Bodybuilding Classic Physique Division Offseason log

Amazing. I feel like you've come so far already if you're just waking up every day looking like that. Also not to be underestimated/undervalued that you seem to be in a great spot in life generally.

Big fan, keep it up!

Bodybuild.

Competitions don't matter.
Pro cards don't matter.
Trying to become a full time coach is going to destroy my love for this, but I'll still have a few clients selectively if I enjoy working with them and like them as people.
Content creation/marketing is not fun and represents more of what you do as an online coach than actually coaching for almost anyone except the very top guys already clearing mid six figures to 7 figures who have waiting lists.
This is a continuous multi-decade on-going art project and lifestyle that, despite the protestations of the propagandized lemmings, keeps me healthy and happy.

My goals and outlook have changed. This is no longer something "competitive" or something where I try to win. It's just a way of life and creation and refinement of something beautiful. Of course I will still do competitions, but view them more as exhibiting my art rather than trying to beat the other competitors or even "beat" my previous iterations. It's pretty subjective. I'm just gonna make the physique I think looks good. Some people are unable to distinguish between beauty and sexuality; that's their problem. Cretins.

Great job

Your lats look wider this cycle & you look leaner.

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So you're moving away from becoming a full time coach? Or you're going to keep moving towards that but think you'll hate it?

Alright I guess I was far too vague; I can see why you're confused.

cliffnotes: I didn't realize how much disutility I was getting from previous teaching jobs by having to pretend to be deferential to people who are frankly inferior and defective human beings who should be listening to me and not the other way around. Now that I'm at one where these authoritarian tyrants don't exist I started to actually appreciate teaching. It's like I'm actually treated with respect and employed to do the important parts of the job and they current school completely discards the ******ed nonsense that is just a facade to construct a hierarchy that somebody of no real worth is on top of. They have no real agency or power over their own lives and can only find meaning in dominating others because they have failed so profoundly as human beings, so this entire artifice exists to placate their egos and distract them from their vapid and meaningless existences. And when a teacher shows up that kids truly look up to as a role model and mentor they find this extremely threatening and he becomes target #1.

I am not exaggerating when I say the two previous middle aged woman bosses I had were large net negatives to the world and humanity would be better off if they dropped dead tomorrow. One Chinese and westernized, who did admittedly study at Harvard but it was educational leadership (lol). The other some unhealthy vegan 50 year old drunkard frail little woman who missed over 20 days of school from illness in one year (I missed 0.5 and that .5 was after my teaching duties for that day were complete). There's this whole progressive education ideology about "active learning' I won't bore you with, but it becomes this mind-numbing exercise in goalposting shifting to justify the existence of high paying administrator roles that not only micromanage teachers, but often times actively lead them away from delivering the service our customers are actually paying for.

I didn't have this in my Chengdu job at all, but it was just extremely high workload, negative visual environment (pollution, crowding, derelict campus, living area filled with hostile Chinese elderly people) even if the social environment was very positive, and very long hours. The guy in charge was incompetent but had deep humility, and after about 18 months of being principal he learned and adapted and frankly got a lot better at the job, and didn't demand the sort of ego validation the two principals that followed him at the next two jobs did.

But the two jobs that followed that... just completely catastrophic and I had no idea how unhappy they were making me and its what made me want to pursue something else. Now that I'm back to a "real" teaching job that is about teaching and not about massaging the egos of middle aged women, I have no pressure to leave or do something else and in fact might end up with lower happiness overall doing another career.

I've seen so many other bodybuilders or fitness people in general get very burned out when they start getting concerned with these 2 things: 1. How will I make money from bbing/fitness? 2. I need to achieve xyz placement or "pro card". When you're stressing about monetization from bodybuilding or the external rewards rather than just enjoying the process, the lifestyle, and the art creation itself, you get burned out and its no longer enjoyable.

Man reading that back it sounded harsh and judgemental and "thremp-like". But it's true and I do legitimately believe that educational leadership attracts lots of human beings where the world would be better off if they were dead. Even more so than finance/law/pharmacy.

So the plan is to ride things out here until retirement, just coach on the side, and enjoy my life without looking to something bigger and better on the horizon. Our starting pay is low, but our salary increase is much more aggressive than at other schools, they respect our time, expectations are clear, no progresisve education ideology, direct instruction is fine, and subject knowledge and exam results are the only real criteria that matter. It's a great semi-suburban living environment, proximity to family, great gyms, even a few meal prep places that deliver to my house in under 40 minutes, and perfect weather. Why on earth would I want to do another career or move somewhere else? no... I already made it. I don't desire anything to change at all.

