09. The Goldilocks Effect
On finding what’s too much so, and what's just enough.
When I first sat down to outline this post around a week ago, the weather in Seoul was the best it had been in months. The humidity level was peaking at a tolerable 60%, the skies were blue, and I could step outside without feeling like I’d melt away in the heat. It had finally felt like we were past the worst of summer, and like autumn, the season I’ve been looking forward to experiencing most in Korea, was within eyeshot.
I speak now in the past tense, because as I’m now sitting down to actually write out my outline, it is raining again, and we are hunkering down in anticipation of a typhoon that’s due to hit in the coming days.
Needless to say, I spoke too soon.
Once Upon a Time…
The month of August was…eventful. You might have seen that Korea was hit with historic levels of rainfall, the heaviest the city has seen in over 80 years with a months worth of summer rain falling in just a few days. I came home late from work to find that my house, among countless others in the city, had flooded. In that moment, walking through my apartment in disbelief while assessing the damage (thankfully nothing catastrophic), I felt that I had hit some sort of wall
.
It turns out that the lessons some of us were taught in childhood from the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, a fairy tale of 19th-century British origin, are applicable in more ways than one. Referring to the idea that humans prefer information, choices, and events that are neither too simple nor complex, the Goldilocks Effect is applied to schools of thought in communication, psychology, cognitive science, and the like. In short, the story and principle of Goldilocks is a familiar fable for the ultimate comfort we find in between two extremes.
Perhaps its a bit of a stretch, or more than a little reductive to draw a line of comparison between a principle that is applied in engineering and economics, with my little experience swashbuckling water out from all corners of my studio apartment in the middle of the night. But when I found myself at one extreme (read: my wit’s end) that week, one that began with a flooded home and ended with an unsuccessful day of apartment viewings in hopes of maybe finding something better, I realized that I never sat down to think about what “better” meant to me. And what exactly triggered me to begin pining for “better” in the first place.
For the sake of one’s mental sanity, limits are best encountered in moderation. Not too infrequently, yet not too often. The adventure that is living alone abroad has been an experience of discovering how high my ceiling is, through both unfortunate and joyous circumstances. It’s felt almost alien, the exasperation and frustration I’ve been sitting with at certain points in the last few months. Prior to my moving away I had enjoyed close to a year of relative quiet at home, where even when things were rough I had the luxury of age-old relationships to distract. I take the unfamiliarity of those feelings as a sign that I was overdue for a check — and whether it be for better or for worse, I sense that my tolerance for extremes has widened by a hair by these recent events. Because the broader that margin grows between low and high, the more space in which we will eventually find comfort in peaceful times.
A Trip Out East
Despite some unfortunate events (with this flooding incident coming out on top) that led me to close out August as being “not my month”, it hasn’t been without its precious moments. Right before the monsoon hit, I took a weekender out to the east coast of Korea with a few friends. It was our first overnight trip together, and also my first time on the eastern part of the peninsula. From the moment we disembarked our train I was met with scenery dominated by shades of blue from both ocean and sky. I didn’t realize how much I had missed the beach until I stepped foot on the sand, but I had also forgotten what such scenery looked like after spending so much time in the city, where even the river water is tinged grey. Spending some time away made the scene that much more beautiful, and was one of the highlights of my first full summer spent in Korea.
Poking Fun (At Myself)
While my Korean has most certainly improved in the last eight months, my limitations with remembering names or places are often revealed with my tendency to switch syllables in certain words. Much to the amusement of my colleagues and friends, it feels like my Freudian(?) slips have become a bit of a signature. I’ll close out today’s post with a screenshot my friend took of one such incident, where I managed to switch the first two syllables of the city we visited on our weekend trip. They haven’t let me forget it, so I figure I’ll embrace it and hope my embarrassment is at least somewhat endearing.
Transcript:
Me:
My health checkup overlaps with the day we go to Dongjeonjin*(?) (*incorrect)Friend 1:
hahaha
Jeongdongjin (correct name)
Me:
Dangnabbit
Friend 1:
So cute Arim
Friend 1 and 2:
*laughing at my blunder, which I made because the mispronunciation is the word for “coin”*Me:
OTL
Why can’t I get this right
Jeong! Dong! Jin!!
As always, thanks for reading :) until next time.