Having nothing to do?

Today, I have a particular strong thought about the phrase ‘having nothing to do’ or what we say ‘無聊’ in Chinese. I keep thinking the question ‘do we really have any time that we have nothing to do?’ or we just do not want to do what we have to do or things that we have to do?

After having some thought, I realize that the answer is we do not want to do anything at all sometimes. But the reality is – we sometimes try to convince ourselves that we have nothing to do and to allow ourselves to waste our time for granted. Then, we end up wasting a lot of time doing things for no purposes such as browsing Facebook hundreds of time (like in a minute or so) in a day, lying on sofa playing mobile phone, or even sleeping.

So, I try not to make myself saying I have nothing to do. Instead, I try to give myself some justifications why I am doing this. Feeling ‘無聊’ sometimes can be caused by a sense of emptiness or ‘空虛’ but I hope that is not happening to be. When people feel ‘空虛’, they lose their directions and can easily be preyed to do some bad things – I think some people commit crime because of this? So, if I am really doing ‘nothing’, I should say I do not feel like doing anything right now. All I need is some rests. Right?

Other than wanting to know about motivations behind one’s behavior, similarly, we could apply this to meanings in communication – ‘people do not always say what they mean and people do not always mean what they say’. Perhaps we could try to think beyond the surface. Then, we will see the deeper meanings beyond the surface meanings.

Urgh… SO MANY CHOICES

In this age of information explosion, there is way too much information available in the Internet and some of them is actually repetitious because some people just like to copy other people’s work and put them as if their own. You can easily find many of such examples in Youtube. These people are wasting our time in searching for different kinds of information. So, in this case, there is always a convincing reason why we usually have to resort to books which have at least certain level of reputation guaranteed when doing research.

Today, I do not want to put the focus on books. Instead, I want to talk about ‘comments’. After reading a news passage in Yahoo, BBC or CNN or a video clipping on Youtube, would you bother reading comments written by others readers/viewers? In reality, I think commenters sometimes tell more truth than the main texts (article/video) themselves.

Below is an example of the above mentioned case from Yahoo:

http://hk.finance.yahoo.com/blogs/simon-lee/%E7%82%BA%E4%BB%80%E9%BA%BC%E8%88%AA%E7%A9%BA%E5%85%AC%E5%8F%B8%E7%9A%84%E5%95%86%E5%8B%99%E5%AE%A2%E4%BD%8D%E8%BC%83%E8%B2%B4-072408842.html;_ylt=AjoCedCnOc08f8mLXL2GnI1hgLVG;_ylu=X3oDMTFrcmdnOGdqBG1pdANCbG9nIEF1dGhvciBCbG9nIEluZGV4BHBvcwMxMQRzZWMDTWVkaWFCbG9nSW5kZXg-;_ylg=X3oDMTFwYTFmYzluBGludGwDaGsEbGFuZwN6aC1oYW50LWhrBHBzdGFpZAMEcHN0Y2F0A2F1dGhvcgRwdANzZWN0aW9ucw--;_ylv=3

Many people criticized the senior lecturer of providing wrong information to the readers… (skip, skip, lazy, lazy…) After doing some little research, it has proved the commenters to be right.

Here is another good example from Timeout:

http://www.timeout.com.hk/art/features/46434/daniel-libeskind.html

I myself also think that the design is really stupid and wastes space. The interiors are badly put together – the floors are dark; every floors have very limited space of about a maximum of 8 classrooms; there are unused space, particularly the angle part, is designed just to fit the design of the building…

So, would we spend some time to activate our critical mind in judging the validity of a piece of news? Or will you just click the ‘share’ button when you find it interesting? Have a thought for yourself.

Before ending, there is a piece of personal advice I would like to share with all of you – dig ONLY into the areas that what you really want/need to and leave the rest aside. Life is short and life is about making choices. One cannot get to know all the fields available in the world – we learn and we forget. And I think this is also the reason why we all have different careers and we contribute to society in different aspects, right?

Extended reading:

[Smarts: It's Not How Much You Learn That Matters. It's How Much You Remember]

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/smarts/200904/smarts-its-not-how-much-you-learn-matters-its-how-much-you-remember