enjambments

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.

_thoughts

2026-10-11T21:36:13Z

One-takes. Unfiltered and unedited spur-of-the-moment writing.

_grief and substitution

2026-10-11T21:36:13Z

Insofar as this section is concerned, a way of my own coping with loss and grief.

Start here

Sacrifice, substitution, and the remainder of grief: the long argument. Every sacrificial order runs on substituting one person for the whole, and grief is the one thing that substitution cannot process. Read through The Lottery, Midsommar, Hereditary and Pluribus.

Then

About the Inadequacy of Attempting to Communicate Grief through Art: the earlier claim that "we only exist in language", and what that leaves art unable to carry.
the shape of what cannot be said: a return to that claim. Something comes before language, and Simone Weil's void is better left unfilled.
2026-10-11: a year of absence, and Weil's void as a vessel for grace.
Declarations_Of linguistic cartographies: prose. A grandmother's memory, and the days she knows me and the days she doesn't.
To Speak, To Listen: reinvention through self-examination, and letting grief become "a beacon of light towards a path of virtue."
Apropos of Nothing: the far edge, a wish for an erasure "beyond disappearance."

_film as philosophy

2026-10-11T21:36:13Z

Media interpretation and how film itself is a vehicle of self-referential observation on society and on the self.

Start here

Sacrifice, substitution, and the remainder of grief: The Lottery, Best Wishes to All, Widow's Bay, Azrael, Midsommar, Hereditary, Rental Family and Pluribus, read as one argument about sacrifice and grief.

Then

on Companion (2025): Ex Machina and her "smashed together", and the love-robot-turned-murderer trope handled with taste.
Christmas Eve Movie: Juror #2, and how the practical idea of justice always collides with human nature.
2025-01-17: the day David Lynch died. His surrealism and dream logic, and art that offers no explanations.
2025-04-08: cinematic violence, from Adolescence to Soft & Quiet (2022).
2025-01-22: when a work of art "phenomenologically speaks to you."
On Experiencing Art: film, music and literature can only be experienced as time unfolds.

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.

_technology, simulation, and the machine

2026-10-11T21:36:13Z

Emerging thoughts and ideas about the emerging and seeming self-constitution of what technology is becoming.

Start here

Technology and its Discontents: belief in an age when science has demystified everything, and why "we should all have read Baudrillard."

Then

Existential Anxiety around the Advancements in Large Language Models: a study of LLMs that "scheme", and what it mirrors in how people communicate.
2025-01-04: 3 Body Problem, and the capacity to lie as a measure of a machine's humanity.
on the compulsion to search for novel ideas: the feed trades intention for a false sense of serendipity.
on passionate online reactions: human reaction turned into data and money, and rage-bait as its sharpest form.
on twitter drama_no.1: the crowd's appetite for an online feud.
we breathe critique and we're so bad at it: meta-criticism as a defence for critical thinking in the age of AI.
on Companion (2025): love and robots, the same questions put into a film.

_musings

2026-10-11T21:36:13Z

Things I have been wondering about.

_language and the unsayable

2026-10-11T21:36:13Z

All things concerning language and beyond it.

Start here

the shape of what cannot be said: "The hand that reaches for a cup has never said the word cup." What is there before language, and two ways of standing at its edge: reframing and silence.

Then

A Return to Form: an idea so unprocessed that it dissolves the moment it's written. Writing as self-erasure.
2025-01-29: the private language each of us develops to absorb the world, one for every person and every topic.
About the Inadequacy of Attempting to Communicate Grief through Art: "we only exist in language," and the grammar of the disguises we wear to make sense of ourselves.
To Speak, To Listen: reclaiming a sense of self, which can't happen without self-examination.
Notes on Inhabiting and Declarations_Of the body: prose. "The body refuses to be metaphor."
Declarations_Of linguistic cartographies: prose. The body keeps its own history, "in the language between breaths."

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."

