Sounds nuts, but it makes perfect sense

09 Sep 2007, ST

By Janadas Devan, ON WORDS

WHY do bars give away peanuts for free, but charge for bottled water? After all, peanuts are more expensive than water.

Well, because 'nuts and alcoholic beverages are complements. Someone who eats more nuts will demand more beer or mixed drinks... In contrast, water and alcoholic beverages are substitutes. The more water bar patrons drink, the fewer alcoholic beverages they will order'.

Another question: 'Why do female models earn so much more than male models?'

It is not because female models are intrinsically lovelier than male models. It is 'because women's fashion is a vastly bigger business than men's fashion. Women in the United States, for example, spend more than twice as much on clothing each year as men do, and the difference is even more pronounced in other countries'. Thus, beautiful women, modelling beautiful clothes, who can catch the eyes of consumers are highly prized.

Yet another puzzle: Why do women wear high heels, despite the discomfort, even harm, they cause?

That seems like a no-brainer. Tall women seem more striking. Also, 'in addition, to making women taller, high heels force the back to arch, pushing the bosom forward and the buttocks rearward, thus accentuating the female form. 'Men like an exaggerated female figure,' writes fashion historian Caroline Cox'.

So far so good. But the problem is if all women wore high heels, such advantages would cancel out. Surely, it would make more sense for all women to collectively agree not to wear high heels. 'But because any individual can gain advantage by wearing them, such an agreement would be hard to maintain.'

All of the above questions-and-answers derive almost verbatim from a wonderful new book by Cornell University economics professor Robert H. Frank, titled The Economic Naturalist: In Search Of Explanations For Everyday Enigmas. Prof Frank is the co-author with the current Federal Reserve Chairman, Mr Ben Bernanke, of a well-regarded economics textbook. Quite apart from its diverting content, The Economic Naturalist is interesting for another reason: Most of its questions as well as answers were provided by Prof Frank's students at Cornell.

Standard economics courses, the professor believes, are too theoretical. 'When students are given tests designed to probe their knowledge of basic economics six months after taking the course,' he found, 'they do not perform significantly better than others who never took an introductory course.' He hit upon a more effective method of teaching economics through - wait for this - a writing course!

Cornell has a writing programme 'inspired by research showing that one of the best ways to learn about something is to write about it'. Informed by 'the narrative theory of learning' - which holds that human beings have a universal predisposition... to impose a narrative interpretation on information and experience', as two educationists Walter Doyle and Kathy Carter put it - Prof Frank had his students write narratives explaining everyday economic phenomena.

They were asked to pose themselves the most interesting questions they could think of - 'Why did kamikaze pilots wear helmets?', for instance, or 'Why do 'almost new' used cars sell for so much less than brand-new ones?' The very act of thinking up these questions was useful, for the students had to consider many preliminary questions before arriving at the final one.

More importantly, precisely because the questions were their own - and were prompted by everyday puzzles in the real world that had struck them personally - they were motivated to take ownership of their questions. That motivation extended to their answers as well, for students with especially interesting questions felt a need to communicate their answers to others.

'Hey, do you know why A occurs? Well, it is because of B, C and D, you see. Let me tell you how it is' - and they formulated their own narrativised answers to their own questions.

They wrote because they had something to write about; they communicated because they had something which they wished to communicate. Learning how to write effectively and well became a function of wanting to communicate something specific - a thought, an answer to a precisely formulated question - effectively and well. Writing is a tool; one cannot learn to wield it without finding nails to hit.

In the process, Prof Frank's students learnt, too, how economic principles worked in the real world. His course opened his eyes 'to the remarkable effectiveness of the less-is-more approach to learning', as he put it - or, as Singapore's educationists have taken to saying, the 'teach less, learn more' approach.

I don't suppose that means Prof Frank's students won't have to, at some point in their educational careers, mug up on the more formal aspects of economic theory. But as an introductory course, his approach seems to have worked wonders.

The Economic Naturalist is one of the most delightful books in the dismal science that one can find in the market today - and it is almost wholly the product, not of a distinguished professor's ideas, but of his students'.

This is a technique of teaching writing that can be applied widely. Lecturing students endlessly on the principles of good writing does almost no good. Nobody in the history of the universe has ever produced a fine piece of writing without wanting to communicate something specific.

It would be far more productive to train students to formulate interesting questions for themselves and to write so as to communicate their findings to others. Prof Frank's approach can work in literature classes as well as GP, in history as well as economics.

'Why are whales in danger of extinction, but not chickens?' That, believe it or not, is an economics question that elicited a neat piece of writing. So, too, did the following: 'If attractive people are more intelligent than others, and if blondes are considered more attractive, why are there so many jokes about dumb blondes?'

My favourite in Prof Frank's book was this: 'Why do humanities professors, who should be more adept than most in their use of language, often write so unclearly?'

Mother Teresa's letters reveal crises of faith

27 Aug 2007, ST

MOTHER Teresa, who is one step short of being made a Catholic saint, suffered crises of faith for most of her life and even doubted God's existence, according to a set of letters.

'Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear,' the missionary wrote to one confidant, Reverend Michael Van Der Peet, in 1979.

The letters, some of which she wanted destroyed, appear in Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, due to be published next week, 10 years after her death.

Extracts of the book appear in the latest edition of Time magazine.

In more than 40 letters spanning some 66 years, the ethnic Albanian nun who devoted her life to working with the poor in the slums of Kolkata in India, writes of the 'darkness', 'loneliness' and 'torture' she is undergoing.

'Where is my faith - even deep down right in there is nothing, but emptiness and darkness - My God - how painful is this unknown pain - I have no faith,' she wrote in an undated letter addressed to Jesus.

'If there be God - please forgive me - When I try to raise my thoughts to heaven - there is such convicting emptiness.'

In her early life, Mother Teresa, also known as 'the saint of the gutters', had visions. In one, she talked to a crucified Jesus on the cross.

But the letters reveal that apart from a brief respite in 1959, she spent most of the last 50 years of her life doubting God's presence - much at odds with her public face.

In one letter, written in 1959, she wrote: 'If there be no God - there can be no soul - if there is no soul then Jesus - You also are not true.'

The book's compiler and editor Reverend Brian Kolodiejchuk is a member of Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity and was responsible for petitioning for her sainthood. She was beatified - one step short of sainthood - in 2003.

'I've never read a saint's life where the saint has such an intense spiritual darkness. No one knew she was that tormented,' said Rev Kolodiejchuk.

Mother Teresa's successor said yesterday that the revelations would not hamper her path to sainthood.

'I don't think it will have any effect on the process of sainthood for Mother Teresa,' said Sister Nirmala, who succeeded Mother Teresa as the head of the Missionaries of Charity.

Cardinal Angelo Scola, the patriarch of Venice, said the letters showed Mother Teresa was 'one of us, that she did all her work as we do, no more no less'.

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, ASSOCIATED PRESS

Don't worry, be happy

25 Aug 2007, ST

New studies on happiness are focusing on more objective questions like freedom from fear and having choices

AMSTERDAM - The tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan long ago dispensed with the notion of Gross National Product as a gauge of well-being. The king decreed that his people would aspire to Gross National Happiness instead.

That kernel of Buddhist wisdom is increasingly finding an echo in international policy and development models, which seek to establish scientific methods for finding out what makes us happy and why.

New research institutes are being created at venerable universities like Oxford and Cambridge to establish methods of judging individual and national well-being. Governments are putting ever greater emphasis on promoting mental well-being - not just treating mental illness.

'In much the same way that research of consumer unions helps you to make the best buy, happiness research can help you make the best choices,' said Dr Ruut Veenhoven, who created the World Database of Happiness in 1999.

When he started studying happiness in the 1960s, he used data from social researchers who simply asked people how satisfied they were with their lives, on a scale of zero to 10. But as the discipline has matured and gained popularity in the past decade, self-reporting has been found lacking.

By their own estimate, 'drug addicts would measure happy all the time', said Dr Sabina Alkire of the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Institute, which began work on May 30.

New studies add more objective questions into a mix of feel-good factors: education, nutrition, freedom from fear and violence, gender equality and perhaps most importantly, having choices.

'People's ability to be an agent, to act on behalf of what matters to them, is fundamental,' said Dr Alkire.

But if people say money can't buy happiness, they're only partially right.

Dr Veenhoven's database, which lists 95 countries, is headed by Denmark with a rating of 8.2, followed by Switzerland, Austria, Iceland and Finland, all countries with high per capita income. At the other end of the scale are much poorer countries: Tanzania rated 3.2, behind Zimbabwe, Moldova, Ukraine and Armenia.

The United States just makes it into the top 15 with a 7.4 index rating. While choice is abundant in America, nutrition and violence issues helped drag its rating down.

Wealth counts, but most studies of individuals show that income disparities count more. Surprisingly, however, citizens are no happier in welfare states, which strive to mitigate the distortions of capitalism than in purer free-market economies.

'In the beginning, I didn't believe my eyes,' said Dr Veenhoven of his data.

'Icelanders are just as happy as Swedes, yet their country spends half what Sweden does (per capita) on social welfare.'

In emphasising personal freedom as a root of happiness, Dr Alkire cited her study of women in the southern Indian state of Kerala, which showed that poor women who make their own choices score highly compared with women with strict fathers or husbands.

Adrian G. White, of the University of Leicester, included twice as many countries as Dr Veenhoven in his Global Projection of Subjective Well-being, which also measures the correlation of happiness and wealth. He, too, led his list with Denmark, Switzerland and Austria.

Bhutan, where less than half the people can read or write and 90 per cent are subsistence farmers, ranks No. 8 in his list of happy nations. Its notion of GNH is based on equitable development, environmental conservation, cultural heritage and good governance.

US researchers have found other underlying factors: Married people are more content than singles, but having children does not raise happiness levels; education and IQ seem to have little impact; attractive people are only slightly happier than the unattractive; the elderly - over 65 - are more satisfied with their lives than the young; friendships are crucial.

