by wars, pandemics, climate change, and bold moves by executives at globally renowned multinationals. Average Joes and Janes, to me, simply mattered little, on their own, to those larger-than-life forces that shape human civilization.