Overcome Adversity

Romance

Ali is a 10/10 girl. She is very loyal, assertive, a go-getter, idealistic and romantic, very supportive, fun, independent, sociable, understanding, respectful…

She is the ideal woman. She gives Daniel space when he asks for it, she punches Chad and trips him over, she cheers Daniel on and accompanies him to the fight, crosses the socio-economic boundary imposed by her parents, defends Daniel in front of others in public (repeatedly), invites Daniel and then approaches herself, suggests new arcade games as date ideas etc.

She also pushes Daniel to become a better version of himself – showing more maturity than him in this instance too – when she tells us/him “you can’t run away from problems”.

However, the entire romance is a bit contrived. The day after Daniel gets beaten, she literally runs up to him in the lunch cafeteria after spotting him, and she bites her lower lip while talking to him. She also tells him she asked other people about his past, which is a lot of effort for a guy who just got beaten trying to recover a radio that got broken anyway afterwards, and who spent a few hours chatting to her.

Note that it takes 59 minutes for us to get a basic overview of why Ali actually likes Daniel so much (until that point it’s “the scriptwriters/director/producers decided so”): dialogue:

Daniel “what am I gonna do, moan and groan?”

Ali “I don’t know, anybody else would”

so she admires his perseverance. Note that she bites her lower lip twice in this scene.

In some situations Daniel should have behaved differently in my view. When Chad first rolled in on his motorbike, Daniel should have positioned himself in between him and her and not allow Chad to talk directly to her (from memory he was right next to her, talking to her, just a few seconds in the previous scene, then he gets teleported away and has to walk over to Ali). They would still fight but it would have made Daniel appear more dominant.

Daniel shouldn’t talk to himself, that’s crazy. He is admirably courageous and has game, but if anyone sees him talking to himself, especially in the 80s, he’d have been referred to a psych ward (or at least ostracised).

Daniel should have played to his strengths: tell Chad that Ali left him and will never go back to him again and how little he cares about getting beaten up (because it’s irrelevant), something like “you can beat me if you want, I’ll just get back up, but at the end of the day Ali still comes on to me” or “you punch radios and sleep alone, I play football with Ali and score”. Another great example would be to pull Ali in by the waist and kiss her in front of Chad and his gang at school instead of running away (when walking towards the arcade). He could also start telling Chad in excruciating detail all the activities he and Ali engage in together. Practical example of when this behaviour was displayed: dialogue:

Daniel to Ali: “everything’s been taken care of. watch this”

Daniel to Chad and his group: “hey guys, how you doin’? it’s good to see ya. hey sorry ’bout the eye there Johnny. your shoulder ok Tommy? you guys be careful not go to step in front of any more buses now, all right?”

One other very weird series of events, especially for modern tastes, is Daniel’s repeated refusal to kiss Ali in ideal circumstances. In minute 37, they are both inside Daniel’s shower, in minute 1h:05 he has another opportunity. This is a very telling reaction from me, growing up in a society where you are expected to go for sex with a girl within the first few hours, and to push for kissing and physical contact from the first minute (“escalation”). Today you have the option of not doing that of course, and taking things slowly, but attraction has an expiry date (note: this goes both ways) so you end up “in the friendzone”. Even if you end up having sex and even if that grows into an exclusive sexual relationship later, there is a high chance some other guy was having sex with her while you were taking it slowly and spending your nights alone, probably masturbating. The issue is that modern society is controlled by women, who are extremely sexual, in fact women are mostly just sex. They categorise men based on sexual attraction, treat men almost exclusively based on how sexually appealing they are, think about sex all the time, sexualise all environments they are a part of and almost all interactions etc. In such an environment you have first mover advantage. Part of this is of course the widespread availability of contraceptives (FREE of charge) which takes away the consequences of sexual choices.

Note that if a man is attracted to a woman and keeps making advances on her and she keeps refusing and moving too slowly, he will lose attraction too, and the thought process is similar: “this person just doesn’t find me attractive enough; am I really this ugly/boring/whatever?”. Between men the element of competitiveness and ego have stronger effects so e.g. “she’s sleeping with him, but not with me? I should find another girl” or “she slept with him on the first date, but I’ve taken her on 3 dates and we still have not had sex?”.

Note on the friendzone: there are innumerable psychological reasons and situations why men end up in situations like this but in practice there isn’t really such a thing as a “friendzone”, if we take the common understanding of it as a relationship where the man wants sex and/or romance with the woman but she only wants to have platonic experiences with him, this is because a guy who actually truly wants sex with women will simply discard women who refuse him sex and chase the providers. There are of course guys who are afraid of intimacy or with low self-esteem or of a generally avoidant nature who remain friends with a girl after being rejected, or who never even ask for sex and expect an Act of God. There are guys who are afraid of sex, or afraid of the emotions that come with it, or afraid of rejection, or who seek approval externally, or who are afraid of women. However these guys don’t want sex and/or romance. There is no such thing as the friendzone.

The Actualisation of the Self

I

When trimming the bonsai tree for the first time, Miyagi teaches: “if picture come from inside, always right one”.

The primary idea expressed here is the imposition of the individual’s vision upon the outer world, expressed in absolutist terms. If somebody dreams of something internally then it is always the right choice (which justifies the actions needed to fulfil it).

From the point of view of the individual himself, this is always the best course of action, but there will inevitably be a division between the great, whose “pictures” are unique and created single handedly, and the masses, who will adopt someone else’s picture as their main purpose in life is to be followers. That is still their own picture – following the status quo and enforcing it – but the picture itself originates not with the adopter, but from the outside. The frame is from the inside (conformity) and the canvas, which is blank, but the painting itself is from outside (status quo).

