To Vote Or Not To Vote

Source: Straits Times

 

I have a pretty good feeling that I won't be voting this time.

See the blue line? That is where I live now. In the last two General Elections I lived in Joo Chiat SMC (Single-Member Constituency where only 1 MP represents that district and stands election) where my parents live, and I got to vote. I was pretty lucky since I got to vote the first time after I turned 21 and again in the year 2006. There are people in their 60s who have never voted in their lives.

Marine Parade GRC (Group-representation constituency where a group of 5 MPs represent that district and stand election) has always been the stronghold of ruling party, PAP and its incumbent, Senior Minister (and former PM) Goh Chok Tong who enjoys an almost celebrity status after Lee Kuan Yew. I found myself diddling about whether to change my address after I moved to my new place, knowing full well it would mean I would no longer be a consituent of Joo Chiat. This, even though I live a couple streets away from my parents who remain Joo Chiat constituents.

You see, as a young voter under age 35, I have gone through one or two subtle life-stage changes since turning 21. As a 21 year old, I was just about to graduate from university, no debt, no responsibilities apart from keeping my nose clean. My parents were of the myth-believing ilk, that if I voted for any party other than PAP, I would not find a job, particularly in the public sector. So I voted PAP.  I felt like I had betrayed my conscience, as my choice had been influenced by my parents' fear. At 21, I was not the most politically-engaged citizen anyway: 10 years ago, social media was largely unheard of and political blogging was still in its infancy.  Five years later, I had another chance to vote and this time things were completely different. There was now a vibrant - and oftentimes virulent - online environment for political bloggers, pundits and casual watchers to partake in the debate. I was also older, more informed and much more active in trading opinions on local politics. I was a student again - a postgraduate - and of course, this meant I had a lot of time on my hands to spend online and in the cafeteria discussing what I and my fellow comrades deemed as the sorry state of Singapore politics. I attended almost all the opposition rallies and of course voted according to my "principles" this time, thinking myself more savvy and determining that the vote was really secret. Really.

This year I will be 32 and unlike the last two elections, I will be a very different voter. I belong to Generation X, I have responsibilities to my family (read: debt) and I have spent some years in the workforce. I am no longer a student nor an academic ensconced in an ivory tower, in fact I spent the last few years acquainting myself with the actual process of governance and policy-making. You can say my political vision isn't 20/20, but it's a lot clearer than 5 or 10 years ago. My views are much broader now and issues like immigration or freedom of this and that are not as starkly black-and-white as before when all I had was a monochromatic lens through which I viewed them.  You could say I do not now expound a single ideology though my views on any one issue have veered more towards the right - not because I have become "conservative", but because having had certain life experiences and having worked within the public sector, I see the issues as a lot more complex than a person who has only a theoretical understanding of it.

So it's a pity that I won't likely be voting  this time, I would have liked the chance to make a choice based on what I believe in for a change, rather than what I fear, or simply voting opposition for the sake of opposing the PAP.

Why Smart Boys Achieve More Than Smart Girls

Research into why bright girls end up achieving far fewer of their goals than bright boys point to a simple observation: girls are brought up to view their "smartness" as innate and given, whereas boys are brought up to view their being able to succeed at something as a result of their own effort and hard work.

This is big. It really confirms my rather shameful belief that my own mediocrity and lack of extrinsic achievements were really a product of my own self-sabatoge. I was always hard on myself when I couldn't do something difficult, eventually giving up and rationalizing that I simple had no "talent" or "natural ability" to do it - like A Level maths and wakeboarding.

I recall my parents telling me that I was "smart" and "clever" enough to ace my exams, be the first in my class (and even the whole school) and expecting no less than perfect or near-perfect grades until I was in secondary school. Yet I also recall my mother berating me for not "trying hard enough", not being "careful enough" whenever I didn't get 100% - the same kinds of phrases the researchers say are usually used on underperforming boys. So I grew up with both environmental signals -- the first, that I was innately smart, the second, that my good grades were a result of my hard work.

