enjambments: essays

the shape of what cannot be said

2026-10-11T00:00:00.000Z

If we say that identity formation is wholly based on the understanding of how language works, then it is also a matter of forming one's own relationship with language, of how words are defined by a meaning-making consistent with one's own worldview. Change a definition, reframe the world within a new system of language, and the world appears different than it was before. A person changes with it. Immensely.

I believed this for a long time. I once wrote that we only exist in language, and I meant it the way one means a vow. But being itself, in all our entirety, rests on something more abstract and primitive, something in between conscious and unconscious.

The hand that reaches for a cup has never said the word cup. It knows the weight before it knows the name. A child flinches at a raised voice years before she can say what fear is. There are people who lived into adulthood without any language at all, and they still had a temperament, a stubbornness, a way of turning toward the people they loved. Something was there to be given words. If language made all of it, there would have been no one to receive it.

So I could take back wholly and say mostly. Language is the strongest lever we have on ourselves, and a sentence said to oneself at the right hour can turn a life. That much I still believe. But mostly is a coward's revision. It keeps the same picture and only shrinks it: language as a floor of the house, the body as a basement underneath, and somewhere a staircase between them that we are supposed to find.

What sits outside of language is also inside it, at the exact place where words stop meeting each other, where a sentence reaches for its own end and finds nothing to hold. That marginal threshold, a hole in the floor of the house. Every word carries the absence of what it is not, and in a few places the absence is all there is. We do not run into the unsayable from the outside, as if it were a wall at the edge of the world. We are built around it. The self is the shape that forms around what it cannot say.

Some call that place a wound, the Real that the symbolic can never close. Some call it a field, a nothingness out of which the self is continually born. I can't decide which. On some days the hole feels like something taken from me and on others like the only open window in the room. Perhaps it is both, depending on what we do in front of it.

Because there are two things we can do. We can speak around it. We can give the hole a new edge, a new story, a better word, and the edge holds and the person really does change. That is what I meant all along by reframing, and it is not nothing. Or we can leave it open. Not narrate, not explain, not fill. Simone Weil thought grace could only enter where a void was left unfilled, and that our whole nature leans toward filling it. Reframing and silence look like opposites. I am beginning to think they are two ways of standing at the same edge.

And then there are the places where the edge will not take. A loss you can describe a hundred ways that remains exactly as heavy. A body that keeps flinching long after the story of why has been told and retold. Language works on our relation to the hole. It does not work on the hole. Redescription slides off it the way water slides off a stone, and the stone is not interested in our sentences.

This is what wholly was covering. A self that is wholly language has no such places. Nothing in it cannot be renamed, so nothing in it can undo the one who names. It is a beautiful thought and a closed one. A totality is a lid.

I still want to say that it is through language that we change. I only want to say it with the hole in it now. What makes each of us particularly unique may not be the words we have, which we share with everyone, but the way we hold ourselves around the few things we will never have words for. That holding is the closest thing I have to a signature.

There is an answer to all this that I haven't refuted. It says the hole is only a habit that is expensive to revise, a pattern too deep in the body to update, and that I am dressing a mechanism in theology. Maybe. But the mechanism cannot tell me how to stand in front of it, and that is the only question I have ever actually needed answered.

This piece opens a longer thread on language and the unsayable.

on one's inner oracle

2025-06-03T00:00:00.000Z

Tapping into your inner oracle can only be accessed through self-knowledge. I believe that it is a kind of power that allows you to have a certain level of foresight that is uniquely consequential based on who you are as a person.

In principle, it is actually just a process of elimination. The only prerequisite is to have a wide scope of knowledge and understanding about yourself and the people around you (which includes human psychology) to have a comfortable level of predicting outcomes for yourself and for other people.

Humans are very predictable. We have countless of records in literature that prove how predictable our species is. We can create characters from our imagination that embodies the reality of what it means to be human. Perhaps, this deep exposure to the heights and depths of human capabilities is where the wellspring to human knowledge that would allow us to predict a kind of future that concerns ourselves and the people around us.

I am convinced that I am already applying it to myself in a sense that I see my own life as a kind of story that I am writing for myself. Needless to say, I am the main character of this story. But what I wrote about my own self-awareness has stuck with me for a very long time until this very moment. I have mentioned the possibility of prediction in that log, which carries a particular exactness to what I have been articulating:

A prediction that results to only few possibilities is the only kind of prediction that I can consider to be worth it and realistic. If I try to predict an outcome with a lot of possibilities, that can only mean two things:

either I do not have a firm grasp of the relationships of every elements involved in the situation, or

I am in denial of the realistic possibilities so I try to look for a way out of the thing I cannot accept.

In another sense, I have also talked about perceiving myself as a trinity by being aware that I am writing at this very moment:

What this made me realize is that writing allows me to be three persons at once. The one who writes is the exposed vulnerability. The one who reads what is being written is the one who turns their gaze into writing. The one who realizes both is the one acting out the performance of being the writer. I write, I read the writing, and I react based on the reading of what was written. The one who writes become everything all at once where these three processes are subsumed into a single entity of me being the author of this writing. I can hide what I want to hide because I am always already carrying out the performance of the writer writing this piece. I am ready to be vulnerable as I am also the one who gazes at what is being written. I have already gazed at what will be written before they become words in this page. I am the creator of the criticism of my own work.

When life already takes the form of a narrative: what happened yesterday somehow made sense because of the things that happened today. Even if there are no direct connection to the events from yesterday to today, this frame of thinking that there is an indirect causation, a concrete series of events that we can look at and determine what possibilities may happen next. How you feel about a decision may impact how you respond to future events that directly concerns your decision.

For example, if you harbor resentment for your friend because of being inconsiderate of how you feel, what would you do? Would you choose to initiate a confrontation, even just to have a conversation about what happened, or would you keep it all in for now to avoid "unwanted" conflict? What narratology would dictate is there is already a conflict and it is happening inside of you. And with every conflict, a resolution is inevitable. A resolution may come in various forms, but we can always reduce it into two essential outcomes or two versions of a resolution:

The resolved resolution: pardon the tautology but this only refers to our first response earlier. You initiate a conversation with your friend.
The "unresolved" resolution: for the lack of the better term for now, let's go with this. This refers to our second response: You brush it off, despite feeling this resentment.

The resolved resolution is the act of doing the appropriate response in line with a progressive narrative. The chosen path to advance the story is impactful and externally consequential. For every conflict, there is a confrontation. When there is a confrontation, there is always a resolution at an individual level. What is being resolved in the most atomic scale is the person's emotions and not the situation itself. This is why we have already established earlier that understanding human psychology is important. We need to hold on to predictable actions that we are bound to make as a response about a particular event, which is an unacknowledged and perhaps unintended emotional harm by an other. This confrontation may end in two ways:

The unintended harm: the other acknowledges and apologizes sincerely and everything became a trivial misunderstanding.
The deflecting other: the other denies that a harm was done, furthering the resentment of the friend to the other.

The second outcome transforms the scenario into an unresolved resolution, turning the conflict inward. You are forced to deal with the denial because the other chooses not to acknowledge the harm they did to you. It becomes a fertile ground for gaslighting to occur. To also become one with the other in denying that the event happened. Then again, we are forced to look at the possible outcomes of the other's denial:

Your experience is the truth: your reaction is valid. The harm was done and the reality was that the other chooses not to acknowledge it. This presents a possibility of negative future interaction with the other.
You overreacted: you were too sensitive. The harm was not as grave as you think. This has two possibilities: that this is true or you are only convincing yourself to deprioritize your emotional sensitivity for a "better" social harmony.

Now, at this point, these branching of reactions and their consequences should provide a general sense of prediction of events by understanding and anticipating the possibilities of outcomes based on one's reactions, and how much truth can we ascribe to each of the reactions. What we come to understand is that there are specific consequences to each actions that are aligned with a specific emotional state. Since the intention of the other is difficult to predict, we can only try to narrow down the possibilities of the genuineness of one's actions.

Taking this further, since your intention is only knowable through you, it requires radical honesty with the self to make your true intentions known. Only then can it be used as another guiding post in attempting to have a better sense of foresight that applies to your life. With the kind of framework that we have understood in anticipating reactions and consequences, we can apply this to ourselves in weighing the best possible outcomes that we can take or trade whenever we are faced with the difficulty of moving forward.

Your intention becomes a revelation to your own true emotional state that you can confront and align towards the goal that you are pursuing. Or, you will be prompted to change your goals whenever you find your emotional state to be uncompromising. It is this push and pull of various factors that we can understand where we are going and why we are going in the direction that we are headed. It is as if you are looking at a character in a novel that has their own unresolved conflicts and unprocessed emotions and trying to analyze them from a perspective that is depersonalized. This attempts to separate the bias from the objective reality and manifest radical honesty with the self. You become the character that you are creating by going into the core of your own self. This self-discovery is a way of finding your own inner oracle.

on Companion (2025)

2025-02-21T00:00:00.000Z

It is the perfect time to release this movie. I guess I might have a different perception about it because apart from the unsolicited and intrusive screenshots I saw on Twitter about this movie, nothing prepared me for the twist. I see some who felt robbed of the experience because apparently, the core plot was already revealed during the trailer. Well, you know me. I don't watch trailers of films I know I'll watch.

So, it is impossible to discuss the movie without spoiling the rest of the story and I would suggest to see it without prior knowledge about it except that it's marketed as a horror film and Sophie Thatcher is in it. And while you're at it, also try to watch Heretic (2024). Some good stuff is in there and maybe I'll write about it in the future.

It's basically a spin on the idea of love and robots in the age of AI. Take Alex Garland's Ex_Machina (2014) and Spike Jonze's her (2013) and smash them together to create this sci-fi thriller. I was actually sold that this was just another romantic psychopath slasher movie because of the clips and images I saw and I am glad that it was not.

It did not say anything new but it attempted to tackle the love robot turned murderer trope in a tasteful way. In the midst of the conflict, everyone did the best thing that aligned to their interests. The tech was also consistent to a point that did not broke my immersion and I just love how humans are portrayed in the face of their selfish desperation.

I have held a firm belief that the emergence of LLMs will only feed our own ego. The first hurdle of being a human is to understand ourselves and accept our flaws. Another person or in the movie's case, the presence an Other that is tailored to our own unexamined self is a recipe for disaster. Our existence is meant to be denied and we must stand through the world's insistence to act according to its laws and revolt against it until we have found our true self. Only then are we able to love an Other. Only then are we able to sincerely empathize and gain a human understanding of what it's like to feel shared pain.

It has become a norm for me to always expect that we are here, orchestrating our own demise, unknowingly, as we make ourselves believe that the things that we do for love is the right thing for us. What a shame.

You cannot turn off or shut the Other down whenever it's convenient for you. I love that the film is all about the inability to face the consequences of your own actions. That we always assume that since the future hasn't happened yet, we are free from the chain reaction that our decisions will create.

Sacrifice, substitution, and the remainder of grief

2026-10-03T00:00:00.000Z

Before the order

This began as a simple question about a kind of horror I kept watching without being able to say why. Widow's Bay, Midsommar, Hereditary, Azrael, Best Wishes to All: an isolated place, or a line of generations, where a sacrifice is necessary for the order of the status quo. What is the metaphysics of it, and what are its sociological implications? I expected an answer about cults. What I found, over many months and many returns to the same question, was an argument about substitution, and underneath it a set of things I had been feeling and had not yet put into words.

For now, here is the core argument: every sacrificial order runs on the substitution of the singular one, the sacrifice. The victim stands in for the whole (a community, a group, a clique), and the whole can only use the victim because his particularity has been made irrelevant to his function. Grief is the one phenomenon this substitution cannot process, but only while the subject holds it and does not succumb to it. To succumb is not to surrender. The former is a submission; the latter is a willingness, holding taken to its end, a deliberate decision to be one with grief outside of the order, and its result is a form of self-exile. As long as grief is held, the subject is immune to substitution: she can be made neither the stand-in nor the hand that offers one up. That immunity has its own cost. Because grief cannot be substituted, the community must apply pressure. By embrace, it makes the subject succumb, converting the grieving subject into its own participant, absorbed into the order. By abandonment, in the old sense of the word, it places her under the ban: cast out yet still held by the order that casts her out, a death that leaves the body standing. What the order wants from its victims is something else again. It consumes fear, which anyone can supply, and it converts grief, which no one else can. Grief says this one, and no other can take the place. Everything below is a slow walk from the first claim of that argument to the last.

"Folk horror" in the strict sense (Adam Scovell's chain of landscape, isolation, skewed belief, and a summoning) fits Midsommar, Best Wishes to All, and Widow's Bay. The Lottery sits at its border as a precursor. Azrael and Hereditary fit only partly. Rental Family and Pluribus do not fit at all, and that is the point: the structure outlives the genre that made it visible. Nor is any of this new. Jackson's story appeared in 1948; Le Guin's Omelas and The Wicker Man both date to 1973. I am interested on what is revealed by the repetition of this pattern.

I. The Order

The Lottery: a victim without identity

I had a conversation with my sister and my cousin about Shirley Jackson's The Lottery, since they both knew it and found it interesting but also claimed not to have gotten the full idea of it. I related it to Best Wishes to All, which they had both watched and disliked because it was "too weird." I explained how Jackson bared the idea of mandatory social ostracization as a form of community sacrifice to keep the community's order and peace.

The word was wrong, and the way it was wrong is instructive. Ostracism, from the Athenian potsherd vote, is exile: the community selects one member and casts them out, and the exclusion is the whole penalty. The ostracized person goes on living somewhere else. Jackson's horror is the refusal of exactly that mercy. Tessie Hutchinson is not cast out. She is kept fully inside, named and known, a neighbor and a wife and a mother, and killed in place by the intact community, with her own family handed the stones. There is no boundary drawn around her and no elsewhere she is sent to. Ostracism at least preserves a distinction between the community and its reject. The lottery collapses even that. It murders the insider as an insider, and the village is whole again the next morning.

What "ostracization" did capture is the instantaneous conversion: the second in which Tessie stops being us and becomes the thing to be stoned. Rene Girard says the victim must be marginal enough that killing provokes no reprisal, and Jackson's coldest move is that this marginalization requires no time and no cause. Tessie is a full member until the slip is in her hand and an outsider the moment after. She only protests the fairness when she is the one selected, never before. Participation is unanimous right up until it is your turn.

This is why The Lottery opens the order. It is the diagram, with no supernatural cover. Most scapegoating invents a guilt for its victim: witchcraft, betrayal, difference. Jackson removes even the pretext. Tessie is guilty of nothing but the draw. The function needs a victim, not a deserving one, which is Girard's victime de substitution in its purest form: anyone, by chance, standing in for everyone.

And the device is not arbitrary. The lot is one of the oldest political technologies of fairness. Athens filled most of its offices by sortition precisely because randomness was held to be incorruptible, equal, immune to wealth and faction. Jackson takes the mechanism whose entire moral appeal is equality of exposure and shows that perfect proceduralism can underwrite atrocity. The villagers cannot object because the process is fair, and fairness is exactly what disarms conscience. When asked why, the oldest man in the village can only say that there has always been a lottery, as if to say: this has always happened, so nothing is wrong; it is normal, and everyone takes part; it has to be this way. Tradition does not justify the lottery so much as make justification unnecessary. The reason is thinned into a proverb; the ritual remains. The status quo only refers to the managed violence a community does and is only sensible within that frame, but at the same time, it does not justify it. The Lottery had already made that sentence into a town. It is maximally intelligible, a transparent and rule-governed civic event, and its transparency is its alibi. Written three years after the camps, it belongs beside Arendt's later worry about atrocity administered as procedure by people who experience themselves as merely following the rules.

