Why Taiwan SUCKS in all areas except food & safety

[Yohan]

Winston, posted a link to the FB group "Foreigners in Taiwan". I was reading some of the posts. They all sound like Taiwan is this wonderful place. First of all. I was there and there is zero spontaneity at all. No cheerful people walking anywhere. It's not a fun place at all. All they had to do was write in their comments some facts as to why we're wrong and none of them did that.

I agree with Kangarunner.

Taiwan is for sure not a place to have fun.

Taiwan is nothing but an island with about 23 million people. A small place considering the landsize and population in other countries nearby.

It is OK to visit Taiwan for one or two weeks as a tourist for holidays, a round trip to see some places, but not much more, just my opinion.

Life is a bit similar to Japan, which is also not known for nice personal communication either. However Japan is larger, more space, more people, more nightlife, just more choice etc. and also politically not disputed.

I live in Japan since more than 40 years, but every year I feel I have to go out for a while for vacation/even after my retirement - and to make it clear, I am not going to Taiwan, but to Thailand, Philippines, Cambodia and Malaysia.

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Who are these foreigners, thinking Taiwan is the best place for them? Likely people who come from a place which is far worse, regarding crime/safety, medical care, low income for doing some manual work, dirty cities, and also Chinese among them who left mainland China/Hongkong for political reason...

For example Filipino workers will tell you that their life in Taiwan is much better than in their own country and not so difficult considering other countries to get visa for working for a few years....and also not far away to go back home from time to time...

[kangarunner]

It's no surprise that many of these people discover the pleasure or learning beyond what is politically correct or aligned, questioning the world and the status quo, later in their years, when the load from their work and family life has subsided a bit, or right when they retire. These days I am talking to a family friend who I barely knew before. He is a 59 and a respected urologist. As he edges closer to retirement, he is reopening his mind to knowledge and experiences beyond what his busy life would afford him. He is reading much more and much wider, he is learning a couple of new languages, he is getting curious about tech, AI, cryptos, etc.

Go to TN or somewhere else in the South in the US. They watch their same old football games and drink beer and go fishing into their 50s, 60s, 70s. They sit around and talk about the same boring shit. How's your sister doing? How's your wife doing?

The problem with the South is they say its reputation has a lot of "Down South" hospitality or soul to it. People don't want to admit that the history of slavery in the south made it one of the most darkest, depressing places to live in the US. Anyone who is well traveled knows that the blacks in the south are far, far different than the blacks in California or Northern areas such as Chicago or New York.

Winston talks about how everyone always says Taiwan is a great place and is fun and safe. I say that people from the South basically defend how shitty the region is and they do defend it with a dumb smile on their face. I hate the south. I hate Memphis. I hate TN. I hate the fact that these dumb humans put on their team colors and go like sheep to the football stadium to watch their grown men throw a stupid ball around.

The men in the south literally put on 100% camoflauge and wake up at 3 AM in the morning to go hunt ducks. Then after they hunt, they will take photos of all the animals they hunted and post them proudly on Facebook.

I hate how ugly the women look in the south. I've never in my life felt any attraction towards white women. I have no idea why the men there cannot see with their own eyes how ugly most of the women are.

So Winston thinks that people in Taiwan are NPCs. I have to say the same thing about the south. I think TN rednecks are NPCs.

Memphis. I still hate that shitty place and I'll never get over my resentment for it for as long as I live.

[publicduende]

@Lucas88 @publicduende Let me ask you guys this. I made a video on my channel and then Winston posted it in a FB group "Foreigners in Taiwan". A bunch of them wrote comments on my video saying, "The problem is you" and another: "You are utterly clueless". I will calmly say that if they are right and they know better about Taiwan, then why didn't they post facts in their comment saying why I'm wrong and why Taiwan is indeed a great place, with lots to do, and is easy to make friends and have fun. Why didn't they do that instead of making those ad hominem comments?