And yet I still became an underperforming (read: average) student in secondary school and gave up on the several challenges I never overcame - like Organic Chemistry (I rationalised that I had "no talent for science") and in-line skating ("no interest"). Later on, I applied the same defeatist ideology to graduate statistics and wakeboarding. I can remember the exact moments during each undertaking where I decided mentally that I would not bother to persevere, choosing failure as the path of least resistance.

However, my history has not lacked evidence of my overcoming obstacles and succeeding at something as a result of applying sheer willpower to it. Despite receiving almost no encouragement from my parents, I taught myself to ride a bike, (I wrenched up the training wheels of my bike and spent an entire day balancing on it back-and-forth along the 20 metres of my apartment till I could balance), swim the breaststroke (I stayed up nights analysing the strokes and then practising in the pool), play the piano without a teacher (sheer perseverance and practice) and pass my O Level "A" Maths (practicing hundreds of hours).

So on the counts of my apparant failures, were they due to my own defeatist mentality, somehow caused by early childhood or youth experiences of being praised for my "smartness" and less for my personal effort? It's really hard to say now, and impossible to calculate the countless times I received feedback from people the first 18 years of my life. But I do see that I was able to get by rather well and succeed at the things I told myself I had to succeed at when extenuating circumstances drove me to overcome the odds. "Failure is not an option" - the extrinsic stick - worked very well for major exams and things that mattered to me, like my driver's license compared to the intrinsic carrot - the pleasure of mastering something for its own sake.

This has huge implications for me as a parent-to-be. In a way, I am rather relieved to be having a son rather than a daughter, so I do not have to be extra mindful about how I give him feedback as he is growing up. After all, if he is going to inherit Daniel's short attention span, I forsee telling him to "focus and try harder!" a lot more than "that was really clever" and "you're such a smart boy!".

I believe the story is more complex than the single variable of different types of praise we give to boys and girls. Women have to deal with a lot more subtle societal messages as they grow up compared to boys, for example, the need to appear feminine and not as aggressive as men in their pursuit of career success and the obligation to be the primary caregivers to their parents and children, all of which interact with their own innate personality and belief-systems to produce their responses to difficult challenges. Whether we choose to stay the course and persevere at something is also weighed in a cost-benefit analysis of whether the end is worth the means to achieving it.

My decision not to continue with PhD had me soul-searching and questioning my ability to complete it (answer: yes) but I also did a pragmatic comparison of the opportunity cost (too much) against my genuine passion for academic research (not enough) and I came to the decision to give it up. I predicted that what I could achieve in the long-term would not compensate me for what I could achieve without that opportunity cost.  I think that decision has paid off and I don't blame or credit my parents or my response to adversity for it.

Project Baby Week 27: Sleep, Just Sleep

Baby is 27 weeks along and just over 900 grams last Friday.

He is also kicking me every hour at least, and it's very cute because sometimes I can see my tummy grooving to the beat. I am now 62 kilograms and finding it harder to get up from a sitting position, especially getting out of cars. Sleep is becoming less comfortable as I am only allowed one or two positions - on my sides - and a full night of uninterrupted sleep eludes me more and more.

Today, after waking at 2am the third night in a row to use the toilet and feeling like I got run over by a truck, I told Daniel that we are definitely training the baby to sleep through the night before I go back to work - no arguments. I can't do this, and I really don't know how Daniel has tolerated years of bad sleep (he wakes several times in the night) without doing something about it. Maybe he should be the one having this baby.

I'm still eating normally, no cravings for anything which makes me think all that is utter nonsense. There should be no excusable reason for anyone to blow up like a baby whale and blame it on pregnancy. We signed up for antenatal classes at the hospital which would begin in March. We are also going to take a tour of the place to select our choice of birthing suites. There are only 3 months to go!