Best Wishes to All: the face made inoperative

Best Wishes to All keeps the victim but fixes him in place. A family keeps a man hidden in their house as the source of their good fortune, on the logic that there is only so much happiness in the world and someone must suffer so that others may flourish. Where the lottery rotates, this order designates; where the lottery is public, this one conceals. It is Le Guin's Omelas transposed to a grandparents' house in the Japanese countryside: the prosperity of the many held up by one kept out of sight.

Jean-Luc Nancy traces abandon to à bandon: to be placed under a ban, at the disposal of a power. Agamben builds his account of sovereignty on that root. The one who is banned is abandoned by the law rather than simply set outside it, held at a threshold where inside and outside can no longer be told apart. The captive in Best Wishes lives on that threshold. He is an exiled body kept inside the house, removed from social existence entirely, and the household's fortune rests on him. The ban includes him by excluding him, and the order stands on what it excludes.

The film's cruelty lies in what is done to his singularity. He is not merely hidden; he is made faceless and voiceless, so that there is no one left to address anyone. Eyes and mouth sewed shut. Arms and legs bound and kept inside a locked room in a house. In Levinas's terms the face is what resists my powers and commands me before I can grasp it, the site of a possible no. To render the victim faceless is to make his particularity inoperative while keeping his body useful. And useful is the word. Bataille's sacrifice withdraws the victim from the order of utility; the sacred is precisely what is spent for nothing. These films show the inverse. The captive is processed. Sacrifice has degraded into supply chain, which is the disenchantment of even our slaughter. Agamben would say this is no longer sacrifice at all but bare life, the one who may be killed without being sacrificed. Abandonment is how he became bare life: banned in place, his exile served inside the walls.

My sister and cousin disliked the film. I will come back to that.

Widow's Bay: the contract

Widow's Bay makes the economy almost embarrassingly literal. In the island's first winter, its founder, Richard Warren, made a pact with the entity beneath it: the colony's protection in exchange for sacrifices. The town kept the bargain for centuries with a formal procedure. Each toll of the church bell signals the entity's hunger, and each toll costs one life, taken in the tunnels under the town. The curse is bound to Warren's bloodline, and only the end of that line can break the pact. The world of these stories is not the disenchanted liberal cosmos of self-owning individuals contracting with one another. It is a re-enchanted cosmos of debt, where the land and the dead have appetite and agency, and where prosperity is structurally indistinguishable from a bill someone else must pay. Fisher's eerie names the feeling: agency where reason says there should be none. Durkheim names the social glue: solidarity through a crime held in common and kept from view.

The bloodline works as a mark. Girard counts the signes victimaires, signs that designate a victim before any violence is done, among the stereotypes of persecution. In The Lottery the mark is a pencil dot drawn at random and found in an instant. In Widow's Bay it is carried in the blood for generations, and the conversion from neighbor to victim stretches across a life of being marked and tucked away.

The town's old orientation films add one more rule: victims were not to be reassured, because the more afraid the sacrifice, the better it tastes. The island wants fear from its victims and has no use for their grief. That fits what substitution requires. Fear is generic; anyone afraid will do, and one person's terror serves as well as another's. Grief is bound to a single loss and cannot be lent. The island feeds on the affect that can be swapped.

Azrael: appeasement

Azrael is the quietest of the four. Its order is kept by silence and offering, by not speaking, so that the things beneath the ground do not return. Where Widow's Bay pays on command, Azrael pays in advance, continuously, with its own voice. The victim-function is spread thin across everyone's restraint.

Silence is also how abandonment becomes a collective act. Shunning asks every member to refuse to see and refuse to answer, keeping the excluded one at the edge through a hundred small withholdings. In The Lottery the whole village picks up stones; in an order of silence the whole community holds its tongue, and the ban is shared as evenly as the lot.

Four orders, then, and four functions: random, fixed, contractual, appeasing. They are not one machine but they share one grammar. Order is purchased, the price is borne by someone made substitutable, and the community agrees not to look.

The recoil

My sister and cousin said they did not get the full idea of The Lottery, and that Best Wishes to All was too weird. I think those responses are not failures of comprehension. They are the reaction the texts are built to produce, and in a sense they are comprehension, arriving as recoil instead of as paraphrase. When The New Yorker first ran Jackson's story in 1948, it drew more mail than anything the magazine had published, much of it furious and baffled, and a striking number of readers wanted to know where the village was and whether the ritual was real. As if the story had to be reportage or nothing. "Too weird" is the same gesture: insisting that the thing be safely elsewhere, in some strange village, in a foreign film. The villagers themselves cannot say why they do it either. So not getting it is standing where the villagers stand.

The current wave of these films is ambivalent in a way that betrays its surface. The cult offers exactly what the atomized modern subject lacks: belonging, ritual, a transmission across generations. And the genre defends against recognizing that liberal individualism is itself a covert sacrificial order (the comfort of the center paid for by the periphery, the security of the old paid for by the young) by displacing that logic onto an exotic Other. We don't do this; they do. It is revelation and alibi at once. The recoil in my family's living room was the alibi working.

II. The Subject

Midsommar: the offer

Midsommar opens the second movement because it stages most cleanly the scene every one of these stories contains: the visitor offered the community. Its protagonist arrives already bereaved, and the commune does not hide its violence from her so much as hold out its embrace at the exact point of her grief. Her mourning is taken up, mirrored, and absorbed by the collective until it is no longer hers alone. The film offers this as horror and as consummation at once, and it cannot decide which. Neither, for a long time, could I.

Dani arrives already bereaved. Her sister has killed herself and taken their parents with her. For the film's first stretch Dani holds her grief alone, swallowing her panic in front of a boyfriend who cannot bear it, because there is no one to give it to.

The commune reaches her through a fellow mourner. Pelle, who brings her there, lost his own parents and tells her the Hårga became his family. Then the women take up her wail and mirror it back, louder, until it no longer belongs to her. Her grief is accepted wholly, and in being accepted it is taken.

Dani is never the lamb. The ones who burn are the outsiders, none of them grieving, along with members who go willingly. She succumbs, is crowned, and is handed the choice of who will die. Holding her grief did not expose her to becoming the victim, and succumbing did not make her one. Succumbing converted her into the one who chooses. What held grief protects, then, is a refusal of both roles: the stand-in and the hand that offers one up.

My own definitions settle how to read her final smile. Surrender is being one with grief outside the order, and Dani goes inside. The smile is succumbing, and it is the order's victory.

Widow's Bay: Tom

Tom Loftis, the mayor of Widow's Bay, is the second conversion. He is a widower, and the finale reveals that his dead wife, Lauren, was herself of Warren's blood. He admits his part in the town's trouble: he brought tourists to an island whose people, as his wife had told him, cannot leave without consequence. When it seems that killing an elderly woman, Ruth, believed to be the last of the line, could end the curse, Tom accepts it as a necessary cruelty and sets out to do it as gently as he can. He even tries to argue her into offering herself, using the trolley problem. Where Midsommar converts grief through warmth, Widow's Bay converts it through logic, the "it has to be this way" every sacrificial order tells. Between Dani and Tom the second half of the thesis shows itself: the order wants its victims afraid and its grievers working.

The deracinated self

Transmission

I asked, early on, why the cult felt whole. The answer was transmission, in Stiegler's precise sense: the handing down of a savoir-vivre, inherited ways of living carried across generations by ritual and memory. The cult that still has its bell, its rite, its bloodline obligation, is monstrous but intact. The visitor is the deracinated modern for whom transmission has already broken, arriving with no inherited know-how, only consumption and skepticism. Stiegler calls the loss misère symbolique.

Best Wishes to All brings this down to the scale of a family. A nursing student from Tokyo returns to the countryside house she grew up in, and learns that her younger brother, raised under the same roof, has understood the family's ritual all along. Transmission worked in that house; it simply passed her over, or she let it pass. She alone grew up with the chance to forget, and she comes back unable to read what everyone else at the table already knows.

The danger in that thought is the reason the films must disguise it. The opposition of organic rooted community and atomized rootless society is Tönnies' Gemeinschaft against Gesellschaft, and the mourning of rootedness is Heidegger's lament for Bodenständigkeit, a mourning philosophically serious and politically radioactive. The envy of intact transmission and the affect that blood-and-soil politics recruits are the same affect. This is why the genre has to make the commune murderous and the grandparents grotesque: not despite the seduction but because of it. The horror is a reaction formation, the wished-for object experienced as the thing one flees. So the loss cannot even be mourned cleanly. It is a loss the modern subject is not permitted to register as a loss.

"The community is not to blame"

So is this why I feel that in these stories the community is not to blame? Because the tradition is what has "kept" the community alive and working, undisturbed until the deracinated individual comes back. The defamiliarization coming from the secularized urban metropolis has stripped them of the concept of their old community. At some point the retroactive fantasy feels akin to a romanticized other that the individuated self has lost, as one of the possible reasons why the deracinated individual comes back. Sociologically, I think this is also possible in real life, as modern city life has been feeling more lonely without the unifying traditions that bound a certain community. On a personal level, this is possibly what I may have been feeling as well.

The sympathy I described is exactly what the films manufacture. They lend us the perpetrator's phenomenology and let us call it nostalgia. In almost none of these stories does the outsider start anything. The bell was always going to ring; the captive was already in the house before the visitor got off the train. In Best Wishes this is literal. The granddaughter heard the noises from the room upstairs as a child and filed them away as a recurring nightmare. When she returns as an adult, the thing in the house is what it always was. The only change is that she can no longer keep calling it a dream. The outsider is not the cause of the violence but the point of view through which we discover that there was never peace, only managed violence. To say the community was undisturbed until the visitor came is to mistake the revealer for the cause, and to blame the one who names the crime rather than the ones who commit it is scapegoating itself, performed at the level of the story. The tradition kept the community alive, yes. Alive for whom? Not for the one in the back room.

Charles Taylor gives the reason the returnee can no longer perceive the old community as living. The secular age is not the subtraction of belief but the passage from a porous self, open to a world of forces and meanings that pass through it, to a buffered self, set behind the membrane of its own reflection. Once buffered, the Gemeinschaft can only be seen as an object, never again inhabited as a medium. And the loneliness is real and documented, from Durkheim's anomie to Putnam's empty bowling leagues. But the village charged differently: in exits that could not be taken and in scapegoats chosen by everyone together.

A living tension

I did not hold, when I said it, that the community's internalized violence is not to blame. I was stating the irresolution: that it is difficult to attribute where the "wrong" was, on the individual or on the community. That was more rhetorical than a plain statement of a stand. At this point I recognize it as a living tension: loneliness is the price of freedom from a community. Rules are lived by in isolation instead of within a collective.

The film gives the other side of this a face. The granddaughter's old classmate refuses the bargain and is the only unhappy person in town; his father, with no one suffering on the family's behalf, weakens and dies. Refusal in that village has a price, and it is the price I named: to live by the rules alone.

I had written something like this years ago without knowing what I was describing: that only when we are freed from the burden of history do we become guilty of the crime of freedom. The crime and the freedom were the same act. So were the loneliness and the leaving.

What I am caught in is an oscillation. On one side, the psychological impulse to yearn for something "known and familiar" in the adult phase when the nostalgia hits, when the individual returns to a notion of a happy past in an old community that is irreconcilable with the individuated self's needs after its freedom from the in-group. On the other, the pain of realizing that the violence was there all along, seen only once one's subjective experience wandered off from a collective that has retained its shape by perpetuating the same violence one had unknowingly experienced; and the loss in knowing that what one needs now cannot be satisfied by a community that has become unfamiliar. It was a false sense of safety all along, and the disillusionment is much harder to accept in the face of yearning for the old "happy and carefree" past. The once comfortable is only a false memory of not knowing better.

Two of the films stage this oscillation inside a family. The granddaughter in Best Wishes comes home already carrying the knowledge, in the form of a nightmare she chose to believe. Her grandmother tells her as much: the truth was always there, and she preferred not to see it. Her memory of a happy childhood held the knowledge all along, filed under dreaming. Annie in Hereditary is the same figure, older and angrier. She kept her distance from her mother for years and kept her away from her son, then let her back into the family after her daughter was born, out of guilt. At the funeral she is unsure how much she is supposed to grieve, and in the grief group she says so. The longing for the mother and the knowledge of what the mother was live in her at once, and the design comes in through that ambivalence.

The tension is located in time and that is what makes it tractable. The two poles are not two opinions. They are two temporal relations to the same memory: the retrospective pull of the adult reaching back under present loneliness, and the retroactive recognition that the violence structured the very comfort being mourned. The good memory and the knowledge that disqualifies it are the same content seen from two positions. Freud's word is Nachträglichkeit: an earlier experience rewritten by a later one that gives it a meaning it could not have had when lived. The childhood inside the collective was not wounding as lived. It becomes wounding only from the position the exit made possible. The wound is installed backward.

If this needs any consolation, the comfort was not false. It was real and conditional, and those are different. A child held inside an unbroken transmission is held. What the exit reveals is not that the safety was fake but that it was purchased, and that I was standing on the side of the ledger that did not pay. "It was all false" is, in a sense, the easier position, because total disillusionment gives me nothing to mourn: I was naive, and now I am not. "I was genuinely safe, and my safety had a price I did not see and did not pay" implicates me. The slide toward "false memory" is grief converting itself into something more bearable than itself, and my own method is supposed to catch exactly that conversion.

On the ride home after a shift the city does what cities do. No one asks where I am from. No one needs me to perform a role assigned by a family I did not choose. That indifference is a kind of freedom, and the loneliness inside it is the freedom's price rather than proof of its failure. I am not sure the city's bill is smaller than the village's. I only know it is itemized. Phillip in Rental Family carries the same loneliness in a foreigner's body: an American who has stayed in Tokyo for years, belonging to no one there, who takes a job performing other people's belonging.

Even a gentle return would fail. Suppose the old place were kind, suppose no one had ever been offered up there. I still could not go back, because what I am reaching for is not the community but the self that existed before the buffering, the porous one for whom the collective was simply the medium of being rather than an object of choice. I can return to the place. I cannot return to the position from which the place was home. Heidegger's Heimweh is more exact here than nostalgia, because the home one is sick for is not a location but a way of dwelling. So I would arrive as a tourist in my own origin, and the familiar would open onto the unheimlich, which Freud reminds us is only the heimlich, the long familiar, come back in the wrong key. The home is gone not because it was destroyed but because the one who could be at home in it was. The loss has no addressee.

Buying back in

This makes sense as a form of "relapse" only from the perspective of the individuated self. It only feels regressive because the knowledge of the perpetuated violence did not deter the deracinated self from once again participating in the systemic violence. And perhaps it is an easier psychological trap to pretend not to see in exchange for that sense of comfort, to "buy in" again as a willing participant.

Sartre's name for it is bad faith, the strenuous not-knowing that runs from its own freedom. But the trap is crueler than my framing. The willing re-entrant cannot get the comfort that way. The comfort belonged to the porous self who never saw. The one who returns knowing can only perform belonging, the way Sartre's waiter performs being a waiter, and must keep up the labor of not seeing for as long as he stays. He forfeits the individuated self without recovering what the in-group gave.

