Month: December 2017

Why do the Indonesian people have a low interest in reading?

Originally published on 30 Dec 2017 10:00 PM

It will be so much better if you provide some statistics to go with the question, such as this one:

To save yourself a click, here are few of the things mentioned in the article:

Translated from article — The reading interest of Indonesians—especially children—is still very low. Data from UNESCO pointed out that the percentage of children who like to read is only 0.01%. That means, only 1 out of 10,000 children in Indonesia likes to read.

According to the statement from the founder of Yayasan Pengembangan Perpustakaan Indonesia (Indonesia Library Development Organization), Trini Hayati, one of the cause of low reading interest is difficulty in acquiring books. There is no point for high reading interest if there’s no book to read.

“Interest is definitely there, but to get a book is still difficult. So, the reading interest of children diminish in return,” said Trini, quoted by Kompas on Thursday, 11 May 2017.

The article continued and mentioned that the lack of proper public library in some provinces in Indonesia, such as in East Nusa Tenggara, is one of the contributing factor to the overall low reading interest of the nation. One of the literature enthusiast in East Nusa Tenggara, Wilfridus Babun, was quoted in saying that the local library in his area only have mere 50 books, which mostly consisted of adults books.

Translated from article — “Most of the books here are for highschool students and adults. It’s a shame since most of our visitors are kids,” said Wilfridus as quoted by Kompas on Tuesday, 2 May 2017.

As others have mentioned, it looks like the lack of “reading culture” is also apparent in a lot of families in Indonesia, which contributed to the low statistics as well.

Apart from things mentioned in the article, in my opinion, although Indonesians outside the middle class is arguably not big on book reading, I’d argue that Indonesia at large is getting much better in reading stuff online. This is quite apparent when you look at the growth of local websites such as Seword.com and other online resources available, including local news outlet like Detik.com and Kompas.com among others.

In comparison to one of our neighbor—having lived in Singapore myself—it is quite apparent that one of the reason Singaporeans are big on reading books, is because the huge level of investments in public library being put throughout the small country they have.

Image 1: National Library of Singapore. The massive structure stands tall at the city center of Singapore. All photos by Ken Yang. Source.

And just in case none of you have been inside, this is what you can expect to see once you enter the building:

Image 2: The amazing structure of National Library of Singapore from the ground floor. They don’t just invest all their money on shopping malls.

And how about the books? They get you all covered mate:

Image 3: Few of the bookshelves inside the library.

Where to read? Well…

Image 4: They provide both indoor and outdoor public area for one’s preference. Most people still read in air-conditioned indoor areas, although they still have a garden outside.

Tell me, with a library like that, who would not want to read?

To elaborate the point I made earlier—I don’t agree with much of being said here that Indonesians aren’t so much of being readers. As I suggested earlier, looking at our local social media contents, no matter how trivial and mindless they are, kind of shows how people in Indonesia actually have some knack in reading stuff—it’s just that surplus of energy is being shot at all the wrong target. In other words, I believe that Indonesians actually like reading, but it’s just there is no easy way to acquire good reading material.

Furthermore, to tell something I’ve noticed in Quora itself, the local topics such as Indonesia and Jakarta is arguably where I’m getting big part of my readership so far, which means that people here actually want to read, but they might actually lack access to reading material. So in a sense, I don’t think that it’ll do justice to generalize an entire 260+ million population as having “low interest in reading” solely because you don’t see people walking around with books on their hands all the time.

So, as mentioned per article, the take away is that:
“There is no point for high reading interest if there’s no book to read.”

Cheers.

Footnotes

  1. Indonesia second least literate of 61 nations

 

Have you found your life purpose and if so, how did you do it?

Originally published on 29 Dec 2017 10:01 AM

Everybody’s life is different from each other, so it is difficult to say that there is an absolute, singular way of figuring out a purpose of life. Still, if there’s anything I could say to answer the question, is this:

People usually figure out their purpose in life by exploring areas of life they inherently gravitate towards.

