Eric Tian

An old high school friend recently asked me who my closest friends were. I thought for a moment, thinking of who I spend the most time with, who I trust the most and who I have learnt the most from, and I realised that most of my best friends are dead. In fact, most of them don’t even know I exist.

Books, blogs and podcasts give unprecedented access to people and ideas. Through writings and recordings we can learn from the greatest, most influential minds in the world and bear witness to the most amazing literary novels in history. This is why I get so emotional when exploring a bookstore – I sense the legacy and wisdom behind these mountains of pages but lack the time and energy to read them all.

I am fortunate to have some close human connections who I can live life alongside. But alongside my living friends are Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Friedrich Nietzsche, Charles Bukowski, Malcolm Gladwell and dozens other literary and podcast giants, people who are mostly dead and have surely never heard of me, yet still guide and teach me day after day.

It is the greatest privilege.

In statistics, expected values (EVs) are the product of each of the possible outcomes by the probability that each outcome will occur and then summing those numbers.

For example, say that each time you flip a coin, heads gets you $10 and tails gets you $0. Your EV would be $5 since there’s a 50% chance you will earn either $10 or $0, and $10 * 0.5 + $0 * 0.5 = $5.

All of our daily decisions have EVs. If we spend 10 minutes going for a run, there are many possible outcomes, including soreness, enjoyment, euphoria, getting injured and getting fitter. Importantly, the likelihood and the desirability of each individual outcome is on a case-by-case basis. A child just learning to walk may have vastly different EVs compared to a seasoned marathoner. The child may be likely to hurt themselves and cry if they attempt to run whereas the marathoner may enjoy it since they have developed it as an expertise and it is part of their lifestyle.

It’s fun to think about the different things we do and the EVs we can hope to get from each. For example, writing is one of my activities with the highest EV. There are very little outcomes that are bad but many that are amazing, such as developing clarity of thought and connecting with readers. Even though the likelihood of the amazing is fairly low, all things considered writing ends up having a high EV.

Being considerate of people is another activity with a high EV. If you like to treat others with respect, smile regularly and remember details, the likelihood of a bad outcome is low. You will probably get better outcomes than if you were an asshole. And over time, the accumulation of these acts may reward you.

How would our lives change if we strived towards high EVs, activities that would challenge us and push us towards positive change, and dumped our low EVs, activities that keep us dormant and perhaps even make us regress a little?

I think it would be quite the experiment.

I have a love-hate relationship with cycling up hills.

I hate it because it hurts. Your legs are on fire because every pedal is a single legged squat. As well as the physical strain, you are moving at a snail’s pace and the disconnect between effort and result is discouraging.

I love it because of the top. You reach the top and you think, Finally, the pain is over, and my body can relax, and when gravity takes over and you begin flying down the hill the freedom makes the suffering all worth it.

Today I rode up the west gate bridge in Melbourne as part of a 50km bike race. I was not prepared for how steep it was. When I saw it from a distance, cyclists looked like ants climbing a wall of concrete and many were walking their bikes along the side. The first 100m was already tough and as I hit the steepest section, my legs were already burning. My gears shifted to the lowest setting and I pedalled as fast as I could but barely moved faster than walking speed. It was painful and disheartening.

But after what felt like an eternity, I reached the top. And oh god, when I reached the top I felt like crying. My legs were spent, my arms were shaking and my lungs were on the verge of collapse. But as I tipped past the summit and let gravity carry me down, it felt like heaven.

Would I have finished the race faster if there was no bridge to cross? Probably. But that race would also have been boring. The hills, the annoying traffic lights, the weird bumps in the road, these are what make races interesting. Suffering up the bridge and its thrilling descent was the highlight of the whole 50km.

Sometimes the funnest parts of life aren’t the easiest or the happiest or the most successful, but the ones that involved declaring a challenge, a challenge that secretly scared you and gave you doubts about your competency, and finding a way to emerge past it, even if it killed parts of you in the process.

The hills are what make the race.

Not every good thing needs to be difficult.

Studying doesn’t need to be difficult. Just do one Anki card, watch five minutes of a lecture, review one set of notes.

Exercise doesn’t need to be difficult. Just walk for ten minutes, do one push-up, hold one stretch.

Reading doesn’t need to be difficult. Just read one chapter, one news article, one blog post.

Assuming that tasks are difficult creates unnecessary friction to get started; a shame, since getting started is often the most important thing.