Liminal Spaces

2023-02-26T00:00:00.000Z

A lunatic's guide to becoming a ghost

first, measuring space in terms of width, with word-processing software: here, summon a block of text that will move one way or another. we often ask where is poetry but it is always outside itself, without any trace, its trace, which is to say, that trace of a phantom limb, which is a limb that bears the weight of all anxiety, whereas an index to a past persisting within the present. its absence, palpable, therefore: presence imagined.

when an object assumes immateriality, it gains consciousness. an immaterial object’s consciousness then becomes sacred by having a single witness. this sacrality is a secret between the disappearance of that object to immateriality and the witness of that disappearance. what was once known to all is now known only to one. as witnesses, we are forced to expose the secret. but first, one must know how to hear a secret: which is to say that we, as tellers of secrets can only redeem ourselves of the burden of guilt, violation, and transgression for exposing such a thing through silence. therefore, all secrets that will follow will only be said through unsaying, or if you prefer: poetry.

there can be no history, but a networked connection between a cluster of events. what is sense but the delimitation (only to say that which is capable of producing an in-between, a rift, between correlations: a threshold) of perception and meaning. if we are freed from the burden of history, only then we become guilty of committing the crime of freedom.

let this be an inquiry: how can a struggle of indefinite tension between want and need be palpable in writing? as if in terms of its material form emanates a tension — or maybe even found in its utterance. how much is it am I willing to say about what I want to say before I unwillingly compromise myself and what I wanted to say? which of these two is want? which is need? which of these am I willing to commit: a knife in my lungs or an arrow to your head?

maybe, an endless monologue towards impossible perfection. a meditation for a consistent routine of inconsistency, whereas the former is its mode of form, while the latter is content: ever-so sporadic in terms of theme but always points towards that same destination: completion.

but completion of what? perhaps it is folly to articulate the process of a completion’s completion. only because of how it lacks material coherence, the focus of which is almost always out of its place, to say that what I talk about is often received from outside: your task as the reader must occupy the space outside the text and be always outside of the text in order to cross the boundaries of interpretation and communication. as we go further along, we will have shaped an indefinite number of concentric circles that infinitely grows in area with reference from the first idea as our first circle: here.

Dante arrives, like how ghosts manifest behind every interweb of relations, of words from meaning and meaning divorced from words. Like ghosts from remembering: always anticipated but never arrives.

March 19, 2018; 14:40
i sit on a chair where i am refusing to do my responsibilities at work. however, i am absolved by the absence of work, which is why this has made it possible for me to skip work while be at work and wait for further instructions which are currently lacking as of the moment. such as this, a moment of interjection can only occur from a break — that is, a break from thinking which makes it able to arrive in a more concentrated impulse, such as this, this series of monologues that attempt to tread that line of ambiguity to give birth to the possibility of a moment such as this current situation, such as i, in this moment, am elsewhere besides be where i should be or do what is expected from me. thought as a vehicle, can only go so far without action. what this action refers to is an extension of thought that renders it in praxis. this realization of thought to action as a linear event poses a limit of a possibility whereas as i think of extending my arm upwards, it can even extend further, by means of imagination, to defy the laws of physics without movement. whereas in motion, action becomes the limit upon which the thought is executed. the arm, in reality, cannot extend as far as the subject wishes for it to.

i am trying to grasp a moment, pardon, an idea (or is it someone’s presence?) but it always slips away from my tongue. it is this ungraspability that links me to it, turning its absence into a nagging superego that links me from it like an anchor or a kite. let my tongue hold your presence, in thought, where losing it would induce fears of loneliness and abandonment. include: a phenomenon, rather than an independent idea or concept.

so far i have said nothing and intend to say anything more than what i have already said for the following statements to come.