Winston, posted a link to the FB group "Foreigners in Taiwan". I was reading some of the posts. They all sound like Taiwan is this wonderful place. First of all. I was there and there is zero spontaneity at all. No cheerful people walking anywhere. It's not a fun place at all. All they had to do was write in their comments some facts as to why we're wrong and none of them did that.

@kangarunner

I don't cheer for people who are sending @Winston ad-hominem attacks, that's not good. Yet, it might be true that those foreigners on the forum might be having a genuinely different experience from Winston's. Why? Who knows. They might be younger, they might have a job in Taiwan, which pays all their bills and gives them a daily chance to rub shoulders with locals, perhaps they speak Mandarin or even Hokkien. Or, perhaps, they keep within their fun bubble with fellow expats and don't even factor in the locals.

The fact that you can't find cheerful people in Taiwan doesn't mean that all Taiwanese, young and old, from all walks of life, are brainless zombies. I found the same thing in Japan. If you see the Japanese walking down the street or sitting in a subway train, they are all quiet, looking down or peeking into their phones, not saying a word. The picture of a dystopic society, it makes you think.

Then you meet Japanese people just outside restaurants, as they say goodbye before parting ways, and you can see glimpses of humanity: they laugh, they crack some simple jokes, they seem to wrap up their evening communicating joy and pleasure. Or you walk down the more hip areas of Osaka and Tokyo and you find young people who laugh, smile and talk, in every possible combination: young couples holding hands, clusters of girls, small groups or boys, all "interestingly" dressed.

What I am simply trying to say is that, when judging an entire nation, one should try and get a sample of that population in different social contexts. Even when I was in Taipei I did see some Taiwanese youth smiling and laughing, or talking, Sure, they're quieter than, say, an Italian or a Spaniard. Sure, they might not be throwing themselves into a conversation if they don't know how to contribute to it (the polite thing to do, usually!).

Yet, calling them brainless and devoid of a soul, that's too much IMHO.

If you could meet some of these people in Memphis, TN you have to wonder if there's some truth to the soulless theory or NPC theory. There was a post on FB from a Memphis person. It said that in the South, the values are: "Faith, Family, and Football". I had to laugh out loud when I read that. There's nothing inherently wrong with those 3 things. But imagine how empty an intelligent person's life would feel if they lived in a place like Memphis where everyone around them always talked about Jesus and God and always talked about the hometown football team? There are literally people born in Memphis who live there their entire lives. They have no intellectual curiosity to ask what is out there in the world. These people marry, have kids, get divorced, then remarry and have more kids. Imagine a place so vapid and uninteresting that you're the only sane person there who actually realizes everything wrong with it. But everyone around you just goes on about their daily routine like everything is happy all the time.

Any time I want a good laugh I just go to a Memphis local news site and look at all the crime stories. Or go on /r/memphis and it reminds me how uninteresting and uneventful their ratshit lives are.

There are people like that everywhere in the world, Lucas. The Memphis-like people are the same UK people Little Britain (the comedy show) would brutally mock. There's the under-educated, those with an under-developed sense of curiosity or ambition. Not everybody is the same. Yet, and here is my "gnostic" certainty everybody is endowed with a soul. Then upbringing, education, personality and life opportunities do the rest. I can see this even on myself: yes I lived in London and then other parts of the world since I was 24 and I am fairly open-minded. Yet, I can tell the difference with fellow Italians I met along the way, who lived around the world and were born in Rome or Milan, instead of a small town in the South.

Living a flat, boring life is all these people know. For you or I, it might look like it's a life not worth living. For them, it's all they know.

It's the famous Japanese proverb, I no naka no kawazu taikai wo shirazu. The frog in the well knows nothing of the ocean.

[publicduende]

You seem to want to insist that human differences in cognition, perception, behavior, etc. are mostly due to upbringing and opportunities. While the influence of those things cannot be negated, I would argue that such things as genetic dispositions, individual upper limits with regard to various abilities (strongly influenced by genetics), and even different levels of soul evolution and energetic constitution (if your worldview permits these sorts of considerations) account for human differences just as much as upbringing and opportunities, or perhaps even more so.

