Run.. For what?

He shuffled his feet on the spot. As he looked around, everyone was doing the same.

Everyone.

Familiar faces, and complete strangers, all had a look of intensity. He shrugged and kept shuffling. A few cycles later, he started stretching. He felt a little self-concious in his shorts but he didn't want to show it. There would be no signs of weakness from him.

The air horn went off. It was time. He got down onto the ground and went into position. His fingers were firmly planted on the ground, his legs pushing and straining, willing to be released. The pistol went off, and he ran.

He kicked the ground hard, willing his legs to carry him faster. His breath came in short, ragged breaths, his body producing more lactic acid as time passed. But he ran on. And on.

Then he noticed something. Nobody else was running. Even if they were, they were not running against him. They weren't running against anyone. They ran alone, oblivious to their surroundings. The rest were just ambling along, quite unfazed by the sight of their opponents rapidly reaching the finish line. He looked harder. There was no finish line. The white tape that he saw had disappeared. The red gravel that paved the floor was gone too. And so was the field.

He slapped himself. This couldn't be happening. All his life, he had been running this race. Or rather, he thought he had. But there was no race. There is no competition. There was no one to beat, and there certainly was no champion or gold medal.

He was confused, so he did what he always did. He sat down to think. As hard as it was to accept, he finally came to realize that the race really had been a figment of his imagination.

Now all he had to do was to stop the urge to run. Especially when he saw someone else start.

The illusion that choice equates happiness.

Its one of the more interesting concepts that I have come across when watching videos of really smart people talking. It actually makes a lot of sense.

Naturally, a complete absence of choice is never a good thing. The flavour text on one of the Magic the Gathering cards reads "Options will cost you, but the lack of them will cost you even more." I am in complete agreement. But there really does come a point where we have too much choice.

Choice is viewed like money. The more, the better. It almost seems like we can never have enough choice to work with. The more options we have, the more likely we would be able to get it perfect, right? Maybe. Very smart people have observed that with too much choice, comes paralysis. We don't make a decision because we are afraid of making a wrong one. With so much to choose from, its easier to screw up. I could go on to explain just why this is so, but I won't.

The thing that I really want to talk about is the fact that a lot of Malaysian parents tend to tell their children that they are really lucky. Why? Because they can choose whatever career they want nowadays. Lucky? Its not really that simple.

The fundamental assumption that these parents have is that their children will be free to choose a path that will leave them happy. When you get to do what you like for a living, then you are happy right? As a general rule, I suppose you could say yes. But children are to make that choice at a very specific point in their lives, whether they are ready to do so or not. Some people screw that up. This is where kids nowadays are worse off than their parents.

When their parents ended up doing whatever it is they do, they were forced into that line of work by circumstance. Life screwed them over. Blame your lousy luck and move on. When a kid now ends up in a field that he hates, the only one to blame is himself. And when you start feeling like your life sucks, and its all your fault, its a lot harder to get on with life. A really long line of 'what ifs' will start to appear. What if I had done this instead of that? What if I hadn't been so hasty? These are things that the parents never had to deal with. And most of these parents ended up being fairly well off themselves.

So its true that the millions of courses that are available now are a good thing. But only if you can deal with it. If you can make a choice and never look back, then its fine. But if you are going to live life mired in regret, then you are better off getting someone to tell you what to do for a living.

If women ruled the world.

That’s something that I have always grappled with. I’ve always been curios about what it would be like if most of the world wasn’t patriarchal. What if the situation was reversed?

As a child, I was under the impression that if women ruled the world, we would have many fewer wars. Shooting someone you don’t agree with just seems like such a typically male response to things. Besides, weapon design is just something that guys do. Its not to say that women wouldn’t be able to develop incredibly destructive devices if they wanted to. Its just that the compulsion to destroy and blow things up is not quite wired into them. The same way that women generally don’t see the need to build a machine that can travel at 250 miles an hour. There is a difference between a designer with passion and a designer who is doing his/her job. A man will build a gun with a gleam in his eye. A woman will do it to get a chore out of the way. So, no guns, fewer wars right?

Maybe. Maybe not. Women might have less violent approaches to conflict resolution, but that doesn’t mean that they are any less likely to enter conflict. Differences in opinion will reach boiling point, and how an entire planet of female leaders will respond is something I’ve always wondered about. We can’t take examples of past female nation leaders for two reasons.

The first, is that any female leader who comes into power she already has guns at her disposal, backed by a bunch of testosterone filled male generals. What I am interested in is a world that is matriarchal in nature. A world where the entire cabinet is made out of women, the same way many cabinets in the world now are filled with men. How would they respond to the cultural clashes and religious feuds that are bound to crop up?

The second is that any female leader who has risen up the ranks in the past have done so by emulating their male colleagues. They is something very masculine about them. Margaret Thatcher wasn’t known as the iron lady for no reason. I don’t know Helen Clarke all that well, but judging from the way the Australs debaters spoke about her, I don’t think she is all that different. What I would like to see is a woman in power who deal with a situation like a typical woman would. I’m having a very hard time imagining what that would be like.

There will probably be a lot fewer explosions. Fewer ripped limbs. Fewer dramatic images of mothers grieving in front of rubble left behind after a bombing. But I cannot believe that the absence of bullets will equate to the absence of suffering.

I’m not really sure what I’m trying to say with this post. To be honest, even if I knew the answers to the questions I have asked, it wouldn’t matter, since that world is about as real as a typical Malaysian is punctual. Its just something I think about when I have nothing better to do.

To be or not to be.

Wandering the street, the boy looked lost,
Blank faced, he looked, but didn’t see,
He wandered aimlessly, almost stumbling with every step,
His listless eyes wore no expression, refusing to commit.

The person that he was, the person that he is,
The person that he wants to be, and the person he is going to be,
All stand divided, all mirror images,
Similar on the outside, until you read the eyes.

There is little doubt where the fracture came from,
But the question of why has yet to be answered,
The answer might stare him in his face,
But unless acknowledged, it will not register.

The clarity of the past cannot be regained,
The neatly drawn lines have all but faded,
Black and white have tainted one another,
Pleasant simplicity replaced by gnawing self doubt.

His state might be confusing, but not particularly unpleasant,
But for one like him, it must not last,
The options are open, and he may have to choose,
Or perhaps he could sustain them all after all.