Thanks man! on a more positive note (from the previous post's vitriol bleeding through the screen), I'm also really happy with the obvious visual improvements. This offseason I mostly trained 2 pull days, 2 leg days, 1 push day per week. I put muscle on all the right places and ended up much leaner than at the end of the last prep. The rate of weight loss was very very very fast comparatively, and extreme even by competitive enhanced bbing standards. Sorta "standard" for 2000s era bbing, but generally in the modern era people are targetting around 12-15% of bodyweight lost over 18-22 weeks. I did 20% over 16 weeks and averaged out 1.34kg per week. It would not have been possible without the CPAP intervention; i used retatrutide last year too and it absolutely helps but the CPAP was really what moved the needle more dramatically than I ever would have expected.

Next offseason... I'm not sure. You tend to have weird obsessive thoughts and impulse buying in the last few weeks of a contest prep as losing that much weight that rapidly is gonna change neurochemistry a bit. I've been obsessively thinking about what training split to do and it'll likely be either the 4x/wk torso/limbs split which I've been using the past ~10 weeks or a push/pull/legs/off/torso/limbs/off type of split. My lower body is considered overdeveloped relative to upper now by modern judging criteria, but I still want to have 2 leg days per week because I think ridiculously overdeveloped hamstrings and glutes look cool and because I am too much of a wimp these days to train for more than 90 minutes in one session which I'd probably need to do if I wanted to cram all of my leg training into only one day. So just split it up into twoi 55-60 minute sessions per week, with the second one following around 4-8 sets of biceps+triceps. And then my chest+shoulders generally don't need much volume or intensity and naturally grow really easily so the "torso“ day is really more like a second back day but with 4 sets of machine pressing motions and 4 sets of machine delt raises tacked off the back of 9 sets of lats and upper back which is the real moneymaker. My lats are already good, but that's another muscle group that I personally just think looks cool when its proportionately overdeveloped compared to everything else. When chest gets overdeveloped... it can look frankly kinda stupid at least in my aesthetic taste.

My impulse buying has been cooking appliances, blu rays of anime and various movies so I can turn off the internet/phone and sit tf down and watch a movie undistracted, bodybuilding posing trunks (I now own 7 pairs...), and weird indian spices to put in my rice cooker. Some people buy video game consoles, phones or cameras, computers, and cars... I've been so damn close to buying a cracked nintendo switch 1 but I haven't even finished all the games I want to play on my ps5...

in my experience, the admins are all people who got into teaching initially and then actively chose to pivot into administration for more authority and higher pay.

those qualities in a vacuum are not bad. most people would reasonably desire both. but teaching is unusual because a lot of teachers got into it for the love of the game. they like teaching, they like their subject, they like working with students.

the people who decide they want to become principals or administrators are selecting themselves into a completely different track.

there is no tap on the shoulder. nobody shows up at your classroom door and says, "hey, you'd make a good principal." it's a self-started process that takes years of graduate school, certifications, paperwork, and credential collecting.

so when someone says, "i want to spend years and thousands of dollars jumping through hoops so i can eventually be in charge of teachers," you're already looking at a very particular personality type.

obviously not all of them are bad, but as a cohort they're not people i'd leave unattended in my living room. if i came back and found them digging through the couch cushions for loose change, i wouldn't be remotely surprised.

It sounds like this is finally an amazing fit for you in terms of job/location. That really seems like the best situation where you won't feel trapped all the time.

How is the dating/partner market there? If there's a high chance you'll stay where you are now for quite a long time, I'd hope it's at least acceptable for your specific preferences. Although, last we heard I think you were on your porpoise and no time for yuppie fitness chicks. However, I can't imagine that's gonna be the rest of your life.

It's one of the worst dating markets on the planet by the numbers. 130/100 ratio. But this is kinda meaningless for me since I occupy such a tiny niche. I'd hate to be a normal middle class master's degree holding Chinese guy in his 30s here. Dating on nightmare mode. It tends to attract the more materialistic types of women too, where a city like Chengdu has women who will optimize more for attraction, lifestyle, values and emotional connection as opposed to raw economic power and status. I'm a niche integrated foreigner within the already niche foreigner market so it's hard to say to what extent overall market conditions would affect me personally since the type of woman who would ever be interested in this is probably very far from the norm in a lot of other aspects.