But the research also shows that many people are simply disposed to being either happy or disgruntled, and as much as 50 per cent of the happiness factor is genetic. Like body weight, moods can swing only so much from their natural 'set point'. So can you do anything about it? Some educators say you can.

People 'can be taught emotional resilience, self control, the habits of optimism, handling negative thoughts and much else', Anthony Seldon, Tony Blair's biographer and the headmaster of Wellington College in Britain, wrote recently in the Financial Times.

Seldon is developing happiness courses, working with the Institute of Well-being at Cambridge which was founded last November.

One recent book seeking to cash in on the well-being craze bears the English title Dutch Women Don't Get Depressed, though it's written in Dutch.

Dr Veenhoven says the title is off base: Statistically, women get depressed more often than men, and Dutch women aren't happier than others in the wealthy West.

He says that with the right combination of individual choices and government policy, nations can raise their happiness quotient by as much as 5 per cent.

In an influential 2004 academic paper, Martin Seligman, the University of Pennsylvania psychologist credited with launching the positive psychology movement in 1998, and Ed Diener of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign encouraged policymakers to consider more than economic development in their planning.

'Although economic output has risen steeply over the past decades, there has been no rise in life satisfaction during this period, and there has been a substantial increase in depression and distrust,' they wrote.

British opposition leader David Cameron recently established a Quality of Life Policy Group to examine ways governments can legislate to boost national contentment levels. 'It's time we admitted that there's more to life than money, and it's time we focused not just on GDP, but on GWB - general well-being,' he said in a speech last year.

Even experts acknowledge the difficulty of assigning numerical scales to feelings, and they are still grappling with how best to refine definitions.

At Cambridge's Institute of Well-being, another group has expanded the standard happiness questionnaire to 50 items, and is incorporating it into a European Social Survey of 50,000 people.

It aims to weigh not only personal feelings ('I'm always optimistic about my future'), but how people function ('I feel I am free to decide for myself how to live my life') and their relationships with others ('To what extent do you feel that people in your local area help one another?').

'Happiness is more complicated than we originally thought,' said Dr Alkire.

AP

A web of curiosity

25 Aug 2007, ST

Net, search engines allow users to indulge curiosity - and learn

By Frank Starmer

SOME weeks ago, my young friend Su Suan - whose father has a Chinatown food court stall which I frequent - had her fifth birthday. A few days after that, I returned to the United States for a work week and my grandson Maxwell's fourth birthday.

What do Su Suan in Singapore and Maxwell in the US have in common, other than similar ages?

Both have boundless curiosity.

Their curiosity drives their passion for gaining new understanding and extending their knowledge base. It taught them language by the age of two or three, without a formal teacher.

I share their curiosity. My curiosity drives my passion for understanding and provides the energy to avoid giving up when something is difficult. It brought me and my wife to Singapore two years ago, when I became Associate Dean of Learning Technologies at Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School here.

Being a worker within the academic community for the past 40 years, I have had many opportunities to observe young learners.

I use the term learner specifically to separate my perspective from that of education - the interaction between teachers and students. Learning is the process of acquiring facts and insights.

It need not be provided by a teacher. What matters is that the learnt material becomes the foundation for thinking, creativity and innovation.

In my experience, thinking is mastered more easily by those driven by curiosity, and made more difficult for those with little curiosity.

I view formal education with some scepticism. Education can become a one-way street between the educator and the student. Education all too often is reduced to memorisation. And poor memorisers like me will score poorly on standardised tests.

My personal experience, though, is that standardised test scores do not reliably separate those who will make significant contributions to society from those who will not.

I was never bothered by average scores on an examination because I knew that when I faced a problem that was interesting, I could almost always find or synthesise a solution.

Test scores measured those class-acquired resources available for thinking but did not measure my ability to quickly acquire new concepts outside the classroom.

When I was growing up in the farmlands of North Carolina, education was 'just-in-case' learning - to be mastered just in case I needed it at some future time.

I have several friends who are superb memorisers and at the same time have made significant contributions to society. They have realised that the purpose of the examination is to achieve a high score and nothing more.

Thus, they do not feel guilty studying intensively for several days prior to an exam, achieve a high score and then forget most of what they supposedly learnt.

For poor memorisers, the Internet and search engines have made a difference. Now I can find needed material with sufficient speed. Having never learnt it is not a serious disadvantage.

Learning is a well-known biological process. Learning requires repetition and it is the repetition that causes changes in our brains that result in memory.

Forgetting is also a well-known biological process but is rarely discussed, specifically in educational circles. We know what it is like to forget when learnt information is rarely used. We deal with forgetting in different ways, ranging from writing notes to ourselves to asking a friend to remind us.

The fast pace of today's society demands that we find a way to deal with information overload. Realising that the forgetting process can be avoided when using Google and the Internet gives us new freedom in problem-solving.

More specifically, we are in the middle of an Internet revolution which brings new resources to the learner's table, the forgetter's table, and to problem solving: an almost immediate access to information and concepts.

This revolution is paving the way to move from 'just-in-case'' learning to 'just-in-time'' learning.