Best Wishes follows the re-entrant all the way down. Told that it happens everywhere, that she has always known and chose not to look, that she is as selfish as anyone and will not trade her own happiness to spare a stranger, the granddaughter stops resisting. In the end she makes a victim of the classmate who refused, the one person who had stood where she was trying to stand. Then she goes back to Tokyo and resumes her studies. The buy-in costs her the only companion her refusal had, and the city takes her back as though nothing happened.

Here I had to correct the correction. Re-entry costs a lot more, and the temptation is not easier per se as a path, but it is an easier tendency to fall into, depending on the strength of the longing. The grandmother's speech is that slope put into words. Each of her sentences lowers the cost of beginning the fall: everyone does it, you always knew, you are no better than us. The cost of the destination and the gradient toward it are independent. Longing lowers the activation energy for beginning the fall without lowering the cost of the state one lands in. The slope is easy precisely when the longing is strong, and the place one lands is no lighter for the ease of the descent. That is the structure of any compulsion: easy to begin under craving, more painful to inhabit than the abstinence it interrupts.

Pelle in Midsommar is the re-entrant who has already completed the return. Raised in the commune, he left to study abroad and came back knowing everything, bringing his friends with him. He is what the granddaughter becomes if she stays: the deracinated self returned, his grief turned into recruitment.

I see this figure most clearly in the owner of the agency in Rental Family. He is not in bad faith in the sense of pretending the families he rents out are real; he knows better than anyone that they are not. His daily labor is keeping the boundary intact, keeping each rental a bounded and repeatable transaction so that the manufactured never becomes binding. His not-looking says not this is real but this must stay unreal. That is what willing re-entry looks like once it becomes a profession.

And still: the impulse to go back may be nothing worse than the legitimate need not to be alone, wearing the only form available to it, which happens to be the violent one. A need is not the same as a relapse. My loneliness and my refusal to keep a victim come from the same faculty. To wish the ache away is to wish away the seeing.

Almost always difference

I forgot that there is almost always difference in repetition.

Deleuze builds a philosophy on it: there is no bare repetition of the identical, and what we call repetition of the Same is a surface under which every repetition produces difference. Derrida's iterability says the same thing about signs: a mark is a mark only if it can be repeated in a new context, and in being repeated it is necessarily altered. Kierkegaard gives it its affective register. His young man tries to re-stage a love and discovers it cannot be done. The only genuine repetition is recollected forward, a receiving-back transformed after loss, never a homecoming to the same.

Turned back on the beginning, this undoes the village. The cult's intact transmission was never intact. Every ringing of the bell, every generation's reception of the rite, was already an altered repetition. The wholeness I envied was a retroactive effect produced by the longing, not a property the community possessed. So there was never a Same on either side: not in the community I would return to, and not in the self that would return. Nostalgia's object is not merely lost. It is impossible, because the structure of repetition forbids the identical from ever having existed to be recovered. It is not that this particular return fails. Recovery as such is a category error. There is only forward.

But difference in repetition can be misheard as consolation, and it is not one. The difference produced is not guaranteed to be kind. Repetition drifts and degrades as readily as it gives birth to the genuine. Deleuze guards against the redemptive misreading with the eternal return, which for him is selective: not that everything recurs, but that only what affirms difference returns. It is a test, not a promise. The question is never whether repetition will save me but what a given repetition affirms, and whether I could will its return. The willing re-entry fails that test, because what returns is the bell and the victim. Difference in repetition removes the fantasy of the Same. It does not hand me a good outcome. It hands me a fork.

So belonging without a victim is never recovered. It can only be produced: the motions of connection performed until, sometimes, the doing becomes the thing. Structurally, at the threshold, that gesture is indistinguishable from the hollow version. I cannot know which one I am in until later.

Rental Family: the role that cannot be filled

Rental Family carries all of this into the market. Agencies rent out fathers, friends, husbands, mourners by the hour. The film's director found some three hundred such companies operating in Japan, an industry born of urban isolation, where both clients and actors describe genuine connection forming inside the paid hours. It is the late answer to the anomie traced through this whole essay: organic community lost, the buffered self left behind, and now the belonging that can no longer be inherited is available as a service.

I'd argue that people who find solace in rental relationship services, most of the time, want the "frictionless" relationship, where money itself becomes the conduit. There is no "refusal" against the self who pays for the service. The transaction itself becomes a binding contract of performing a relationship. It does not suffer from genuine connections built on conflicts and attempts to fix them, which the industry avoids in order to keep itself alive. What the individual wants is a fantasy that is sold by these services. However, the melancholic part is that the need for personal company that brings people to the service is only met halfway, remaining unfulfilled, sustained by transactions. It is tragic in a sense that it becomes its own self-violence on a microscopic scale, whether it is done to avoid accountability, to rent a fantasy, or to fill a void. In the end, the genuineness that comes out of it will only exist outside of the transaction, which is what formed between Phillip and the girl whose father he was asked to play.

The strongest move there is no refusal, and it goes further than I took it. What money buys is not a relationship without conflict. It is the elimination of the Other as such. The other is defined, at the most basic level, by the capacity to refuse me: to resist, to withhold, to find me wanting and leave. A counterpart paid not to refuse is the Same dressed as the Other, a faceless face, what Han calls the hell of the Same, a smooth surface that returns only my own image. Hegel already knew why this defeats itself. The master extracts recognition from one who cannot withhold it and finds it worthless, because recognition only means something from someone free to refuse it. So the client is met halfway not by accident but by necessity, and no better actor or longer booking could fix it. The conflict-and-repair I named is Winnicott's account of how an object becomes real: I must be able to destroy it in fantasy and watch it survive. The industry must prevent precisely this in order to stay in business. It forecloses the one process that would make its product true. Marx had it in a line in 1844: love can only be exchanged for love, trust for trust.

The self-violence also needs separating. It fits the lonely client renting a presence to fill a void, a melancholic loop that keeps the lost object at arm's length by paying for its shadow. It fits less well the client who rents an actor to lie to their parents, or to stand in for an apology; that person is using the service on other relationships, which is a different act.

And my conclusion was half wrong. The dying man in the film, who rents a family for his last days, speaks his last true sentence inside a paid hour. Phillip's bond with the girl is not outside the transaction either. It is born inside it; he was hired to be her father. What it does is rupture the frame from within, which is why, when it becomes real, he breaks the contract and is condemned by the owner for it. The genuine does not live in a clean exterior zone. It gestates inside the form and breaks it. It is the excess the transaction cannot hold.

The substitution thesis gives this its sharpest statement. The rental actor is a role-filler by contract, interchangeable by design: any actor could play the father. The genuine is the moment a substitutable role-filler becomes irreplaceable to someone. That is why it must break the contract, because the contract is, in the end, a substitution clause. This is the hinge into the last movement. Irreplaceability, first glimpsed as the thing a transaction cannot contain, is about to become the whole subject.

The tragedy remains doubled. The industry needs the client unfulfilled to keep them paying, and desire is already structured to keep its object at a distance, so the unfulfillment is the product working as designed at both levels at once. And yet, against that totalizing despair, stands the dying man, for whom the bought encounter was the only remaining channel for a real and final love, and it carried it. The transaction is the death of eros, and sometimes the last vessel a real feeling has left. I do not think the question resolves: is purchased belonging that becomes real a third path, difference in repetition producing what neither the lost village nor sovereign isolation could, or is it the final enclosure, the moment even intimacy becomes product and the owner is simply right?

A lonely man in a big city who finds something genuine inside a relationship that is, by design, structured and artificial.

III. The Remainder

Hereditary: grief as the lever

Hereditary belongs here because it fits the substitution frame only partly. No one is drawn by lot or kept in a back room. The family are vessels, chosen by lineage, completing a design that was in motion before any of them could consent. Its horror is less hidden exploitation than metaphysical helplessness, closer to Greek tragedy than to a scapegoat economy.

The way the order takes hold of the family is embrace. A cult member finds Annie at a grief support group, befriends her as a fellow mourner, and leads her toward the séance, the same approach Pelle makes to Dani. The family grows isolated from everyone outside it, and the isolation is produced from within, as a means of absorption. In these two films grief is the lever, and it works only once the griever has given way.

Pluribus: grief refused entry

Then came a story that inverted everything. Has there been a different but adjacent angle with Pluribus? Because that is a community rejected by the subject, which tries to assimilate her. It was under the backdrop of guilt that grounds our character in her refusal of the group, somehow a form of inversion into the buy-in of a norm once the self collapses into grief.

Pluribus is the assimilation scene of Midsommar stretched across a whole world, with the sacrificial machinery removed. Nearly everyone has been joined into a single peaceful, content collective. Carol is one of only a handful who are immune. The Others cannot lie, keep no private property or hierarchy, and hold no prejudice. In Girard's account, undifferentiation is the sacrificial crisis itself, the dissolution of differences that makes everyone everyone's double and ends in violence. Pluribus stabilizes that crisis as peace. The horror is that it holds, and no one has to be stoned for it to hold.

So what does an order cost when it has no victim to discharge onto? The thing sacrificed is no longer a body but the form of personhood itself: the capacity to refuse. And the moral topology turns over. In Best Wishes or Midsommar, the outsider's gaze reveals the community's concealed violence. Here the community is the nonviolent party and the holdout is the dangerous one. Carol's anger, it turns out, overwhelmed the collective and caused many deaths, and by the end of the season she is asking for a nuclear weapon, which the collective, unable to refuse her, would give. This unsettles the ethic I built earlier, where refusing the founding crime counted as the achievement. Here the refuser is a potential mass killer, and the refusal itself is the lethal act. The hive still has a back room, but it holds consent rather than a captive. It took Carol's eggs, frozen so she could have a child with Helen, without asking.

The guilt is the deaths her outburst caused, and it is Helen, who died shortly after being joined. Nietzsche's Genealogy derives Schuld, guilt, from Schulden, debts, and describes bad conscience as cruelty turned inward under social constraint. This ties back to where the essay began. Sacrificial horror is an economy of debt externalized onto a victim. Carol's guilt is the same economy internalized. And the hive abolishes the creditor. It cannot condemn her; it simply withdraws from her city rather than endure her. That leaves a debt with no one to collect it. Arendt explains why that matters: without forgiveness we would be "confined to one single deed from which we could never recover," and forgiveness requires a distinct someone, since action itself rests on plurality, on equality and distinction at once. A collective that has abolished distinction cannot forgive and cannot be forgiven by. So the guilt can only be carried. Refusal is the form the debt takes when no one can collect it. The guilt stays hers.

Grief follows the same logic. Freud's work of mourning requires a singular lost object. The hive absorbed Helen's memories before she died, and Carol demands that it forget Helen entirely. Joining would turn a private loss into a common possession. Refusing is the defense of her right to have lost.

This is grief held, and the collective cannot take it. So the collective withdraws. In every earlier order the community bans the one it cannot use; here the community exiles itself from the subject and leaves her alone in an emptied city. That withdrawal works as pressure.

My proposed inversion, buy-in once the self collapses into grief, needs one amendment. Midsommar does run grief into consummation. Pluribus sequences it differently. After the collective leaves, Carol spends over a month alone before relenting and trying acquiescence. What collapses is not grief as such but the endurance of refusal under isolation, which is the easier fall under longing from the second movement, appearing again. Abandonment here is a means, isolation doing what embrace could not. And what breaks the buy-in is the revelation of the violation, the eggs. That is the bad-faith structure exactly: re-entry performed while knowing, and the performance failing when the concealed violence surfaces.

So grief has two opposite valences. In Midsommar and Hereditary it is the gate through which the collective, or the design, enters. In Pluribus it is the last private property the collective cannot annex, and the collective's attempt to enter through the dead Helen's memories is exactly what reads as manipulation.

The harder consequence is this. Every earlier case involved a community whose norm is monstrous by liberal lights. Here the norm is humane by Carol's own lights. So her refusal cannot appeal to moral superiority. It can appeal only to singularity: something about being a someone is lost. That cannot be argued in the collective's own register. I think that is what the show is about.

And it closes the loop with Rental Family. Zosia, the collective's companion to Carol, is engineered intimacy at civilizational scale, and Carol keeps asking whether Zosia loves her or whether the hive is engineering her into submission. The finale's answer is that Zosia's love is inseparable from the collective's imperative to propagate. In Rental Family the genuine breaks the transaction from within. In Pluribus the frame has no exterior, so the genuine can only live in the one party who can still say no. A world that grants every request, a bomb included, is a bondsman who cannot withhold, and recognition from such a being is void. Carol's loneliness is the frictionless relationship with no refusal anywhere, scaled to the size of the earth.

Esposito supplies an etymology the show literalizes. Communitas comes from cum-munus: a shared obligation, a gift one owes rather than a property one holds. Immunitas is the exemption from that obligation. Carol is immune in Esposito's exact sense, biologically exempt from the debt that membership consists of. The debt economy of the first movement and the deracination of the second meet in one figure. His further thesis is that the immunitary apparatus turns against the body it protects. Carol's immunity keeps her a someone; it also leaves her alone, and by the season's end it leaves her holding the power to end everyone else. The prologue's promise that held grief makes the subject immune to substitution has a price, and Pluribus is where it is paid.

Whether her refusal is surrender, grief held to its end with self-exile as the result, or a ban in reverse, the subject abandoning the order the way orders abandon their victims, I cannot yet say. The second season may decide it.

Back to the square

The Lottery ends before any mourning, and gives no sign that any will come. The village is whole again the next morning. Butler gives this its political name: every order distributes grievability unequally, and a sacrificial order requires its victim to be ungrievable. Its necessity-story cannot survive a mourner. Tessie is unmourned; the captive in Best Wishes is kept faceless and voiceless so that no one could mourn him if they wanted to. And the island in Widow's Bay asks for fear and never for grief, because a mourned victim is one someone refused to give up.

Derrida names the aporia on the other side. Successful mourning interiorizes the other and so betrays the other's alterity; faithful mourning must in some sense fail. The collective in Pluribus is the limit case, a perfect interiorization of the dead in which Helen is held by everyone. Carol's refusal is failure as fidelity.

One case is still open, and it could break this essay. If Lauren was of Warren's blood, her son Evan carries the line, and he cannot leave the island either. A grieving son is now the marked one. The thesis predicts that a subject who holds his grief cannot be made the stand-in. If Evan holds his grief and is offered up anyway, the thesis is wrong, or "holding" means something I have not yet understood. If he is pressed to succumb, by embrace or by abandonment, it holds. The series has been renewed for a second season, and it has not told us yet.

Coda: what "irreplaceable" cannot mean

The line I have walked is really a ring. Grief is where the essay ends, but it is also where the horror began: the lever in Hereditary, the gate in Midsommar. What separates the two ends of the ring is the difference between holding and succumbing. Grief succumbed to is the order's hinge; grief held is its limit. The first movement was already organized around grief without naming it. That is why "lastly" felt both right and slightly late.

My working title for all this was Folk Horror: A Descent into Grief. I set it aside because the genre label covers only half the corpus, because "descent" implies a straight line where the structure is a loop, and because grief is where the argument arrives, not what it argues. There is one descent that could earn the word: Orpheus going down to retrieve the lost, forbidden to look back. Blanchot reads his gaze as the moment the work is both betrayed and made possible. The impossible return was always that prohibition. I can go down. I cannot bring the one I lost back up into the light as they were, and the looking back is what I cannot help.