II

Another valuable life lesson from this is self-confidence: as long as one is true to his inner self, his vision is always right. This can be used by anybody and should be: confidence stems from 2 things: self-talk, and action. Combined, they form self-belief. To become confident you simply need to 1. tell yourself each day that you are great, and worthy of successes, 2. obtain results in the real world to avoid cognitive dissonance. The second part is very important but it can come later; without it, if you tell yourself you are intelligent and attractive but are broke and always lonely, your confidence will take a hit and you will have to manage an internal mental conflict between reality and self-belief. Your only options then are to become delusional (it works but it’s not sustainable as you intentionally miss out on real-life opportunities) or to take actions and obtain results.

III

Finally: is it right for each person to believe that their own picture is always the right one if it comes from inside? If we accept that there is a soft of “collective unconscious” justified by thousands of years of evolution that gave rise to massive commonalities between the majority of people of each race, then we can deduce the end result of self-actualisation will be a (mostly) homogenous society. In exceptional cases where the picture is detrimental to the majority because said individual is malevolent or deranged, and where said picture is imposed upon the whole social group, this would be justified too under the laws of nature, where the strongest takes all. This would be balanced inevitably by egalitarianism once the majority of the other individuals actualise their own picture, which happens to be the same as the ruler’s, except resources are limited so he will be forced to share (or be eliminated).

This assumes of course normal development of both the individual and his society – not conquered or ruled by a foreign power, not traumatised from childhood or adolescence, not under extreme survival conditions such as total war.

Personal Development

I

To the writers’ credit, Daniel does develop as a person throughout the film. In some places this is portrayed well: he has a breakdown quite early where he says “it sucks for me I wanna go home”, which is a display of the positive disintegration struggle wherein he is ready to accept a new mental structure (and lifestyle) but his first instinct is to recreate the earlier one that is better known to him. He does meet Miyagi and start learning karate properly and change his mindset eventually (visible when he understood that cleaning is a karate defense technique). His desire to start leaning karate seriously – when he walked into the Cobra Kai club for the first time – is also a showcase of his tendency towards development; note that this process was spurred by shocking life events (moving to a completely different city and starting from scratch, and getting beaten up badly and hounded) which is in many cases the starting point for the positive disintegration process (in modern terms this is called post traumatic growth).

II

What could have helped Daniel at the start was the power of positivity: within 24 hours of moving to a new place he had friends, had been to a party, and had a great girlfriend. His cynical attitude made him almost quit: he broke his bike and had it not been for Miyagi, he would not have been able to go to places anymore. Luckily for him this is a fictional film set in the 1980s, today he’d likely become a drug addict at that stage and his life would be over.

III

There is a strange attempt to portray the hero’s journey as the maturity of man by himself in minute 29 when Ali is mature and brave by comparison with Daniel who is childish and immature, as she says “You can’t run away from problems, you need to confront them head-on.” but he responds “You leave me alone. I do things my own way, you mind your own business.”; weirdly he also starts with “I’m not running away” despite and while literally doing that. Later he does learn karate by himself and practices a lot, but this is inappropriate given the modern setting. He isn’t really by himself and he isn’t a hero (the radio did get destroyed early on, RIP) and he doesn’t do any heroic deeds (winning an organised karate tournament doesn’t count).

IV

Parenting is severely flawed in this film and worryingly it was made nearly 30 years ago. Ali’s parents force her to dance with Chad, they ignore her feelings and desires on the matter and thus force her into misery because of their narcissism: her role is to be “the popular rich girl who paired up with a popular rich guy at school and were the alpha couple that made their parents proud”. Sadly the film does not show us the consequences of her stepping outside of that role – narcissistic insults are met with rage, which means Ali’s parents would have shouted her down or beaten her.

V

Mr Miyagi was right to teach Daniel cleaning as a symbol of responsibility and as part of a disciplined holistic lifestyle approach. He was wrong to live the second part of his life alone and with regret and guilt. What he should have done is finish the grieving process and find another woman and have a child (or several). For reference, the 5 stages of grief are: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Note that this process takes place in most cases of loss in life, not just death of a loved one but also break ups, broken friendships, changes of environment. You should memorise these stages.

It is visible in min 1h:30 that Miyagi feels extreme guilt over the death of his wife (dialogue: “complication but no doctor come”), which is irrational as there was nothing he could have done to save his wife or to protect her. This thought alone, if accepted, would have cured his guilt, or even prevented it entirely. I disagree with TLP that the only solution to guilt is sublimation and partly disagree that it never leaves you:

“The guilt always stays with you. Always. It never goes away. Never. I’m of course not saying you deserve it, but I know it is your inevitable tormentor. So either you reach some kind of stalemate with it or it beats you down. That stalemate is sublimation.” … “The only thing I’ve ever found that works, in the absence of a God who can forgive you, is to understand your guilt as not coming from the failing but generated by you as self-punishment, so that you can go on with the rest of your life. ”

The origin of the guilt is the victim mindset. ALL addictive behaviours also originate with this mindset, self-pity. The answer to this is self-responsibility and empowerment. From a practical point of view, life happens in each moment, day by day, and Miyagi has made the choice to lead a solitary life in misery. The guilt is a pointless what-if exercise. I am also talking from personal experience here (as in, I have not experienced any guilt).

Stay strong, brothers.