The Internet levels the information access playing field such that the information available to a world-class researcher is also available to young learners in remote villages. It also levels the social playing field.

While living in the US before moving to Singapore, as a hobby and my grandkids' project, I tracked the building of a cable stay bridge (http://ravenelbridge.net ) and then the removal of two older truss bridges (http://oldcooperriverbridge.org ).

I received e-mail from children of the workers, from the Governor of South Carolina, from engineers within the US Department of Transportation and from staff of several international firms (Skanska, Freyssinet, T.Y. Lynn, Dyno Nobel).

What I experienced was that the Internet sufficiently depersonalise question-asking, such that one's curiosity was amplified. A very unexpected feature of the Internet.

But just having access to the Internet is not enough.

Search engines such as Google are to the Internet what the card catalogue was to the print library.

Google + Internet = a personal memory extender and learning enabler.

With Google and the Internet, I can forget about the forgetting process. By avoiding learning or memorising material rarely used, I have more time for thinking and chasing my curiosity.

What I see within my university world is a radical shift from education to learning.

Education requires someone to determine what is essential for a group of learners. Efficiency demands that educators direct their class to the middle of the group - leaving both extremes (the fast learners and the slow learners) either bored or lost.

Google and the Internet bring a new tool to the educator - a tool for enabling individualising learning while at the same time encouraging curiosity.

There is little bridge building going on in Singapore and I needed to find another outlet for my curiosity when we moved here.

Several years ago, I watched a large golden silk spider in our garden in the US. I observed what I would call remarkably intelligent behaviour. I was curious about a spider's weaving, capturing and processing of dinner, as well as reproduction.

Over time, I built a web page to share my curiosity with my 12 grandkids, aged 18 months to 10 years old (http://frank.itlab/spider_2002 us ).

Moving to Singapore, I found spiders in playgrounds and vacant fields, but the colours of insects here are much more striking than those in our US garden. I built a new web page (http://frank.itlab.us/photo_essays/singapore.php ) to share what I found with my grandkids in the US.

But I also had a secret agenda: childish curiosity can be alive and productive in a grandfather of 65.

Looking at not only my grandchildren but all children, I see that the same curiosity-extinguishing process that I faced in primary and secondary school 50 years ago is still alive and well in both the US and Singapore.

Where are the demonstrations that it is okay to be curious and ask questions at any age?

Part of the motivation for my photo adventures, specifically with spiders, is to demonstrate the unexpected surprises associated with chasing one's curiosity.

Do unexpected surprises happen while chasing curiosity?

For me, some of my spider video was shown in a Discovery Channel programme 'Superhero Science', and in May, some of my building photos were part of a programme, 'Risk Takers', shown on the Discovery High Definition channel. The Australian Broadcasting Company used a few of my spider photos in a programme too.

In each case, 'discovery' about my work was the result of Google and the Internet.

The bottom line is that learning can be fun.

I want to find ways to restore the joy of learning that I see in Su Suan and Maxwell, and find ways to rekindle the joy of learning in graduates of our educational systems.

The writer is Associate Dean of Learning Technologies at Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School, and an avid photographer and spider enthusiast.

Order too much food - it's good economics

19 Aug 2007, ST

In his new book, Professor Tyler Cowen explains how to use economic thinking to better your life in small ways

NEW YORK - Economics Professor Tyler Cowen delights in using his expertise to get the best out of life. In his new book, he says anyone can.

From choosing a restaurant to persuading a child to wash the dishes, Discover Your Inner Economist follows in the footsteps of the best-selling Freakonomics, by showing how to put economic thinking to work in almost every area of life.

'Small improvements in understanding can bring a much better use of incentives, leading to much better decisions and much better lives,' writes Cowen, who teaches at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

In a restaurant, he will order the most elaborate dishes rather than plainer fare on the assumption that, having invested in going out, there's no point eating food that you can cook at home.

By the same token, he will order several dishes - more than he can eat - to sample as much as possible and maximize his return on the cost of the outing. What he doesn't finish, he takes home.

For good value, he will seek restaurants in less-expensive parts of town because, he says, those in high-rent areas are either for the masses or very expensive.

'There are better food buys in East Hollywood than West Hollywood, where the movie stars live,' he writes.

He sees dating as a good place to apply the economic principle of signalling - the idea that, for example, people study for an MBA degree at Harvard more for what it says about them than for what they learn.

Playing hard to get fails to separate the winners from the losers, he concludes. In economic-speak, it doesn't satisfy a separating equilibrium - because it's too easy for losers to mimic the behaviour of winners.

Not surprisingly, he says that in marriage and family life, financial incentives are either too hard to get right or counterproductive, as he found when he tried paying his stepdaughter to wash the dishes.

Similarly, he cites a day-care centre that started fining parents for picking up their children late and found this made the problem worse. The fines allowed parents to make a financial calculation about what they had previously seen as a question of courtesy or parental responsibility.

Cowen, who discusses many of these issues on his blog (www.marginalrevolution.com), also finds that museums are run for their donors, not for the public.

He also contends that the book market is not about reading or enjoyment - a big proportion of books are bought but unread.

