Recently I got to see Blue Man Group perform in Seoul, and it was fantastic! While I’ve seen their various shows and concerts before, it was with a new perspective that I watched them portray their commentary and musings on conformity, on group-think, and on the plight of modern man in a rapidly changing world. After living in East-Asia for nearly a year, I’ve had the chance to see first-hand how confusing it can be for a culture to try to keep up with all the changes that are happening, especially a culture that teaches conformity in every aspect of daily life.

It’s easy to point to others and say “I’m different than that person.” However, we all share a lot of common behaviors and knowledge, and we tend to act similarly to those around us. We are taught how to behave in different circumstance and different places, we are told what to eat and drink and wear and watch and do, and we are nudged by friends and strangers alike to live by many shared tenets and strategies, be they the Ten Commandments or the Golden Rule. Pressures to conform are all around us.

So are pressures to be unique. This is probably the biggest difference between the Orient and the West: Westerners are given the context to explore on their own, to develop into someone different in many ways from those around them. Orientals, on the other hand, are not; in fact, they are specifically denied this context. We all know this.

Hmmm… we all know this… but is it really true? Is it true that Orientals all think alike? Not really. Is it true that Westerners all think differently? Hardly! While as a single group we have many differences of opinion, belief, and desire, once you break us into various contingents and demographics, we are each just a face in the crowd. Given enough people, we can find even the most rare beliefs to be shared by hundreds, thousands, or even millions.

How many commonly-held viewpoints do we all know? Aren’t these beliefs themselves each an example of group-think?

My challenge to you is this: be different. Really different. Throw common sense into the limelight once in a while and inspect it. Challenge it. And most importantly, be willing to reject it. Do the same with anything that ‘we all know’.

For instance, ‘we all know’ that security cameras reduce crime. So then why is it that we keep finding that, in fact, they don’t?

Conventional wisdom is rarely wise. If anything, it’s simply a comforting way for us to fall into group-think, into not having to think for ourselves.

So challenge it. Ask yourself if you really understand the matter or if you’re basing your opinion on sound bites and over-simplified snippets of information, rather than having an opinion that is well-informed, well thought-out, and truly your own. Yes, it takes more effort to really understand the issues. Yes, you’ll be hounded by your peers for not doing things the way everybody else does. But that’s a good thing. That’s a strong indication that you really are different from those around you, that you’re not just another face.

It’s OK to be different. It’s OK to question common beliefs, conventional wisdom. In fact, it’s more than OK, it’s necessary if we want to fix the major problems in the world today.

Dare to be different.

Other news

• Attack of the Killer Tomatos: Tainted Tomato Cases Jump to 383 People in 30 States, D.C.
• Blame It on Rio: Science proves that bikinis turn men into boobs
• Caveman: Pursuit of Females Dates Way, Way Back

Quote for the week

Never allow anyone to rain on your parade and thus cast a pall of gloom and defeat on the entire day. Remember that no talent, no self-denial, no brains, no character, are required to set up in the fault-finding business. Nothing external can have any power over you unless you permit it. Your time is too precious to be sacrificed in wasted days combating the menial forces of hate, jealously, and envy. Guard your fragile life carefully. Only God can shape a flower, but any foolish child can pull it to pieces. - Og Mandino

From the editor

Sometimes I get a chance to really surprise people with an unexpected gift: this week I dropped in unexpectedly on my parents’ house so that I can attend my brother’s wedding this Friday. Of course, I write these in advance. As am writing this, I haven’t yet gotten on the plane. But by the time it goes live, if everything went well, I’m in Alaska for a few days with family.

It’s always nice to visit home, and this time especially so. This is (to the best of my recollection) the first time my mother has had all her immediate family together at once in about a decade or more. Other than the self-imposed stress of so many house-guests, I’m sure she’s beaming on the inside.

I’m back to Korea this weekend, but for now, it’s good to be home!

Healthy thoughts,
Jeff

Have you ever noticed that no matter what problems come your way, you nearly always find a resolution that is good enough? No matter how big your troubles may seem, they come and go? Life goes on.

Problems are a part of life. Whether it’s what to have for dinner, or how to keep from losing money on some deal, or how to get out of the way of that truck barreling down the road straight at you, we all struggle to find solutions to things that are not the way we want. Sometimes they are enormous, other times they are simple, but always they are there if we go looking for them. In any given moment, it’s possible to find hundreds of things that are not perfect… just look around and you’ll find examples.