Today while in a bedside tutorial a neurologist told our group of medical students, “When you are talking to a patient, you need to go back to when you were three. What did you always ask?” None of us answered.

“Why? Why? Why?”

Always keep digging, he explained. There is more to one’s medical history, social history and history of presenting complaint than what is initially revealed. There are more stories longing to be told, more emotions to uncover, more meaning behind this conversation. If you are impatient or take someone at their word, you will miss a whole lot. And with enough time and listening, you might even begin to understand them.

I’ve noticed that a common feature of my lowest, most depressive moods is a profound lack of curiosity. When life and nature and people are no longer interesting, depression is at your doorstep. The world turns lifeless, smells disappear and nothing surprises you. When I attempted suicide many years ago I wrote in my journal, “The world looks grey. I cannot see colours. My world once full of beauty is now meaningless.”

One of the reasons I decided to live was because of a garden bush near my apartment. It belonged to a house a few doors down, one I had walked past many times but never noticed, and what struck me was its colour. The bush was by no means impressive – it was disorderly and unkempt – but amidst the pitch black sky and the grey filter it threw over everything, this bush seemed to defy all odds and shine bright green. The vividness of its shade was extraordinary.

And then I turned my attention to the house the bush belonged to. I saw there were engravings on the ceiling and that it was shaped like a palace. The design was actually quite lovely. On the front wall was a sculpture of a Greek-looking face with curly hair. “I wonder who that is?” I thought. And suddenly my world became more interesting, less unmanageable.

They say that curiosity killed the cat, but I suspect that far more lives, conversations and beauty have been lost by a lack of wonder than too much.

“The most important thing is to never stop questioning.” Albert Einstein wrote. “Curiosity has its own reason for existing.”

Team sports are a funny thing.

Compared with individual sports, the lows are lower. If one person makes a mistake, the whole team suffers. One mispass, one slip, one lapse of attention results in not just one person’s demise but that of the whole group. You are only as strong as your weakest link.

Yet compared with individual sports, the highs are also higher. One person’s victory is the whole team’s victory. When you rely on other people, as you must in team sports, you achieve greater things than if there were just multiple copies of yourself. Your teammates can amplify your strengths and cover your weaknesses. And in this process, you forge new friendships and a bond that runs deeper than most acquaintances.

Even though I’ve competed for many years in table tennis and distance running, my most memorable sporting experiences were in volleyball, a sport I only played seriously for one year in high school. I remember being terrible when our team first came together – forgetting positions, fumbling passes, missing serves, and the frustration that came with miscommunication. I hated that the whole team lost a point off of one person’s mistake. But I also remember the exhilaration we felt when we pulled off a rehearsed play, began to serve, receive and spike more consistently and having our team progress as a unit, beating teams we previously lost to. I cried more in that year of teamwork than all my years of individual sports, tears of both pain and joy.

The losses hurt more when you had six on a court. The wins also felt more glorious. The whole experience was more exhilarating, more addicting.

Not far from the hospital is a vietnamese cafe that makes amazing banh mis for $8-9. I discovered it thanks to my partner’s recommendation and have visited it regularly these last few weeks.

All the banh mis are delicious but my favourite order is the crispy pork. I rarely eat pork but the one here is my guilty exception. I have ordered it twice this week and have been very happy both times.

Today I went in for a late lunch, ready to play the dance of scanning the menu when I already know what I want, when the shop owner looked at me, smiled and said, Crispy pork? At first I thought I misheard him since he said it so casually, like him saying, Good day, or How are you, but then I saw he had already put the price on the counter machine. He had remembered my order.

This is the first time any store has remembered my order. I’ve never particularly cared about this since the food is the same regardless, but this small acknowledgement was very touching. I suddenly felt that my previous visits were meaningful, that the store owner didn’t take me for granted, but remembered my face and made the effort to associate my order with it. He must have over 100 customers a day and the thought that he was able to remember me out of all of them was comforting.

Too touched and shocked for words, I nodded and paid on my phone.

One of the best ways you can appreciate someone is to remember the things they have told you. In this era of digital dementia, memory is a scarce resource. So if someone knows that they occupy just a little bit of your storage space, it can be a big deal. And maybe, this comfort will unlock more trust and openness in the future.

Here’s to more crispy pork orders.