His own strategy when reading a book is to dip in, sample a few chapters, read from back to front, or simply discard the book if there is a better one to be read. If he starts 10 books, he says, he may finish just one.

'Why not be brutal about this?' he writes.

'Is this the best possible book I can be reading right now, of all the books in the world? For me at least, the answer is usually (but not always) no.'

Reuters

Discover Your Inner Economist (US$17.13 or S$26) is available on www.amazon.com

Thinking aloud about self-pity

16 Aug 2007, ST

By Hong Xinyi

BY HER own admission, when American writer Joan Didion sat down to pen The Year Of Magical Thinking in 2003, she had nothing else in mind besides the urgent need to make sense of her grief.

On Christmas night that year, her only child, Quintana, was hospitalised for pneumonia and septic shock. Five days later, her husband, writer John Dunne, died of a heart attack during dinner. Her daughter would die less than two years later.

Didion, an iconic journalist, essayist and novelist, made her mark with her sparely detached and steadfastly lucid prose.

In seminal books like Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), she captured the texture of American culture and politics with a distinct, melancholy elegance.

The Year Of Magical Thinking, an account of how she coped in the days following the death of her husband, won the National Book Award in 2005. Earlier this year, it was adapted into a Broadway play starring Vanessa Redgrave. Below is an excerpt from the book:

YOU sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

The question of self-pity.

People in grief think a great deal about self-pity. We worry it, dread it, scourge our thinking for signs of it. We fear that our actions will reveal the condition tellingly described as 'dwelling on it'.

We understand the aversion most of us have to 'dwelling on it'. Visible mourning reminds us of death, which is construed as unnatural, a failure to manage the situation.

'A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty,' Philippe Aries wrote to the point of the aversion in Western Attitudes Towards Death. 'But one no longer has the right to say so aloud.'

We remind ourselves repeatedly that our own loss is nothing compared to the loss experienced (or, the even worse thought, not experienced) by he or she who died; this attempt at corrective thinking serves only to plunge us deeper into the self-regarding deep. (Why didn't I see that, why am I so selfish.)

The very language we use when we think about self-pity betrays the deep abhorrence in which we hold it: Self-pity is feeling sorry for yourself, self-pity is thumb-sucking, self-pity is boo hoo poor me, self-pity is the condition in which those feeling sorry for themselves indulge, or even wallow.

Self-pity remains both the most common and the most universally reviled of our character defects, its pestilential destructiveness accepted as given.

'Our worst enemy,' Helen Keller called it. I never saw a wild thing/sorry for itself, D.H. Lawrence wrote, in a much-quoted four-line homily that turns out on examination to be free of any but tendentious meaning. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough/without ever having felt sorry for itself.

This may be what Lawrence (or we) would prefer to believe about wild things, but consider those dolphins who refuse to eat after the death of a mate. Consider those geese who search for the lost mate until they themselves become disoriented and die.

In fact, the grieving have urgent reasons, even an urgent need, to feel sorry for themselves. Husbands walk out, wives walk out, divorces happen, but these husbands and wives leave behind them webs of intact associations, however acrimonious.

Only the survivors of a death are truly left alone. The connections that made up their life - both the deep connections and the apparently (until they are broken) insignificant connections - have all vanished.

# The Year Of Magical Thinking ($19.26 with GST) is available at Books Kinokuniya.

# Books For The Soul is a weekly column that highlights books which move, comfort or inspire.

Middle-age management

16 Aug 2007, ST

Here are 13 tips on how to survive middle age and still be cool

By Peter Aspden

THE world is run by middle-aged men although, sometimes, if you are a middle-aged man, it doesn't feel like it.

No other socio-demographic group is subject to such ridicule, contempt or sarcastic admonishment. There seems to be something intrinsically funny about everything that the middle-aged man does, whether it is planning barbecues in the comfort zone of his back garden or plotting to climb Everest.

He is a bore or a charlatan; preparing early for death or clinging pointlessly to the life-affirming qualities of youth.

A middle-aged man in love is absurd. His wish to drive a fast car is the sign of existential crisis. His jeans mean that he refuses to grow up. Listening to the anthems of his youth on a rackety turntable is nostalgic tristesse; listening to 50 Cent on a newly acquired iPod means he is half a dollar short, at the very least, of proper maturity.

And yet it is the most fragile of human conditions - middle age. It demands the most delicate of balancing acts as we lean comfily on the experiences of a life half-lived and yet feel the need to look forward to novel challenges. We are worldly wise but yearn for fresh adventure.

We will almost certainly have dealt with burdens and bereavements and have come out the other side, trying to invest emotionally in a future that we now know will turn out to be the usual battered compromise between aspiration and bracing reality. That requires a certain amount of irony and courage.

Men take the brunt of middle-age jokes and that's proper and correct. Middle-aged men run the world and hegemony is blood-related to hubris and humiliation. The more powerful you are, the more amusing your plight if you suffer a setback.

The coverage in the world's media of then US president Bill Clinton's unfortunate liaison with a young intern was never based on its intrinsic importance; the story was just uproariously funny, each detail dripping with improbable bathos. And it conformed entirely with one of the most popular tropes of mockery of the middle-aged - the lustful man satiating inappropriate desires on a younger woman.

