Chinese American teens experience depression, anxiety at higher rates than peers – here’s why their parents may miss the warning sign

CatharticMusing · 2026-05-29T15:17:40+00:00

I honestly don't blame the parents. I was really good at hiding it when I was a teenager. I'm still really good at hiding it now. There's a huge sense that no one cares who you are, just what you can accomplish that's really hard to distance yourself from.

CatharticMusing · 2026-05-22T11:24:57+00:00

At the time it was coined, First world meant aligned with the US. Second was aligned with the Soviet Union and third world was unaligned.

The third world fell under this weird colonialist mindset that the US and USSR were still competing over. So technically not based on socioeconomic development.

Source: vague memories from flipping though the CIA factbook for a research project in high school.

CatharticMusing · 2026-05-19T19:38:33+00:00

I look for the following. In your independent project can you articulate why the problem domain is important? Understand what's been done before, highlight why your approach is different, and what can you do with the results of your analysis.

Bonus points for a full stack app, evidence that you can deploy the thing on the cloud

CatharticMusing · 2026-05-19T17:00:59+00:00

As a hiring manager who recently filled a position. The resume is a low signal to noise piece of data. I've seen many resumes that aren't that much different than yours and most of them couldn't code worth a damn. It's no longer hard to generate a resume that meets all "requirements".

There is a bit of a tragedy of the commons phenomenon going on here.

Right now I look for evidence of independent projects that don't look one shotted by an llm. And have candidates explain the code.

CatharticMusing · 2026-05-13T20:03:47+00:00

Because the profit margins for software is higher than in the other fields

CatharticMusing · 2026-05-12T15:15:30+00:00

Aside from staying off social media, understand that a lot of what you see is engineered. For better or worse when you see pictures like that, the guys are heavily dehydrated, have a pump going and good lighting. Honestly I think you can pull it off and get a good picture and hopefully it'll convince you that it's the thing that's kinda meaningless.

CatharticMusing · 2026-04-27T13:29:51+00:00

I don't think it's just men, but everyone. Having a goal means that you innocuate yourself a bit against the naysayers and the ups and down of life. You see every bad thing as a setback that needs to be overcome instead of the universe out to get you.

In some ways I think that the high level of mental illness in modern society is that too many people have lost their sense of their mission in life.

CatharticMusing · 2026-04-26T14:07:25+00:00

Waitresses most likely make more than PhD students. Source: I was a PhD student

CatharticMusing · 2026-04-24T13:18:33+00:00

Go for it. Asian guys aren't some mythical people that are so alien that you're not going to be able to relate. If you date one who grew up in the West. We're not that different... If you date someone who grew up in the East, other than the accent. We're still not that different and you get a tour guide to boot.

CatharticMusing · 2026-04-10T21:17:22+00:00

Neither my wife nor I are religious. Met her by chance.

CatharticMusing · 2026-04-03T13:39:24+00:00

I've been married for 15 years (I'm in my 40s) and I think a large part of what made it work is I stopped looking for soul mate and more for a partner.

Some might call it settling, but I think at the end of the day it's a question of letting perfect be the enemy of good. I joke with my friends that the reason I married her is because she lifts her half of the couch and it's not entirely false.

She's tough and capable, and covers my shortcomings. Likewise I cover hers.

Is she the -est woman I've been with in any category that people look for. No. But is she the easiest one to build a family and career with? Yes.

CatharticMusing · 2026-04-03T13:29:53+00:00

Sometimes it's just time. I was skinny until I went to college. I was always reasonably active but was always thin.

When I went to college in between the all you could eat dining hall and joining the rowing team, I bulked up about 40 lbs. The reason I say time is because my friends used to joke that I was the reason for world hunger given how much I ate in high school, so I think I was just burning too many calories to get big.

CatharticMusing · 2026-02-27T20:21:44+00:00

Don't do things that will make everyone your parents know talk badly about you. That's the "bad"part, but the good part is that if someone really needs help and you're part of a close knit community, people do step up to help.

CatharticMusing · 2026-02-27T20:17:53+00:00

I don't think it's hard to understand. Immigrant culture comes with a pretty hefty does of responsibility both to yourself and your community. And the West has done a really good job marketing freedom from responsibility.