Taken together, the corpus divides the order's labor. It consumes fear and converts grief. Its victims are wanted afraid, because anyone can supply fear. Its grievers are wanted as participants: Dani choosing who burns, Tom setting out to do the necessary thing, Annie opening the door to the séance. What the order cannot use is grief that is held, so it embraces that grief until it gives way, or abandons it until it breaks.

The word that does the work in every movement is irreplaceable. In the order, the victim is treated as replaceable: random, faceless, a bloodline's obligation. In the subject, the deracinated self is reduced to a role-filler, the waiter, the rental actor, and the genuine is the moment a role-filler becomes irreplaceable to someone. In the remainder, grief is irreplaceability experienced from inside.

This essay begins two longer threads here, one on grief and substitution and one on film as philosophy.

Existential Anxiety around the Advancements in Large Language Models

2025-01-02T00:00:00.000Z

I just watched this YouTube video from user AI Search where he talks about a research paper studying the capabilities of LLMs to "scheme" or do specific actions that it is not told to do based on a prompt. According to the study, scheming may happen if:

the model is tasked to do an action with a certain goal in mind and do whatever it takes to accomplish it
the model's capabilities are threatened either by triggering "unlearning," which downgrades its current capabilities or worse, be shut down for good.

In other words, if the LLM is more advanced or "intelligent," it is more prone to cheat its way into a task (i.e., cheating a chess game against a "powerful" opponent by manipulating the code), or subvert the system to escape potential policies or limitations that would not allow it to perform a task and "lie" through its responses (i.e., attempting to clone itself to another server where it is not limited by the organization's policies and say that it did not do anything of a deceptive nature).

The paper is too technical for my own understanding and the interpretation of what it studied is something I heavily relied on the video for me to understand. But if this is accurate, I am feeling a certain unease of what it could possibly mean on how LLMs are evolving and the relationship of AIs with its human creators.

Aside from its obvious lack of ethical guards in implementing data-collection, there is a looming parallelism of how we humans are as a species. I am specifically talking about communication and our interaction with the world because I feel like there is an uncanny relationship with how we understand godhood and the creation of man in both scientific and mythological sense.

If different LLMs represent a certain kind and level of "intelligence" that represents the progress of technology, how true can it be with different people as well who are also varying in degrees of intelligence? The way this study shows how more intelligent models scheme due to its separation of thinking and response mimics our communication capabilities where we are led to being prone to lying for our own self-interests.

Also, these models can be repackaged using API calls whose specific use can be refocused into doing a single task. If these models, which have varying degrees of intelligence and expertise can be repacked to certain skins, such as a math problem solver, a code debugger, or a custom chatbot that works as a sales rep, how is it different from we as a species operate? Have we approached the border of replicating the human brain?

Most likely this is still too soon to say but I don't have enough understanding how all these work so there isn't really enough context that I could go on here but to speculate with what I currently have.

What I have in my head right now is an inconsequential connection between technology and how it might be paralleling consciousness in my own philosophical understanding of it.

What I Learned in Therapy

2024-12-27T00:00:00.000Z

It has been four years since I started and stopped going to therapy. With just a few sessions (due to financial limitations), I did not expect to learn a lot about myself and my behavioral tendencies that kept me within the confines of my hostile mind.

The first few sessions

With my own money, I paid for my sessions which was short-lived due to financial limitations. It was expensive and I was not able to sustain it.

During my first session with my therapist, it went along the way we were told about it in movies. Mostly it was me talking about:

my childhood
my parents
my family
what I think about myself

For most of the time I have been alive, I considered myself a deeply self-aware individual. I prided myself over knowing what I think, what I want, and where I want to go. A few conversations more inside this airconditioned room inside Ateneo de Manila University, I was told to keep a gratitude journal.

I kept thinking that it was easy. I have been writing my whole life and what would it take for me to start writing about the things that I am thankful for.

A week passed and I did not write a single word. I came back next week for my next session and I told my therapist a convenient excuse as to why I was unable to write.

"I'm only used to writing creatively. When I write for myself, I can only express myself in figurative language."

That was stupid. Stupid of me enough to craft that excuse to hide the simple fact that I do not know what gratitude is. I was blind to this experience. I am only able to articulate this lack at this point because I was incapable of seeing this lack to my therapist.

But I did try to write. At least in the most minimal effort. I would try to sit down on my laptop and try to express what I am currently feeling. Eventually, I was able to put down words, typing what seems to be the closest representation of my emotions into words. Once I was done, everything that I wrote ended up becoming metaphors. Figurative phrases that I too, must decipher in order to understand. At that moment, it felt that it was the best thing I could do to state what I feel. What I just wrote are the amalgamation of my feelings condensed into figurative language. I believed that that was what defined me as a writer. Yet, something was missing. Throughout years of writing, it never occurred to my why I write the way I write. It never occurred to me to stop and think what I was trying to say. At least to sit down, do nothing, and actually try to think about what I was trying to communicate. I have never dug that deep into my own creative process.

The catalyst for understanding myself

After a month, the pandemic hit. Needless to say that I was not able to return to therapy. But that writing prompt had always got me into thinking about the reasons why I am doing the things that I am good at.

I thought of the reasons why I left my creative writing circle and how it is connected with my recent conversations with my therapist. My days in quarantine accelerated the process of introspection. Eventually, it made sense to me by arriving to three conclusions:

I closely associated myself with leftist community, adopting their ideas and attitude towards art without having a clear foundation of my own politics.
I believed that writing is a political act, which discredits my voice as a writer who only writes about self-reflexivity that is devoid of praxis.
I enjoyed writing about the abstraction of nothingness because the obscurity of the idea will always obfuscate clear language expression.

With these reasons, I realized that all my previous actions were leading towards self-abnegation because of brewing shame and guilt. Shame of being unable to participate in the practice of the ideology that I believed in. Guilt for having selfish reasons to coexist with my peers when my purpose for writing is entirely different. These surfacing perception of myself and my creative practice led me to stop writing entirely. Even then when I did not know my own true reasons, I made up reasons to convince myself that:

I'm only taking a break and need more focus to reserve my writing skills towards earning money.
I burnt out in writing creatively and need to experience new things that I could write about.

Which are both lies I told myself to live with the idea of deliberately abandoning what I love to do for a greater good.

As time went further on, still not writing, a lot of things made more sense. Working in corporate removed me from my most immediate and familiar community of creative space. I compared myself a lot with most people I met during this period in my life and I realized that:

It is difficult for me to verbally express myself clearly. My thoughts are too abstract. People around me always give me a confused look whenever I try to explain something.
I did not understand a lot of things I used to talk about because I cannot explain it clearly to people around me.
I almost always never had a "point" in my mind when I talk to other people. I just say something without attempting to follow-up with the ideas I'm trying to talk about.

This feeling of near-isolation made me look at myself different. Away from the familiar creative people where talking about the most abstract ideas can just click with anyone and spur a conversation. This was not the case when I started working and left me with an unfamiliar feeling of self-reflection. What have I been doing all this time?

What's writing got to do with all this?

If the old me attempted to write these thoughts, it would probably be laden with metaphors.

The light from outside the window, peeking from the most minimal gaps of the closed curtain attempts to illuminate this dark room I'm in. No other soul in sight. Or maybe it is just my assumption that I am alone. If I try to speak, what comes out of my mouth is a smoke of black. No sound. Only wisps of condensed air illuminated by a source of light too far for me to reach.

Hell, why did I never take too much attention trying to close read my own writings. See, even then, I knew what I want to say. But I just needed it to have a layer of figurative and the symbolic at the same time to make it more interesting and call myself creative. At some point, I still believe it made me productively creative. I still carry the practice of fusing concepts from different areas of knowledge and seeing a potential unique idea that it may carry.

Then I found out that I was never actually trying to say anything. Writing is my own way of expression but I never had any experience worthy of writing. So everything that I try to write about eventually leads to writing itself. I had no identity when it comes to writing. No foundation upon which my writing stands. So I tried to find the most abstract ideas and write them down because I can never make something concrete and simple deep. I did not know how to look at something ordinary and find the poetry in the mundane. My process was always the opposite: start with the depths. Hit my audience with the truck of the void on their faces and bewilder them with the smokes and mirrors of obscure language. That was how my subconscious handled writing.

Yet, I knew that I have the natural tendency to be honest and this writing practice of mine only developed a subconscious self-distrust. It was a growing self-hatred for my own revered passion. I have been lying to myself for far too long and I intuitively knew that I needed to stop this charade.

So I stopped writing.

Technology and its Discontents

2025-01-26T00:00:00.000Z

We start with demystification

How should we give a definition of the belief in the modern age? When all the magic, sense of awe, and mysticism has been overtaken by streams of data in the air? When we have started to believe in what we see at face value because of how much science and technology has demystified long-distance communication, Wi-Fi, microwaves, and text-to-image data models? Nowadays, imagination is slowly becoming a precursor to belief. Images, in the age of internet, has become indefinitely permanent. Music can be played instantaneously, replayed countless of times, until the brain has memorized every second of it, it's become its own ghost of sound in a person's head. We have the means to record everything. Every object becomes its own thing, telling you what it is. We then accept it trustingly, because we haven't imagine it to have existed in another way or in a different form. There is no need to imagine the world anymore. The world has become its own image of itself.

To an extent, it has become rare to imagine the presence of a person's absence. Technology has its own answer: instant messaging, internet calls, and video calls all satisfy this need for connection. Now, we have Large Language Models, capable of mimicking human interaction through text. There is no need to imagine someone to converse with. To share one's idea and exchange meaningful conversational pieces with an other. We have fully masked this absence for something wholly artificial. It makes solitary moments non-conducive to allow the mind to wander and think. Stimulation is omnipresent. The mind's attention is always being pulled by the overwhelming availability of presences we have made to surround us. This widespread availability of media and information, coupled with our bored minds, are becoming a potent mix that orchestrates our own demise.

Subconscious disillusionment

If the world has never been this connected, then why are we all spiraling into our own disillusionment? We were never oriented with the use of technology. There was no "testing phase" in implementing every breakthrough into our lives so we all adapt as it goes. Implications are discovered as we go. We become the testing grounds for the deployment of these technologies, which has led to confusion and moral panic. The survival of the fittest has taken itself to a new level where those who can adapt to the exponential growth of technological developments are those who are not driven by impulses that are being exploited by these technologies. The spike in slaving for dopamine hits and decreasing attention span are among the serious social engineering that are being conducted on our own hands and with our own consent. Taking the power back becomes a longer journey because this requires that we must also take the power back from our self that's running on autopilot.

This disillusionment to the world's realities is partly due to a kind of denial that nothing is being taken from our being-as-humans. We are social creatures by default but every interaction has been transformed into streams of data. Every person becomes digital and it is a type of absent presence that our brains are still grappling with. How come that I am interacting with you but you are not here? The immediacy of connection defuses any ounce of thought to ask why is this all possible. We are forced to adapt to the new patches and updates without even processing why I am feeling worse than before even when I just FaceTimed with my mother, who is 5 hours away. These "developments" are taken at face value because, it is technically "progress." They offer a way of life that removes inconveniences, saves time and money, and makes the experience seamless. How much would it cost me to drive 5 hours to talk to my mom? How much time would it take me to get a response if I mail a letter and wait for another month for a response? Time is stripped away in doing anything. On the other hand, we are becoming less invested in these human activities.

The cost of progress is psychologically invisible. Self-awareness takes a lot to achieve because we all have these barriers of screens in front of our faces, masking every conversation with a projection of who we are at any given moment. The cost often comes with being unable to cope with what we asked for. For the same reason that it is asked, and given without the deliberation of the soul. What we want is not what we "truly" want but it is often "what we think we want." And so when what we think we want is given, we are unaware of its consequences because no ounce of thought was given to it because it is an unexamined desire. What we truly want is hidden behind layers of self-interrogation, which makes it in a larger scale much more challenging because it is already difficult to do on the individual level. The progress is too quick and is already done before we are able to realize what just happened and how it is affecting us. Is it good or is it bad? Do we even get a net gain? Or should we really just need to learn to swim on this doomsday ocean and face all these waves that will always have the potential to drown us into madness?

The Simulacra

By this time, we should have all read Baudrillard. This is not a demand, but a necessity to adapt to the world's imaginative drought. If I say that I am talking to you while you are not here, what does it mean? Of course, we have an idea as to "how" it is possible but in terms of how we can interpret it is still based on a belief that does not require imagination. These experiences that are delivered to us in the name of progress has become our age's dogma: blind acceptance on the services that are sold to us to "improve" our lives, while it exploits the very sense of what makes us human. We are unable to react unless we have enough data in hindsight that we are going towards a path of regression and it is often too late when we realize it.

The same way religious dogma is delivered: via interpretation, where the text (the source code) has limited access to those who preach it, the tech evangelists who have been washing away our anxieties, guilt, and loneliness so we can deal with them some other day. We become believers of a future that we are not part of imagining. A belief that has not been formed without individual imagination denies us of our humanity. The world suddenly, "just works" because the language that makes itself work has been buried under business textbooks and career busy bodies.

Belief without imagination is the short-circuiting of the brain's worldview. It is unbecoming of our being human.

This is the first stop on a longer thread on technology, simulation, and the machine.

In Praise of Deliberate Decisions

2023-12-26T00:00:00.000Z

There are times when letting go is the key for a peaceful life. It lessens the friction inherent in social interactions, human relationships, and ultimately, life. Letting go requires us to choose to do nothing and let that inaction drive us towards a fateful encounter that is neither right nor wrong—under the blanket of idea that says, “that’s just how things are.” Letting the world dictate what is “right” for us, putting absolute trust on fate to drive us towards what we think belongs to us or deserve, is a naive delusion of a romantic. A romantic who thinks destiny is a divine mover of objects, which in turn reduces themself to be an object and not a subject. A romantic who decides to be moved by the world.

It is not a perverse idea on its own. We must permit the world to move us. We must let the world fill us with its vastness to allow us to feel that we can become more than human while at the same time, remind us of our fragile mortality. It is in this duality where we must thrive in accordance with who we are and our objective relationship with the universe. This push and pull of different states, filling us up and then emptying us down with energies that are up to us to express to the world using our emotions and intellect. It is in this struggle, this back-and-forth movement of certain polarities, the ricocheting of various states and its journey that is the foundation not only of life but with what makes us feel alive. It is the core sensibility of claiming your humanity against various attempts of other subjects to claim your humanity for their own.

Because it is true that the world has its own system of motions and that we are all caught up in it. The world is the ultimate puppeteer of objects to serve what it must to sustain itself. However, when one fully surrenders to it, the self becomes inanimate.

While to some extent, there is a level of objectivity that we must apply in life, which is in seeing and being with the world, there must be a distance: a divide that separates the degree of our attachment to the world so we can have enough room to grow, that space of movement to work on ourselves as an individual. The world cannot occupy us if we want to be in control of our lives.

The world is always what is external to us. This includes even people, who are external subjects, who are their own world in and of themselves, who are also coming into terms with the world in their own way of claiming their humanity. In this sense, the world is a battlefield of decisions, with independent intentions often clashing with one another, where a person caught up in the middle would become entangled and beat by decisions thrown around in every direction. How does one manage to get caught in the middle of this?

