I. Book, movies and TV dramas
This year, I’ve read many books that are related to psychology. One of my motivation is following the motto of Socrates, know yourself! A more urgent reason is probably I want to understand the puzzles I saw during my life in Japan. I just couldn’t understand the rationale or motivations of many behaviors of human beings or friends around me very much and I want to have a better understanding. Besides, I also continue my old hobby of knowing the life of great scientists and watching American TV dramas. Here is a list of books, movies and TV dramas I finished in 2022:
- Irvin Yalom’s novel, The Schopenhauer Cure, as a continuation of my previous reading of his novel When Nietzsche Wept.
- The courage to be disliked, by Ichiro Kishimi.
- A documentary drama call Genius, Season 1, by National Geographic about the life of Albert Einstein.
- Better Call Saul, final season (From April to August).
I.1 The Schopenhauer Cure, by Irvin Yalom (22 October 2021)
This is my second novel by Irvin Yalom. I was attracted by the title because I have been wanting to know more about Schopenhauer since 2020. See my previous post (in Chinese) about a course on the history of western philosophy. I finished the reading on 22 October 2021, right after my beginning of my doctoral course. Schopenhauer is known for his pessimism. And the main character of this novel, Philip Slate, is an unpleasant person, driven against his will by sexual impulse, with a best friend, Schopenhauer.
In the novel, Philip is cold-hearted, lack social skill and think social interaction pointless. He has no sympathy or care about others. Yet, he wants to become a counselor, asking for the supervision of the other main character, Julius, a professor counselor facing the problem of a fatal cancer.
The novel of full of interesting tensions. Within Philip, there is a tensor between his unpleasant feature like arrogance and disdain, and his nice feature, like attractiveness, high-intelligence, loftiness and otherworldness. The other main character, Julius, is thoughtful and sympathetic, a contrast to Philip.
I see myself a lot in Philip. I have felt I could never truly “fit” into the ordinary social life, although I could in principle pretend to do so. No wonder I like Schopenhauer and agree with him on a lot of aspects of life, just as Philip does.
Anyway, this novel is a good resource to study Schopenhauer.
I.2 The courage to be disliked, by Ichiro Kishimi (25 December 2021)
This is a book explaining the Psychological theories of Alfred Adler. I got to know this book from my ex-girlfriend, Tetra, who was my girlfriend when I finished this book. She had known this book from a famous Chinese YouTuber, Mr & Mrs Gao, in a series of informal folklore-like videos introducing the three famous psychologists, Freud, Jung and Adler. I knew Freud from my one of my undergraduate friends, Xianglei. Adler is the second and Jung is the last from Jordan Peterson’s psychology course in Toronto University.
This book by two Japanese authors does a wonderful job explaining Alder using a conversation between a confusing young person and an elder. From my current interpretation, the main point is that our interpretation of our experiences matters a lot. They are not simply some facts that already happened, but are stories we tell ourselves for coherence and consistency, fitting into our larger life plots. This view is already very interesting, doesn’t it?
I probably will revisit this book. It is a compact little book, taking about one or two days to finish.
I.3 Genius, Season 1, about the life of Albert Einstein (16 January 2022)
I believe I had heard about this documentary about Albert Einstein in January 2021 from Yumeng Pang, one of my friends when living in the international dormitory, Kashiwa-no-ha International Village. A year later, I finished watching this whole documentary on 16 January 2022. This documentary might be my first exposure to the life of Einstein. I roughly knew his 1905 miracles year in the Coursera course about special relativity, but never knew other stories. He really struggled a lot as a physics student. Also, he doesn’t seem to care much about family life and has a “free soul”. Without doubt, he is an excellent physicist to be admired, but hardly a good example as a man.
I saw many familiar and famous figures in this documentary, including Marie Curie, Pierre Curie, and Carl Jung. I’m surprised to know that Jung and Einstein are good friends since their young ages. My next step is to read Einstein’s biography, Subtle is the Lord:The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein, which I planned to read since 2021 but have never started.
I.4 Better Call Saul, final season (from April to August)
This is the best TV drama I’ve ever seen! Even beyond the famous Breaking Bad! Watching the final season is one of my 2022 high lights. There are so many exciting moments.
The top moment is the death of Nacho Varga. Here is a little background. One of the main themes or motifs of Better Call Saul is lingering between good and bad, or wrestling with life without losing one’s conscience. Nacho is a criminal from the very beginning of the story, working for a drug Cartel. Yet, he has the purest soul when he died in Episode 3, Rock and Hard Place. This contrast is similar to that of the Bell-ringer, Quasimodo, in Victor Hugo’s novel, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. Nacho’s death also reminds me of the death of Socrates.
This is just one example; the story of the two main characters, Jimmy and Kim, are even better. I haven’t mentioned here because their plot is even more subtle and intricate. But, it is these details that make this show very special.
I can never convey over 1% of the depth and the charm of this TV show. Just go and treat one episode. If you love art, or intricate plotted stories, or carefully-designed lines, or are obsessed with beautiful poems, or music, Better Call Saul will amaze you!
II. Non-physics learning
- Peterson’s psychological video lectures (from September to November 2021): Personality and it’s Transformations.
- Peterson’s Bible series (from November 2021 to June 2022): The Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories: Genesis.
- The programming language, Julia, by following one website, one MIT’s course, and Vidal’s many-body physics course (logging-in is required.)
