The world looked in horror this week as scenes from the storming of the Capitol building in Washington were flashed across television screens and social media. The bastion of democracy was being stormed and this does not bode too well for the world. Hopefully, the incoming administration takes cognizance and action and arrests and sentences the perpetuators of this assault.
The week for us was the start of the work week for 2021. BB started school and will go pretty much every day for in-person lessons while GG still is on home-based learning and will go back to school only once a week. She is pretty frustrated and hopes that when the new semester starts in April, she also will get to go back to school on a daily basis.
In the latest COVID-19 numbers, the world has now seen nearly 90 million cases and as in previous weeks, the US leads with more than 22 million positive cases and India comes at number two with 10.5 million cases, followed by Brazil with 8 million cases. As with last week, Singapore had quite a few days with double digit cases and days with more than one case in the community, though the dormitories are pretty safe these days, due to increased testing.
To distract us from all this negativity in the world, here is today’s positive thought.
Take care people and stay safe, stay masked and get vaccinated as soon as you can!
The Nancy Pelosi Way: Advice on Success, Leadership, and Politics from America’s Most Powerful Woman – Christine Pelosi
In this personal and important book Christine Pelosi takes a close look at how her mother went from homemaker to Speaker of the House of Representatives and became the most powerful female politician in America. Her book addresses Speaker Pelosi’s role in current events, and offers advice on politics, family, and friendship gleaned from her mother’s life.
From her childhood in Baltimore to her hands-on motherhood in San Francisco to her national leadership, this book demonstrates how a mother of five and grandmother of nine achieved her success. Chapters include: Know Your Power Proper Preparation Prevents Poor Performance Know Your Authentic Self Claim Your Seat at the Table Build Strategic Alliances Don’t Agonize, Organize And more. In 2007, Nancy Pelosi became the highest-ranking elected female government official in US history when she started her tenure as Speaker of the House of Representatives. In January 2019, she began her third term as Speaker during a tumultuous time in American political history. Having represented San Francisco for thirty-two years, she has become well-known for her work to expand health care, lift up workers, protect the environment, promote human rights, and make progress for the American people regardless of the president in the White House or the party controlling Congress.
The Japanese have a saying: “The misfortune of others tastes like honey.” The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer called schadenfreude “an infallible sign of a thoroughly bad heart and profound moral worthlessness”, the worst trait in human nature.
We all feel happy when our favourite team wins and gloat at the other team. In an India-Pakistan cricket match, when India wins, you usually get to hear and see crackers burst with loats of gloating and I am sure it is pretty much the same on the other side when India loses a match.
There is a word for this feeling – a German word, schadenfreude which literally translates to harm-joy and is the experience of pleasure, joy, or self-satisfaction that comes from learning of or witnessing the troubles, failures, or humiliation of another. Schadenfreude is a complex emotion where, rather than feeling sympathy, one takes pleasure from watching someone’s misfortune. This emotion is displayed more in children than adults, but adults also experience schadenfreude, although generally we are able to conceal it.
I read about this word and was absolutely fascinated by it. So I decided to read up more about and the meaning behind the word.
As human beings, we know how to enjoy failures. Enjoying other people’s misfortunes might sound simple – a mere glint of malice, a flick of spite. But look closer and you’ll glimpse some of the most hidden yet important parts of our lives. We feel a sense of glee at someone’s incompetence, a self-righteous satisfaction when hypocrites are exposed and the inner triumph of seeing a rival falter. Sometimes it is easy to share our delight, but far harder to acknowledge are those spasms of relief which accompany the bad news of our successful friends and relatives. They come involuntarily, these confusing bursts of pleasure, swirled through with shame. And they worry us – not just because we fear that our lack of compassion says something terrible about us – because they point so clearly to our envy and inferiority, and how we clutch at the disappointments of others in order to feel better about our own.
Researchers have found that there are three driving forces behind schadenfreude: aggression, rivalry, and social justice. Self-esteem has a negative relationship with the frequency and intensity of schadenfreude experienced by an individual; individuals with less self-esteem tend to experience schadenfreude more frequently and intensely. The reverse also holds true—those with higher self-esteem experience schadenfreude less frequently or with less emotional intensity. It is hypothesised that this inverse relationship is mediated through the human psychological inclination to define and protect their self – and in-group identity or self-conception.
