There are at least two important types of
self-improvement that a person can engage in. The first involves addressing
flaws, righting wrongs and curing maladies of one sort or another. These might
be character flaws, undesirable environmental factors, or even actual physical
or mental disorders. The second kind of self-improvement does not require a
problem to be solved, but is instead characterized by developing positive
traits or states of affairs that were previously absent. For example, learning
a new language, learning to play a musical instrument, or learning how to
speed-read are activities that a people engage in, and yet these personal
projects are often undertaken without any sort of external compulsion or
necessity. Sure, a person might be learning a language because it is required
of him or her, perhaps to fulfill a job requirement, but people often improve
themselves in these and many other ways simply because they want to.
The difference between these two modes of
self-improvement is analogous to the difference between what has been called
the “disease model” of psychology, which strives to treat mental illness, and
positive psychology, which aims to further improve the abilities of healthy
people.
I suppose it is possible to unify these two modes of
self-improvement by claiming that the second, positive type of self-improvement
does indeed rectify an undesirable state of affairs, namely, a growing sense of
dissatisfaction arising from not possessing the attributes that the
self-improvement activity cultivates. It’s as if a person spontaneously decides
that not possessing attribute x is a
problem, and then takes measures necessary to solve this problem. While
recasting positive self-improvement as problem solving in this way doesn’t
change much, it does allow all kinds of self-improvement to be treated as instances
of problem solving, which simplifies understanding their relationship to
wisdom.
As I mentioned in my last post, I’ll be writing about
my own attempts at self-improvement, the challenges that I face, and the
progress that I’ve made. In addition to the journal-keeping therapeutic value
that I hope to yield from this exercise, it will probably provide some
opportunities for talking about wisdom itself. So, without further delay…
For the past two years, I’ve been living in Lahore, Pakistan.
I moved here from Toronto to live with my family, mostly because I felt trapped. I had a part-time retail job,
which I found after an unprecedented, recession-induced, fourteen-month dry
spell. I was suffering from depression, and felt extremely tired and
under-motivated most of the time. I didn’t have enough to pay my university
tuition arrears, and so I wasn’t able finish my final year. In a bout of
despair that people in the northern hemisphere probably only ever experience in
February, I agreed to move to Lahore and help my sister improve her company’s
IT infrastructure.
My sister was more concerned for my well-being than
for her company’s computer systems, of course, and wanted to pull me out of the
rut I was stuck in. The love and care of my family, the change of scenery, and an
improved diet all helped me lift myself out of my miserable state of mind and after
a very long time, let me shift back to a more positive perspective on life.
A year later, an old friend, whom I attended high
school with before I moved back to Toronto in 1999, offered me a job at the multi-national
tech consulting firm where he worked as a senior manager. For the past year, I’ve
been writing articles, white papers, marketing collateral and technical
documents, and I now earn enough to live comfortably (though certainly not
lavishly).
While it might appear that I’m content with my
situation, this is only marginally true. Yes, I’m not in a continual state of
panic and anxiety, the way I was in the months leading up to my departure from
Toronto. However, there are many issues that I have yet to resolve, and just as
many annoyances that make living in Pakistan rather troublesome and undesirable.
Foremost amongst my troubles is my unfinished degree.
I have less than a year of study left to go, and it would be a travesty to leave
such an important life goal unattained. I have about three years left to resume
my academic efforts – any longer, and I’d have to start over from scratch. While
the possibility of not earning the degree that I’ve worked so long and hard for
is in itself a horrible prospect, I also have a gargantuan student loan to pay
off. While I might be able to find a source of income that allows me to fulfill
this financial obligation that I have to the Government of Canada, even without
a degree, I highly doubt that I’ll find it here in Pakistan. My current salary
might appear rather respectable when set against the low cost of living in this
country, but it is no match for foreign debt.
The most salient of the annoyances that come with
living in Pakistan is putting up with “load-shedding” – rolling blackouts that
have steadily worsened over the past two years. At present, the building that I
live in, situated in an upscale neighborhood of the city, receives no more than
an hour of electricity at a time. The gaps between these bright patches are
usually an hour long, but have recently lengthened to two hours between
midnight and morning. In other words, I get less than twelve hours of
electricity at home each day. The UPS that I have powers a handful of lights
and ceiling fans, but that’s about it. Food spoils more quickly, washing and
ironing clothes requires beatific patience, and the benefits of air
conditioning (which is already scandalously expensive) are tragically
short-lived. What’s worse is that these service outages are entirely unscheduled,
so they can’t be planned around.
