How Watching Hyouka May Help Improve Your Life

Hyouka is truly an amazing show, not perfect but amazing. It utilized familiar setting but filled in that setting with interesting characters and unconventional high school-based mystery. This post is not a direct anime review but rather my reflection on Hyouka. Read on to learn how you can make your life better (like I did) using lessons from this anime.

Don’t do anything you don’t have to. What you have to do, you do quickly.

I am proud to say that this is not the case where Hyouka inspires me to live the energy-conserving life. Watching Hyouka made me realized that I had always been living that way without knowing it! Oreki Hotaro was my hero, or rather, he was me except that I wasn’t as good-looking as he was. Energy-conserving lifestyle worked extremely well when I had too many tasks at hand. If I tried to do everything, I would be totally exhausted and would probably collapse. So every time I got new assignment, I asked myself ‘Do I have to do this?’. If I didn’t really have to do it, I pushed the task down my priority list and invested my limited energy on what I really had to do instead. After I decided that I had to do something, the next question would be ‘Do I have to do this NOW?’. When the answer to those two questions were ‘yes’, I started doing it as quickly and effectively as possible.

That’s what I usually did and as a result, I often managed to get myself some free time. But of course, living like that did not come without some backlash. Often, other people had different opinion on what I had to do. And I ended up doing things that no one appreciated and skipped on things that others thought were important. But then again, if I were afraid of how others thought of me, I would end up having all my energy drained. So I guess that in the end, I am like Oreki but without Chitanda to drag me around.

Sometimes it only takes change in perspective to solve a problem.

I took this one from Chitanda. Her super energetic personality could be tiring for me but I absolutely admired her insight and ability to perceive other people’s emotions. Let me give you some example. When the Classic Club members were trying to figure out how the Furuoka Village Murder Mystery film should end, Chitanda was the one who ‘felt’ that Oreki’s ending was not compatible with the original writer’s intention. Chitanda could somehow sense others’ feelings and intentions which sometimes played vital role in solving mysteries.

In real life, changing perspective may help me understand the problem better especially the problems that involve human relations. To be more specific, changing perspective helps me understand the people involved in the problem. There were times that I tried to see things from others’ point of views and based on their contexts. When I did that, the problem I was facing was simply my own fabrication or misinterpretation.

Stop being obsessed about winning everything.

Can a person with type A personality change to type B personality as he gets older? I have no idea but it can’t be that easy. Fukube appeared easy-going but the viewers later learned that he used to be covertly competitive towards Oreki. So far, Fukube still could not best Oreki and secretly harbored jealousy. I could not be sure that he was sincere when he said that he felt much better after he gave up trying to be the best in everything he did. Well, he did keep repeating that ‘a database cannot draw any conclusion’ and always made way for Oreki. Despite my doubt for Fukube’s true position, I agree with him in that once we can stop being obsessed with being the best, we become happier…we are free.

Masterpiece is born masterpiece.

It had a lot to do with the Kanya Festival mystery and what happened in the Manga Club which I would rather not go in to details. The point was that there were several times when extremely talented people dismissed their achievements as just matters of luck. Some showed no interest or gave no special regards to their talents. These kinds of action cut like knives to the ones who tried so hard to do the same but could not. Just like what Ibara said, ‘a masterpiece is born a masterpiece’. I believed her. Some people were just born with certain gifts to achieve great things.

Nevertheless, most of the great accomplishments were not purely the result of innate gifts. What I am saying is that even if you have no gift, you can still make it, albeit with more effort. Being jealous of other people only leads to dead end.

So that’s it for now. Hyouka clearly contained other interesting things than those I mentioned above. How about you? Did you pick up something else worth talking about from Hyouka? Do not hesitate to share them here. I will post my full review of Hyouka after the show ends.

Did you notice? The four topics I wrote were related to the four members of the Classic Club; Oreki, Chitanda, Fukube and Ibara.

Warning: Feel free to adopt some of these tips for your daily life. But please do not hold me responsible if you later find your career or social life in ruin.