Specifically, for someone with high self-esteem, seeing another person fail may still bring them a small, but effectively negligible surge of confidence because the observer’s high self-esteem significantly lowers the threat they believe the visibly-failing human poses to their status or identity. Since this confident individual perceives that, regardless of circumstances, the successes and failures of the other person will have little impact on their own status or well-being, they have very little emotional investment in how the other person fares, be it positive or negative. Conversely, for someone with low self-esteem, someone who is more successful poses a threat to their sense of self, and seeing this mighty person fall can be a source of comfort because they perceive a relative improvement in their internal or in-group standing.
Aggression-based schadenfreude primarily involves group identity. The joy of observing the suffering of others comes from the observer’s feeling that the other’s failure represents an improvement or validation of their own group’s (in-group) status in relation to external (out-groups) groups. This is, essentially, schadenfreude based on group versus group status. Rivalry-based schadenfreude is individualistic and related to interpersonal competition and arises from a desire to stand out from and out-perform one’s peers. This is schadenfreude based on another person’s misfortune eliciting pleasure because the observer now feels better about their personal identity and self-worth, instead of their group identity. Justice-based schadenfreude comes from seeing that behavior seen as immoral or bad is punished. It is the pleasure associated with seeing a bad person being harmed or receiving retribution and schadenfreude is experienced because it makes people feel that fairness has been restored for a previously un-punished wrong.
Today schadenfreude is all around us. It’s there in the way we do and view politics, how we treat celebrities, in online fail videos. Today it is probably easily felt and shared compared to earlier times. Most of us have a sense of unease while experiencing schadenfreude, but we squash it down firmly while enjoying yet another article or video about the failure of someone else, and if it is someone we don’t know, like a politician or celebrity, it somehow makes it ok. And if the suffering is because of something they said or did and is a comeuppance, it makes us feel justified as if they deserved whatever happened to them. But what about when we misjudge people? Those are the times our schadenfreude leaves feeling ackward and slightly upset at ourselves.
There has been an explosion of research. Before 2000, barely any academic articles were published with the word schadenfreude in their title, but now even a cursory search throws up hundreds, from neuroscience to philosophy to management studies. What is driving all this interest? No doubt it is partly motivated by our attempts to understand life in the internet age, where sniggering at other people, once often socially inappropriate, now comes with less risk. But could it also be that we are becoming more empathic? The capacity to attune ourselves to other people’s suffering is highly prized today, and rightly so. Putting ourselves in another’s shoes impacts on our ability to lead others, to parent, to be a decent partner and friend. And the more important empathy becomes, the more obnoxious schadenfreude seems. Schadenfreude has been called empathy’s shadow, casting the two as fundamentally incompatible. According to psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen, psychopaths are not only detached from other people’s suffering but even enjoy it. Yet schadenfreude has its benefits – a quick win which alleviates inferiority or envy; a way of bonding over the failure of a smug colleague. But it is also a testament to our capacity for emotional flexibility, our ability to hold apparently contradictory thoughts and feelings in mind simultaneously.
Living in an age of schadenfreude, we fear that this emotion can lead us astray and we really need to think with a different perspective about what this much-maligned emotion does for us, and what it tells us about our relationships with ourselves and each other.
Exquisite, evocative and judgemental, schadenfreude is an inherent flaw in the human psyche, but it is a flaw we all must face up to and learn to live with if we truly want to understand life in the modern world.
Around the World in 50 Years: My Adventure to Every Country on Earth – Albert Podell
This is the inspiring story of an ordinary guy who achieved two great goals that others had told him were impossible. First, he set a record for the longest automobile journey ever made around the world, during the course of which he blasted his way out of minefields, survived a serious accident atop the Peak of Death, came within seconds of being lynched in Pakistan, and lost three of the five men who started with him, two to disease, one to the Vietcong.
After that-although it took him forty-seven more years-Albert Podell set another record by going to every country on Earth. He achieved this by surviving riots, revolutions, civil wars, trigger-happy child soldiers, voodoo priests, robbers, pickpockets, corrupt cops, and Cape buffalo. He went around, under, or through every kind of earthquake, cyclone, tsunami, volcanic eruption, snowstorm, and sandstorm that nature threw at him. He ate everything from old camel meat and rats to dung beetles and the brain of a live monkey. And he overcame attacks by crocodiles, hippos, anacondas, giant leeches, flying crabs-and several beautiful girlfriends who insisted that he stop this nonsense and marry them.