In other words, for the most parts, people find purpose and meaning of their lives by doing something they’re passionate about. You might remember the saying, “Choose a job you love and you will never have to work a day in your life”.

Of course, this is a kind of simplistic way of looking at it—not everyone has the luxury of “choosing” a very spesific job they knew they’ll love. A lot of people might be trapped in a job they don’t like, or working with people they despise. Still, being said that, I can be quite certain that nobody figured out their meaning of life by just sitting at home doing nothing. I am a believer that for people to be truly fulfilled, at the very least, we ought to find something we’re good at, and try to enjoy it as much as we can.

You might want to read my own personal experience on this. Who knows you might find it useful:

What my experience and observation tells me is that, there’s a pretty good chance a lot of people figured their purpose in life rather accidentally—much like how you bumped into your life-long partner when you least expect it. I believe that all in all, figuring out the purpose in life is a pretty organic process, where everyone has their own ways of making sense of their lives.

In a sense, you could say that if you live your life by following what others are doing, you might be trying to live someone else’s life, not yours. Thus, since you’re walking on someone else’s footsteps all the time, you might be led to a road that strays you away from the path of figuring out your own purpose in life. So, if you want to figure out the purpose of your life, I think it’s so much better to find your own ways through life yourself and not just blindly follow what others are doing.

Thank you for the request. Good luck.

During social interactions (people I know and don’t know, for example, at a barbeque) my brain is stunted, I don’t know what to say, and don’t know how to take the conversation further. What could it be?

Originally published on 29 Dec 2017 9:27 AM

Does that happen often? If it’s just very occasional sort of thing, I wouldn’t worry too much on that. You’re probably feeling a little anxious because you’re not used to your surroundings, and when you can’t cope with it, this kind of thing usually happens.

Other answers here already mentioned that it’s probably just normal anxiety when interacting with people, not to be confused with social anxiety, which is a debilitating mental condition usually leading to anti-social behaviors.

I guess it’s important to note that being anxious while meeting new people or getting yourself on uncomfortable social situations is pretty normal, especially if you’re still very young and are not used to dealing with too many new people all at once. What you can do about this, is to get out more and try to get used to it.

To give you some context, I remember during early days of my life, I was easily anxious around people too. I could recall quite a lot of things I did and said in the past that were pretty embarrassing, even by my own standard. It’s only until I went out of town and got into university, being forced out of my comfort zone and meeting a lot of new people that I’m gradually getting my stuff together. So don’t worry, you’re not alone. As long as it’s not too severe, I do think you shouldn’t worry too much.

Good luck.

Did you see Asian people wearing surgical masks in your country?

Originally published on 27 Dec 2017 4:18 PM

Here in Indonesia, yes, there are people wearing surgical masks. However, as far as I know, that surgical mask trend is far more popular in other Asian countries, most notably the East Asian countries like China, Japan or South Korea. At least that’s from my own travel experience.

Image 1: Japanese school girls wearing surgical masks. Source.

Some background readings about the trend:

While in other places, they wear masks to cover from viruses or as a fashion statement (they sell cute and funny looking masks there), here in Indonesia, people wear these masks mainly to cover up from the terrible air pollution when they’re strolling around places with motorcycles.

Image 2: In Indonesia, a lot of people travel around by motorcycles. Wearing masks is often encouraged mainly for health reasons. Source.

As far as my knowledge goes, in countries like Japan, people wear masks like this out of very unusual reasons.

Video: Why Do The Japanese Wear Masks In Public? | ASIAN BOSS.

And just in case some of you are wondering, these are the kind of “cute and funny” masks I was referring to:

Image 3: Montage of different kinds of fashionable masks. Images from various sources.

Thank you for the requests.

Footnotes

  1. In China, Cute Masks Combat Ugly Pollution

What proportion of Singaporeans can speak Indonesian today?

