50,000 Dollars in Debt: Am I Rich or Poor or What?

$50,000 my girlfriend melissa is gonna
end up $50,000 in debt learning Chinese and getting a degree in Asian Studies here at the University of Victoria and it's exactly the same University program that I was enrolled in fully five years ago before I went away to live in Yunnan China before we went away to live together in Taiwan before we enrolled in baking college ended up getting kicked out of baking college or asked to quit making college because we were vegan and the college couldn't handle have vegan students even though they promised a mess they could it's been a long rocky road these last five years but melissa has made the commitment or is taking the gamble to now enroll at University of Victoria and try to get formal education in Asian Studies which means the politics of Asia the history of Asia book learning related Asia but obviously a big part of our current task outside of the classroom just the two of us sitting here at this very desk is to teach ourselves Chinese advance in progress in reach higher and higher levels of ability in Chinese $50,000 in debt is a lot of money to anyone and it's a lot of money to us I do not know if in the next two years I will have to go into debt myself and that is basically the topic of this video I don't get asked about my financial situation I guess if I ever do it's other youtubers once you know how much money I make which I've been incredibly honest and forthcoming about unlike everything else in my life and I right away I send them a link to oh yeah this is how much I make per month and you know I just lay out the facts now while I was in Taiwan I did make enough money from YouTube to pay my rent but that was just because my rent was hilariously low Taiwan I was living in a small town called Puli in the central Taiwan somewhere I'll probably never see again anyway long long strange story as to how I ended up in in Puli but yeah if your rent is low enough and you earn $400 a month YouTube and patreon combined then you can pay your friends back with what you earn but no in my current circumstances and for the foreseeable future I am financially dependent on support from my mother I would say my parents but my father is now deceased and that financial support is finite but we don't know how finite it's gonna prove to be right now during coronavirus the family fortune and the family business is in an unpredictable if not dire straits and that's okay one of the reasons to be here in Victoria rather than being in Beijing or Thailand or Taiwan is that if my mother really does run out of money she can no longer support me going back to university at least here I will have the legal right to work whether I have to get a job at a 7-eleven or a gas station or grocery store if I have to get some very humble work to keep going I can do it now I never want to misrepresent myself as broke I don't do eBay ghing I don't I don't do fundraising unless it's for a specific project with a specific outcome like when I raised funds for for court case I made a post in text form on patreon recently where I was relating my strange struggles with university professors and how dishonest some of these university professors have been with me and how I think they lie to themselves also about the significance of money in meritocracy professors when they think I'm poor they tell me one thing and then the minute I say oh no my parents can afford to pay for me to go to school here their whole act changed this is you know these strange differences in attitude and you know some professors are in denial but the extent to which access to higher education relies on your having money up front and some someone give themselves someone kid you so had a post stating this and one of my turns of phrase there it's we're calling an anecdote where I had this sort of interaction with a professor I said this professor look the problem is not money the problem is that there are no universities offering me you know a legitimate opportunity to get education and emphasize that point I said look if there were one University in the United Kingdom England Scotland there were one University that offered me you know a genuinely valuable educational opportunity to learn an Asian language to get a degree that could lead to employment where I would really benefit subjectively also in terms of my career my parents could could afford to pay for it not just tuition they could afford to buy me a solid gold desk and a fountain pen encrusted in diamonds now obviously I was joking my parents would not buy me a solid gold desk but I was saying to this professor in this email correspondence look what really matters is whether or not the educational opportunity is worth it and my parents at their current stage of life again my father now deceased but in the final years of his life they did have the attitude that they did not have when I was younger that if there were a real educational opportunity for me that it would be worth them going into debt also be worth paying any price for that's that's common among Chinese immigrant families that's common in many cultures to really see the value of education that way or even if you don't have the money to go on to pay for it now it's interesting when I was younger my parents did not have that opportunity and these things which my ferret's refusal to support me when it really mattered screwed up my life is a very interesting topic for for another video I pointed out to my mother I guess it was about five years ago that I wanted to enroll in a class in to learn Chinese in Toronto back in 2000 2001 some of this was way way back well when I was young and that class was taught in the high school system so that was part of the adult night school program offered by Toronto's high school system so it was adult learning night classes but physically in a high school so not a high school course I think it was I think it was $200 Canadian maybe it was even less it was like $180 there