The travails of middle age constitute both a permanent human dilemma and one that is specific to different generations. Each era has its own mid-life anxiety attacks.

If you hit middle age in the 1950s, you had the memory of the war and its aftermath weighing in your consciousness. That was no slight thing. It made you behave in a certain way: calm, thankful, dignified.

But today's middle-aged men are unencumbered by such a powerful and profound collective experience. We are, instead, the self-obsessed, cossetted generation. Babyboomers - could any label sound more bombastic?

As we moved through our teens and 20s and early 30s, we enjoyed the fruits of liberalised social mores, cultural revolution and low house prices.

Sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll, and feasible mortgages. There was no trade-off between hedonistic gratification of desire and sensible planning for the future. We had it all. So when we begin to feel 'it' - all the joys that a life can bring - slip away, we become perturbed and confused.

How do we define our terms? Let's not get too involved with age cut-offs. Today, anyone who was in any way shaped by the social and cultural upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s is middle-aged.

You don't need to count the years. It is a difference of sensibility. Today's world is nothing like that one was. So you are alienated from it. A new generation, with entirely different values, is rising to power. You don't quite understand it. You are middle-aged.

Clinton's discomfort and pedantic wriggling over his misdemeanours - 'I did not have sexual relations with that woman', just like 'I did not inhale' - was the classic illustration of a middle-aged man caught between sensibilities and his efforts to prevaricate between them doomed to ridicule. With sex and drugs, there is no half-way house; not one that can be comfortably inhabited anyway.

The middle-aged man must learn to steer between the values that he imbibed as he grew up and the unfamiliar norms of a new order.

He must decide whether they can be reconciled or whether some of his most fundamental beliefs need to be adapted or jettisoned.

He must learn, in a world that revels in surface and triviality, how to act his age, a much more difficult task than it sounds.

We cannot rely on the way our fathers acted their age, for we are fundamentally different from them.

Today, a 64-year-old rock star still sings that he cannot find any girlie action and we wryly appreciate the irony, not because he is no longer capable of it but because he arguably suffers from a surfeit of it.

Yes, the Rolling Stones are still with us, most of them, and, frighteningly, they still serve up one of the best acts in town.

That is the world as it is: Old is young, white is black.

We need new rules on how to behave. There are helpful manuals for single girls, bored bachelors, serial monogamists, lesbians, swingers; nothing for us. There is pathos and sympathy for Bridget Jones; there is none for Bob Dylan's archetype of middle-aged disorientation, Mr Jones ('something is happening, and you don't know what it is').

So here is a handy guide on how to negotiate this existential thicket: tips for a vigorous and dignified mid-life.

They deal with certain troublesome aspects of style, art and life: rules for a group of people who always thought they would never need them.

Can I wear jeans?

Yes. Jeans belong to us.

Of course their origin predated us, but we made them what they were: symbols of a counter-culture that said that slack was cool, equality was hip and trousers were square.

From Jackson Pollock dripping paint to the Allman Brothers band dripping sweat, jeans were the uniform of a cultural movement that poured its passion into its art. They represented integrity and soulfulness.

That brand value, as we must learn to call it, is not to be lightly dismissed. We can happily leave the £200-a-pair (S$610) abomination that calls itself designer jeans to the 25-year-olds.

To honour the egalitarian symbolism of jeans, they should be chain-store cheap. To honour your probably less-than-perfect physique, they should be black or dark blue, and loose.

Should I be on Facebook?

No. If jeans belong to us, techno-networking belongs to them.

Here is an overriding principle of the rules: Each generation must be allowed to have its own thing.

As a young person, you can ape the style of a previous generation, but you cannot dictate to it. As a middle-aged person, you should recognise the tics and lifestyle of those who will succeed you but never succumb to their more extravagant trends.

Broadly speaking, cultural revolution was our thing, technological revolution is theirs. This is no excuse, of course, for being computer-illiterate. You must ride the waves of society's innovations but not in bright-red surfer shorts.

Should I consider cosmetic surgery?

Never. There are infinitesimally few reasons to persist in the discredited belief that men are more rational beings than women. But not paying thousands of dollars to look like a peeled trout is one of them.

The same reasoning applies to living with hair loss. It is painful but be big about it, for goodness' sake. The image of Silvio Berlusconi in his bandana should surely suffice for thoughts in any other direction.

Can I dance at parties?

No. Forget Mick Jagger. He is a one-off. Dancing to contemporary sounds is the courtship ritual of the West's youth and they should be left to get on with it. 'Harmless bopping' is for toddlers at birthday parties.

Should my views become more concrete as I get older?

No. There is a giveaway word in the question: Do you want your thought processes to resemble an inert, grey, heavy lump?

Nothing is more ageing than the sclerosis of our attitudes on life. They represent the closing of the mind. Of course there are certitudes you will have acquired on your journey so far, but they should be few in number.

