Moving this blog to Substack

blog.emily.fan now redirects to emilyfan.substack.com

This blog is now at oldblog.emily.fan

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On Being Bold, Confident, and Kind to Myself

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  Why might we be so mean to ourselves? I like to think that I am accepting and forgiving of others , and that I make an effort to understand the challenges others face, yet my own inner critic is quite harsh. It seems to be a common experience, but why do we engage in such self-sabotage? My hypothesis is that my inner critic is driven by how I feel about how society judges me.   I see people be mean to each other on social media. I recall my parents’ harsh reprimandings in their attempts to make me a better person. I hear gossip. I falsely believed that the unkind statements, perhaps made by the person while they were in a bad mood, were how society was judging me. I was afraid of being “a bad person,” “lazy,” or the countless negative things others said. I believed that what others said about me was the scale that I would be weighed on. I was afraid that I wouldn’t be accepted by society. Having been socially awkward and lonely for a large chunk of my life, the inner critic...
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You Can Be Your Best Friend

Dad: I’m afraid that you’re going to be lonely living at grad student housing as an undergrad.  What I should’ve responded: my best friend is going to live here. They can completely empathize with me and will always make time for me. We will be spending a lot of time together. That person is me.  I realize that this above statement can sound extremely sad since loneliness and not having friends (besides yourself) in general can suck a lot. I’ve been there myself. However, I can’t force people to spend time with me. Realizing that I’m always going to be there for myself and can enjoy my own company can be incredibly freeing. If I can enjoy being with myself, I don’t need to be afraid of being lonely. Wouldn’t this ultimately free me from loneliness? Ironically, this post was inspired by my recent conversations with friends and other nice people. I’ll keep them anonymous in case they like being anonymous. 
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Not Knowing, Perhaps Never Knowing: Fundamental Questions in Life

I realized that a lot of the questions that I sought answers to probably won't be answered within my lifetime .  what does it mean to be a "good" person?  how do we do the most good in the world and what does that mean?  do we even want to try to do the most good?  what kinds of institutions / incentive structures that will bring the best in people and how do we make them happen? Religions and philosophies have evolved thousands of years trying to answer those questions, and more, and yet, we as a society do not seem to have come to a consensus unlike the fundamentals of math.  It honestly used to terrify me , that I wouldn't be able to know, that I might not be armed with enough knowledge to really know that what I am doing is good for society or myself, and accidentally follow the footsteps of the likes of Karl Marx, Adam Smith who seemed idealistic, and perhaps craved for a better society, but had their teachings warped in a way that may have caused a lot of ...
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