I have been feeling this at least since June/July of last year. The days seem to be flying past. I would wake up one morning on a Monday and the next thing I know it’s Friday! The week has zipped past me without really realising it. I used to think it was just me, but on speaking with family and friends, I realised quite a few of them also felt the same. Here we are in the new year and time still seems not to stop. And in the midst of the pandemic when most of us are stuck at home, we would expect time to not pass as fast as it would during a normal time. Instead of time slowing down, it seems to be moving at wrap speed. I decided to see if this is a phenomenon and if this is scientifically true.
Time as a concept is fixed, there is a fixed number of hours in a day and day morphes into the night at a fixed time each day and is constantly moving and changing. What happens now is different from what happens in the next minute. Simply put, this minute you are reading this paragraph, but within the next sixty seconds or slightly later, you will reach the next paragraph and time has shifted.
But it has also been proven that time passes faster at the top of a mountain as opposed to at sea level. The difference is small but can be measured with precision timepieces that can be bought today for a few thousand dollars. This slowing down can be detected between levels just a few centimetres apart: a clock placed on the floor runs a little more slowly than one on a table.
Einstein understood this slowing down of time a century before we had clocks precise enough to measure it. He imagined that the sun and the Earth each modified the space and time that surrounded them, just as a body immersed in water displaces the water around it. This modification of the structure of time influences in turn the movement of bodies, causing them to “fall” towards each other.
But how does this explain why sometimes time is elastic, why sometimes time moves fast and other times it is as slow as molasses? Why when we are having a bad day, or eagerly awaiting something that will happen tomorrow, a day can feel as long as a year and when you are having fun or are on a holiday, an entire week can pass before you know it and it’s time to go back to our mundane life? This is probably what is the elasticity of time.
While researching this piece, I realised I am not the first to realise this and speak about it. While this has not yet been fully researched, some people feel that it is because we create our own subjective experience of time in our minds and it doesn’t always match up with what we read on the clock or the calendar. A 20-minute lunch with a friend goes by in a flash, while a 20-minute wait for a delayed train can feel interminable, yet in reality of course the duration is identical.
We estimate the passing of time in two ways, either prospectively by how fast is time passing right now or retrospectively by how fast did last week or the last year go by. When we are stuck at home, either in a lockdown or because we are told to work or study from home for the time being, we are stuck with those with whom we live and there are many who are isolated from family and friends and we have the long days to fill up. While work takes a big chunk of our time, we have also found other ways to pass time for when we are not working. We do that by rediscovering our hobbies, watching content online or on television, speaking with family and friends and other ways to fill those hours which we would have otherwise used for socialising. But inevitably, the days start to look and feel a little similar. Weekdays and weekends blend together and we find it hard to distinguish between them and there are many days when I have woken up and it has taken me some time to think about what day it is.
This blurring of days who all look the same leads us to create fewer new memories, which is crucial to our sense of time perception. When each day is either the same or similar to the previous one and the one before that, we fail to distinguish between them. Memories are one of the ways that we judge how much time has passed and so when days look similar or even identical, it just feels like one long day and with nothing to really distinguish between our weekdays and weekends, months go by before we have something new to add to our memory bank. It’s like when we go on a holiday to a new place, time seems to zip by there because everything is new, and when we get home and look back, because there are so many memories of the holiday, it feels like we’ve been away longer that we actually did.
During times like the pandemic, it’s the opposite that happens. Now, if we get to the end of the week and look back, because we have hardly any new memories made, time seems to disappear. It’s a less extreme version of the experience some people have while in prison or when they’re ill. Time passes painfully slowly and they long for it to be over, but when it is and they look back, time can feel as though it has contracted. Of course some of us have found ourselves busier than ever during this period, juggling the technological challenges of working from home with the new job of home-schooling children. So even though we may be busier than ever, we spend all our time at home and this means we don’t have many memories which are not associated with another place or location and this makes us feel that time has just zipped by. Dozens of Zoom calls from the same surroundings can start to merge into one compared with memories of real life where we see people in different places.
Our perception of time in the future has also altered. Pre-pandemic, we thought of the near future when we would take holidays plan for or other events in our lives. But today, we either look to the far future when all this is over or to the immediate future, perhaps planning on what to cook for lunch the next day. Once the pandemic is over, will we look back and see it as one chunk of time or will we be able to distinguish the various months of 2020? I do remember the time in January when Singapore reported its first case. This was just after we went for S’ cousin’s engagement over in Johor Bahru in Malaysia. That was the last time we went out anywhere significantly other than for errands and that day stands out in stark contrast to the rest of the year.
So what do you think of your time during this pandemic? Did time zip past you or was it slow as molasses? Do comment and let me know.
Memories and Such 