was only a symbolic fee because it was really provided by the you know Toronto public school system by the government right and my parents would not pay it and they had this but these are my parents you know any one of my father was already working in years my father had done work in China I did Sloane backwards they knew the importance of it they knew about you they knew all this stuff they would not pay for me to have this this course and you know what part of the good and the bad of it definitely with my father and my mother to assert lesser extent my father saw a lot of his money wasted on education for his other sons who very simply were not intellectuals and never would be intellectuals and he never made anything positive of that opportunity one of his sons kept dropping out of university again and again it cost him a lot of money and he would keep paying for this son to go back and you know guy was a [ __ ] at the beginning he was a [ __ ] in the middle he's a [ __ ] in the end he's just not that kind of guy that guy did some purely physical jobs that I think he was good at and that he enjoyed I remember he had a period of time as a bike courier remember him telling me about that he had a period of time actually in modern dance again a very purely physical thing he is not a book-learning type of guy and it doesn't matter how much money you pour on him you know you you can't you can't pay someone enough to make them want to learn you know you can't buy the motivation and that kind of character is you know something intangible you know another one of my half-brothers he finally did get a master's degree every time you meet that guy doesn't matter if it's over five years ten years thirty years every time you meet him he's telling you a story about the last time he got drunk but the last time he got high on drugs including hard drugs like peyote LSD cocaine heroin like he'll tell you heroin stories that's kind of cut yes and I don't pry it's not like I'm asking questions that leave he'll right up front tell you stories with us and he's telling you stories about chasing women getting laid that's the kind of guy he is and my father paid a lot of money for his education in his case a master's screwed know peachy but guess what you know at the beginning middle Amanda that he sounded like the stereotype burnout he sounded like someone you know just his tone of voice his manner of speaking his habit tests his behavior he sounds like a drugged up loser he sang like someone has been using our drugs since his teenage years and that's exactly what he is and III talked about it with my father just once again before he died it was not not long before he died where my father was relating to me how these professors my brother had had said different kind of discouraging and critical things to him and you know my father was basically relating the subpoena fair and I said to him you know Barry has it not occurred to you that what these professors are saying is just literally true that this is quite reasonable I said can you take a step back and just listen to your son's voice can you listen to how this guy sounds and how he conducts himself like do you not notice that he'll ask you a question and five years later I'll ask you the exact same question he has no memory of the answer you gave last time like do you not know this like can you really not recognize that your son has all the signs of like a long-term alcoholic drug user etc and if you not notice that that's what it's like revolves around his drugs alcohol and sleeping with women like that's that's how he presents himself it's not concealed but can you not see this and the answer for my father was no he could not see it was a great example of a parent just not wanting to see the reality for the kiddies so look my parents had their own negative experiences with the university education when they had their own negative experiences with paying for their kids to go to university that's not an excuse for the way in which they up my life back in like 1993 to 2003 like many many chapters ago they made a lot of really bad decisions that have really negative long-term consequence to me and they refused to support me when it mattered however having had all those experiences and for them they've seen a lot of proof of what kind of creative writer I am what kind of researcher I am the ways in which I can use my mind and intelligence productively the ways in which I really am an intellectual unlike some of my brothers and sisters you know they know what I can do so what would be the point of me working at a 7-eleven or me working at a Starbucks by the way back in back in when I was a kid and it mattered I did work at Starbucks another story I did work at a Whole Foods Market at a grocery store my parents did force me to do those kinds of jobs which completely up and ruined my university education back when it mattered so again another story so you know but in their old old age having had to have experiences in bed they are at this juncture one is for me but that whole anecdote about the solid-gold desk the point of that is even when the problem isn't lack of money and the problem isn't that I have low grades at University of Victoria that there still is no positive opportunity for me moving forward I'm completely happy to be honest with my audience about what my financial situation is I'm completely honest honest about my career education situation that is very fundamentally and integrally why I came on YouTube in the first place I'm willing to be honest a bit of fun thanks know be honest about it and you know if I weren't I would feel ashamed in looking back at my youtube videos and seeing a lot of half-truths and lies and I don't for me it's wonderful that YouTube is my diary and it's also my way of sharing my life with my daughter who I now very rarely get to see I'm divorced with a daughter growing up in Europe she can watch these videos she can learn from my experience good bad indifferent she can she can