The Other Wes Moore Chapter 7-8 epilogue & afterword

    Now after reading this book, yes, we are a product of our environment. By our own personal qualities, showing and following the environment influences our values, goals, aspirations and behavior patterns. Since we are social animals, our self-esteem and self-assessment is 100% dependent on comparison with others, and we simply cannot escape this pattern. People are given different expectations by their elders in the family, depending on their environment. 

    The social environment and the environment in which we live are a product of our own and the group's perceptions, and are artificially created by ourselves and the group. To this extent, we are in a relationship with our environment, as creator and creature. Our artificial factors determine the factors of the environment, and the environment changes, as a result of the artificial factors. And on another level, it is that we are living in, and then being influenced by, the environment that we have created. This level of our relationship with the environment is that of the influenced.

Just like the idea I had when I wrote the first blog about this book, the family is part of the environment. And the influence that family has in the early years can have a significant impact on us as adults. What happens in a typical Chinese family is that parents have high expectations of their children, or parents' own unfulfilled aspirations from their youth are imposed on you in an I'm-good-for-you kind of way. The most common thought that some Chinese parents instill in their children is, "I suffered a lot to have you." "Why don't you be considerate of me." "Everything I do is for your own good." "I'm your parent, how could I possibly hurt you." In other words, moral kidnapping. And the way these parents look out for you is to take away everything you're interested in, what they don't think is useful. What they think is useful is studying. They can understand you studying until midnight, but they won't praise or even think you can do better once you try to relax. They will say things that will make you mentally condemned and stressed at the same time. Traditional Chinese parents will never understand how much every word they say hurts their children, and if they can't handle that hurt, you will become a useless person in their eyes. Having traditional Chinese parents is very suffocating. People who grow up with such parents in China spend almost their entire lives running away from their family of origin or reconciling with themselves.

This is the impact of the family of origin environment. In the original blog, I used my own family of origin and my friend's family of origin as a comparison, and it is obvious that the impact of the family of origin is great. I owe my upbringing to my mother and grandparents. Their education and communication style made me who I am now, and I am very grateful for the care and education they gave me. It is because of the influence of my family of origin that I have grown up to be a child who can be trusted by my parents. My friend, on the other hand, is the opposite of me. Her family of origin is negative, for example, her parents' marriage has broken up and they are separated. Through my conversations with her, I learned that her mother would consider anything she wanted to be a waste of money. Even if she earned her own money to buy what she wanted, her mother would blame her for not honoring her mother first when she earned money. My parents, on the other hand, would satisfy me when I asked for something that I wanted, as long as it didn't seem useless. And if I earn my own money, my parents will give me recognition, and remind me not to waste it. Her mother doesn't praise her for her B+ grades. Her mother thinks, if you can get a B+, why can't you get an A, why not do better. My mother, on the other hand, was very comfortable with my studies because I was the type she didn't have to worry about and would tell me that she wouldn't require my grades to be great, she said she would only require me to be average. I still remember what she said: "Mom and Dad are very ordinary people, we will not ask you to be much better. We just want you to be able to support yourself in the future, so that we can rest assured." I'm very grateful that my parents don't oppress me. The above is also a manifestation of the environment, different family environments raise children with different outlooks.

    If we put aside the word environment, we actually find that at the core we are still influenced by ourselves. That is, what we create ourselves is qualifying us. Yet the environment is only as good as the human element, and the human element is only as good as the environment. So this circular process, its own illusory circular nature, he is actually limiting ourselves. Therefore, our correct perception of the environment is crucial to determine whether we can, in a sense, break away from this illusory environmental cycle created by ourselves, so that we can see the correct relationship between ourselves and the environment from the perspective of a third party.