And yet, amidst all those troubles, there are more important things to find as well. Sure, the temperature is too hot or your in-box is stacked a little too high or traffic isn’t moving fast enough… but does it really matter? In the grand scheme of a lifetime, is it really that big a deal? Does it warrant all the negative emotions it brings up or the energy invested to try to change it? Or can you use that energy and focus to find the good things around you, to experience something wonderful?

Some people seem to attract big issues. You probably know a few people like that… no matter where they go, there is a crisis to be averted, a dilemma to be solved, or a situation to be rectified. It seems every moment with them is stressed and panicky. They will say that no matter how hard they work, there are always more problems to solve. I say that they are in the habit of seeing problems, and that until they break that habit they will never realize just how much joy they are missing.

I love the quote: “Don’t sweat the small stuff. And remember: it’s all small stuff.”

Yeah, it is all small stuff. It may seem important at the moment but given a week or a month it will disappear as just another passing phase or even be forgotten entirely. Just because it seems like a big deal now doesn’t mean it will feel that way tomorrow. Don’t treat it like the end of the world or turn it into more than it needs to be.

Don’t forget: it’s all small stuff. Whatever problems you have will be resolved, or go away, or open a new path for you to learn and grow from.

Sometimes the issue on your plate really is a big deal, maybe even a matter of life and death. Even then, can you be OK with it? Can you see the silver lining? Can you find happiness even while you are deep in the problem? Can you learn from what’s going on so that next time it won’t be an issue? Can you feel the humor of the situation and chalk it up as a story to tell?

The things that matter most in life aren’t problems. Every instant is there to be appreciated and enjoyed… keep that in mind when you’re getting stressed or overwhelmed. Take a step back to enjoy the moment, no matter what the moment is.

If it isn’t right… oh well. It’s small stuff. Don’t sweat the small stuff. Enjoy the moment.

Other news

• That’s ‘pacifier’ to us Americans: Dummy use link to ear infections
• Too much of a sad thing…: Elderly suicides surge in Japan
• … perhaps this is part of the the cause? Overtime Work Tied to Anxiety, Depression

Quote for the week

The trouble with so many of us is that we underestimate the power of simplicity. We have a tendency it seems to over complicate our lives and forget what’s important and what’s not. We tend to mistake movement for achievement. We tend to focus on activities instead of results. And as the pace of life continues to race along in the outside world, we forget that we have the power to control our lives regardless of what’s going on outside. - Robert Stuberg

From the editor

In the last week, I’ve been asked numerous times about Mad Cow and whether I eat beef. It’s a little surprising just how pervasive this issue is in the minds of Koreans at the moment.

What’s on your mind? What worries you? I’m always looking for ideas for future topics… let me know if there’s something you’d like to read about!

And, again, please forward this to your friends! If you like it, the people you know might, too. Your recommendations mean a lot to me… thanks!

Healthy thoughts,
Jeff

For as much as we love to know about the world around us, very few people actually take the time to really learn about the things they are interested in. Most people settle for sound bites, filtered through the popular media and pre-packaged to take no more than a couple minutes per story.

Now even most educational shows have been reduced to 5 minute segments, each segment an entirely self contained cliff-hanger for the next segment (just watch an hour of the Discovery or History channels to see what I mean). It seems people who channel-surf would find a show in the middle and have no way to figure out what was going on, so they would continue past it. Now anyone can drop in to the middle of a show and quickly catch up.

The news, too, is heavily abbreviated. Instead of getting a detailed story, we get a minute or two of overview and maybe one new fact, then on to the next story. And, predictably, newspapers are the same. Most of the news in ongoing coverage is repeated from the last time, and very little is actual new information. Even breaking news is mostly filler and conjecture and contains very little actual data.

While this is convenient for the average television viewer or newspaper reader (and therefore good for advertisers), it’s a horrible way to learn anything. Our minds soak up information very quickly, but instead of tuning in to learn, most of us tune in to tune out, and marketers know this. Instead of television being a great educational tool, it’s just another distraction.

If you want to really learn about something, you need to avoid all the popular media sources and go for the actual sources. They may be a report written in a lab somewhere, or an article or book in a non-popularized trade-journal. Often a quick search on Google is enough to track down the original source for a given news story or research result. You will likely find that the brief version given in the news bears little resemblance to the original story.