to our own conclusions but in terms of what I'm going to do now and what's happening next to my life I'm gonna be honest to you right now lack of money is not a problem for me three months from now six months ago it could be it could be that my life becomes a financial struggle and if so I'll be just as honest with you about that then as I'm being honest with you about my current situation now I don't ask people to donate more than one dollar per month on patreon I have not been eBay game for many years now you know there was a very different situation years and years ago now it's like four years ago where I needed money for a court case and I did a fundraiser just for that court case and the money raised from the fundraiser a hundred percent of it went to rightly to the lawyer I paid for my own airplane tickets to fly in and out and attend the court case by the way I paid for my own hotel rooms I didn't do any fundraising for that right it was just money to pay for the lawyer very different situation and that's program funding if I were raising money for a particular thing I don't know there's a homeless donkey walking the streets and we want to do a vegan fundraiser try to get this donkey into a you know sanctuary for me I would do that and I would say hey look the money's going to the donkey fine want to donate it to you I would do that I would do fundraiser for a specific thing where it's good and the money isn't going to me the money isn't going to feed me but the truth is is say the patreon is one dollar a month I don't ask anyone to pay five dollars I don't ask you to pay twenty dollars there are no higher rungs I'm a pin just asked for one dollar a month and why would you do that why should you do that for the same reason that I would do that if I were somebody else discovering this YouTube channel if I were in the audience I would really appreciate this content I'm putting on you I would want to see this comment and I would want to pay one dollar to have the ability to chitchat with the Creator and you know have the kind of content have the bonuses and have videos made in response to my questions Chapman's all the time terms of patreon supporters talking to me I know I would want to support that person I would want to show that I care and I would want to have that interaction and one dollar a month these dashing saying was it's less than the cup price of a cup of coffee well I think coffee is three dollars and fifty cents print it's it's symbolic and you know what's not symbolic if you want to help the channel if you want to help me have like a career on YouTube is actually sharing the link when there's a video on a topic that's interesting and you actually know people or you know a Facebook group or you know a retic group if you know people for whom a particular video will be meaningful or interesting and you share the link that really is helping me because even if money is not scarce in your life even if you're not running away from poverty it's very very hard to be motivated to spend six hours or 12 hours researching and then recording a video in my case it's the research not the recording that takes time very easy for me to actually do the performance as you've noticed but you know I have in the past put a lot of time into researching recording a video and then if that video only gets 400 views for me that is really defeating for reasons that have nothing to do with the money that would be made or actually is made out of YouTube it has nothing to do with the extent to which you know like I will still be able to buy groceries if only 400 people watch that video or if nobody sports mood that's not the problem right but the problem is in my own life how do i prioritize putting those twelve hours into researching and recording a youtube video as opposed to studying chinese as opposed to spending quality time with my girlfriend as opposed to doing another two hundred push-ups as opposed to talking to my lawyer and weeping about the fact that i don't get to see my daughter fill in the blank right we all have other things to do and i don't make youtube videos for myself this isn't a form of talk therapy for me I really do it to reach out to and communicate with an audience I really do it for the long-term directed into right political and social consequences of making the few YouTube videos available online I very briefly I wrote fan mail to a guy yesterday who had done book reviews in text form on the internet and he stopped writing the book reviews in 2011 like I found his blog with the book future posted and I sent him fan mail and said look you know I just want to thank you for those book reviews you did more than ten years ago I found them and I know that it's not rewarding making this kind of content on the Internet I know that being creative taking the time to write an essay like this thing I know how how cold and lonesome it can be to create some of this and put on the Internet then you hear nothing positive back from it or maybe maybe you have a view tracker and you know in ten years only 50 people clicked on that book review and read you're right and you know I know so I'm sending you this email now to really thank you and I want you to know that when you when you do create some of that you put it on the Internet it can have positive consequences ten years down the line it can have positive consequences twenty years 200 years down the line you know so it's hard to be positively motivated it's hard when only 400 people watch a video it can be hard when only 2,000 people watch a video but yes my point here is simply quite apart from monetary reward quite apart from the question of whether I can afford my next bottle of soy milk that's not my situation my right the question of reaching an audience and creating conflicts creating content that's meaningful an audience and getting that feedback hearing back now whether it's through patreon or the video being shared that matters to me and if you're my audience help matters to you too