How 'The Karate Kid' Ruined The Modern World
I think The Karate Kid ruined the modern world.
Not just that movie, but all of the movies like it (you certainly can't let the Rocky sequels escape blame). Basically any movie with a training montage.
You know what I'm talking about; the main character is very bad at something, then there is a sequence in the middle of the film set to upbeat music that shows him practicing. When it's done, he's an expert.
When I am fired as the Editor of Cracked and run out of ideas for penis-based horror novels, I want to write this up as a self-help book, probably titled Fuck The Karate Kid: Why Life is So Much Harder Than We Think, by Dr. David Wong. I also have to become a doctor at some point.
It seems so obvious that it actually feels insulting to point it out. But it's not obvious. Every adult I know--or at least the ones who are depressed--continually suffers from something like sticker shock (that is, when you go shopping for something for the first time and are shocked to find it costs way, way more than you thought). Only it's with effort. It's Effort Shock.
We have a vague idea in our head of the "price" of certain accomplishments, how difficult it should be to get a degree, or succeed at a job, or stay in shape, or raise a kid, or build a house. And that vague idea is almost always catastrophically wrong.
Accomplishing worthwhile things isn't just a little harder than people think; it's 10 or 20 times harder. Like losing weight. You make yourself miserable for six months and find yourself down a whopping four pounds. Let yourself go at a single all-you-can-eat buffet and you've gained it all back.
So, people bail on diets. Not just because they're harder than they expected, but because they're so much harder it seems unfair, almost criminally unjust. You can't shake the bitter thought that, "This amount of effort should result in me looking like a panty model."
It applies to everything. America is full of frustrated, broken, baffled people because so many of us think, "If I work this hard, this many hours a week, I should have (a great job, a nice house, a nice car, etc). I don't have that thing, therefore something has corrupted the system and kept me from getting what I deserve, and that something must be (the government, illegal immigrants, my wife, my boss, my bad luck, etc)."
I really think Effort Shock has been one of the major drivers of world events. Think about the whole economic collapse and the bad credit bubble. You can imagine millions of working types saying, "All right, I have NO free time. I work every day, all day. I come home and take care of the kids. We live in a tiny house, with two shitty cars. And we are still deeper in debt every single month." So they borrow and buy on credit because they have this unspoken assumption that, dammit, the universe will surely right itself at some point and the amount of money we should have been making all along (according to our level of effort) will come raining down.
All of it comes back to having those massively skewed expectations of the world. Even the people you think of as pessimists, they got their pessimism by continually seeing the world fail to live up to their expectations, which only happened because their expectations were grossly inaccurate in the first place.
You know that TV show where Gordon Ramsay tours various failing restaurants and swears at the owners until everything is fine again? Every episode is a great example. They all involve some haggard restaurant owner, a half a million dollars in debt, looking exhausted into the camera and saying, "How can we be losing money? I work 90 hours a week!"
The world demands more. So, so much more. How have we gotten to adulthood and failed to realize this? Why would our expectations of the world be so off? I blame the montages. Five breezy minutes, from sucking at karate to being great at karate, from morbid obesity to trim, from geeky girl to prom queen, from terrible garage band to awesome rock band.
In the real world, the winners of the All Valley Karate Championship in The Karate Kid would be the kids who had been at it since they were in elementary school. The kids who act like douchebags because their parents made them skip video games and days out with their friends and birthday parties so they could practice, practice, practice. And that's just what it takes to get "pretty good" at it. Want to know how long it takes to become an expert at something? About 10,000 hours, according to research.
That's practicing two hours a day, every day, for almost 14 years.
Don't let me act like I'm some kind of guru here, either. I write boner jokes for a living now, but I'm three years removed from looking at the Classifieds and seriously considering making ends meet with night jobs that would have had me cleaning toilets.
I walked out of college at 22 thinking I was going to be king of the world within a few years. Ten years later I had failed at one career, then failed at another, tried to go back to school twice, accumulated $15,000 in credit card debt, and was working at a job where I was one promotion above high school kids.
I felt like I was working myself to death. Year after year. And even then, so many things had to break my way to get what I have now. A company happened to get sold to the right people, a guy happened to quit his job. Another dude died. If those dominoes hadn't fallen in just the right way, instead of Editor of Cracked I'd be behind the counter at Denny's, getting wrestled to the ground by cops because I don't actually work there. Before this happened to come along I had lost hope and lowered my expectations over and over and over and nothing that had happened in my life up to that point prepared me for it. Nobody told me how hard this was going to be.
All I had was fucking Karate Kid.
Anyway. I know what will make us feel better:
David Wong is the Senior Editor of Cracked.com and the author of the critically-acclaimed horror novel John Dies at the End, available in hardcover everywhere except the 72 countries in which it has been rightfully banned.
The media could be also to blame, for placing martial arts as something that solve any kind of problem easily.
ReplyI love this article, it's brilliant. Paints the perfect picture of what's wrong with our society.
ReplyDragon Ball also ruined it for me. It told me to always work hard and be honest, but so far things only go terrible when I do such things.
ReplyLol David for a moment there you sounded like John cheese! Great article!
ReplyAnyone has seen the documentary "Bigger, Stronger, Faster"? Pretty much helped me open my view on the world. On how pretty much cheat, lie and steal are the ways to survive in the world, depsite what they told us at school.