You will start to discover just how many research articles and reports are biased or skewed to make a point. A pile of data (which most readers, even the experts, will skim over) will be followed by a quote that is pointedly designed to alter your perception of the report. And often that quote, while not strongly supported by the data, is what is actually printed in the popular press.

If you want to get up-to-the-minute information on a breaking event, turn to one of the major news carriers for a couple minutes. But if you want to actually learn something, turn the TV off and actually dig in to the original source.

Other news

• Addicted to the phone by age 12? When did they get the freakin’ thing in the first place? Spain treats child phone addicts
• More comfortable than a cork: Patch ‘halts holiday diarrhoea’
• Not to be confused with ‘Texting Thumb’, and entirely different from ‘PSP Thumb’: Beware the ‘Blackberry Thumb’

Quote for the week

The best way out is always through. - Robert Frost

From the editor

One negative side-effect of living in another country is that sometimes you miss all the cultural reminders of upcoming holidays. I was just logging into my computer at work today and discovered Father’s Day had come and gone when I wasn’t paying attention.

Luckily, there were still a couple hours of Father’s Day left in the US, and so I was able to reach my dad and my brother and wish them both well. I didn’t, however, get cards or gifts for either of them… I simply forgot.

To all the fathers out there: happy belated Father’s Day!

Healthy thoughts,
Jeff

For the last two weeks, there has been protesting (and some rioting) in Seoul over the decision to resume importing American beef into South Korea. The cause for all the concern: the fact that US beef has been connected to a case of mad cow disease in Canada. In other words, the US beef supply is (to some unknown degree) tainted with mad cow, and therefore should not be consumed under any circumstances.

In my very first article, Understanding What You Read, I noted that statistics can be manipulated to convey many different objectives, agendas, and aims. Now I would like to elaborate on this.

How dangerous is mad cow disease? Well, according to current statistics, hundreds of thousands of cattle have been infected worldwide. Of those, many have entered the human food supply. The disease that humans can possibly get as a result of eating an infected cow is new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), and this has currently been linked to roughly 200 deaths worldwide.

Yes, 200 deaths. Total. In ten years. In the whole world. That’s an average fatality rate of roughly 1 in 300 million per year.

In other words, you are more likely to die being hit by lightning than die of vCJD. You are more likely to be on a hijacked plane than die of vCJD. You are far more likely to choke on your meal (especially if it’s beef) than to die of vCJD.

To be fair to the statisticians and mathematicians, these numbers are expected to rise. There are probably a few dozen (perhaps even a few hundred) people worldwide who have been infected but have not yet shown symptoms and been diagnosed. It is even conceivable that the beef industry worldwide will have to drastically reduce its stock and start afresh from new, known-healthy animals.

But this is a far cry from any remote cause for panic. If anything, we should be aware, and we should hold the industry publicly accountable to handle the problem so that it does not become a global epidemic. US corporations, while fraught with scandal overall, are generally receptive to market demands and government regulation, especially when the two go hand-in-hand.

Therein lies the irony of the Korean protests: if anything, I suspect the US and UK beef supplies are becoming among the world’s safest, specifically because of the problems that have happened so far. I would be concerned about supplies from countries that don’t have the oversight, investigative, and litigious checks and controls that we do, such as the third-world countries around the globe. If an outbreak is going to get out of hand, it is far more likely to come from a small country that depends on beef exports for survival and lacks infrastructure and education to recognize the early-warning signs if an outbreak begins.

It never hurts to be aware. It’s good to keep informed of science and health news to know when a particular disease or activity is found to be of concern. But it’s also important to stay balanced in your response and choices regarding this knowledge.

If mad cow, or any other disease, frightens you, then it’s time to start learning. Keep the big picture in mind, and remember to compare the impact of a specific concern to other, common concerns. For instance, in the US, about 1/3 to 1/2 of all deaths are from heart disease. That’s thousands of deaths per day. About 1/3 of all deaths are from cancer. Compared to that, mad cow is negligible. If you eat beef every day, at every meal, you are still not going to get vCJD. It’s almost guaranteed you’ll be safe.

Spend your energy on other things, and stop worrying. Protest American beef? Hardly. There are more important things to be doing.

