It Pays to Read: Reading is worth $960 an hour!

There's a story about a miser during the Victorian era who either kept a bond certificate or cash sitting in the bank for his entire life. When he withdrew his money, the buying power of his asset shrunk due to inflation. He ended up being poor at the end of his life.

What if you never read this story and lived this scenario? 43% of workers have less than $10000 for retire. Imagine how many more have no investment plan and are just shoving money into a savings account?

Reading allows you to relive the thought process of another human being. A good chapter book (no pictures) represents roughly a year to a thousands of years of human experience. If you read at a modest pace of 20 pages an hour, you could finish a 300 page book in 15 hours. Let's be modest and some author wrote a book in a year. Assuming that this writer was working 40 hours a week, for every one hour you read, you exchange 133 hours of the author's work!  If you assume that author is working at federal minimum wage, reading is worth $960/hr!

Let's say instead you read about ancient Rome. Let's exclude the author and count the total living hours of each Roman. On average there was roughly 50 million people living every year, and the Roman Empire was roughly 2000 years old. Let's say a book on the Roman Empire was 3000 pages. Assuming your 20 page reading rate, for every one hour of reading about Rome, you exchange roughly 76,000 man-YEARS of human experience! Instead of living and dying 1000 times, you can read for an hour!  If we assume the federal minimum wage again, that's $4.8 billion dollars an hour!  Take that quantitative easing!

I hope this is one reason to motivate you to read.

[caption id="attachment_389" align="aligncenter" width="300"] (My favorite book.  $15 USD) 

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Where's the Rock?

Pop music, yes.  Rock music, no. It's not popular in China.

And no, they're Japanese.

I haven't been exposed to too much to American rock, but I know something like Queen cannot currently exist within Chinese culture.

No, I'm not going to blame the Chinese Communist Party.  That's too easy.  Even a country as repressive as Russia has Pussyriot.

I blame the way "Chinese culture" (again I use this term loosely) views reading.

I agree with John Green in that reading is a means of expressing the human condition in ways that no other medium can.  Reading is valuable because it forces us to question or re-enforce our personal values.

Cao Xueqin's The Red Chamber from the Qing dynasty expresses the general sentiment of the role of reading:

"in the case of us girls it would probably be better for us if we never learned to read in the first place.  Even boys, if they gain no understanding from their reading, would do better not to read at all; if that is true of boys, it certainly holds good for girls like you and me.  The little poetry-writing and calligraphy we indulge in is not really our proper business.  Come to that, it isn't a boy's proper business either.  A boy's proper business is to read books in order to gain an understanding of things, so that when he grows up he can play his part in the governing the country."

(Cao, Xueqin. The Story of the Stone: The Crab-Flower Club. Trans. David Hawkes. Vol. 2. London: Penguin, 1977. Print.)

Be filial to your parents and study when you can.  Read about Confucian morals and anything relating to moral and social harmony.  That way you will live a happy and peaceful life with many babies.  Reading's function is utilitarian.  Beyond that reading is a waste of time.

"Now that you have your degree, how much do you earn?"

I can understand my parent's generation asking this question.  The amount of education and resources at my disposal is unheard in comparison to their background.

But when international students from China and Taiwan told me they've never read The Red Chamber, I was shocked and appalled!  Not only is a BEAUTIFUL piece of literature, the novel is incredibly critical of Chinese society.  Cao Xueqin forces you to question the happiness behind a conventional life, something most Chinese find too disturbing to ponder.

Rock music glorifies the feelings of the unique individual.

Listen to the lyrics to my favorite Japanese band Asian Kung Fu Generation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_IsnEZcl4E

Here's the English translation of this.

Ignoring the funny dark humor of the video, the lyrics have a hopeless tone.  Rock music belts about the human condition sucking because suck life occurs without our volition.  Once we sing about sucking, it establishes a sense of normalcy between the music and listener.  Sharing human emotion creates the feeling of empathy.

Reading about literature is valuable because it does the same thing!  Wanting to feel happy is easy because it's natural and intuitive, but so is feeling pain and recognizing suffering.  The lack of reception towards Chinese rock music is a symptom of a society that cannot fully cope with the existence of pain and suffering.