the difference between voice and void is a matter of a hundred muscles. but both can be either of each when put in a particular context. everywhere, there is a voice and nowhere, there is a void. this does not say anything new, this boldness, perhaps, even a feeble boldness is the consequence of the peak of nothingness from the precedent artists, and as a condition of our time in the age of transhumanism. where are the limits of the voice if there exists a transcendence of human cognition. from Lacan, then we have arrived to the non-bodily phenomenon that exists as the building structures of the current society: the gaze and voice. both are capable of existing without the body, without the cause that permits the phenomenon to occur. it has transferred outside the very means that cause them to exist.

what is dead is devoid of a voice but not a presence. a presence that ultimately takes the form of a voice or a gaze that ghosts a subject like a personal panopticon. presence extends beyond death.

there are no one-word truths. one can only arrive at truth by going beyond every representation of the real, which is to say that representations are the window to the real which has to be broken down, stripped of its illusions in order to arrive at the truth. truth is never the goal but the path of process upon truth is attained. in other words, truth is never a thing or an object of desire. it is a place where nothingness resides and it can be said that the quest for truth is always the path towards self-destruction, to cancel the self, to die, as a sacrifice in order to see the self with the absolute Other. which is to say that every truth is an Other that manifests through representations of the real.

for instance, the perceivable real, which is through the senses, the objective material world, such as in the creation of a plate represents the human desire and necessity for progress, to organize. the plate as a concrete representation of “order” as a category such as abstract linguistic labels to “put food in” involves a kind of awareness of boundaries. anything outside the plate is not edible, therefore it is not worthy of being called food. whereas the truth behind this representation of the real stays empty and elusive in a sense that in questioning real representations, we are compelled to ask further “what for?” such that in questioning representations, we are forced to break through the material reality and lean towards phenomenology to infer relationships between the material and the abstract, of presence to absence.

it then, brings us forth to the confrontation of nothingness. ever since Heidegger said that anxiety is brought by the direct confrontation of the self with the Nothing. the truth that all truths are empty, a void, a hall of mirrors, which is an aporia in itself, where one is suspended above and below everything, causes all things to disappear in front of our eyes. the sacredness of all things hides behind the fact that we are all witnesses to the disappearance of our own truths. any attempt to hide the truth becomes sacrilegious despite the anxiety it brings. before and after all things such that the truth of the illusion of beginnings and ends. there can be no salvation in truth and on the search for it. truth must not be the end goal because it does not end. to make peace with truth is to make peace with death. truth is beyond mortality. to become a ghost is to arrive at truth, where the timelessness of the self can only be achieved. let me gain another form of consciousness by hiding myself from the world. i am ready to become sacred and become the sole witness of my own disappearance.

in the beginning, there was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. i have come to terms with faith by recognizing signs. as much as my faith relies on the world, there is still too much emptiness in it. an emptiness defined as the natural state of things such that faith itself thrives by that emptiness. belief, as opposed to factuality, is never independent of each other. i believe in a fact that facts are capable of proof which begs belief. but as i believe in signs, there is too much emptiness that must not go unrecognized. i believe in the sign of the empty signifier for an absent signified (which will be the only way to represent the unrepresentable). the signifier must empty itself to contain what is uncontainable.

there is no outside of the cave.

Consequences of Belief

2023-12-22T00:00:00.000Z

I may have reached the point where it has become difficult to capture the feeling of experiencing things for the first time. At the age of 27, I am feeling a kind of unfamiliar loneliness, to say that it might be possible that I am carrying a type of solitude that grows bigger than what I can handle.

I grew up with solitude like a childhood friend—something that always stays unchanged, reminding me of what it once was to feel I belong in a home, the bringer of welcomed nostalgia, but has become someone who I drifted away from as I became an adult. Its tenderness slowly becoming a memory. Quick catch-up conversations start to feel like small talks that do not amount to anything. My relationship to solitude exists at a safe distance between fear and my newfound belief.

Now this heavy feeling is something I recognize that was birthed by self-neglect. I can feel it loom over me the more I age, as if this solitude is an invisible companion I had been nurturing throughout my life and only now did I have the ability to see it—once this loneliness has grown beyond me.