Resources:

• S Koreans protest against US beef
• vCJD Worldwide Figures (up-to-the-month, so figures may be different than quoted above)

Other news

• Clip ‘em and check ‘em: Toenails point to heart disease
• Just like chocolate: Sleep: A Necessity, Not a Luxury
• Saving the world, one breath at a time: Asthma Inhalers To Go Green

Quote for the week

Statistics: The only science that enables different experts using the same figures to draw different conclusions. - Evan Esar

From the editor

As a world traveler, I am often accused of many things just because I am an American. For instance, more than once I’ve been lectured on all the evils America and (insert whichever president is current at any given moment) are subjecting on the world. Whether its a war, a cultural influence, a scandal, or the environment, I’ve been vilified on many occasions simply because I come from a particular place.

Fortunately, Koreans as a whole are not giving me grief over the whole mad cow issue. At least this time, it’s not my fault.

Healthy thoughts,
Jeff

Where do you define the boundary of ’self’ in your world?

Does ’self’ end at the physical boundary of your body? That doesn’t really make sense if you think about it, as we typically include surrounding personal space in our description of ’self’. If someone enters your personal space, you are very aware of it, even if your body hasn’t been touched.

Does ’self’ end at the extent of that close-in boundary? That doesn’t quite work, either. It seems natural to include some of our surrounding living and storage space in our notion of ’self’. If your house is robbed, for instance, you may feel personally violated. So self extends beyond your reach, and even into spaces nowhere near where you currently are.

‘Self’ can even include other people, to an extent. Any pair or group of people who are very close each see the other(s) as being part of ’self’ to some degree. Over enough time, that inclusion is nearly (or even totally) complete, so that each person fully includes the other in their notion of ’self’.

With enough openness, ’self’ can be grown to include anything you can imagine. This takes practice. It also takes unconditional love and trust. If you extend ’self’ to include others, you are not dictating their actions or emotions or experiences, you are allowing them to have their life experience (whatever it may be) and including that in your life experience.

Compare that with the ‘ownership’ viewpoint. If I own an object, then I expect it to be where I left it. If I own a dog, then I expect it to answer to my beck and call. But if I extend myself to include an object or a pet or a fellow human, then I am agreeing to accept it the way it is. (Sure, I may shape it’s behavior, but I do it with care and attention, with intention, rather than from a place of control or demand.)

‘Self’ can even be extended to include everything, the entire cosmos. This is a very simplistic statement of what it means to Become One with the universe. It is Enlightenment, or connection with God, or whatever your religious perspective may call it. It is a liberating feeling in the moments it can be experienced.

Some choose to phrase this slightly differently, to call this experience ’self-less’ rather than ’self’. Sure, to drop the boundary between you and not-you could be simplified this way. However, I choose to see this as an extension rather than a loss. When you experience yourself as being more than just your body, you are feeling a spiritual connection and communication, a communion, with everything around you. This means growing, not eradicating, your identity. This, in my mind, is not self-less, it is extended self.

Extending yourself is basically loving life, the world, your fellow man, and you. It means being present, in the here and now, and experiencing all the wonders around you. It means opening up and becoming vulnerable, relinquishing control, knowing that there are aspects of yourself that are beyond your control even though they are within your ’self’. It means observing and feeling that which is going on in the world beyond your physical body.

Extending yourself means opening your heart and and truly being. Being more than just you. Just being.

Other news

• This, ironically, drives premiums up even more: More Young People Going Without Health Insurance
• Smoke ‘em if ya got ‘em: Cigarette machines may be banned
• Pour me another! Oh, wait, wrong bottle: Bottling it up ‘can ease trauma’

Quote for the week

We are all spiritual beings having a human experience. - Anonymous

From the editor

In case you hadn’t noticed, I took the source citations (shown as [www.somedomain.com], for instance) out of the links I’m putting in the newsletter. In the past, the newsletter was primarily distributed via email, and my desire was to give readers a way to ensure the links they were seeing were valid and not spoofed or altered. I have decided over time that the readers who are likely to look are also likely to know other ways to find the same information, and the extra editing effort I was putting in was not worth it. If you have thoughts on this matter, please feel free to contact me.

Also, I just found an error with the site that is making it hard (impossible?) to post comments on blog entries. I’m still trying to figure out what’s going on. If you’ve seen this before, please let me know of things to try.

Healthy thoughts,
Jeff