The modern world, bewilderingly fast in its tendency to change, requires a supple mental approach. The Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo coined a phrase for this: pensiero debole or 'weak thinking'.

Think of the 'soft hands' of a world-class cricketer or tennis player and apply it to your mind.

Ah, sport. Should I work out?

Of course. A no-brainer (literally). It should be as automatic as brushing your teeth. It makes medical sense and philosophically reconciles your engagement with the physical world with the workings of your mind.

Competitive sport is fine, but there are sub-rules here. You can play a sport only to the extent that it at least resembles how it should be played at the highest level.

For example, you can play Sunday League football if you can run for 90 minutes, shoot, turn and tackle. Tennis is fine if you are capable of running in to follow your serve with a volley or can pick up a drop shot. Standing on a baseline waving an ineffectual racket in the air means it's time to take up golf.

Is it okay to get drunk once in a while?

Certainly, but only with someone you love. Not with mates, business colleagues or on your own.

You should be moderate in all things, including your moderation.

Should I keep up with the latest sounds?

This is a hard one. Young people get genuinely offended when reminded of the cruel fact that, musically, they well and truly missed the party. It must be hard to have your era defined by Duran Duran or Oasis or the Arctic Monkeys.

Avoid being too smug about this. Feign an interest. Don't introduce them to your playlist. They will discover it for themselves.

The only interesting musical development of the past 25 years is hip-hop. Engage with it, it has moments of brilliance. But don't play it in the car with the windows wound down.

Can I drive a sports car?

Absolutely. To drive fast is a pleasure. Speed was worshipped by the modernists who aesthetically shaped the last century. They adored the purity of the sensation, as well as those streamlines and gorgeous engines.

Velocity is part of the way we live and, as such, must be embraced throughout one's life. A temptation to succumb to pompous, ugly vehicles because they are 'practical' should be avoided.

Out-and-out sports cars should be black or anthracite, although there are certain Ferraris that make sense only in red. Proceed with caution, in all senses.

Can I have an affair with a woman young enough to be my daughter?

Ah, no. I'm not going there. Eros famously observes no rules.

If you haven't learnt that by now, you don't deserve to call yourself a middle-aged man.

Should I worry about my salary/pension?

The question is: How much is enough?

It is a tendency of middle age to sublimate existential anxiety about the present into obsessive scrutiny over a future which may or may not unravel as you expect.

Get these clear in your mind. Don't let a swelling bank account become a comfort blanket for mid-life. You must think about the years ahead but there is the bracing world of the here-and-now to deal with, too.

Don't let it slip away. Perform occasional acts of wanton extravagance and of striking humility. Eat at the best restaurants in the world. Devote a hard month to charitable work.

You are still on the lookout for transcendent moments that will remain with you for the rest of your life. You know now that material reward takes you only so far.

Adjust your life accordingly. Be happy in your home. There are 1,001 extraordinary things to do before you die. One of them should not be buying a book called 1,001 Extraordinary Things to Do Before You Die. Show some imagination.

Should I go to church?

There is no more private matter than that of religious faith. Organised worship adds the dimension of solidarity to thoughts that could easily become solipsistic and can be of immense comfort.

But be very sure of why you are there. Is it out of routine and respectability? The next time you go, take five minutes to ask yourself some tough questions. You may find it profoundly unsettling. That is a good sign. Keep up the good work.

Accept this central, oxymoronic fact of life: Life gets both easier and more difficult as you get older. Ask your God how and why this should be so. You may not get a reply.

Financial Times

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There seems to be something intrinsically funny about everything that the middle-aged man does, whether it is planning barbecues in the comfort zone of his back garden or plotting to climb Everest

Slowing down to a life of grace

04 Aug 2007, ST

By Catherine Lim Suat Hong

THE day before his annual visit home to family and friends in Singapore, my brother sent me an e-mail. It began cryptically, with biblical references to 'meeting one's maker'. Reading it further however, I decided he had made an intelligent decision. The e-mail was to inform me of where his important documents were kept in Australia.

We live in uncertain times. Plane crashes, floods and heatwaves, terrorist attacks. Closer to home, dengue and avian flu loom large.

Our personal radar is not often tuned to crisis mode. Even in conflict-ridden parts of the world, there are pockets where 'normal' everyday living can be found. So my brother's e-mail came as a timely reminder that the times we live in are tumultuous ones, and that fate can be cruel.

A lorry slipping into a waterway, drownings, murder triggered by misplaced words - a son, a mother, a daughter, a father - a life snuffed out leaving a trail of grief. And often there is collateral damage compounded by paperwork being not quite in order.

It's time for me to start tidying up the loose ends of my life. I may not have much by way of material holdings but I have responsibilities. And among them, the most onerous is to myself: to live a good life, one guided by a moral compass and attention to important details that get lost in this fast-paced 24/7 city we live in.

So I've made a decision to 'slow down'. Nothing can be ever so urgent as to subject family, friends, colleagues and strangers to the brunt of my impatience and irritability. As a result I am closer to enjoying everything I do, from eating and drinking to cooking and writing. When I exercise, I turn off my cellphone and mentally turn off a few other switches as well. It's difficult. It takes discipline and resolve.