When we read a novel, we expect characters to change. If a character at the end of a journey is the same as when they started then it was a pretty lousy journey. Every good story has change and conflict scattered throughout to test the characters and build them into people worth reading about. These stages of growth are signalled through chapters.

There is a book written in reality too: the story of our lives, and we are writing it every day. To make this book into an interesting story, it helps to think what chapter we are living in and let that guide our focus. Here are three ways to do this.

First, remember that we cannot stay in this chapter forever. There are more hurdles to overcome, more giants to battle and more riches to discover. We were not supposed to stay stagnant here. You will eventually graduate, drift away from friends and live independently. And indeed, despite the uncertainty, you will need to.

Second, remember that this chapter exists for a reason. Whatever lesson this chapter is supposed to teach us – love, learning, suffering, discipline – it plays a role in the larger story. This chapter might be entirely different to a previous chapter. It might even feel you are writing a tangent, a dumb side plot or ruining the progress you’ve made earlier. No matter. Good journeys are rarely linear but often messy and random. Change course if you so desire but keep on writing.

And lastly, recognise when a chapter is coming to an end. A graduation, a promotion, a new job, a marriage, a death – these are all daunting but necessary transitions. No interesting character can come about in safe seclusion. Step forthrightly into your new adventure.

And maybe, at the end, we will have something worth reading about.

A few days ago I went to to unlock my bike from the apartment carpark and was met with a surprise: my front wheel had been stolen. Not the back wheel, not even my lights – just the front wheel. My bike, which normally hung from the rack by the front wheel, now dangled like a dead branch. The only thing holding it to the rack was my D-lock. It looked pathetic, like something from a trash pile.

What was worse was that just one year ago my previous bike had been stolen from this same carpark, in nearly the same spot. And around that time my housemate’s front wheel had been stolen from this spot too. It was a little absurd that this kept happening.

This morning I dragged my broken bike to the bike store to buy a new wheel. Dragged is an appropriate verb – the store is usually a 15 minute walk or a 5 minute bike ride but this arrangement took 30 minutes. A bike without a front wheel is difficult to walk because you need to hold up the front of the frame so it doesn’t fall on the ground and so you are left holding constant bicep curls. It was like pushing a poorly designed, obese unicycle. Due to this awkward situation my half-bike and I could not move faster than a crawl and we were frequently met with looks of pity from passers-by. And all this time I knew that once we eventually reached the bike store, the cost would be at least $200 for a replacement. It was all very sad and I began to feel sorry for myself.

But during this walk, near the peak of my irritation, I stopped at a red traffic light and looked up at the sky. There I was met with a gorgeous canvas of grey and blue. It was mesmerising, a serene mix between sunny and cloudy. Around me I heard dogs barking, couples laughing and two high schoolers hollering as they rode scooters past me without helmets on. And all of a sudden, I realised that it was a beautiful day and this trivial bike problem nearly made me miss it.

A strange thing happens when we see that there is good in the world, and that it is worth noticing and fighting for – our worries begin to dissolve. When put in the grand scheme of the universe, what was once a tragedy now becomes trivial. We are free to laugh at ourselves and take ourselves less seriously. It is a feeling of lightness.

Being the hero of our imagination is in many ways, a curse. When we have the spotlight on ourselves by default we miss the world passing by. We miss vivid colours, beautiful sounds and heavenly tastes. We miss interesting conversations, complex ideas and kind people. It’s like playing Pokemon and never leaving your house. There is so much more to learn, live and explore.

Let us open our eyes and see what we can with them before they close forever.

Today I was walking to the library when I encountered an old man. He was standing still on the sidewalk, wearing a thick grey sweater and brown shorts, muttering something to himself. As I got closer, I heard that he was repeating one phrase over and over again.

It will be fine. It will be fine. It will be fine.

Just then it began to rain. Still he stood there, chanting. Do you want an umbrella, I asked him. He looked up, surprised by my presence, then felt his forehead, as if only just realising he was outdoors, and hurried away without a word. As he went away I noticed he walked with a limp and wasn’t wearing any socks. His white ankles stuck out against the backdrop of brick buildings like a daisy in soil.

My friend, I wanted to say to him, I have no idea what horrors and hardships you have seen, how broken and beaten down the world has left you in, and how long you have been chanting this wish, but I also pray your situation will be fine, whatever it is. It is dangerous to hope, but in many times hope is all we have.

“Hope is the thing with feathers” by Emily Dickinson:

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.