Originally published on 27 Dec 2017 12:10 PM

Singaporeans don’t actually speak “Indonesian”, but they definitely speak the “Malay” language—these languages, albeit slightly different, came from pretty much the same roots. In fact, Malay language is one of the official language in Singapore, which also happens to be the language used in Singapore’s National Anthem “Majulah Singapura” (Onward, Singapore).

Image 1: Lyrics of Majulah Singapura. Composed by Zubir Said in 1958.

When it comes to statistics, according to the General Household Survey 2015, the figure is as follows:

Image 2: Literacy & Language spoken by population in Singapore. As per 2015, Malay native speakers made up 10.7% of the total population.

So while the number of people who speaks “Indonesian” in Singapore is probably confined to those 2% “Others” figure (or unregistered), 10.7% of Singaporean speaks Malay, and should still be able to converse with Indonesian speakers with some ease, since these languages are still pretty similar despite all the differences.

Cheers.

Footnotes

  1. General Household Survey 2015

 

Can I play music from a phone to a PC via USB? I have no Bluetooth and WiFi available in my PC?

Originally published on 27 Dec 2017 11:49 AM

Technically, yes, you can still play music directly from your phone’s storage. But it’s best to just copy your music to your PC and play them from there. Mobile-to-PC connection is pretty unreliable if you ask me, even up to this date, especially with Android devices. Still, depending on your platform, this could be very easy to be done too.

If you’re using Apple products, transferring media with iTunes between your iOS device(s) and your PC is very convenient, so when it comes to music, this should be a piece of cake. However, the drawback about Apple products is—as you might have guessed—the lack of cross-platform compatibility to other devices from non-Apple platforms.

Android smartphones on the other hand tend to be more flexible. They usually provide you with more options in terms of its device-to-device connection, so you have more things you can do with it, such as browsing spesific folders and organize things the way you want it to be from your PC. This is impractical to be done with iOS, although you can still do it with the help of some 3rd party applications.

Good luck.

What is it with people never knowing what they want, and changing their mind daily about relationships?

Originally published on 27 Dec 2017 12:13 AM

I’m not quite sure myself, and especially whether people actually change their mind “daily”, but in my opinion it’s usually some combination of 1) general shift in our decisions, 2) some uncomfortable social and/or interpersonal problems and 3) the way our brains work.

1) General shift in decision making. It’s a common knowledge that people would often change their minds about their romantic relationships, and not always for the best reasons.

I’ve heard few very bizarre cases of last-minute cancellation of marriages, whose reasons would only be known by the people involved. I was lucky enough to hear few 2nd-hand information on why couples, close to being married, cancelled at last minute. While the details are still pretty murky, it looks like something as simple as few misspoken words from one of the family involved during pre-marriage discussion, could turn the tables around for the couples.

2) Some uncomfortable issues surrounding a relationship, as far as my experience goes, could potentially break a relationship apart even when things are going relatively well.

What I mean by this is those cases where you are in romantic relationship with someone from different skin color, cultural upbringing, religious faith or even something along the line of differences in political views. In my home country where people of different religious faiths often brush each other, this problem is especially very common, where one party might come into a sudden realization that things are not going to work out, regardless of the number of discussions being made about this sort of thing.

3) Our brain works chemically. This seems to be a bad news when it comes to things like romantic relationships.

Learning some psychology myself, I figured that our brains are very volatile, especially when you take hormonal changes into account. You could take a look at this following article for the details on this:

The few things to note here are our sex hormones (testosterone and estrogen), chemicals that affect emotions (dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin) and attachment hormones (oxytocin, vasopressin).

The way I understand this, basically when it comes to attraction and sexual love, you can’t trust your own brains—depending on the balance of chemicals in your brain, you might actually think differently. This, I believe, the reason that lies behind what they call, “blinded by love”, as people outside your sexual relationships (i.e. people with different chemical balance) might actually see something you couldn’t see, simply because you are too infatuated to see it. In other words, when you’re in love, your brain chemicals might be playing tricks on your thinking, possibly favoring a kind of reproductive prospects (getting laid).