The doctor said Baby's head is down, I suppose the right place to be, and from the pokes I am getting in my ribs, it explains a lot. We still haven't seen his face, on Friday there was no space between his face and my uterus to take a good enough 3D photo of him, so we had to settle for a 2D image. He wasn't doing much, just mucking around I guess, making smoochy movements with his lips, totally cute.

Daniel is all psyched about him, he wants to feel Baby kicking all the time and he talks to him before bed (unfortunately, in English). It's a shame fathers don't really have much to do with the baby's growth beyond the few minutes it took to conceive it. As much as I would pooh-pooh the emo crap women say about the lovey-dovey feelings of gestating a baby, I can't deny that the 9 month journey with its attendant hormonal explosions, wretched nausea and sickness, the burgeoning stomach and the thump-thump-thumping of Baby rocking it out in me is the most inexplicable and strange sensation I've had.

I am experiencing Nature in the most profound manner. Perhaps this is what they mean about motherhood. There's nothing else quite like it.

Dan Gilbert on What Makes Us Happy

Dan Gilbert is a Harvard Professor of Psychology. This is an excerpt from interviews he gave which are found on BigThink.com.  I thought what he had to say about humans and how we think and make decisions related to our happiness was worth spending the half hour or so transcribing onto this post. I will post my thoughts later.
What is Affective Forecasting?
Affective forecasting is the process by which people look into their future and make predictions about what they'll like and what they won't like. When you make decisions, whether they're large ones like whom to marry, whether it's Jim and Charlie, whether to move to Anchorage or Cleveland, or small ones - to have a doughnut or a croissant, to wear the red blouse or the green blouse, all of these decisions are predicated upon some estimation that your brain is making very rapidly, that one of them will feel better than the other one. How does your brain do that? And how well does your brain do that? Those are some of the questions that Affective Forecasting tries to answer.

What Is Impact Bias?
Impact bias is the tendency for people to believe that events will have a stronger impact than they usually do.  And that tends to be the main form of error that affective forecasting takes. Most of the time, when people are wrong about how they will feel about the future, they're wrong in the direction of thinking that things will matter to them more than they'll really do. We are remarkable in our ability to adjust and adapt to almost any situation but we seem not to know this about ourselves and so we mistakenly predict that good things will make us happy, really happy for a really long time; bad things they'll just slay us....it turns out neither of these things is by and large really true.

Why are we susceptible to Impact Bias?

Well there's a whole host of reasons why people are susceptible to this impact bias, one, for example, is we have a remarkable capacity for rationalization. People are very good in finding the good in the bad, very good at making the best of the situations that they are irrevocably stuck with. They don't know they have this talent, so when we think, "how would I feel if my spouse left me" we go, "oh my god, I'll be devastated, I'll be devastated for weeks, months, years in fact." What we're overlooking is the fact that within a relatively short time, we wouldn't be thinking of the same way of our spouse as we do now. We'll be starting to see all the ways in which she wasn't right for us, we didn't share as many interests as I once thought, sex wasn't as good as I remembered, et cetera. All of these are illusions of prospection but rationalization has a funny reputation of having a bad reputation. Most people think of it as making stuff up. It's not making stuff up. It's finding ways of seeing the world that are both accurate and pleasant. Almost everything can be seen in multiple ways, almost everything has a good view, a bad view, the brain is very good at finding the good view. The good view isn't any more wrong than the bad view is, so in a sense what our brains do is to go shopping among the various ways of thinking about the situations we're in, and they settle on the most positive one. That's a talent, that's not a foible.

Historically, what has made people happy?

Well of course we don't know how the antecedents of what makes us happy have changed over time because there are no good fossil records of smiling. Um, the really serious research on the scientific bases of happiness have only begun in the last couple of decades. Nonetheless I'd say that it's an educated guess to say that social relationships have been, and continue to be the primary predictor os human happiness. We are a social mammal.  And the thing that makes us happy is the...the affiliation and the esteem, respect, goodwill of other human beings. We like...we're happy when we have family, we're happy when we have friends. And almost all the other things we think make us happy actually are just ways of getting more family and friends.