As you can imagine, this power situation has a major
impact on my life. The summers are extremely hot, and there’s only so much that
a ceiling fan can do. Using computers and accessing the Internet is next to
useless, and there’s little point in attempting any activity that takes more
than an hour, like downloading large files, watching a movie in one sitting, or
playing video games of the more involved variety. If it weren’t for this laptop
that I bought just three weeks ago, I’d be cursing myself right now for not having
saved my work, instead of continuing to type away in my now uncomfortably dark
and warm room.
In addition to the obvious types of frustration that
these power outages cause, there are several rather subtle ones. It leaves me
feeling deeply insecure, not knowing when I might be interrupted. I often put
off activities that a power outage might cut short, and even when I proceed to
update my computer or watch a movie or begin a print job, I’m haunted by a
dreadful sense of urgency. I find
myself glancing at the time over and over again, hoping that I accomplish the
task before I’m switched off. As if being interrupted isn’t bad enough, many electricity-dependent
activities are all-or-nothing affairs, cannot be resumed, and have to be
started over if disturbed.
Other difficulties and undesirable states of affairs that
I associate with living in Pakistan include the scorching heat that bakes most
of the country for around eight months every year, the risk of contracting
Dengue fever or other exotic illnesses, excessive and ubiquitous filth and pollution,
and the relatively poor infrastructure for roads, health care, and Internet
access.
The unacceptably dangerous traffic conditions here make
life especially difficult for me. For many different reasons, I have chosen not
to drive, and bicycles are my preferred mode of transportation, and are also a
hobby that I have a deep love for. The traffic in Pakistan, especially urban
areas, is unimaginably aggressive and disorganized, with vehicles making as
many “lanes” as they can by attempting to overtake each other, swerving into
oncoming traffic or onto unpaved turf whenever they please, tailgating each
other with reckless abandon, unabashedly disobeying traffic signals (when they
happen to be functioning), and otherwise asserting some form of vicious primal
dominance upon any species of vehicle smaller than themselves.
While some people (usually poor folk that can’t even afford
the sub-$300, China-made motorcycles that dominate the roads here) do ride
bicycles, this is a risk that I’m not willing to take. Despite over ten years
of urban cycling experience in Toronto, I wouldn’t last a week biking around even
the nicest neighborhoods in Lahore, even if I bought the nicest bike I could
find (which are, by the way, rather low-end by North American and European
standards). I would literally not survive. Because of these awful conditions, I
stick to a rather strict home-to-work-to-home routine, and commute by (noisy, cramped,
smog-infested and shockingly dangerous) auto-rickshaw.
However, there are some less tangible issues with
living here that are much more severe, and might be thought to rival the
country’s energy crisis in magnitude, at least for me. These have to do with people’s
behavior. While there are all sorts of folks, good and bad, pleasant and
unsavory, in every corner of the world, many people that I meet, witness around
me or otherwise share space with throughout the day behave in ways that I often
find grating, and sometimes find difficult to tolerate. There is a higher
incidence (compared to Toronto and similar places) of people being
unnecessarily loud, not respecting public space or public property, exhibiting blatant
opportunism at the expense of everyone else (as well as the coherence of the
system itself), subscribing to rather petty forms of materialism, displaying an
astonishing degree of short-sightedness, being reckless or outright lawless for
little or no reason, and failing to tolerate even the most benign opinions or actions
of others that they disagree with. Even this list of specific observations fails
to capture the wrongness that I sense
when I’m in a public place.
Finally, living in Pakistan has left me in a social
void. The combination of unstable channels of communication, dangerous and
inconvenient modes of transportation, and largely incompatible psyches do not
lend themselves to making many new friends. While I have a few acquaintances at
work and meet with family members somewhat regularly, there aren’t many people
here that think or act like me, resonate with me in any profound way, or that
share my interests.
I’ve thought about my situation deeply, and strongly
believe that I ought to live elsewhere, at least for a while.
Now that I’ve made it clear, both to you readers as
well as myself, that there are significant problems that I need to solve, it
becomes somewhat easier to discuss their respective solutions. That, however, will
be the subject of a separate post, since I’ve already chattered on for a good
long spell.
My next entry will be about specific attempts that I’ve
made to inch myself closer to homeostasis. I expect that this discussion will
include some tidbits from the psychology of problem solving, like problem
formulation, problem finding, and Newell and Simon’s means-ends analysis.
Until then!