I am not denying that human differences are imprinted in the DNA. Nature and nurture, to summarize.

What I don't believe in, or, better, I cannot reconcile with my world view, is that some human beings are different because "they have no soul". They all have a soul and maybe, whoever programmed our incarnations destined that soul to live a bout of incarnate existence in a society they're not entirely fit for.

Even if we accept that all human beings are endowed with a soul, it certainly doesn't follow that all souls are equal in terms of their development and energetic constitution. It could be the case that individual units of consciousness go through an evolutionary process through a series of transmigrations, with some having reached a more advanced level of soul evolution than others. Higher soul evolution could theoretically allow for a greater store of information accumulated through lifetimes of experience, as well as keener perceptual abilities and a greater upper limit for complex cognition, thus accounting for the massive differences we observe regarding the level of thinking, scope of interests, and behavioral proclivities of human beings.

I totally agree with the above. Souls exist at infinitely wide nuances of experience, cognition, wisdom. Even if the memory of past existences is erased at every new incarnation, the baggage of that soul is still present and may well manifest itself in the way we go about its life on Earth.

This explanation may well account for the difference in human thought, perception and feeling, and action. I am just rejecting the postulate that some human beings are soulless, as if nature decided to let them exist at an inferior plane of consciousness. If Gnosis has to be believed and followed, one of the goals of incarnate life is to challenge a soul into elevate itself spiritually despite its limitations.

But even if we limit ourselves to a mundane level of reality, there are obviously undeniable genetic differences which shape human cognition and behavior. Genome-Wide Association Studies can already identify gene variants that polygenically influence such traits as intelligence, extraversion, openness to experience, empathy, autism, etc. Out of these traits, I can especially see intelligence and openness to experience really shaping how somebody interacts with the world. Obviously somebody with low or even medium IQ isn't likely to develop much intellectual curiosity while those deficient in openness will rarely open themselves up to new perspectives (what @Winston would describe as "NPC" traits).

So no, it's not just to do with upbringing and opportunities; we all have a unique biological inheritance and possibly even a different soul and energetic constitution that strongly influences our cognitive abilities, behavioral tendencies and other personality traits.

We're not all the same. We're not all equal. I wish people would stop trying to peg everybody into a single hole while disingenuously arguing that any conceivable human differences are simply due to inequality of opportunities just because it sounds nice and inclusive.

I know we're not all equal. Once more, all I am saying is that all of us are endowed with a soul at birth. If life on Earth were a race, we are all drivers given a car. There might be better or worse drivers, driving better or worse cars. Yet, a driver and a car to each of us it is.

[Winston]

@publicduende it seems you are idealistic and don't like to admit ugly truths, right? Lucas is right that we are not all equal and all the same. That's too idealistic. Let me ask you this. People say that cats and dogs have souls too. If that's so then do you claim that cats and dogs have the same self-awareness and consciousness that we do? lol. Of course not. You see what I mean? Not all souls are the same. There could be different types of souls. NPCs may have a soul like you say, but it could be a totally different soul than ours. It could be an AI soul created by the matrix for NPCs to serve the matrix only? Kind of like how Sims characters may have temporary AI souls in order for them to function in the game?

Another theory is that NPCs have souls in the same way animals do, it's just a life force that keeps their body alive. But they do not have divine spirits. The soul is still part of the matrix and ties you to the astral dimension outside of this matrix, which is where you go in the afterlife. The controllers want you to be attached to your soul and view yourself as a soul, because the soul is still part of their matrix, which is an energy extraction loosh farming matrix. But they don't want you to see yourself as a divine spirit.

This makes some sense too. It could be NPCs have souls, but not a divine spirit. Are you gonna claim now PD that everyone has a divine spirit too? lol. I highly doubt it. You are too generous PD and give NPCs too much benefit of the doubt. Maybe you are too idealistic?