So to sum up, it’s safe to say that when it comes to romantic relationships, it might be close to impossible for us human beings to be perfectly rational or consistent with our decisions, when you consider all the things that could affect our own decision making skills.

Thanks for the request.

What should you do if you don’t find any meaning in life anymore?

Originally published on 26 Dec 2017 10:46 AM

Short answer — I think you should just do something else in between, then you go back trying to find it again when you feel like it.

Long answer — I think you shouldn’t fret much about not finding any meaning of life once in a while. I honestly think not having any meaning in life is just part of being human, and whether we like it or not you can’t always be in constant state of having a consistent meaning of life. This means that even when you’re certain you’ve found a meaning for your life, there’s still that slight possibility that you might got it all wrong and have to start over from scratch. It might actually be more difficult that way since you’ve possibly hung onto that “meaning” for quite sometime by then.

Related reading:

I’m not sure if you really mean it when you said, you “can’t find meaning anymore” but I’d suggest to wait for a few days or so, and see if you can find a meaning at a later date. Have fun with life of no meaning! Who knows you’ll find a new one when you least expect it. Putting it in another way, I think finding the meaning of life is like finding a “soul mate”—you just can’t force yourself into finding it when it’s not immediately apparent.

So basically, you just have to sit back, relax and try again next time. Enjoy Netflix, video games or whatever you usually do to put your mind off the day-to-day routines. The point is, don’t forget to have fun while you’re looking for meaning of life. Even if you don’t find that meaning soon, at least you’re having fun. #yolo.

Thanks for the request. Good luck.

Is it true that in Indonesia today, Chinese Indonesian women prefer to date older white men over men from their own ethnic group?

Originally published on 25 Dec 2017 9:07 PM

Purely from observation as a Chinese-Indonesian (and an Asian) myself, I’d say that this is not too common. And just in case someone thought of “racism”, well, the way I see it, the reason for this might not be too clear cut. Meaning, it’s not exactly because racial differences that they’re not doing interracial marriages—men or women alike.

Much like any other Asians (especially East Asians), a lot of the Chinese here still maintain a kind of “traditional” view on romantic relationships, thus they are still rather reluctant to date people outside their culture—not solely skin color—it’s the culture. This means, for the most parts, Chinese here (men or women) won’t have much inclination to date people from outside their ethnicity, which include virtually other sort of people such as Caucasians, Austronesians, Arabs, Indians, Slavic or—even—Mainland Chinese, Taiwanese, Chinese-Singaporean, Japanese or South Koreans. In other words, many Chinese and some other Asians I knew tend not to date people outside their culture, especially if they’re still living in Asia. This is not to say those kind of relationships don’t exist—it is only to say that they are very uncommon.

To explain further, I’ve heard numerous stories as well about how relationships between Chinese from different countries (e.g. Indonesia, Malaysia, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan) is a kind of hit-and-miss scenario. Meaning, despite we’re all biologically belong to the “Chinese” umbrella, since we’ve brought up in very different cultures, things don’t always fall into place purely because we’re all Chinese—the similar skin color only helped the most on the initial sense of familiarity. I think the general mindset in dating for a lot of us, is still “prefer from the same culture”, although since here in Indonesia most people are Austronesians, people might be led to think it’s solely because of racism.

Just for the record—people outside the East Asian triangle might or might not know this, but despite the fact that Chinese, Japanese and Koreans tend to look pretty much alike, I’m pretty certain that we tend to see each other as “different”—much like how Javanese, Bataks and Balinese might actually see each other differently, despite looking pretty much alike. So really, in many senses, it’s not exactly a matter of skin color issue that the Chinese (or anyone else really) don’t do interracial or intercultural marriages.

Thanks for the request. Happy dating.

Is Indonesia heading towards middle-income trap? And what should Indonesia do to avoid middle-income trap?

Originally published on 25 Dec 2017 11:50 AM

Few other answers here have explained very well about the numbers and economics of it, so I’m just going to add few stuff from my own perspective.

Is Indonesia heading towards middle-income trap?