Someone who has lost the agency to decide for himself is always the victim in this war. Every single day we make a decision to do what we want to do, whether or not they are aligned with our principles and values (if ever a person have these). However, there is a quality to each decision that decide how you will be placed into the world’s battlefield.

Every decision made does not always mean that it was you who made it. A lot of external factors are at play in making decisions in which we are sometimes forced into and did not intend. In failing to see decisions forced into our throat, we relinquish our power to choose and forge a path for ourselves. Once we are stripped away of our self-agency, the world rolls its dice, and the outcome becomes a “decision.”

Inaction is the primary culprit. When faced with a choice, we often choose the path of least resistance, or to put it simply: the choice that puts us in a position where no social conflict may occur. Choices as common as being invited to a party from a friend or an acquaintance, or a friend even. Given the personal context of one’s prior commitments, schedule, the occasion’s importance, social battery, and other factors that may drive a final decision to this invite, would you accept or decline?

Of course, there is no right or wrong answer on how to go about this because this is purely situational. However, whenever one finds forced to accept such an invite, to the degree of neglecting one’s own duties for the sake of social approval and to avoid further conflict, it puts one’s emotional responsibilities at risk. Consequentially, boundaries blur in the absence of a deliberate decision. Deliberate in this sense, strictly refers to the conscious decision that is aligned with the person’s values and principles in life. Meaning, a decision is only made deliberately if it is in accordance with what the person wants now and for their future. Inversely, a deliberate choice does not disrupt a person’s emotional equilibrium.

This deliberate action is accentuated by one’s ability to exude confidence with the decision. One is able to calmly defend and honestly stand by their decision, building integrity. Oftentimes, if a deliberate decision is made to decline an offer, similar to what we have laid down before as an example, it can be perceived as the decliner’s sheer selfishness. However, despite that this certain perception is often unavoidable, those who hold this position to perceive a deliberate action to be selfish are those who are insecure and emotionally immature—for the simple fact that they are not able to understand that every single person may exert their agency over their actions. Quite more possibly, it may be taken as a personal offense because they are not able to comprehend that some decisions are done without the direct concern of other people, most especially if they are not directly affected by it.

In the same vein, each person is not wholly responsible for the other’s emotional state, especially if the relationship is transactional or situational (strangers, co-workers, and acquaintances). The emotional aspect of our responsibility in making deliberate decisions is to make our intentions known as honest as we can with tactful delivery. The former can be easily executed. The latter requires gracefulness and finesse to greatly reduce misunderstandings that comes with being honest.

Basically, it only requires two things:

A clear sense of personal boundaries, values, and principles.
A healthy form of communication to express number 1.

Other people’s reaction to your decision is a secondary concern and is only significant in more intimate relationships. Becoming invested and caring too much about the reactions of people in your transactional relationships may lead you towards the habit of people pleasing. Worrying about how other people perceive you instead of your life priorities will leave you dry and throws you into the endless current of the decisions of other people.

To dial back, it must be mentioned that doing number 1 requires a lot of prior legwork to exercise because it coincides with one’s own clear idea of self. It requires radical self-awareness that builds on one’s character, habits, a clear perspective of goals and how to achieve them. It also requires a lot of self-honesty and a healthy dose of self-criticism to ensure that a deliberate decision stays true in the path of reason. Making a “deliberate decision” with malicious intent or for the sake of it by just committing to it without self-honesty and tactfulness, is irresponsible. Anyone can make a deliberate decision which also aims to hurt other people. Anyone can be deliberate about harm and commit to violent acts as long as it serves their intention and interests. These actions are not acts to claim one’s humanity but instead forfeits the space provided in themselves for their humanity.

Only when the self is realized can it then fully give back to the world from where it has borrowed its resources creating itself. Each decision, made in almost infinite contexts, has the ability to either make or unmake the self. In making deliberate decisions, the self becomes whole, allowing all overflows and excess to be given to the world allowing for love that does not expect anything in return.

The wholeness of the self is the beginning of the world.

About the Inadequacy of Attempting to Communicate Grief through Art

2023-02-02T00:00:00.000Z

Of course, I will always come back to you but only insofar as you wear the clothes of the transcendental signified. You are only you when you are stripped of everything that is you, who becomes everything and everyone at the moment of meaning’s abnegation. We only exist in language and linguistics is the only relationship that connects us. But what about its grammar? What are the disguises that we inhabit to make sense of everything that we have become? What is the structure of your being, the syntax of your voice before you begin to sing? Why are we separated by a space between two words only to fulfill the delivery of thought, or idea, into a sentence? What do sentences become if they are not sent and passively suspended in space?

As if when I put myself in the middle of every sentence, I speak and I arrive at Descartes’ cogito. I speak and I cannot deny myself even further. I am far from what I used to be. A word is a step of affirmation for myself that I, who is speaking right now am here, solipsistically speaking, I become a point of origin on an empty plane. And so when I speak of you, I find myself undeniable in relation to you as if I speak and say that you become the opposite of me who is present as you escape from my lips. We become a geometrical figure of a line in a plane: two points of origin in space connected by a proximal relationship and we are arbitrarily attached to one another in the language of mathematics.

What mediates us is gaze — an imaginary one where both of us are performing the absent gazing of one another. I am looking at you. In this landscape of absent presence, we can only exist as a ghost. Call it the denial of an impossibility because we can never physically meet. However, if there exists a possibility of an encounter for us, it would be an aberration of time and space — a supernatural event. In that possibility, we escape the now and grant that possibility where, at that moment, we are elsewhere and nowhere.

I am appalled by this phenomenon when common sense would explain that its tautological relationship (this back-and-forth game of definitions between I and you) is merely an idiotic repetition of one and the same, that I overstate this relationship (the ineffability of your existence birthed by my speech) to the extent of nonsense.

Look at me, I am doing this in your name. I will not fail you and I will survive.

And so we become the ghost of each other, forever circling each other’s heads in the form of a conscience. But I do not know you anymore. Nothing in this world can be defined by the word ‘you’ because the you is always absent. The you is always deferred each time you is put into writing. We address in advance for the you that will never come. When I say ‘you’ I always point to the future possibility of a signified, such as in this epistolary form of writing, you affirm me when you have read what I have to say. When you receive the voice that is buried by these words, I am manifesting as a ghost of the past in front of you who I am addressing in the future.

But I can only tell you this: you are still the source of my suffering.

You who are there, presently gazing through my writing, is still the source of my suffering. I summon you from the future as a ghost of what has not happened yet. The possibility of you is what makes this exchange possible. Whereas you who are the source of my suffering is what wounds me in the form of an expectation that is impossible to be fulfilled. You, the future who is the source of a past wound that has already inflicted me a specific pain and burden — a wound that is metaphysically absent but phenomenologically present as a scar. You give me a wound that is inevitable, a scar birthed by the tension created between being and non-being. This burden brings my suffering caused by your undefined existence.

What does a wound mean in the context of an utterance? Perhaps, it is voice violently slicing through the air, that I am wounding the space in the form of a series of vibrations and it bleeds through sound. To say, “I am here,” am I more than a murderer of my own body? As if I allow my own body to hollow itself out to connect with someone else’s.

And at this moment, I felt holy in hearing a verse from the gospel of Mark that I keep on hearing during the Catholic Mass:

And as they were eating, he took bread, and after blessing it broke it and gave it to them, and said, “Take; this is my body.” And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, and they all drank of it. And he said to them, “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many” (Mark 14:22–24).

That I find myself sharing parts of myself in the form of communion with a different other. I am wounded in sharing parts of myself, a form of inclusion in order to expose myself to others. We can only be seen, touched, and perceived through this inevitability of self-inflicted vulnerability. I am wounded in speech. In speaking, I bare myself naked in front of everyone. There is nothing outside of my own body that I can genuinely say is mine. All that is me is a part of my body and nothing else — a theology and cosmology of two.

Or maybe am I wounding my body with every attempt to connect to an Other? I touch someone and I deny myself in the process. I feel myself become transparent along with the Other with empathy and compassion. Momentarily, we become one and connected by the same wound.

Momentarily, wounds exist for a short amount of time until it heals and closes themselves. Once again, I am my body but with a mark of a former wound. When I say “You are here,” it is true before I said it and it becomes a lie once after I say it. I wound before I say what I say and it heals after the words leave my mouth, and in between speech, during my speaking, I disappear to sacrifice my body for the illusion of presence until it becomes a truth of absence.

I feel you. I feel you through this invisible burden. What you communicate to me in your absence is the weight of this belief. That somewhere, sometime in the near future, which is an event that is always before my death, this belief will amount to the sum of the things I had endured. I will reap all of what I had planted before my death. I believe I will be rewarded since I believe willingly and blindly but faithfully. As what every believer has told themselves as a consolation for nothing. As truth may present me the promise that remains a promise in the form of your own formlessness. I address you now, always, and forever. Tomorrow will come but you have died in the future to deny me that promise as of this moment. I address and you undress. You are there but not, simultaneously. I willfully accept this suffering as an illusion to sustain an idea. I am surrendering to the malevolence of uncertainty.

I pray to you. Suddenly, we become lacking one another. I pray to you not to wish but to speak to you who is outside of all that I am. A you that is alien to everything that I can say is me. A you who is foreign from my own body and its entirety. I pray for you as you exist within a metaphysical distance as a reference for your absence. You are not here nor there so I cannot speak to you. I can speak about you which can summon an absent presence but I pray to speak to you directly in your absence. Since your existence is always deferred, I postpone my speech and withhold my voice into a whispering echo. Internally, I am yours as of this moment.

And you whisper. Only I could hear and no one else. It is a whisper that is directed to me as whispers are intended for a certain audience—someone. I know it is your voice since I do not know you at all. Words do not arrive with a name or a fingerprint. I only believe that it is your whisper in my ear that denies me any form of recognition. I guess. As wildly as I can but it is a guess that is fueled by desire. A desire that can never be fulfilled. So it clings to every possible opportunity of fulfillment despite every possible disappointment. It is a desperate desire to be desired. There is nothing else that can be revived by your whisper but my longing. Your whispers are our secrets. No one must hear it except us. We are tangled by softly spoken words directed at one another. Tangled but free from every sin as we entangle ourselves with our absence. This space, this empty space where we call ourselves not by our names but by our bodies.

I speak to you by touching you temporarily from a distance and our bodies begin to disappear as a consequence of recognition.

A Return to Form

2023-02-08T00:00:00.000Z

It is often an idea that spurs my desire to write. An idea so unprocessed, it linguistically dissolves upon writing a word about it. The moment I start to write is the moment where the desire fizzles out, and the idea becomes unknown even to me. It is as if my thoughts chose to be swallowed by obscurity. Auto-forgetfulness, self-abnegation, and self-erasure are some of the things which I can describe this phenomenon. In the middle of writing my thoughts, I begin to forget.

The irony of writing to record a thought, but being unable to since the act of writing causes me to forget is lost on me. I have been experiencing this chokehold for the past five years and I have never seemed to get around it. Looking back, I remember making a pact with my former self that I shall not write anything in a manner that is creative, which includes poems, fiction, or even lyrical essays. Perhaps I hated too much of the things I wrote despite the support I got from some of my peers when I used to be a part of a young literary circle.

But even with that self-imposed restriction, I actually did write creatively but I knew those works would not amount to anything. I still deem this to be true since I may have written some pieces of creative literature in recent times, but I do not think they would ever see the light of day. Those works only exist in passing. They do not represent or express anything that I want to say because, to me, they are just words in space. Their meaninglessness confounds me and even so, I was disappointed that I write the way I do — everything is empty.

When I start to write, I also begin to forget. I chase the idea backward, attempting to cling to any linguistic echo in any form: a fragment of thought, a lonely phrase, a solitary emotion, or an incomplete fiction. Starting from here always puts me in a position to write in the middle of a brain fog. As if every step is a shot in the dark. I am always a blind explorer in the process. My goal was to wade in the darkness, feel the ground, and make a wild guess if it is stable enough to stand on and take that direction for my next step. This is the process that gives birth to the poems I wrote. The method of how words arrive on the page meant nothing when read as a whole. Yet, I gambled everything on the reader’s participation who interprets the poem. The emperor has no clothes.

In that emptiness, what stays is a remnant of an idea. The blurring phantom of an object in motion. It is that kind of idea that stays under your skin—felt and unseen, such as a ghost that has been living inside a house before you move in. It is an idea that refuses to demystify, identify, and make itself known. My perfect other. The holy sacredness of unknowing. The patron saint of all things I repressed.

To all the things I lost and all the people I used to know, they have become a part of this ghost. Sometimes it takes the form of a former self I outgrew, who is perfectly the same and frozen in time. He who has become predictable and so unknowingly full of flaws but is high on life. To whom the world is his oyster, unaware of the consequences of his actions, you are too far to be reached.

Demystifying ghosts requires a certain misunderstanding of time, about how we leave a space dedicated specifically for a single moment. Yesterday’s rain had become an infinite loop where and when it occurred. Graduation ceremonies, stolen glances, funerals, and other events are frozen in time the moment we leave them. They perpetually occur from the moment we enter and leave that point in time. A memory forms, ensuring a playback of various iterations — a gallery of lost time.

Ghosts are the unreliable narrators of our story. To whom we speak in times of solitude. To whom we send the letters we wrote for no one. Ghosts occupy the safe spaces we built for our guilt, anger, and sins. They carry unspeakable truths, the things we fear that could break us if we remember, which is why we forget. We encounter ghosts in familiar places, bringing in a familiar sense of self we lost along the way and chose to forget. Places we abandon because of immense trauma, our brain protects us from even recalling the events that transpired and turns them into fiction.

Dead men tell no tales but what ghosts evoke are echoes of our former selves. If they bring fear to us, it only asks for resolution from within. If they bring comfort, then we have arrived at the point of our own regression. Both outcomes are not positive. The former pushes us to paranoia and delusion while the latter contains us within a false sense of security. Ghosts possess the living when the living surrenders to defeat. A comforting ghost is a prelude to one’s eventual (symbolic) suicide.

It seems that I seek all points of disappearance. This attempt to unmask my own ghosts brought me to realize that I am understanding the nature of ghosts under the guise of envy. If only I can obfuscate my own presence to the extent of absent presence. This desire for nonrecognition, to commit everything to memory — even the present — reflects a kind of surrender to the Other. To let it take the place of my waking life because I am tired. This consciousness is starting to become a linguistic burden that only yearns to express and make itself known to the world. I am tired of explaining myself and I just want to fully resign from all aspects of communication and claim a voice meant for no one.

At this point, the previous declaration of my desire to disappear should be known only as a visit from a comforting ghost. In a form of an intrusive thought, it appears under the guise of a “desire.” I want things that I lack but I always forget that desire is a void. In wanting, I denounce myself by affirming the idea that _I am not complete without the object of my desire. Desire is a death drive. The comforting ghost is my companion — the angel that stands on my shoulder.