It goes beyond a work-life balance; it's finding a rhythm which suits you, oblivious to the frenetic pace of the external world, yet without shutting out the ambient sounds of human existence.

Some people dead and alive have it: it is grace under fire. Socrates, Gandhi, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr and John Lennon had it. Nelson Mandela and Ban Ki Moon have it. And after reading a recent interview with Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn, I believe he had it too. Closer to home, Elizabeth Choy had it, and centurion Theresa Hsu has it.

How did they get it? I don't know. But the common thread is that they all serve the cause of humanity. How did they come to serve this cause? Again I don't know. But here's a plausible list of factors: they were moved by the milieu of their times - destiny; genetic imprint - nature; upbringing - nurture; mentors - inspiration.

How do we aspire to be like them? Do one good deed a day, think one good thought a day is a simple prescriptive. Or, 'do unto others what you want others to do unto you' - which is more challenging to ponder.

Death can come swiftly. In my mind, I replay the last telephone conversation I had with a friend in London. She was coming home to Singapore. She never made it. She died barely a week after we spoke and six weeks after she had been finally diagnosed with fourth stage cancer.

I remember her voice, the way she lived her life - unconventional, a wild child in her younger days. But she had grown up, with two children of her own, and buried a husband.

I remember her best for the way she made me feel - near unconditional acceptance of who I was. I cannot be unconditionally accepting, but I can give both emotional and physical space to those who try my patience.

I think of what I know about them and sometimes I get it so wrong. Then I think of what I don't know and that is when the space opens up for forbearance.

Catherine Lim Suat Hong is a freelance writer.

Words of Wisdom gleamed from the TV

I saw this in a dialog on TV. Found it meaningful enough to share it online.

What is life?

The clouds in the sky become rain.
Rain becomes water on land and flows into the sea.
After evaporation, the clouds are formed again.
This is a never ending cycle.

Water from the sky comes to earth and then returns to the sky.
It seems to be a journey in vain.
But in the process, it has breathed life into animals and cultivated the land.


All the troubles come from within us.
Moe than often or not, one's troubles are not caused by external forces,
but by incessant worry.
Happiness and worry last only for some years.

Humans tend to magnify problems,
but if we look beyond ourselves,
we are as small as grains of sand.
Small and unimportant.

Gatherings and partings are facts of life,
why do we bother over them?
If we really have affinity, we will meet again in the house of God.

Life is like a dream.
As long as you live it well,
why would its duration matter?
Real life and happiness begins in the afterlife.

Vesak Day

Today is Vesak Day. Never celebrated it though cos I am not a Buddhist. To me, it is just a holiday like any.

Anyway, I came across this interesting article.

The Significance of Vesak - Buddha Day

The significance of Vesak lies with the Buddha and his universal peace message to mankind.

As we recall the Buddha and his Enlightenment, we are immediately reminded of the unique and most profound knowledge and insight which arose in him on the night of his Enlightenment. This coincided with three important events which took place, corresponding to the three watches or periods of the night.

During the first watch of the night, when his mind was calm, clear and purified, light arose in him, knowledge and insight arose. He saw his previous lives, at first one, then two, three up to five, then multiples of them .. . ten, twenty, thirty to fifty. Then 100, 1000 and so on....

As he went on with his practice, during the second watch of the night, he saw how beings die and are reborn, depending on their Karma, how they disappear and reappear from one form to another, from one plane of existence to another.

Then during the final watch of the night, he saw the arising and cessation of all phenomena, mental and physical. He saw how things arose dependent on causes and conditions.

This led him to perceive the arising and cessation of suffering and all forms of unsatisfactoriness paving the way for the eradication of all taints of cravings. With the complete cessation of craving, his mind was completely liberated. He attained to Full Enlightenment. The realisation dawned in him together with all psychic powers.

This wisdom and light that flashed and radiated under the historic Bodhi Tree at Buddha Gaya in the district of Bihar in Northern India, more than 2500 years ago, is of great significance to human destiny. It illuminated the way by which mankind could cross, from a world of superstition, or hatred and fear, to a new world of light, of true love and happiness.

http://www.buddhanet.net/vesak.htm

Heaven and Hell

Where there is Heaven, there is Hell.

Where there is Good, there is Evil.

I came across this paragraph from a book, "The Thieves of Heaven" by Richard Doetsch, page 301.

Do u believe in Heaven?

Then why is it so hard to believe in Hell? They are just opposite sides of the same coin.

Hell is real and it is eternal. Hell is not some picture on the wall., some actor in a movie. (Satan) is not just a cloven-footed beast with horns.

Man has envisioned Satan and created Hell with his own thoughts: Dante's inferno, the nine circles of Hell, fire, and brimstone - they are all bullshit. That is all man's imagination.

As we cannot hope to comprehend the beauty and salvation of Heaven, we cannot hope to comprehend the torment and agony of Hell. It is dark, unrelenting, and viciously evil.

Hell is is undeserving if any name. You have no concept of pure evil but you will........Before we are through, you will know better than any man who walks this Earth what true evil is.