Aug. 2020; Me time, Introspection, and Hidden Talents

I’m the first to admit that I’m perhaps a little behind the times. I read books with paper pages and a picture on the cover. I use notebooks with a pen to write stuff down and remember things. I can’t use excel, and I still listen to bands from before the 2000 millennium seemed to make most things crap. (Think about it, name me some amazingly groundbreaking bands/novels/movies after the year 2000. Nope, ya can’t do it.) So it’s really no surprise that new trends can often leave me somewhat bewildered. Even so, with many passing fads that come and go I can at least understand why that particular thing is somehow popular. Finger spinners (small things please small minds.) “Wristbands for a cause.” Planking. But the big one that’s been in the news for several reasons over the last couple of years is the extreme craze of short video apps. (Probably shouldn’t say Douyin, they might send the thumb breakers round to silence me.)

Statistics vary wildly, but according to the South China Morning Post (owned by the gorgeous Jack Ma’s Alibaba) the average smart phone user in our lovely PRC spends over 6 hours per day with their faces glued to that tiny bright screen in their palm. 6 hours. So allowing 8 hours sleep per 24 hours, that totals 38% of our waking day. Oh. My. Word. Of course I understand many people use their phone for such essential things as work, but just how many hours daily are spent watching mindless poop. Personally I think a platform like Douyin is fine, we can’t access websites like YouTube here so easily, and having an app full of mind opening information can only be a good thing. But, herein lies the problem; nobody watches documentaries on the Irish potato famine, or listens to the great thinkers of our time recite the works of Keats, Byron and Shelley. Oh no. They watch cats cutely sleeping and infants comically falling over and people involved in hit and run accidents. But, most horrifically of all, is the live streamers….

Now I can’t really voice my concerns with a well informed opinion, as I’ve never actually spent any significant time watching such garbage. My only real glances at it have been over the shoulders of phone zombies on the metro, but damn that’s the enticing thing about it, they make you want to watch them! (The fake laughing and sped up time frames just beg you to give them your full addicted attention, and we do!) But with the same reasoning I’ve never eaten rat poison either, yet I’m pretty sure that’s not such a good thing to wash down Sunday lunch with. Having the language barrier is one thing that (thankfully) means I can’t fully appreciate what’s going on, but I don’t think these under dressed young ladies making duck faces or these make up covered boygirls are explaining Pythagoras Theorem or one dimensional motion displacement. My presumptions lie in that these perfect skinned lovelies are slyly appealing to our impressionable minds, and somehow coaxing us to gift them with tokens of our appreciation for all their effort and hard work. But, I just don’t get it.

There’s a young lady who’s garnered a huge amount of attention by showing the gentile side of country living, making food and crafts at the delight of her sweet old grandma. To me, this is about as appealing as eating a taxi drivers flip flop or tattooing ones eyeball, but I get it. It’s calming, it takes our minds away from the manic city life we are all frustrated with, and fills our heads with soft music, pastel colours and the beauty of tradition and simpler times. We are all fully aware that she has a gigantic set and film crew working alongside her, and we also know shes making more in a month than most of us do in a year, but good for her. She’s delivering good content that makes us happy and keeps us sane in our moments of insanity. What I simply cannot fathom is people who take joy in watching stuff like morbidly obese infants stuffing their faces with enough food to fill a rhino.

Of course everything works on a supply and demand basis. No demand, no supply. But are we really devolving to the point that we consider this entertainment? Many of us admire talent and creativity, and in these stressful lives we lead we also appreciate a nice soothing distraction. Sometimes we don’t want to think, and that’s absolutely a positive and much needed thing. Our brains need to switch off and just watch rubbish, that’s what “Friends” and “Desperate Housewives” was created for. But a growing percentage of these short video watchers are the young in our society, and ongoing studies are proving the negative effects of our brains taking in such a rapid bombardment to the senses, most alarmingly is young peoples inability to concentrate for longer periods of time. When I was a kid I often had a pretty solitary and introverted life, and I would take refuge in books. There was of course no internet, and video game have never appealed to me. I read the epic novel Moby Dick for the first time when I was about 13 years old. Now that’s over 200,000 words of olde English language, nearly 2000 pages. I am by no means suggesting this is normal for any 13 year old, by my own admittance I was really quite a weirdo, but how many kids do you actually see reading books outside of school now? Come to think of it, when’s the last time you saw an adult reading a novel?

If this silly article has any kind of point, it’s that I really wish we could direct our attention more at learning, self growth, appreciation for the earth and the people and differing cultures we share it with, rather than giving so much of our mental energy towards such banal and literally pointless wastes of our time. One tradition that many people from my part of the world like to partake in is the making of new years resolutions. We come up with a list of things we’d like to improve on or change about ourselves over the coming year, and we set the personal goal of achieving this from the stroke of midnight, December 31st. Quit smoking. Lose weight. Swear less. Leave husband. Most of these ultimately are forgotten within the first week of January, but that’s purely down to willpower. One of my many new years resolutions for this year was spend the time to either learn something or create something every single day. And so far, seven months into this year, I’ve done it. And you would not believe how much different I feel for setting this target and making it happen. (*as a side note, another resolution of mine is to pay a genuine compliment at least one person every day. Receiving a real, heartfelt compliment feels so good it can make your day, so why not give a few out to the lovely people around us.)

I’ve always firmly believed that each and every one of us has the inbuilt ability to be really good at something, but 99.9% of us never actually figure out what that is. We hear the word “talented” quite regularly, but I truly believe that it’s not just the gifted few. I think we all have talents, it’s just understanding what our own personal talent could be. Maybe you’re an Olympic class Judo person. You ever tried Judo? Or maybe you could freedive for 5 minutes, be a Michelin star fusion chef, or solo sail across an ocean. If we spent a little more time digging deep introspectively, maybe our possibilities are endless. And if we at least tried to foster a new talent who knows what might happen, maybe we fail, but hell we could learn a lot more about ourselves along the way.

One thing I’ve found since living here in China is that so many people are very modest about their abilities. I’ve met people here who can paint like a true artist, but when asked they just play it down to be a silly hobby. If I could paint like that I’d be talking like the direct living ancestor of DaVinci! I’ve met secretaries who could be concert pianists and housewives who could be university lecturers, but their modesty and shyness keep these amazing abilities locked up inside. We all have responsibilities and bills to pay, we have to work and look after the family and try to eat better and live somewhat healthily. But because of time and stress and all the other crap it’s all too easy for us to forget about our metal well-being. When we are children all we can think about is enjoyment, having fun, learning about things and trying new stuff, just because we want to. As we become adults a lot of that is gradually chipped away. I think as adults it’s vitally important for us to ask ourselves what do we really enjoy. Not what do we do because we’ve always done it, but what gives us real pleasure. Ask yourself. Think about it. Are you doing it? What could your talent be? What could you possibly be very, very good at? We all need a little “me” time, and that’s not something to be ashamed of or to feel guilty about. Turn off Douyin. Buy a novel and take the time to read it. Take a judo class. Maybe you’ll discover the undiscovered inside.