Lots of foreigners and the Xinjiang people who live here culturally segregate themselves away from the Chinese and toward the foreigners. If I started looking, I'd start in the foreigner+xinjiang people community and mostly not even bother with the Chinese women.

I broke up with that powerlifter girl Rita in 2020 just pre-pandemic and spent the next 4.5 years constantly dating and in and out of relationships, the longest of which was 1 year. I hated it and I hated who I was becoming when I was pursuing a partner. So I decided to stop. And I did. I still accept dates when the woman approaches/initiates which has happened twice since moving here (one of them frankly mogged me in every ****ing dimension besides sanity. 5x my income, law degree which she never used, turbo successful entrepreneur, much more conventionally attractive than me ostensibly all natty vs my laser skin treatment steroid botox peptide beauty, 11 years younger, fluent in English way beyond my Chinese fluency, but was self admittedly a traumatized nutcase), but I don't actively seek a partner at all at this time. Maybe I will in the future but for now I'm good it's aight.

Well that's not totally true... got an older Thai woman who also income-mogs me and has a 19 year old "daughter" (her daughter was born male...) in university coming to visit in August. had 2 dates in BKK. She owns a jewelry store. but once again in this case I was more in the receptive/pursued role.

This did actually happen once explicitly in the Chengdu job. It was unique circumstances as I was working for Dipont education which has a much more meritocratic and results based promotion system, as opposed to most westernized schools caring only about optics, image, and credentials as you point out. This was also unique because Dipont basically did staffing and quality control at dozens of schools in china, and each foreign principal shared leadership duties with a Chinese principal and there was clear division of labour; the foreign principal was mostly in charge of teachers and curriculum/extra-curricular stuff, and the Chinese principal dealt with parent facing stuff, student behavioural stuff, and day-to-day administrative stuff.

But then in the British school a lot of tasks that should have fallen on the headmaster (we did not have a head of secondary and were in the recruitment process; the very remote location on an Island with a population of 40k made staffing and retention extremely difficult) fell on me. Specifically, class observations and mentorship of other teachers who were getting negative feedback from students. The job was kinda split between 3 people; I was in charge of auditing teaching quality, another lady was in charge of managing student behaviour, and the third was responsible for curriculum and extra-curricular activities stuff. Then our general overall school headmaster was a real piece of work. They were nice enough to be direct and say 'you lack the image and credentials for the highest levels of school leadership, but we begrudgingly admit you understand very clearly how to deliver the exam results which are parents number one priority". And I was not at all offended and completely agree; I've chosen a physical presentation and communication style NOT befitting of a principal at all and those sorts of optics abso-****ing-lutely matter in attracting more parents and dealing with upset parents/students. If you're hypermasculine, muscular, but have a weird androgynous "false positive gaydar" feminine sass along with ethnic ambiguity, that will turn off a very large % of prospective parents choosing a school way before they realize you speak Chinese or have multiple graduate degrees. I've seen examples of non-conventionally presenting people being very successful in education leadership in China though; a man named Moses from Kenya. 6'4, massive frame, a bit fat. He doesn't exactly strike one as an intellectual on first impression, but he's frankly smart AF and an ultra devout pro-natalist Christian with something like 8 kids with a woman he's been married to for 3 decades or so. He was also a great boss and a mentor when I was coming up and building my skills earlier in my career.

So circling back to your main point, if the job was about managing teachers and coordinating everyone to deliver what customers want more, I could do it. I am keenly aware of my flaws and I understand there are also other very important parts of the job. I look down on all the sort of "box ticking" and administrative precision/rules obsessions, but ultimately I can begrudgingly admit this is still important to the job in many respects and even if I'm good at the "here's how we can teach better and get higher scores" and the calming down crying students parts, being inadequate in those other aspects makes me pretty unsuited for it. I've made peace with letting go of this already, and it's not like I can't change my mind later...

plus it's like "yeah we're different because we're not offering international education; we're offering a uniquely traditional British boarding school education! Our head of secondary is American and has never even lived in the UK!" yeah... that doesn't really fit.

The current school has 0 foreigners in administration or leadership positions, which is exactly why it works so damn well because most foreigners are complete ******s who have 0 understanding of how the preferences of Chinese students and parents differ from those of student and parents in their home countries and assume that the decision to study a western curriculum means they want all aspects of education to be similarly westernized. So... I don't have to worry about it!

Teaching is such an easy career with an absurd amount of money in it for essentially zero work. There is a massive populist movement to continue this bullshit narrative.