- Problems of Philosophy on MITx Online (from 17 November 2022 to 9 February 2023)
II.1 Peterson's psychology lecture videos
If you have ever wondered what psychology is about specifically, this series of video lectures should be a great first step. See my previous post about my learning experience.
Psychology is an interesting subject, which is neither like pure hard-core science nor like engineering. Yet it tries to deal with a very fundamental question about human beings. This makes this subject unique and fascinating.
One very useful fact I learned is that the concept of general intelligence (or $g$ factor), which is commonly known as IQ, is one of the first major findings of psychology. I remember Peterson commented in one of the lecture videos, “if you reject the concept of intelligence, you should reject almost all psychology”. Also, this trait is very stable and there is no known method to increase one’s general intelligence.
II.2 Peterson's Biblical stories series
One of the human-unique activities is storytelling. And Biblical stories have survived for a long time, indicating some valuable truth buried among them. Biblical stories provide prototypes for many popular movies and anime, like A Certain Magical Index. I personally got very interested in them when taking a course about western modern philosophy back in 2014 during my freshman year. For example, the story of Abraham is just incomprehensible but also very powerful. Back then, I felt that I saw a similar kind of stories in life but just cannot articulate myself. As a result, this story stuck in my head and came to me from time to time. I’m so happy that Peterson provides an interesting perspective about this story in this series.
I would probably write a separate post about this Biblical stories series in the future.
II.3 Programming language Julia
I heard this a lot, and I finally decided to learn about it. However, it feels very much like Matlab and Python, so nothing particularly interesting for this learning experience.
The only thing worth mentioning is MIT’s computational thinking course, realized in Julia. The examples mentioned in this course are very cool and interesting. The coolest example is seam carving by 3B1B, where you can change the width of a picture without distorting the image.
II.4 Problem of Philosophy on MITx Online
I tried to take a similar course on edX (it isn’t there anymore…) in 2021, but the plan was interrupted since I was falling in love in 2021. During 2022, in Jim’s quantum mechanics edX course, I got to know MIT have been moving many of its courses from edX to its own MOOC platform called MITx. And I met this familiar title called Problem of Philosophy again. I clicked the enroll button without hesitation.
I love this course! It is one of the best non-physics learning experiences of year 2022. The Professor Alex Byrne has made this course as fun as possible. As an example of the unique style, go and watch the 2-minutes short introduction video about this course.
I’m quite fascinated by how philosopher forms an argument about a deep philosophical question like what is consciousness. The logic itself is just one aspect. The more important aspect for me is their argument is quite intriguing and innovative. One of the astonishing pieces of writing is Galen Strawson’s Basic Argument against Free Will. If you believe logic is the fundamental principle, you would agree with this conclusion of this argument and admit that people have no moral obligation for anything. It clearly sounds absurd! I quote Strawson’s final words in this essay,
Again, this course is so good that I plan to write a separate post about this in the future. But first, I want to review everything I have learned.
III. Try some video games on PS4, but give up later
One of the former doctoral student, Shumpei Iino, got his PhD and graduated in April 2022. He went to a game company afterward. In the farewell party, he mentioned the game nowadays is very impressive.
The last time I was quite serious about video games was more than 10 years ago. I had been very into the World of Warcraft in my high school years, especially junior high school years. It was quite an experience! The experience was so good that I never got the same kind of excitement in any other video games thereafter.
Anyway, after hearing Iino’s comments, I went back and borrowed a PS4 from one of my friends, Weiguang. I tried some very famous games like GTA5 and Red Dead Redemption 2, but they fail to grasp me. I just couldn’t get much joy from them. I gave up around June or July.
IV. What is love? What is a close relationship? What makes a good friend? How should a person act in the world? (Before and after September)
IV.1 Why all of a sudden this BIG questions?
These questions are life-long questions. I had been thinking very hard about them seriously during 2022, which was a perfect time for these questions, since I was drowning in my first romance relationship. We started in September 2021 and ended it in September 2022.
A short-lived love story usually goes like attractive beginning, sweet middle, then it deceases to a boring and nonsense ending. However, that is not my 1-year-long experience went. My feeling is that all these states mixed up and entangled together during the whole year. And thus I felt like drowning in this experience. The fact is, after almost three months since the breakup, I still couldn’t come up with any coherent and worth-telling narratives of this experience. No wonder! That is probably one of the reason why great literature and music all chooses love as a theme. It is one of the biggest problem and question for all humans.
IV.2 Start an "essay writing project"
Anyway, this experience is still unique and impressive, of course, in both a good and bad way. It leads to a series of related question like what is a good friendship? Or how should a person act properly in the world? These questions just couldn’t go out of my mind after this experience, so I decided to seriously think and study them. I stared an “essay writing project” since November 2022. This is inspired by Peterson’s essay writing guide, where he provides a convincing argument that writing about a topic helps one think more clearly. I believe “thinking clearly” is exactly what I need.
As it turns out, it is not so different from conducting research. It is quite amusing and satisfying to apply my experience in doing science to this big questions that grasps me. I’ve scheduled this project to a few hours a week during the weekend, in a cozy Starbucks in T-site near my campus. I stared with an essay titled, “How should a man and a woman treat each other in a relationship?”, and I will talk more about this fisrt essay when I finish it.
IV.3 Happy times!
There are no lack of happy moments in my 2022 with my friends and Tetra. I want to end this year-end summary post with these happy and beautiful memories.
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