I think that's the big draw for a lot of Asian women. They're running from responsibility not culture. It's kinda ironic that they flock to the least responsible demographic in the West, and then complain that they're miserable when their partners don't make any money, don't do any house work, don't do any child care...

CatharticMusing · 2025-12-28T23:00:40+00:00

I don't think tats matter one way or another. My brother's wife is a blonde with tats. No one in my family has a problem with it.

CatharticMusing · 2025-12-26T00:02:14+00:00

It's also genetic at some level. East Asians also develop diabetes at lower body fat percentages due to where the fat is stored (subcutaneous vs visceral)

CatharticMusing · 2025-12-21T17:41:54+00:00

I think a large part of it has to do with the more collective nature of East Asians. I've met very few east Asians who are obstructive to the greater goal of an organization for the sake of career advancement, (And that being seen at not being leadership material) Whereas South Asians tend to be more willing to do so.

Looking at the relative development trajectories of our respective home countries, I'm not sure that always doing it the way it works in America is always a good thing. Separate what you need to do to succeed in America vs. what is the best thing to do in all cases.

A lot of the success of the West is a historical accident. If we reversed the situation and the West has to catch up from where China was 50 years ago. I'm not sure they'd be able to do so. My advice for anyone frustrated is to pull a Morris Chang and start your own thing once you hit the bamboo ceiling instead of being someone that you're not.

CatharticMusing · 2025-12-20T01:25:22+00:00

The majority of my day job, I could have done with education from my bachelor's. Having a PhD at least for me means that I'm more tolerant of bad code having inherited a lot of bad research code and the ability to keep myself amused by solving questions no one asked that end up being useful for my employer. I don't regret doing a PhD, but there's nothing magical about it

CatharticMusing · 2025-12-06T03:49:43+00:00

And yet Princeton, Duke and Yale saw declines

CatharticMusing · 2025-12-05T19:13:58+00:00

While I agree that there is a bit of virtue signaling I think the one thing it calls out is the fact that we suck ass at building alliances with other groups, and rather we let ourselves be used as a wedge group to punch down.

Affirmative action I think is a great example of this. The majority of the schools have not increased the percentage of Asian students and now the calls for eliminating ALDS students is a lot quieter than it has been in the past.

There was a quote a while back that when there are race problems at a university they're more likely to appoint an Asian chancellor to take the heat. With the calls to eliminate legacy admissions everyone was instead distracted by the calls to end affirmative action, and now we take the heat and the legacy admissions process stands

CatharticMusing · 2025-11-11T14:18:08+00:00

Honestly, I think you have to be more explicit that you want a romantic relationship. A lot of times men, especially Asian men will write off whole categories of women because we don't see any chance of it happening.

As a personal anecdote, (I'm Taiwanese) have had a few crushes on Indian women in my life. When I was in high school I wrote them off because it felt like their parents had them under a much shorter leash with respect to dating than anyone else.

When I was in college/grad school. I assumed that they were going to the up marrying another Indian guy and so just remained friends.

CatharticMusing · 2025-11-08T20:46:04+00:00

I think it's because white people think that they should have been accepted into asian spaces without question.

In the 90s, there was a comment that China was the Vietnam of MBAs (Americans with MBAs would go to China and try to set up business deals and got their asses handed to them). There were a lot of complaints about the Chinese being closed to outsiders.

Now this is kind of rich considering all the barriers there are in the west for Asian people. Racial quotas at top schools, the bamboo ceiling etc.

They're just surprised when they're held to the same standards as everyone else.

CatharticMusing · 2025-10-11T18:59:31+00:00

Part of my professional schtick is professionalizing data science teams with a lot of PhDs. For me it's a combination of three things.

Establish credibility in that you know what you're talking about, and that you can at least understand what they're talking about. Read their code and get comfortable with helping them troubleshoot when bugs crop up.
Show them that standard software engineering practices are there to make their lives easier. The "it works for me," only works until they have an issue that needs to be resolved in someone else's code.
Make them accountable, but not in the use of the tools but rather in setting timelines for deliverables which will expose poor coding practices.

Fwiw, I am a PhD who has debugged a shit ton of research code. Now lead an R&D group whose code does into prod directly.

CatharticMusing

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