We started watching korean variety shows since they started appearing on Netflix. I think it started with Physical 100 which gave me the push I needed to get started on my own strength training journey. Physical 100’s participants were widely varied so they feel more relatable compared to professional athletes. It was mind-opening to see what the human body was capable of in a non-professional sports setting.
Then we got into The Devil’s Plan which is a puzzle slash strategy slash political game show. Watching this made me feel extremely unintelligent as I struggled to follow the games’ rules. But it was highly entertaining. We watched season 2 recently, and my partner lamented that she just wanted to watch people competing with their intelligence without the politics.
So we started watching Elite League, a game show where students from several top korean universities compete to solve puzzles. Again it was mind boggling to see what the human brain was capable of. I enjoyed being mind blown at how creative some of the problem-solving was. This is not something I would encounter in my ordinary life, so it was like peeking into a different dimension for a little while.
It was also fascinating for me to observe the psychology of the participants. Imagine being told you’re the smartest your entire life, only to realise how limited you are when competing with other people. Some people may have the raw intelligence, but they crumbled under peer and time pressure. Just like a tiny microcosm of reality I guess. I wonder how many contestants went through an existential crisis after.
[possible spoilers ahead] During some of the games some players used over-complicated solutions which made me wonder if an over-active intelligence was actually a handicap in reality. There was a team from an university that was apparently ranked below all the other universities, so they were the underdog. Unexpectedly they went really far. I think being the underdog allowed them to play in a much more relaxed manner. When they won a game it was a huge fun celebration because it was unexpected, but when the supposedly top university won it felt more like a relief because they were expected to win anyway. This made me think about how expectations shape our reality and happiness. It feels like it is not fun to be an academically inclined person because people will just have expectations upon you for the rest of your life, and it is difficult to break out of those expectations. When an average student suddenly gets an A, it is like they achieved something great. But anything less than an A is unacceptable and even embarrassing for high-performing students.
I observed (just my personal observation, I could be wrong) that some contestants took failure really hard. If they took failure this hard in a game show, how much harder would they take failure when they are out and about in society? It makes me feel that if one is used to winning, they would want to keep winning. They would not be inclined to take risks, or they would feel like they have very little margin for error. Hence they are typically pretty much locked into their high-flying trajectories, unable to contemplate a life without these type of wins.
I started to contemplate that being somewhat average is actually a form of superpower. There is much more room to manoeuvre, more opportunities for experimentation. Average people are accustomed to a certain rate of failure, so they don’t take failures too hard. Wins are really celebrated and joyous because they are unexpected. They are not par for the course. It doesn’t feel too bad to switch out an average career for another average career. People around them don’t have high expectations of them, so there are less disappointments all around. Doesn’t this feel like a happier life?
(There is also a certain type of people who seek out failures deliberately because they know failures are key to learning. But these people are not typical.)
There is a whole long separate discussion if getting straight As or going into a top university is even important in life. I think it really depends on the individual – what do they really want to get out of life? Unfortunately I think at age 18 very few people would know what they really want. Personally I think flying under the radar is a form of happiness, but I probably could have only reached this conclusion after 4 or so decades of life. I still feel a lot of trauma from the education system, and I feel it killed my love for learning for a prolonged time, and formed psychological barriers I struggle to overcome till today. But if I can go back in time with the knowledge I have now today, I would still place less focus on academic results and focus on learning things that actually matter. The way most schools are structured is just not conducive to actual learning. They are also terrible for neurodivergent people like me.
Watching these shows made me start to wonder if my brain can be trained to play some of those games. Serendipitously in the same week I found the book “Mindshift” at my library’s skip the line collection. After reading the book I had a sudden interest to browse Coursera again, and also to rekindle my ancient interest in programming – after a 8 year hiatus? The last time I tried to do anything serious I burnt myself out so much that I couldn’t touch it for 8 years…but I would like to believe I am much better at chunking and pacing now.
I am not sure if this is just a passing phase since my most of my interests tend to be short-lived. But I think they are short-lived precisely because I didn’t know how to engage with them in a way that wouldn’t burn me out. We’ll see, who knows?
I think it is very interesting to have new ways of thinking and living after watching tv. That one person’s vision of creating some entertainment can have ripple effects on a society’s culture. We decided to watch AlphaGo the documentary because we were introduced to Lee Sedol in The Devil’s Plan 2, and it resulted in another great learning experience.
Sometimes I forget that the brain is essentially the original learning intelligence, that we can feed it continuously and it will keep on learning and making unexpected connections across everything we’ve learnt. The emergence of artificial intelligence has only provoked me to have a deeper curiousity towards what our biological brains can be capable of. They are modelled after our brains after all. These days people like to defer everything to AI, instead I am inspired to consciously start feeding my brain new inputs continuously and observe how and what it learns. It is inevitable that with new inputs there will be new outputs. I used to have so many self-limiting beliefs of how and what I am capable of learning. But now I am almost seeing my brain as a separate entity from myself, my self-esteem and psychological hangups are almost separate from its inherent biological ability to learn.
What is going to happen if I keep giving it new inputs in the right doses on a regular basis? I don’t know. I may or may not feel smarter or see any visible outcomes, but I do know for a fact that the process of learning itself grows new neurons, and that can help reverse the cognitive decline that comes with ageing. So, instead of feeling expectations or fear that comes with anticipating failure, how about just letting the brain do its own thing that it has evolved to do? It is about establishing trust in the science of our biology, and that doesn’t have to involve any feelings we have for our selves. I find that oddly liberating.