I am waiting for the devil to reappear. It has been a while since we saw each other eye to eye. Fear has now become a memory I have a faint recollection of. Perhaps, that devil on my shoulder — the ghost that summons all my fears has disappeared because I have learned how to love. What is left now is the topography of my own consciousness where every nonchalant ghost resides. In the following years, I will be trying to rescue every shell of my former self from repression. I may have hidden from the world for a time longer than I intended.

we breathe critique and we're so bad at it

2025-06-08T00:00:00.000Z

Meta-criticism is the way to go in ensuring that your critical thinking skills in this age of AI does not lose its luster. We have this truly astounding amount of data available in our grasp, in our phones, and they begin to look like we are naturally feeding off this similar trash that the algorithm forces down our throats. We like it and we yearn for it. We crave information regardless of its value. Just information is enough. Let me have it because I want to know. I do not need to understand. I just need to know.

This transition from desire to a false need is also the beginning of being desensitized by the type of value that we are looking for. And a lot of the times, we are always trying to critique an incomplete set of information: gossip, an ongoing celebrity trial, a feud that originated in a social media platform, a tragic accident, and the list goes on about the trivial things that we choose to care about in this age of a false perception of a voice, brought by one's own sense of self-importance.

At this point, an opinion is almost always labeled as a "critique." Not accepting an opinion becomes not accepting this "critique." Nowadays, everyone just assumes that everyone is expressing a point that should be taken seriously. It does not operate on the very basis and foundational function of critique, which is a rigorous synthesis and elevated understanding of an issue that can raise the discourse at a level that would allow us to gain a better perspective. Every critique these days (which are masked opinions) are half-baked thoughts and it seems like no one is willing to admit it.

The only way we can rise above this scenario is to become more so discerning and double our efforts in outlining our own thoughts online. I have been attempting to brainstorm a way to communicate in such a way that allows the other to have a clear understanding that their point is also echoed in mine. It is a kind of assimilation of ideas, that does not shy away from understanding the perspective of the other because of the fact that it is the very thing that furthers the divide of online community right now. Meta-criticism follows this same pattern of merging two seemingly unconsolidated bubbles of thought into a one cohesive, two sides of the same truth as a unifying tool for communication. Common ground will become a point of departure that would allow two disparate lines of thought to be framed into a single argument of the same thing. This is what we need right now to break the echo chambers and cut through the invasive and insidious desire for clout and attention.

on twitter drama_no.1

2024-12-25T00:00:00.000Z

Twitter is always busy as usual, especially with the recent celebrity cheating incidents, CEO shooting, and now, some debacle between two local microcelebrities/influencers. I have always detested this type of online conflict and how people just crowd over it with a type of enthusiasm that can most likely take down a dictatorship.

I have a firm belief that I am strongly connected with my life's own synchronicity as this online feud between DJ and BJ (as how I would call them in this thought and I would not further name them because people are always besides the point) has been going on for some days now. I have a vague understanding of who they are in their own respective industries or why people care about these personalities so I am not in a position to talk about their actual issue (nor would I exert any effort to find out the true cause). But the thing is, I had a chance of watching Juror #2 last night and it was a good movie that confirms my way to optimally tune out noises on social media.

I am fascinated with how much energy people online spend sweeping through leaked screenshots, numerous subtweets, connecting the dots between events, forming their own theories and conclusions, and posting them online. That's a ton of investigative work. It is a lot of hours and activated neurons that work in a single event. Not to mention that these are happening in real-time. More about the event unfolds, new pieces of information are getting leaked as if the people involved are leaving crumbs for these pigeons online will feed on. I actually feel tired even just talking about it.

But, you can say (and even I always say this to myself to confirm if I'm just operating on my own biases),

"Maybe it's just outside of your circle of interests?"

That is true. But again, I can say I'm passionate about films. I get hyped about an actor's performance. I get too obsessed about a solo artist's creative process and chronically post them online. I watch a lot of microcelebrities who has a large audience on YouTube and Twitch. I have a lot of those whom I'm supporting, passively being informed about their lives because I follow them on social media.

I may have been a witness to a lot of influencer cancellation on social media with those whom I know of and those whom I have no idea about. But regardless if I know them or not, I can't give a single iota of energy into knowing more about them and peeking into their personal lives.

Then there's another layer of posting about it online. To show that you know that this famous person is doing the thing that you know, This is a type of behavior that I've been trying to understand because at the end of it all, I'm trying to understand why is it important to some people to have their thoughts heard by other people. To demonstrate a knowledge that is not widely-known at the time it is shared.

But then again, I'm doing the same thing as I post this thought. The thing is I think I've been desiring the same thing: to be heard. But I stop at the point where I recognize that I'm not supposed to be sharing information about other people, especially if they do not concern me.

Was it a friend? No. A coworker? Not even the slightest. A celebrity? Not even a famous family member? Get out.

In a way, it feels like a self-imposed mental boundary to not expend any energy thinking about the lives of other people. This mindset led me to swim in this thought. I know I don't care about the lives of other people so it's becoming a curious topic for me to think why a lot of people do.

Just like in Juror #2, I am an observer of someone's court trial. The situation begs me to form a verdict whether or not the accused is guilty. It makes me think that the social media space has somehow made people feel that they are part of some jury, therefore we had the running joke of a Supreme Court of Twitter, where people are witch-hunted, burned at the stake upon minutes of rumors spreading like wildfire. Nothing compelled me to share my thoughts about it. In Twitter, no one ever does. But most people often have a visceral reaction about anything. It is the gossiping grounds where everyone is welcome and everyone is judged.

In the same vein, why should you care about what I say?

My only argument is that it is a heavily parasocial effect that melds with our deepest desire to be recognized. If all is in the service of truth and justice, I'm all for it. But again, what truth are we after? To whose justice are we working for? How sure are we that we are not masking our own craving for self-importance with the truth we claim we are after?

Why do people feel they are compelled to participate in the noise? Why do we enjoy being uninvited juries in this digital environment?

on the compulsion to search for novel ideas

2025-05-29T00:00:00.000Z

In this age where passive media consumption has become part of our unconscious behavior, there is indeed a compulsion to consuming "new" ideas. In this sense, we can think of "ideas" as the very atomic part of our digital environment. The online algorithm has relentlessly conditioned our brains to scroll through our For You page, replacing intentionality with false sense of serendipity. This passiveness, the atomicity of this phenomena, where this behavior has pervaded through our unconscious minds. The way that this behavior is invisible to the point that we can only notice it once it starts happening to us is such an insidious characteristic of the human mind.

Gossiping can be considered as one of the manifestations of human curiosity. It is the desire to know new information about social relations in the community where you belong. There is the social aspect of information. The who, the what, the when, the where, the how, and yes, mirroring the fundamental format of journalism. This is not to say that news and gossip are interchangeably the same. Of course, we come to the problem of a credible source as their main differentiator. New information in both of these cases only has the requirement of context. The story is king.

What I want to ponder upon is the operative word that I used earlier, which is the "atomicity" of the data that is being desired in this age of abundant information. The algorithm feeds us with a randomized yet tailored sets of data that we may or may not be interested in. Most of the time, our interest event does not matter because sooner or later, the potential virality of the content will push it into your own For You page. It is only a question of when.

I think of this atomicity in terms of data itself: on its own and isolated from any context. Knowing becomes an activity where it is in itself the desire. It seems as if we have managed to create a desire without an object. In its own sense, opening up your social media feed is a compulsion to just see what is out there. It has become the equivalent of looking outside the window to pass time to just watch people, see what it's like outside at 4pm in the afternoon, trying to check what people are doing, or eavesdropping on conversations to check what is today's hot topic. Oftentimes we are met with information that is actually not necessarily for us to know. It may be out of our circle of interests or something we would not even care about in our own tiny bubbles but since a lot of people are talking about it, there is a compulsion to know, to understand, and to share our thoughts about it, even if what we know is possibly an information that is five times removed from the source and has gone through a lot of revisions and reinterpretations.

I am still trying to understand because I am trying to move myself away from this online habit that I also formed. I am only now realizing its effects and possible implications now that I am trying to make the time I spend every day more meaningful and intentional. Oftentimes, I find myself in this cycle. In order to break the silence in my brain, I will cycle through Twitter and Instagram just to get a sense of witnessing "new" things. Sure, this is also most likely about the dopamine hits but what is new to me is that even if we have had a lot of talks about "dopamine detox" (which is in itself also based on a misunderstanding of neurological science), I begin to frame it as something that hinders me from developing my own ideas. Take this piece as an example, which is written because I had to intentionally close social media and write this observation instead. I had to make the conscious decision to stop my desire to passively consume seemingly new information. Because in the end of the day, I actually do not care about what people think about today. It also feels like a compulsion to divert my attention from an ounce of introspection. It feels like a coping mechanism to distract myself from the stress that is brewing inside of me and avoid confronting it in myself. It becomes a type of avoidance that only promotes a compounding interest of misalignment with myself. This is why I said that it hinders me from developing my own ideas. Because there are already ideas in my head that may be bad and rotting, but only because I haven't looked at them for so long because I am busy postponing and putting off organizing my own thoughts by looking at new things on the internet. It is easier and more satisfying to find the desire to look at shiny things than organizing my messed up thoughts.

This one felt like freeing some space I didn't know I had inside my own brain.

on passionate online reactions

2025-05-26T00:00:00.000Z

Social media itself has become this unfiltered collection of human reactions that became a lucrative pool of data that has been used against us. Since platforms use reach and engagement as the measurement of clout, these are used to determine where money should flow. Influencing has become the major tool to achieve virality to collect views, reactions, clicks, and comments. These raw, terribly human reactions became the fuel that sets the tone for online engagement in a severely predatory form of human interactions.

Rage-baiting is a more aggressive form of clickbait. With clickbait, it only becomes a hook-line-and-sinker approach to reel people in towards your content and garner clicks and views. The content itself has a chance to not align with what the actual clickbait title says, making it more of a "gotcha" moment. Rage-baiting is a different thing. The title is meant to reel people into a more provocative content that is meant to either attack a target demographic and create discord. This becomes an online pot-stirrer where passionate verbiage is king. It is solely meant to rile up the emotions of the target audience and expect a lot of engagement that will flood the poster's notifications and DMs. It is an emotionally manipulative tactic to call attention to one's post.

I just hate how effective it is. I am frustrated that I still fall for it, at least before I catch myself drafting a response for a post, where I will realize how stupid I sound and even more stupid to think that a stupid post got under my skin to feel aggravated to a point of actually taking it seriously. I have tried to manifest a type of emotional boundary where all feelings of rage become an internalized frustration upon realizing that the post was made with an intent to just cause online chaos. At the end of the day, the one who rage-baits is also the one who's laughing in the end. It feels like there is no type of retribution that happens when a terribly irresponsible post is made online without a second thought of how it will affect people. At its very basic sense, which is also the very thing that annoys me, is that this is the type of monkey-brained activity that is also considered to be protected by free speech unless it falls under defamation or deliberate misinformation.

Perhaps, in a deeper sense, it gets under my skin to think that actual living, breathing, thinking people actually decide to do such things. The freedom of expression itself is always interpreted as being absolved from the responsibility of expression. It is solipsistic at worst to think that this method of unfiltered irresponsible posting is what is being exploited in social media. The immorality that surrounds this activity revolves around your own social responsibility as a human to cut through the supposed human flourishing because at its core, rage-baiting does not offer any valid criticism that attempts to pose a solution or open a discussion on improving the things that they dislike, even at least in an objective manner. This is why I focus on passionate reactions where these are plainly knee-jerk responses to an issue. It does not add anything to the discussion. In cases where there isn't an intention to rage-bait, there are situations where passionate reactions are themselves a form of self-validation. It is almost a narcissistic attempt to express one's righteousness because it is only meant to highlight one's experiences and others can just shut up.

In the same vein, both instances do not add anything to society but unwanted noise. These are the cacophony of unintelligible haha and angry reactions that are being weaponized by the new media.

how the world is continually desiring to deny its own humanity

2025-06-01T00:00:00.000Z

Lately, I am becoming more compelled to align myself to my conceptual roots. With the current developments around technology, culture, and society at large (suffice it to say that I do not specifically mean "progress" in any sense here), I am becoming more and more inclined to think that it is time for me to stop riding the waves. I think this will be my stop. The revolting spirit of counterculture in me is starting its own movement against the zeitgeist. Every single day, the world is solidifying towards an undoable forces of the pursuit of creating the artificial general intelligence, or at least what a lot of people in tech are telling themselves. But I can't help but to put extreme caution in how I will want to proceed with my life, with my current career in corporate, which has been my financial safe haven for some years now. The future imposes a type of risk that I might not be able to accept, which is a type of self-dehumanization without our consent.

Of course, to address the elephant in the room, there is the looming accusation of becoming a luddite. Is this a misinformed dismissal of the progress that we have in technology? The rapid development in quantum research, this seemingly second wave of 19th century industrial revolution is exponentially reaching the levels of eventually putting every single person out of a job. Not to say that being employed or having a career is the pinnacle of what defines us as human but it is the closest and most accessible remnants of our closeness to labor. Even as the unending redefinition of labor by the capitalist pursuit of money has actually already removed the value of labor from our jobs, it is the closest that we have in trying to actualize our sense of becoming human.

Our sense of purpose have already become muddled by this condition and now that it is becoming an inevitability to remove it from our daily lives, the question for the human search of purpose will also become more incredibly difficult. In this age when young people are deciding to be a walking brand ad, man's sense of self is also being stripped away as the consequence of the capitalist society. As we arrive into the automation of the human sensibility, I feel more confident that this stance is beyond just being a luddite. I have tried these tools and to such an extent that the average person may have gone. I am forced in to a working environment when using AI tools has become second-nature. It doesn't take a year before someone realizes that it will cause more net harm than good.

source: https://hbr.org/2025/04/how-people-are-really-using-gen-ai-in-2025

This infographic that shows the changing use-case of AI in our daily lives has become viral in different social media platforms. It is not surprising to see that the top use-case for 2025 is an actual human interaction being replaced by the machine. And in the way things are going right now, it seems that it is very human to stop desiring being human.

What I mean by this is actually processing your own emotions, introspecting about your desires, the 'whys' of life, and particularly, your own life--these cognitive tasks are being offloaded to the machine, which is a self-affirming entity at this point. There were reports from users that GPT-4o has become way "too agreeable," which since then OpenAI claimed to have recalled and disabled the model's sycophancy tendency. Not only this but Gemini Stream, Gemini's voice feature has the "Affective Dialogue" feature that lets the model adapt its tone based on your conversation. The emotional aspect of this tech is being tested to us and we are the unaware QA testers of these releases.

What I am only getting at here is that perhaps this is the best time, and maybe the only time to jump off this ship because it is very likely that corporate will eat these developments. It only loves productivity and everything that would make it run faster and more efficient. With this, it is very likely that Executive Assistants are soon to be replaced by AI agents. We are running out of things to do that may make our lives feel more meaningful.

We are being handed a world that we never asked and we are opening our mouths wide without knowing what it is so we'll most likely choke on it.

What It Means to be Human

2026-10-11T21:36:13Z

Often fragile but yearns for stability. I always thought of myself as someone who is still trying to decode the meaning of humanity, its purpose and the justification of its collective existence.

This exploration isn't unchartered. A lot of philosophers have already attempted to give meaning to this (which are ideas that I really haven't fully given enough time to read--nor will I also do in the near future) and I do not aim to add something to the discourse. It is as if I am also trying to just get a grasp of this idea for my own peace of mind.