For reference, the median wage where I live is X, teachers in a poor shithole area want ~1.3X as a min. Teaching is part time employment. You literally don't work a full time load. Yet somehow you make substantially more than firefighters, police, etc. Its a fucking travesty.

Then we get to the admin. Cornell (random Ivy) employs ~15k people, they teach ~30k, and there is something like 1500 academic staff. How many fucking cooks and janitors do we need? Or is there actually an entire cottage industry of grifters who exist in a bizarre parasitic relationship with these institutions?

It honestly disgusts me. I have no clue how bad it is in China, but the US needs less college educated folks, higher learning standards (sorry dark skinned people), and a Euro style admission policy. Take some tests, score high, get in. You live in a shithole apartment with a shared bathroom and then go take classes in an office building. Fuck the art exhibits, 8727 clubs, sports, and all this other nonsensical bullshit. Sign me up for the full on socialist educational system. Oh and Harvard can keep all their shit. If you got 70 dimes to drop, whatever. Its the same in Eurotardia.

Frankly, I agree. You basically got a lot of work to do in the first ~1-5 years learning the ropes and prepping routines/habits/materials, after that the hours of real labour fall to part time. Just hope you work at a school that doesn't invent pointless tasks to keep everyone busy and stressed and instead work at one that says "how about we pay you less but send you tf home when you're done teaching?"

went back to my college for the reunion and couldn't beleive the changes since i was there last, the new housing looks more like high end condos than dorm rooms

just insane

surely Harvard is more than $70k these days? My nephew's final year at Williams College is something like $95k

not exactly a great payback for him tbh. He's a very bright kid...I think he came top 5 in his high school & is top 5% in his class or sth...he was planning on joining the CIA I think, but won't now for Trump reasons & so has only managed to find a job as a paralegal with his Mandarin, Linguistics degree.

not a great return to date for his $350k+. He did have a trans roommate though so it wasn't all wasted

tangentally related points....

one of my daughters is at ANU, one of the top Aus universities. They've invested so much in their faculty & the accompanying bureaucracy that they are stony broke. They're based in Canberra which is where our gubmint & Parliament is also based & all those Chancellors & Vice Chancellors must be getting paid fortunes. Australia tightened up immigration laws 4/5 years ago & this in conjunction to fallout from covid means the universities are getting fewer high paying international students from China & India so all of a sudden, they are cancelling courses & ejecting kids to other universities when they are 50 or 75% of the way through their courses.
& because the uni's strength is it's politics

re teaching though...very likely to be one of the safer jobs of the next 20 years at least.

fw i grew up just south of where williams is

and yes, williams is probably the most selective liberal arts school in the country, if you got into there you likely could have gotten into an ivy

he had to be an incredibly smart kid to get in

rough, yeah about 25% of all ivy league slots are already filled up before anyone sends in an application about 15% legacy and 10% hopeful legacy, stuff like the prime minister of croatia and son of an oil sheikh are always getting in

feel,

Yeah, its more with room and board and other fees. Looks like 86 this year and 91 next. I whiffed on all my Ivy applications and applied to the wrong college at NYU (oops). Ran into a rather tough year as well (03). Somehow got into an elite liberal arts school and might've had a shot at Amherst/Williams. But the math didn't really math even 20 years ago. Maybe if you were poor and could get an absurd amount of AIDs. Even now chunking out 30-40k a year seems about where it might make sense to attend a **** tier Ivy/Elite LA school if you wanna get into something targeted. (Auto accepts to professional schools if you can have a warm body score, finance, etc.) Otherwise if you're paying rack rate or carrying debt back, you're gonna be very ****ed compared to if you just went to somewhere that would bend over backward so you can sleepwalk through your classes.

But that racket is pretty well known. Its the K-12 **** that no one is really keen on exploring. If you've ever wondered why for profit universities exist, its someone willing to pay 15k to get an education masters that they'll pay back in two years. And since the system is public that have essentially no standards on the educational level. https://www.uft.org/your-rights/salary/d... My buddy's gf was on the scam from the jump. 2 Masters from University of Phoenix equivalent that you can complete on your summer break and by the time you're 30 you make 6 figs a year with the summers off. https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/commen... The worst part is that everyone knows this is an absurd scam, but they abuse it and let random freaks keep parroting "teachers are underpaid". Maybe if we compare them to corrupt CA firefighters/police making 200k+, but in your average area teachers make way more money than any other public servant and work vastly less hours in a much more desirable environment. Just don't start caring about the kids.