ReplyI have read the entire article and I get the point that Mr.Wong is making. However nobody is going to sit through a movie that's 10,000 hours long. The montage is simply a movie device to speed the passage of time. Only an idiot would think that it only takes a short time to become an expert in something.
ReplyNope, pretty sure you missed the point.
Yep, the montage generally only condenses a few weeks, maybe months. This is forgivable in Rocky movies, because fighters do go through relatively short training camps before each fight, and Rocky had indeed been at it for years.
Wong is a prophet for the new age. Two great, true articles back to back.
ReplyTHe montage song from Team America would work for this article.
ReplyHow old are you? That will tell me where your mindset is....
ReplyI, however, enjoy pie.
ReplyGzz dude jealous much?
ReplyLucky for me my example is not the Karate Kid but Scrooge McDuck, I only spend money on things I need which over time has put me in a position where I could buy awesome stuff if I wanted, which I don't as I'm happy with simple things.
ReplyYou obviously missed the sequel. One thing that stood out to me as a kid was that he DIDN'T get to live happily ever after with the lovely Elizabeth Shue. So life went on and he could either hang on to past glories like a high school football captain, or find a new challenge (or you can wait for new challenges/problems to find you).
ReplyThe japanese girl was the best.
Well, Erika Nagai also sort of raised the standards on how to see attractive women doing karate. It was just bad.
ReplyIf I'm reading this article right, the lesson is that you will never be successful or rich, so why not f**k off at work, spend more time spanking it, and learn to like ramen?
ReplyIncidentally, I'm way beyond being an expert at spanking it.
No, the point is that the escapism of our popular culture makes real life seem to suck even harder by comparison. Which is why many of us try to engage in real life as little as possible, making it suck even more.
I guess I should be an expert at what I do by now because I have been doing it 5 days a week, for 25 years, but yet my comic strip readership numbers are consistently in the toilet and I am constantly on the edge of losing the house, the car, am way way way over my head in mind-numbing debt and haven't been able to really sleep in 4 years. Curse you Karate Kid!
ReplyThe top 1% of Americans control about 35% of the wealth in the US, while the bottom 40% control less than 1% of wealth. So a good proportion of the general public break their necks every day trying to come up with enough to live on, while a handful of elite bastards are so filthy rich they don't know what to do with themselves.
Replythats the way things are; if a point basically boils down to blaming someone else (as was literally addressed in this article) you are so missing the point. There is so much opportunity in north american culture
I'm reading this as I just finished a 12-hour shift at my s****y graphic design job -- whereupon I came home to end up having to do more work via e-mails for a naggy, greedy boss with apparent mommy & daddy issues who keeps me on call for 24/7 like I'm some f*****g physician. f**k it, I'm quitting this Friday when I get paid. My wrist hurts like a b***h from constant computer work, and it's putting a damper on my masturbation.
Survivor changed everyone's life for the better, though. My burning heart sure pumps blood to my eyes of the tiger at the moment of truth.
ReplyWhat the f**k are you talking about?
@eccehovenweep, Try watching some Rocky movies numbnuts. Then grasp the point of this article, and this comment.
At 2 hours a day, or 10,000 hours, I figure I am an expert at: Sleeping, eating, driving in traffic, goofing off, jerking off, and whining. Now who wants to hire me?
ReplyI saw a guy on the street corner with a sign basically saying this. Was it you?
As many have said, it is ALL about practicing the correct way, and that is absolutely true! You, and I really can't stress this enough, MUST be blasting Joe Esposito's 'You're The Best' on repeat, during any and all training sessions. You can do 10,000 hours in about an hour twenty (roughly 27 listens, though it's hard to stop after so few). Which is good because you've got cars to wash, fences to paint, and a shitload of other housework to do. Consequently, Daniel LaRouso did become en expert at menial labor, he went well beyond 10,00 hours, with zero help from any JoEspo tunes.
Reply Hide All See All 4 RepliesAnother fantastic read, once again Mr. Wong has gotten things all right. I may have to buy his novel (even if it is free all around me as I was once told). My story and the title character's have one really big similarity, and that always draws you in, it's like being famous.
actually the point of the training daniel did was to develope himself physically but in the exact ways he would have if he had known wax on and wax off and paint the fense was the same movements as blocking and defending but interesting enough once daniel got fed up at doing all the house work mr miyagi showed him the training and after that it was purely martial arts training but not just an hour or 2 a day but all day long. the movie was taking place over a few months giving that daniel was infact training for a few months maybe 4 or 5 months a good 12 to say 15 hours that means he had anywhere from1344 hours to 2100 hours of training where in the kobra kye had probabily an hour of training 3 days a week(which is what the average martial artist goes through) for say 5 years.(being that they were black belts and the average person takes 4 to 5 years to reach black belt) so your looking at 3 hours a week for 260 weeks or 780 hours of training.. the kobra kye may have had 5 or 6 years of training under there belt but they didnt train all that often most martial artist train for about an hour to 2 hours in a given session for about 3 days a week so logically speaking there isnt any reason to believe that daniel couldnt have learned just as much as them in 4 months training most of his days
sure, but that just misses the point. The sensation of a problem disappearing in a few moments was what the post spoke of. and you already knew that. om trying not to just dismiss you as a know it all, but ....
Randell1985, I am alarmed at the amount of effort you will go to, in an effort to explain why daniel could have defeated the kobra kye.
Abso-freakin'-lutely buy his novel. It's the best book I've read in a long time, and i'm a decently avid reader. Seriously, if you like reading Cracked articles, you will not regret it.