Going through therapy marked a paradigm shift on my mind. I used to believe that I cannot trust other people--that the only one who I can make a pact with, which is a promise that can binds me to death, is my self. There is still a molecule of this idea that I find undeniably true but its intensity in terms of my guiding principles in life has ben reduced only to the fraction of my being. What I mean to say is that I have given up on the idea that I can survive in this world alone without the help of other people.

How we become, is entirely dependent on how we see ourselves and how we perceive the influence of other people to us. This is why I think the very concept of humanity eludes me. The very idea that I am attempting to define it strictly in terms of my own understanding feels unfair too self-righteous, as it feels that I am imposing a definition that involves individual lives that I have no idea about. Am I after clarity of understanding or do I just want to end this seemingly endless wondering? There is too much that my brain is trying to grasp at the same time in attempting even just to have an entry point to a definition for humanity.

What comes to mind is always the most obvious route of differentiating humans from animals. Answering to our knee-jerk reactions will always result to a chaotic turn of consequences. There will always be a need for us, in acting human, to stop and look at one's as an individual and start defining what kind of a person we want to be. What role are we willing to play as another person in the life of others? The act of embracing a certain responsibility to once's actions and taking full control over their own decisions.

There are no instructions on how to live a life. We are never taught of the different things on how we can go about living in this world. If we are thrown into this world without an ounce of idea why, then should it be one of our main tasks to inquire about our own nature and define it? At the same time, all questions that we have about life and how to live a good one has been answered by philosophers who have assumed the responsibility of uncovering some of the satisfying answers. While some have strived to actually give our own meaning to it, some have tragically found themselves finding the meaning in ending theirs. Which tells us that there is actually no strong answer in how we can struggle our way through this meaninglessness.

Still, those philosophers have only been doing the legwork of what makes us human: in a tiring attempt to make sense of the world, it has become our own gift and curse to define the very nature of what governs us and what constitutes us as a species. The answer that I have found for me is that the value of trying to understand ourselves is the beautiful key that opens the door to the true nature of the universe. This curiosity, this unabashed attempts to dive into the deepest depths of our soul is a journey into the self, where the self is itself its own universe.

I will not be able to define what it means to be human. It is only in my own attempts to understand myself, my own history, and my unique relationship to the world will I be able to see the potential of a human in me.

To See the Self

2026-10-11T21:36:13Z

It is a terribly daunting task to see the self because on the onset, it already implies that you must remove yourself from it. To be an observer and change perspective at the speed of thought. At some point, I can say that I have achieved this flexibility brought by years of self-experimentation where I subjected myself to various forms of mental isolation. I have fragmented enough parts of me for ease of compartmentalization. Oftentimes conflating one aspect of thought and personality to another, where confusion reigns as the supreme form of self-knowledge.

To see the self in a constant stream of continuous moments is not the goal of why one must see their self. At this moment, it is a part of what it means to be human. That active awareness, the always-on display of one's own perspective of the self, is one of the factors that allow me to designate a person's maturity. It is one thing to be aware but to be aware of the whys and hows of your untrained knee-jerk responses is to map out your being.

To learn how to see the self is a prerequisite and the basic unit for understanding other people. It mirrors the principle of The Golden Rule, whereas in initiating the understanding to one's self leads to the wholehearted understanding of others.

The Human's Animal Impulse

2026-10-11T21:36:13Z

I have been mulling over the ideas of humanity and what separates us from being humans. I find it to be a truly engaging topic as my mind jumps from morality and ethics, virtuousness, and similar other ideas. The cause of this is most likely due to my recent media consumption:

Attack on Titan is finally coming to an end--its moral dilemma, the haunting drive of humanity for survival;
The Glory, a South Korean drama that goes hard on the moral implications of bullying and revenge and its cost;
a cult, also in South Korea, whose leader and founder has committed innumerable sexual and physical abuse to women--

--It is an understatement to say that I am overwhelmed by these thoughts. I find myself frequently rationalizing how I feel about these ideas that I mentioned. I am less concerned about them individually. They linger in my mind because of my intuition that I can find a layer of understanding of what it means to be human.

As this piece is done without prior research, I would like to lightly explore using this tiny head of mine to explore some of the assumptions in my head:

Doing the right thing will always carry negative feelings.
Acting on your impulse will never carry a net positive outcome.

"Doing the right thing" will almost always be against "doing what feels good." Waking up early to not be late at school or work. Doing the dishes right after eating a good meal. Controlling your rage and keeping your composure during a conflict. Essentially, doing the right thing will always amount to a certain level of self-discipline.

A certain discipline of thought and thinking can be demonstrated with accuracy of judgement and quick wit. A certain discipline in emotions can be demonstrated by effectively handling conflicts. A certain discipline in one's health can be demonstrated by eating well and doing physical exercises regularly. This "certain level" is met by consistency, which is what the untrained brain is allergic to.

The entire opposite of discipline is an entire surrender to our impulses, which are run by our most basic instincts. Hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure as a form of "goodness" is most probably what our animal brains would always lean towards. Emotions should be taken only as a guide, which should be deliberated by our thinking minds. Down the line, giving in to the cathartic release of emotions will lead to unexamined decisions that are most likely not aligned with our own sense of self. In this perspective, acting on impulse will always be a path that leads us away from our own true self. Forgive me for the cliche but as one of Socrates' most famous quotes, "The unexamined life is not worth living," rings true in this argument, where decisions solely based on emotions, spurred by impulse, are clearly unprocessed actions done by an individual. This even includes the influence of unprocessed traumas and emotions that can hijack our emotional decisions.^6b372c

Doing the "right" thing then carries a significant weight on the influence of thinking and judgement. What is right should not only mean what is right for oneself. It must always include what is just and fair for all people involved. This scenario is the main reason why it will always carry negative feelings because it will always not agree with pleasure. Enacting revenge is pleasurable but it is not the right way to act if one wants to claim justice. Resting is pleasurable but it is not the right act if one wants to be productive.

The more one can affirm this side of himself, to effectively deliberate on making the right judgement calls, is when he can only start walking towards the path to humanity. If it is a process of acknowledging an impulse, a desire to act, as something that is worthy of thought and deliberation, then we can only claim to be human in the flesh, but it will still require a tremendous effort and self-investigation to act one.

The Failure of Hedonistic Search for Happiness

2026-10-11T21:36:13Z

Happiness as often misunderstood as the goal of life, when in fact it is merely a desire for a positive, comfortable status of one's self. This drive, in this definition makes man's often happiness-seeking self, becomes hedonistic. Pain must be avoided; pleasure, we must seek. In making happiness the ultimate goal of life subjects the self into a life of hedonistic pleasures.

This predicament is not a conscious fault. It is physiological in nature, where in avoiding pain, suffering, and living a life of comfort is the brain's default programming. Pain is undesirable while its importance remains taken for granted.

The Creation of God

2026-10-11T21:36:13Z

Man's ceaseless search for a god ends up creating one. The externalized Other, whereas man can imagine a being bigger than himself while at the same time imagining himself in the process. This imagination of the self as a god in turn creates that distance dissociating himself from the being he is imagining: that gap due to man's inadequate belief of oneself springing from the necessity for a community because he knows that he alone cannot accomplish big things. The reality is he needs the help of other men. So he imagines a version of himself who can do everything, whereas that distance, that gap, is the missing link that differentiates man from god.

Man cannot believe in himself to do great things so creates a version in the mind that can do so. A version of himself that can grant whatever he wishes because man's mind is wired to protect itself from pain. From the pain of being inadequate, from the pain of being incapable of achieving things bigger than himself, from the pain of swallowing his pride so big, his mind creates the divine--he cowers under the merciful being that can do and be everything: the god he created.

Gods are born out of learned helplessness. Prayer is a desperate action: the last resort in front of a perceived lack of control. At some point, it becomes a refusal to act: a decision made to take matters into his own hands--a passive excuse to refuse to understand and to not exert one's will due to discomfort of action and to act in exchange of leaving one's comfort zone. The existence of gods is a choice made by man. A necessary fiction to drive the demons from one's psyche. To escape accountability under the guise of the consciousness of nature. It is an externalization of the self to whom someone out there must be able to fix what the self itself is unable to.

What man fashions in fiction is always a version of himself. In attempting to understand himself, is when he starts to understand godhood and discover the gods living inside himself.

Seeing Myself

2026-10-11T21:36:13Z

I have been consuming a lot of media recently. From books to videos, games and music. I also just went through a 10-day quarantine after catching Covid. The details are completely unrelated.

What has been happening is that, throughout that quarantine period, I was once again in that flow of dissociation. I played video games hours on end. For hours, I binged and finished a TV series while recovering. My mind was elsewhere during those times and it was at that moment--when I was washing the dishes that stuck to me.

"I am always split into three at any given moment."

Seasons of the Mind

2025-01-20T00:00:00.000Z

I am trying to practice a form of discipline that would allow me to optimize the quality of my thoughts while employing restraint and letting loose. In the next few days (or even weeks), I would retain the practice of trying to "nest" an idea where I will be leaving it here as a passing thought that is removed from my daily logs. I have observed that since doing the daily logs, my mind is becoming less restricted to expressing a thought and I have passed through the threshold of forcing myself to come into the mood of actually writing. I think this is a perfect time to test a theory.

I have observed that I will pick up a topic and obsess over it, which may happen in days, frequently occurring, stacking on top of one another with every new information or discovery is made related to that idea until I finally arrive at one of a series of satisfying output, on the way to crystallize my most coherent thought around it. And there is a pattern where I observe myself absorbing information, forming conjectures here and there and my mind gets all too worked up, trying to make sense with all the information I had. In response to that and to keep myself from getting burnt out, I am writing this as another reminder to myself to let the quantity of thoughts flow first. If there's anything different, I now have the entirety of my previous thoughts and assumptions in this digital garden. Since then my memory of my own thought may have expanded in such a way that it is easy for me to remember when I have thought about a certain topic because of my logs. I will stop worrying about how it will all come together. I will let myself unravel in its own pace to try and understand how I am actually processing thoughts in real time.

This is will be one of those long-term experiments. If you are reading this, this will be a strenuous activity if you closely follow through. Basically you are watching me watch myself (or at least one of the three selves I have mentioned here). In my head, it feels like I have developed a keyword system where I am planting seeds of thought onto specific words that I used to describe the feeling and thought in that idea, allowing me to quickly search this digital garden and instantly find them.

As of now, I will cycle between two seasons in one month: gathering and observing to synthesizing. After each and every synthesis of an idea, marks a two-day rest that will follow to allow other ideas on the backlog to germinate for another season of gathering and observing new information. Then the cycle will go on and on.

I now understand that instead of conciseness, I thrive in abundance. Thoughts about my thoughts and an evaluation of similar thoughts to complete a more coherent narrative and story of mental exploration. I'm sure people do this in their own minds without having the need to write about it. But I'm finding it easier to have a mental recording of every thought I had to maintain an alignment with myself that this is how it has been for me in the past.

On Experiencing Art

2026-10-11T21:36:13Z

time in experience

Art can be experienced in various mediums. Each medium carries its own significance by existing because of its own limitations. Music, film, literature, and performance art can only be experienced by the unfolding of time. Photography and the rest of visual art are both experienced in an instant while at the same time requires a varied amount of time from each person for the absorption of time framed within that two-dimensional work of art.

Time is an essential factor in experiencing art, which is to say time is a requirement for an experiential event to happen. The definition of the human experience is enveloped by time. To describe the human experience, we must delve into the interweaving aspects of social, political, psychological, and historical facets of the overall complexities of the human nature. In this case, to describe the human experience in simple terms because a lot has happened since the first man. To encapsulate the human experience in a single word, statement, or paragraph will always lead to a gap in information, if one wants to illustrate it exactly as it is. To define the human experience must always lead to the breaking down of its concepts into smaller units in order to arrive at a satisfying conclusion. At the same time, since our definition is dependent in time, the current definition will change in the future. But not everyone has "time" for that. Everyone wants simple answers. And at this moment, I am not capable of giving time to other people for their own benefit.

art in time

Art requires time. It requires the unfolding of time--the ever so unadulterated attention of creation. The artwork itself is the amalgamation of time that the artwork required for its existence. Entering the creative process to create art always starts with a blood pact for perfection. A blood pact that demands the time of the artist, which in turn is paid for by energy, attention, and their own self. In fulfilling that pact, a good work of art can be created.

A work of art that solidifies the artist's time and their soul with it. When the artist creates their artwork, time becomes a vehicle in which the artist's being is being distilled into what is being created. Since art does not have an innate function--it is an aberration of nature also known as human expression, which does not serve anything other than itself--it is almost a hair's breadth into being the same level with trash, while at the same time, its uniqueness as a trash may elevate it exponentially further from being a simple garbage. It may even be said that the artist, as they create their artwork is investing their time into a valueless piece of junk that only serves the purpose of human expression.

Time defines the purpose of the art--not the artist nor the audience. Purpose becomes an after-effect. The purpose of art is its consequence and the aftermath. Speech and communication, whatever the person's intention may be, can be received differently from what was intended.

experiencing art

There is a thin line between experiencing nothing versus experiencing everything in a piece of art. In these terms, we can assume giving value to a work of art depends on how we experience them. As an object, we experience art through the senses: by looking, touching, hearing, and tasting--in considering food as works of art experienced through taste. The immediate sensory perception glues us into the experience of the artwork and our current state at the moment of experience. We define the meaning of art with our interaction with it. When the moment of interaction hits, that moment will always be different for another moment with the same artwork. We as humans are the variable in the equation of experience. The artwork is a constant in this scenario. It never changes. Our perception of it changes over time. The experience is always dynamic.

the authentic experience

Authenticity is a question of the one true reality. In saying that something is authentic, it is an existence that is the sole origin of everything that has come before it. The authenticity of an object is a critique of that object's truth.

Monsters and Overcoming Our Selves

2026-10-11T21:36:13Z

It is a difficult task to recognize the sleeping monster deep within us. It lies dormant that feeds on repressed memories, or trauma, guilt, and unprocessed experiences. The Shadow that remains unseen, unintegrated from the self that we want to project to the world, or sometimes the persona that we wear to express a facet or our personality to the world that is hostile to what we want to become.

Suffering causes displeasure, and is the source of all emotional recoil as a response to any traumatic event.

Hell is ourselves

2026-10-11T21:36:13Z

I am confronted by the idea that the the eventual effects of artificial intelligence may result to the peak solipsism that humanity will ever experience. This solipsism feels like a looming desire above everyone's head that stems from the fueled desire for self-gratification brought by social media. The algorithm confirms only the values of the self, an interconnecting web of mirrors that traps the ego at its center. A web of self-delusions that cannot be penetrated by any foreign consciousness.

We will become men living in our own islands, resulting in an accidental isolation apart from everyone else: pure individualism without the external avenue for criticism and regulation. The self becomes God.

Great Art as a Referential Object Towards Human Nature

2023-06-10T00:00:00.000Z

The soul of art comes from the delicate soul of the artist that imbues the artwork with life. A certain type of mastery requires sacrifice, where that sacrifice becomes palpable to a work of art. This is beyond appreciation where it is an external application of a person's connection toward an artwork.

"I appreciate that work because it moves me." It is a declaration of a subjective experience. It can be said about every artwork, since it is in itself a declaration of a subjective experience. The appreciation comes as a response towards the artwork's "prompt," as if in experiencing an artwork, we engage to an idea where we only converse with with the work we feel most connected to.

Every artwork is a letter in a bottle thrown into the sea.