No one is ever gonna convince me that there is meaningful prep work to do as a teacher when you keep teaching American History upto the Civil War, and World History till the fall of Rome every year on repeat. God forbid you teach math and at one point in the last 20 years had to switch from whatever was taught when I was a child to learning Common Core.

My recollection of my own K-12 was my own school's inability to attract anyone who could teach computer science, ap calc, or ap econ and just our AP course selection consisted solely of g4y r3t4rd **** like history/poli sci/english. And just tons of holocaust porn about how hitler and the nazis were the ultimate incarnation of sadistic evil and just hated the jews for no reason at all or bc they were inherently racist and there was absolutely no provocation whatsoever. Just pure Israeli goyslop propaganda to reinforce the Boomer moral framework.

But we did get to read Great Expectations before AP in "accelerated English" and that was a fantastic experience I am really grateful for actually.

And now I spread hyperinterventionist hy00ge government Keynsian economics/MMT propaganda for a living LOL, but I'd like to think I'm being humane by identifying it as clearly propaganda that doesn't work empirically while I am teaching it and mentioning that what happens IRL is very different than what will get us maximum exam marks and that we are only concerned with CIE A-levels conception of propagandized fantasyland reality, not actual empirical reality.

That's one clear difference between Chinese education and American. There's less concern with thought control and propaganda and more acknowledgement of education as a venue for competition and for signaling rather than gaining any practical intellectual skill. But if you're approaching this with brutal honesty about what you're doing rather than illusory fantasy this feels more honest to students and parents at least. You're here to complete arbitrary useless academic tasks and perform better than your classmates so that you are allocated more opportunities and socio-economic status in the future, and this is essentially zero-sum. The lack of self serving delusions and pretty lies is one of the things I most appreciate about Chinese culture generally. There's none of these white lies to protect people's sense of dignity. But taken to an extreme (all ethnicities are equal and any differences in outcome are solely due to social inequality and conditioning that require re-education and coercive re-equalization) these sorts of pleasant delusions can have seriously dysfunctional consequences for a society...

Yeah, part of that is the natural gravity of how intelligent teachers are and what they want to do. If you're teaching an AP Econ/CS course, you could clearly move into a collegiate teaching environment which is obviously more lucrative and if you are slightly more competent than your shittiest adjunct you'll end up in the private sector. The math don't math for History tho. You got .00001% of people who are Indiana Jones, a decent bit of actual historians who work at museums/etc, and then your college n00bs, and then at the absolute ass end people who teach HS history that essentially never changes. (Assuming someone with a History degree gets their teaching certificate. Otherwise we just have someone with a random college degree who is more than capable of teaching a class which is incredibly easy to teach.)

The WW2 stuff is pretty hilarious. I'm pretty sure explaining how the Jews have been persecuted for 2000+ years, somehow lucksacked into the most lucrative career imaginable, and then consolidated their wealth with ethnically bigoted policies would result in you find a new career the next day, but I don't see how any of that is remotely even debatable.

MMT is pretty great stuff since it doesn't even white board well. It basically falls apart when you introduce foreign trade to the model and expand to third party actors that don't fall within the core "tax/print to generational wealth". I do enjoy how some neo-Keynesians refuse to recognize the core insanity of it insisting it just another flavor of neo-Keynesian insanity.

On a happier note, I do think that grasping college as a chance to learn things if you feel like it (I took a Coursera class on comic books), but understanding that the core aspect is to just produce the best scores as possible is really instrumental for getting ahead. The whole cost/value prop with universities is essentially about 2 things: 1) Signaling value 2) Networking, both of which are merely different aspects of social proof. Will you Saudi Prince buddy give you a very cush career as the white man with a Harvard degree? Prob. Will someone hire you because you came from a target school? Def. But will ultimately, when you're 30, will anyone care you went to Dartmouth when you're a bottom performing associate? I could rant about the amount of people who took their shot while being moderately competent and landed in incredibly cush jobs. (One Google VP just managed the Qatar account, then got cut loose and immediately went to manage the Qatar side of the transaction with Google. Great gig. 10 hours a week and mil-ish comp.) If only education actually prepared people for society instead of people randomly thinking "more is better" and "teachers are our future" we'd be much better off. You can basically learn any topic you want with a little bit of effort today. (One recent thing I did was tank sizing for natural gas tanks to prevent the freezing of the valve.) But that is enough ranting for this morning.