As mentioned by others, I personally believe Indonesia is still on its way to even face a direct risk of the middle-income trap, but this is not to say that the risk isn’t there—as far as I understand about risk in economy, the way the nation develop will eventually determine whether it will hit the wall or climb out of it. In other words, risks to be trapped in the middle-income trap would always be there, but whether or not it will happen, would depend highly on the development of a nation.

And what should Indonesia do to avoid middle-income trap?

As I mentioned, when it comes to reducing risks, it all boils down to the steps taken to reduce them. Despite the fact that, in my opinion, Indonesia is yet to face the direct risk of this, there are certainly few things to pay attention to when it comes to confronting this problem, mainly on the social of it.

Relationship Between Education / Social of Indonesia
Education is probably one of the more important things in a country that would benefit it as a whole, and it’s not only for the economy—by people having higher education, it would also increase quality of life of the general public, better decision making in life and also better social progress as a whole.

So, even when you look solely at the social of it, investing in education is never a bad idea. Still, the problem with a country like Indonesia is that the socioeconomic disparity in the country is very huge even by Southeast Asian standard.

This means that the students from low-income families do not receive the same education with the ones from the middle-to-upper class families, which, by effect, could potentially make the gap even wider, as the people from low-income family would be “stuck” doing low-wage jobs, thus might be unable to provide better education for their children, and lead their next generation to continue the cycle all over again out of the inherent financial inability to rise up above their class of origin.

In the middle class sector, there are problems as well, as I noticed most of them are pretty detached from the low working class people, to the point that it’s so obvious that they see them as less than real people. What I mean is that, since the disparity is huge, people seemingly couldn’t care less about people outside their own classes, to the point that it’s strikingly obvious.

I don’t know if any other people noticed this, but I’ve noticed that middle income people (or even the “newly rich” or OKB, Orang Kaya Baru, a derogatory term for people leveled up from a lower class) see people from a lower class as almost literally “lower” than them solely because they might appear shabby, don’t wear nice clothings, or dressed up in working uniforms as cleaners, waiters/waitresses or app-based transport drivers. This in turn created that situation where the middle class—the people that probably should know better, as they might originally came from a working class as well—don’t want to have anything to do with the working class, and see them as simply lazy, failures or “just there to clean up stuff”, thus ignoring them altogether in the big picture.

While this might appear to be very trivial, I believe that this very blatant segregation between the lower class and the middle class is a potential problem, as it certainly have raised some consistent issues especially for the factory workers.

Image: Bandung – Thousands of factory workers gathered up as Aliansi Buruh Jabar (West Java Worker Alliance) in front of Gedung Sate. They demanded rise in minimum wages of West Java province by 20 percent. Source.

Although I understand that a lot of these demonstrations might not always have the best intentions, it still doesn’t take away the fact that life is becoming more expensive by day in a lot of places in Indonesia, and it’s only a matter of time until people realize that they don’t have enough to go by with the same wage but more expensive cost of living.

Again—this, I argue, is partly to blame to the middle and upper class, who keep on pushing the standard of living upwards for themselves without considering the potential effect of those raised standards to the people who are struggling just to go by. Thus, all these things combined—the ever existing education gap, social segregation, consumerism—I believe would become an even bigger problem if no attention is drawn to this particular area.

To sum up, I believe that before we even think as far as foreseeing a potential risk in the future, it will benefit us as a whole to try to tackle some of the more apparent and immediate problems that have been presented to us quite consistently. Of course I’m not saying foreseeing a potential problem is a bad thing—as I certainly just did in this answer—but the way I see it, a country like Indonesia could use less foresight and actually start doing something about the condition.

If you’re not convinced, let’s just say that in Jakarta alone, I’ve seen unbelievable progress made by an administration focusing on immediate actions rather than endless “foresight” in forms of meaningless meetings that could take hours without actually coming up with anything. I believe that fact alone should make any rational person to sort out some of our priorities that might be severely outdated or, to the very least, inaccurate.

Thank you for reading this far.