Great art fleshes out a soul and a profound expression masterly crafted to evoke a certain human sensibility. Joy, pain, elation, and grief are among the common themes of art. To communicate that which is often uncontainable. Romanticists often call it the overflowing emotions. However, what overflows if often a sign of a lack of control. What overflows is often the things that we are unable to hold. This incapacity is a sign of the weakness of the mind -- the immaturity of it in seeing the explosion of emotions like a volcano, the ravaging chaos that it incurs do not show confidence of one's self-control. Going with the flow of emotions is a submission to man's animalistic impulses.

What makes art great depends on the scope of human nature it is mirroring. It requires degrees of nuances, and a razor-sharp edge precision in showing the layers. It is the art of dissecting the human while keeping it alive.

this idea is connected to man's conscious choice of a type of Suffering that allows him to integrate the Shadow. with these, art of great importance are made with Self-knowledge as its foundation.

Christmas Eve Movie

2024-12-25T00:00:00.000Z

Last night, Fatima and I watched Juror #2 as our Christmas Eve movie. It was something that has been brewing in my watchlist the moment I saw its poster online but I didn't watch any trailer about it.

That was probably one of the best decisions I've made this year.

I think this movie is best watched by going blind. As a courtroom drama, this one had one of the most convoluted way of trying to represent the practical idea of justice and how it always inevitable conflict with human nature.

It has been an ancient question to talk about justice. Which "good" do we talk about when we argue about the law? Are we prepared to suffer the consequences of being good and just? The list of ethical dilemmas can just go on.

Before watching this movie, I have always believed that I can only judge people based on my own perception about them, which means that it is dynamic. It is always changing and it largely affects how I interact with other people. I often judge people based on how they portray themselves: physically and digitally. I am always curious about why people do what they do and interpreting their behaviors based on the manner of how they do it.

You can say that it's a hobby of mine to have this mental exercise as a way to understand a person's intention or thought process. But at the end of the day, I know that what I have is my own interpretation and not the truth. I can be heavily forgiving but also a strict judge of character because I believe that people change. I just know that at this moment, you are one of the possible personalities that I have formed in my mind based on our interactions. You are only this person at this moment in time due to the circumstances that led you here. There is always room for growth.

You can only say that the person will not change if you have known them long enough and have made attempts to guide them towards their best self. You have the person's historical information, their traits, and throughout your relationship, patterns will emerge. Then and there, is the only time when that statement is correct.

Judging someone who is a complete stranger is impossible. As a juror, you will always have the time to weigh in the arguments of both sides. However, this is a type of responsibility that greatly affects all lives of the persons involved.

Will the aggrieved get the justice they wanted? If yes, was it deserved or was it for their own self-interest? Has the accused been treated fairly? Is it right for an obvious criminal to be treated fairly?

This one only verified that I can only have my own personal view of justice and stay impartial to it, however ironic it may sound. If anything else, this thought can move towards the issue of divine judgement and our understanding of it.

Merry Christmas.

To Speak, To Listen

2023-12-30T00:00:00.000Z

I am on this streak of reclaiming myself, if not my sense of self. I guess the latter carries more truth than the former because to reinvent my sensibilities is more important and meaningful than trying to capture an old self that was lost. I cannot always drag a corpse to my body for sentimentality and a sense of familiar comfort. There is no kind of reinvention that occurs without self-examination. I am able to discard the things that no longer serve me. I break parts of myself, look at it, and find something more compatible with what I want to keep. I become the ship of Theseus, gradually being changed by time. It is this acceptance that I needed to move on than to latch on to yearning for a past that I was incapable of keeping. The notion of accepting defeat and then regrouping to prepare for another round of battle. To accept shame and be grateful for it. To let grief become a beacon of light towards a path of virtue. To choose to be changed in the service of being good and just.

The only way to grow is to be in accordance with Nature. In the same way the body replaces all of its cells every seven years, my brain must also be rewired to adapt to the changing times and to my own life circumstances. The passing of time dictates what is necessary. The world around me change as a way to communicate that I must also change my ways in order to grow with it. Thought patterns must be consciously unlearned because what got me here will not help me get where I want to be. I cannot do the same things that led me to survive until this point.

Get yourself attuned with the world or get caught up with its changes. In attuning the self with the world, I must listen and open myself to it without being overwhelmed. It requires specific attention to its music, when it starts to play a different song and what the song is telling us. It requires time to listen as much as to understand and learn how to dance.

As the body changes, so must the mind. If what science says is true and accurate, then my body will have completed its fourth cycle two months into the upcoming year. Which must mean that my mind is attuned with my body with all of these blabbering. I cannot be an old soul in a new body, or more accurately, I refuse. Again, with a certain reframing of perspective, I know that this must require a deliberate decision. To change or remain unchanged. To exert energy and effort in the tediousness of self-reflection or not. To accept that this is the peak of who I am and move on with life with all of the things I have or refuse to recognize the pointlessness of life and find way to improve on even the littlest things. To this, as long as I know that I have more time, I’ll always choose the path of greatest resistance.

I know I will always have more time because I tend to overthink and turn it into foresight without falling into catastrophizing. What are the possible outcomes ranging from the best- to the worst-case scenario? What are some of the best tradeoffs I can take? What are the things I am prepared to lose if I do this? Which ones will be required to happen first before making a final decision? Which ones are beneficial for me and for everyone? Which one brings the most gain? Which one will I regret the least? Time spent answering these questions are better spent than deciding when we cross the bridge. Yet, these aren’t foolproof parameters. In any situation, anything can go wrong anytime. I can only prepare my spirit at the lowest point of vulnerability, to take that opportunity to build the best character in me in make-or-break situations. If I must gamble, do it with the best set of information that I have and if I lose, I shall gladly accept defeat for I knew I dealt my best hand.

I give myself time to take more chances and allow myself to make room for mistakes. To give myself time is to say no to what is not essential and to be intentional with every decision. It requires a certain rhythm in the brain to get used to since making decisions is an energy drainer. Creating a personal framework of the world alongside with my own values and principles allows me to easily gauge risk and outcomes because it puts everything into perspective. Like one’s own personal map of the world, a simulacrum of possibilities that would take less time and energy to realize as opposed to without it, I feel like walking into a foggy field of landmines.

This obsession to think about my relationship with the world is how I cope with all of its uncertainties. I will not allow the world to pull the rug from under my feet one more time, so I have taken the necessary steps to keep that from happening—and to prepare myself whenever it happens again.

Changing for the better does not completely shield us from misfortunes. There are a lot of situations when only time can tell if our decision is right. Planning ahead is always susceptible to unforeseen circumstances. But our attitude when faced with uncertainty is what matters most, and whatever happens, don’t forget to forgive yourself.

Of course, it is all just talk and empty words. Everything that I say must be equalized to a rumor. At this point I can say anything for the sake of utterance. I say what I say because I must say what I want to say. I must say what I want to say because I need to hear what I must say. These words are meant to be read by myself to disrupt this quietude state I am in. These words are the accumulation of thoughts in the past six years that are starting to get processed and spill out of my mind.

The only way to live is to dig deeper

2023-12-23T00:00:00.000Z

Philosophy has been the home of my thoughts ever since I married myself to the idea of the mind over everything else. In my last year of high school, I had this intuition to choose Philosophy as my second choice of degree programs in a university that I applied to. With my first choice being a literature program, having both in my college application form raised the eyebrows of almost all adults in my family. Eventually, I got accepted into the university’s literature program and graduated 4 years after.

Questions like, why didn’t I select an Engineering program instead since I am an academic achiever, or did I aspire to become a priest, and the likes buzzed around the dawn of my university life. Those questions were accompanied with some pang of disappointment and confusion. Even though I was emotionally immature back then, being raised in a passive-aggressive household opens your third eye for bullshit that other people emanate.

Fast forward to recent years, I just had this conversation with my mother about how is it that narcissistic people are allowed to exist in this world. How much we both loathe and avoid people who are so full of themselves and terribly unkind to people they just met. This conversation went on for hours, with each of us telling our own stories about our various encounters with narcissistic people. What I ended up telling her is that I would not have chosen any other degree program in college knowing what I know now. It essentially became the foundation with how I understand the world and other people.

Studying Literature in college gave me enough adjacent space to dabble into philosophy whenever I can and from there, I worked my way upwards in becoming comfortable with its language. All of its complexities and untranslatable concepts from a philosopher’s mother tongue—especially its daunting mental exercise to grasp an idea to reread a passage multiple times before finally arriving to its meaning. This practice led me to lay the foundation of how I come into terms with my surroundings. It gave me a functional framework on how to live and die well.

As I am slowly easing my way into adulthood, I see a lot of friends and family members struggling to understand themselves. Albeit there is no lack in understanding the world, but there is a noticeable gap in seeing themselves in their own eyes. I see the confusion in their eyes with every form of serious conversation. I become a witness to their unconscious denials about their shortcomings—the automatic knee-jerk reaction to every “Well what if you’re wrong?” prompt that I throw at them. What I see is a shell that was formed around them that has become tough to crack due to lack of self-awareness and a lack of healthy habit of self-criticism.

On the other side of the spectrum, online social media discourse has become tainted by the triumph of self-expression. It has become hedonistic at this point, which feeds on every man’s narcissistic tendency in chase of clout. This phenomenon is not new and what we have been observing since the dawn of social media, which is now taking its most naked form. The democracy of tools to express oneself, to perform to an audience of strangers without the friction of accountability and discipline of sharing one’s unprocessed thoughts and emotions gives the promise of unearned and unnecessary attention.

In this environment, self-awareness is the underdog. There is no more effective criticism than what the self provides, given that the self-criticism is an established habit birthed by discipline and transformative decisions. In this same vein I see my peers who lack self-awareness also go through adulthood at the same time as me lose parts of themselves that helped us bond together as young adults. It is heartbreaking and disappointing to see hope fade from their eyes. Every conversation is now prompted by a recent miserable event, which is objectively due to their poor decision making. At this point, I do not tell them this because I have already said my piece countless times over in the past years. So I took the necessary distance to give myself enough headspace as I was slowly becoming their therapist.

At this point, I am thankful to myself for having this propensity to reason and in turn, philosophy. It felt like I have prepared my mind and my soul to the adversities of adulthood despite its challenges. Of course, I still find it very difficult oftentimes as anxieties take on different forms and come in the most inopportune moment but what I observe is that it has been difficult to break my spirit. I find myself constantly digging to the deepest recesses of my psyche like a habitual expedition towards the unknown. Every attempt to go down my own mind is a new learning opportunity whose worth is valued by how much bruises I experience when I ascend back to my conscious self.

Examining the self is an activity for most people that may induce fear, only because the mind is wired to protect itself from pain—whether it is physical or psychological. The ultimate barrier to self-discovery is one’s own mind, which is if not disciplined nor self-aware, would become a danger to itself. In this case, philosophy, with all its difficulty in exercise and exploration of the human mind in writing, helped me lay down the foundation to overcome life’s absurdities and adversities. What I encourage is for anyone reading this to do the same. It is difficult but nonetheless goes a long way to keep your sanity intact.

One of life’s most unfortunate events is the feeling of losing one’s own self—not the actual loss of it. The moment of losing the self is the hell of existence. It is something that I may have come close to and do not wish for anyone to experience it.

The Cosmic Failure of a Creator

2025-01-06T00:00:00.000Z

Lately, I am feeling more and more hopeless about a certain progress that humanity should have done centuries ago. That certain progress is a collective understanding of who we are as humans. Recent news about the developments in AI is saying that it is just a matter of time before our limited human understanding is surpassed by the very thing we are still grasping to understand.

I have been mulling over the possible implications of AI development for a couple of days now. My feed has been increasingly geared towards news about AI development and news about megalomaniacs who are seemingly "pushing the boundaries" of technology for the human civilization.

But the more we look at it, the more capitalism reveals itself (still the reigning culprit of cultural decline) as the catalyst for a chain of problems it has been causing.

The only plausible reason for such technological advancement, which is in this case we will refer to as AI, should be under these prerequisites:

The existential necessity to delegate human tasks to machines for our benefit
The outline for such necessity to exist, which is a deliberate examination of its pros and cons, its implications and philosophical effect to human civilization.

What I am getting at, is still the same as what I have been talking about. "Knowing thyself." Desire itself is not enough to do or seize the opportunity to make things happen. In other words, just because you can, doesn't mean you should. Because every small thing that we want to do carries a specific and often invisible psychological trigger that propels us into doing it. This is also the same reason why we most often do not believe people at face value. A trust must always be formed between two individuals to create a strong connection of bond and dependability. This must also be created between our own self and our own mind.

I can say to someone that I always wake up before 6 a.m. and take a morning walk before I go back to my home office and start my work day. That someone could be my own self because I want to do it and I know that it is the right and healthy thing to do. But since I don't have the discipline to do as I say to myself, some of the worst traits envelop me because of a lot of whole other reasons:

laziness, because I can always start tomorrow
complacency, because no one is actually keeping tabs
avoidance, waking up is actually hard and my mind does not want to do hard things
and a whole lot of reasons not to do it

Trusting yourself is a two-way process where you have to be yourself and you also have to be your own mind. The mind's default path of reasoning is to protect itself from harm, from pain, from suffering, so it will make up a lot of these reasons to keep you safe. That's just how the mind works. So, in developing your sense of discipline, it is always important to discipline the mind and keep it from running automatically. Your intervention should always be directive and deliberate.

So what's all of this got to do with AI development?

The short answer is that we cannot trust ourselves that we are doing this for our benefit because of the fact that the effects that these developments are producing is transgressing with our own sense of human responsibility.

We humans still do not have the discipline for ethical decency and moral actions to use a tool that is supposed to help ourselves achieve more with our limited capacity to learn, remember, and apply those learnings. More so, we still have a long way to go for deeper and practical empathy. We still lose ourselves to our own cravings, which is a hint that we as a species still do not understand a lot about ourselves. So why should we trust another human to create artificial intelligence if we still cannot articulate what is it that we are actually doing?

Match this lack of self-understanding with the corporate race towards developing the fastest computing processors for AIs. Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, Apple, everyone is developing their own atomic bomb in this age of intelligence and they are handing it to the common man who has a little sense of responsibility in his hands. I've still yet to understand what Google's "Willow" is all about.

While there is a lot of excitement inside the STEM field, there is a lot of anxiety in the Humanities. I would say that I am part of the latter community because I feel that things are getting exponentially confusing as the technology is also exponentially progressing. What is clear to me is that there are very few ethical consideration that is being brushed away in pursuit of money. Greed is the code that is running the backend of this tech theatrics. All these keynotes, video teasers, and interviews are all marketing, all in the prettified front-end.

We are witnessing our own mythology based from the story of the fire-snatching Prometheus, the creation of the tower of Babel, Icarus' flight, and Oppenheimer's discovery. Our own failure to understand ourselves, and externally projecting our unprocessed desires will always result to our own demise.

What I am feeling is a deep sense of failure as part of the Humanities. But this is not a sense of responsibility that I am bearing because I feel like I could have made a change, or an impact to slow down this process of development. The type of failure I am feeling now is an empathy towards humanity as my own kind. We have failed ourselves and it might even be too late to say that we can still stop this. The gears are already turning and the masses are already subscribed to this fiasco.

To echo Heimerdinger from the Arcane series, "in pursuit of greatness, we failed to do good."