This is just the default and assumed world view among Chinese; they understand this by 15 years old. I really regret NOT understanding this at a much younger age. While in my formative years, it felt like society and authority figures tried to signal the exact opposite in imparting an understanding of how the world works on young impressionable me. It wasn't just wrong; it was the opposite of right and I fell for that **** hook line and sinker. "frat guys are douchebags LOL!1! They're just in college to party! They will never get good jobs like "losers" who are in the library all day" LOOOOOOL.

I don't take a conspiratorial view of thinking this was some sort of attempt to deliberately undermine people as a form of competition; I think they really believed the world was a truly meritocratic place and things like "it doesn't matter what college you go to, just make sure you study hard and learn a lot of important valuable skills" were how the job market works.

Like I said before, Chinese culture is blunt and far less feminized and concerned with a "happy consensus" view of human nature. Go up to the average western 37 year old woman and just use the phrase "sexual (or marriage) market place" and watch her roll her eyes and say something like "oh so you're one of those andrew tate incel types, huh?". The most basic propositions of human nature with near infinite empirical support that are so readily observable, that some mates are more desirable than others, that there exists scarcity, and therefore there exists competition for mates, is just completely unacceptable to them. If you mention the phrase "behavioural genetics" or 'race and IQ', you'll get an even more offended response. They live in such a delusional world entirely divorced from reality and their ways of rationalizing what's going on the world around them are frankly, what I'd describe as schizophrenic. But nobody will ever diagnose them as such, of course...

Most of the seniors didn't come to school this week and I had a class 1 on 1 with a bright girl. I asked her why she was studying overseas and why her older sister was studying in Zhejiang province. She didn't say "because I want to experience cultural diversity and understand occidental ways of life to gain more worldly perspective". She said "because I wasn't academically talented and was unlikely to earn placement in a good Chinese university. But with a lot less effort and talent required I secured a UCL offer." There was no shame in her voice, just telling it like it is without trying to save face. Humility...

She asked me a question I dislike being asked, solely because giving a real answer is going to be very long-winded and people are usually asking this question to make small talk, not to explore my motivations deeply. They're often expecting a shallow answer, but I can't bring myself to give them one. She asked "Why did you choose to live and work in China?". I paused for a full minute and said "I need time to figure out how to phrase this without being too long..."

"If you asked me when I was 26-28 and still FOB, I'd have said something like "great transportation, awesome people, cool food, great infrastructure, friendliness, low crime"!. But now... no... it goes much deeper than that. Culture isn't just things like food, entertainment, art, dance, holidays, rituals, and literature. It's also worldview and a shared understanding of what a human being is... what human nature is... what model explains human decision making in even in domains that are "icky" to discuss. In this aspect, I have a deep admiration for Chinese culture. They don't shy away from things that westerners are too scared to face. There's no collective self serving delusion. The western moral and ethical framework changed greatly after WW2, and frankly became corrupted and warped. It's exceptionally difficult to live in a society where the collective understanding of human nature is so divorced from empirical reality, and Chinese just have a far more pragmatic approach that is more concerned with truth than dignity. When it comes to history, perhaps there's many things they choose to shy away from facing to preserve their collective dignity... but when it comes to facing the least pleasant parts of human nature, they are brutally honest and this leads to having a relatively more harmonious society grounded in empirical truth rather than wishful delusion".

The true joys of living abroad. Which spawns a whole new rant of people who "want to see the world and experience different cultures", but are really interested in going on poor people vacations. Although I will admit that you will likely learn to hate Chinese tourists via this.

For example, until you actually do business in a post-Soviet culture you'll never really understand its lingering effects even among seemingly Westernized people. And the cultural divide where some younger people are even comfortable with outright lying/cheating/stealing. Its a malignancy that will take generations to erase. But I'm sure that two week vacation in Bulgaria in an AirBnB is totally gonna help you "see the world" and provide "cultural enrichment" beyond seeing infinite stray cats and lots of Slavs.

Amusingly I have done some volunteer work in Africa and know people who do vastly more. But still witness white saviors who think the white man can fix African problems without understanding anything about Africa, who promptly get swindled and are confused. Yes, getting poor black people loans for small motorbikes is objectively good. No, they will never pay you back assuming your African business partner even bothers to enact your plan and doesn't rob you first. Which is probably why I'm reticent to even attempt to do business in sketchier post-Soviet countries because I kinda hate Slavs (totally understand the Nazi view of them now), and I hate the way they do business even more.