[Winston]

@kangarunner

Keep in mind that even Rock has never fully explained why he likes Taiwan or what's so great about it. All he has ever said on the forum and in person is this: "Taiwan is clean and safe and efficient and things run smoothly, unlike the Philippines." In every post about Taiwan on this forum, that's all he has ever said. Obviously, cleanliness, safety, and efficiency doesn't make for a good happier abroad destination. That doesn't give you happiness, romance, or human connection. Rock never said that Taiwan was happy or had good vibes or good connection. He avoided talking about vibes and energy because to him, those things are subjective and don't matter. His excuse is that he only understands practical things like money and business. It's all a cover, because he doesn't want to talk about things that are important and go against what he says. Obviously to be happy, you need more than just efficiency and safety and cleanliness. Rock never wanted to face that or deal with it. This is true of other expats in Taiwan too. They never explain why Taiwan is good or great or why they are happy there. When I ask them, they have no answer. Same as Rock. No real answer. It's a reality breakdown. It may be a sign that they are all NPCs too. Because NPCs can't answer something they are not programmed to answer.

Keep in mind this quote by Gandhi "Even if you are in a minority of one, the truth is still the truth."

Also this quote by Google AI:

The quote, "A sane person to an insane society must appear insane," is attributed to Kurt Vonnegut. It highlights the idea that when societal norms deviate significantly from what is considered rational or healthy, those who adhere to reason and sanity might be perceived as outliers or even mentally unwell by the majority.

[publicduende]

@publicduende it seems you are idealistic and don't like to admit ugly truths, right? Lucas is right that we are not all equal and all the same. That's too idealistic. Let me ask you this. People say that cats and dogs have souls too. If that's so then do you claim that cats and dogs have the same self-awareness and consciousness that we do? lol. Of course not. You see what I mean? Not all souls are the same. There could be different types of souls. NPCs may have a soul like you say, but it could be a totally different soul than ours. It could be an AI soul created by the matrix for NPCs to serve the matrix only? Kind of like how Sims characters may have temporary AI souls in order for them to function in the game?

Another theory is that NPCs have souls in the same way animals do, it's just a life force that keeps their body alive. But they do not have divine spirits. The soul is still part of the matrix and ties you to the astral dimension outside of this matrix, which is where you go in the afterlife. The controllers want you to be attached to your soul and view yourself as a soul, because the soul is still part of their matrix, which is an energy extraction loosh farming matrix. But they don't want you to see yourself as a divine spirit.

This makes some sense too. It could be NPCs have souls, but not a divine spirit. Are you gonna claim now PD that everyone has a divine spirit too? lol. I highly doubt it. You are too generous PD and give NPCs too much benefit of the doubt. Maybe you are too idealistic?

I don't know what more to say, @Winston. I agree with @Lucas88's POV that a person's behaviour is the grand total of a multitiude of factors, including genetics and predisposition, personality, upbringing, disparate life events and opportunities.

From this, to say that some humans do not have a soul, or have the same soul as an animal, it's not an ugly truth, it's simply not compatible with what Gnosis and all esoteric texts say about humanity. I personally don't your matrix/NPC theory holds much water. I see is as a way for you to substantiate your conviction that many (most?) Taiwanese are cold, distant, and boring.

I told you many times and won't stop reterating - sometimes those quiet men who don't speak much and go about their lives, boringly, might give immense contribution to our lives. Staying in Taiwan, would you consider, say, a semiconductors engineer who pioneered technology you and I use everyday, an NPC only because he will be reluctant to talk to strangers, or discuss alternative science, spirituality, etc.?

I am not an idealistic on this, @Winston. I just think this conviction of yours, you have been banging about for months, is simply a projection of your frustration towards the Taiwanese. I may understand the frustration, but calling normal, hard-working family men soulless or, worse, having the soul of an animal...that's quite insulting to them.