The city has become an amalgamation of memories of old lovers. Old pathways already marked by our fingerprints, the alleys mapped by our mind, and all those same roads we walk on every day, which upon sight, become submerged with the ordinariness of familiarity. What I am trying to say is I’m still looking for a poem in everything, a god in every gesture of speech. Some things stay the same but rot away with time.

This is the time when I can feel the time slowly etching itself onto my skin. I can feel youth being transferred from me to the younger generation, making this unresolvable conflict of aging known to me. I become aware that I am slowly losing my steam with the rush of unrecognized novelty passing through me like a new form of language I am too old to comprehend.

New experiences start to become an index of a similar encounter from the distant past. Every form of novelty carries an echo of a forgotten memory. Living starts to feel like a bittersweet walk through a gallery of the things that resembles objects that I should know, but don’t. I feel like I am forbidden to understand, where I am only an onlooker from the other side of this tempered glass. At the moment of trying to understand, the sudden realization comes in: I am back inside my own shell.

Doubt sets in. Always coming unannounced but always when I need it the most. It becomes this self-sustaining system that keeps my sanity in check.

In understanding the world, it has become a prerequisite to understand what I am trying to tell myself by my own actions and thoughts. The world becomes a perfunctory object that would rely on the interpretation of my immediate self. In so doing, I start to question the position of the voice that I am currently using at this moment. I become my own omniscient observer who speaks in first person, communicating with my self who is at the forefront of experiencing the world.

This shift from one “I” to another is difficult to catch in writing. And in reality, I know that my mind is giving birth to separate consciousness with their own function to preserve itself. Fictions after fictions become entangled into a fortress of vines—a forest of thought canopies with its own ecosystem of faith and a graveyard of beliefs.

In this game, I would let you participate in this space where there is no judgment.

Apropos of Nothing

2023-02-01T00:00:00.000Z

For some reason, I have come to ensure that nothing that I have produced will persist beyond what I can control. There can be nothing that will exist that will be under my name. Everything that I have written must be erased. All that I am seeks a type of death that cannot be confirmed, that is beyond disappearance, that is what comes after the state of absence itself — perpetually unverifiable. I am only here to make proof for a claim that I once was — and still, as of this moment — here to state these facts in order to make them true. Despite the fact that in the future, all of these things that I am writing about right now would not matter, I am able to say that I did something — that even such thoughts as this do not remain to be buried inside the hemispheres of my brain.

I bleed consciousness, the remaining disquietude of the remaining faith I have to a universe that answers all the questions with another question. To you dear reader, there is nothing else, nothing more I could say to satisfy your curiosity. No more to satisfy your insatiable yearning for the discovery of the world to represent it through beautiful prose, in poetic verses, or even in silence — no. I am only here to tell you that there is nothing and only death is true. There can never be anything more. There can never be anything more than this. But I am not here to tell you that I have seen it all. And even if I have, I would not be able to describe everything. There can be no words for it — and that is the same reason why I am able to say that there is nothing more to this. To a life that we hold so dear, everything is, and nothing more.

Call this a fin-de-siècle syndrome but no one has told us that there is nothing more because everything is repetition. Everything is a prayer about the things that we would change if given the chance to do it all again. Until those prayers manifest into action because of the fact that prayers are promises to ourselves that only we can fulfill. I have given rest to the idea of gods and goddesses but I have never forgotten to acknowledge everything that is beyond me, beyond what I can do, and beyond the things I cannot. There are regrets and there are secrets but all we can do is attest to the things that keep us awake at night and carefully choose the words we tell ourselves because the world only makes sense when we are drunk.

I might leave all of this behind until I cannot see you at the end of that flat horizon — that line that separates heaven and earth because I need to get lost and you need to leave. I have dedicated an entire year to searching for the exit door from the universe and I have found it under the pillow that I sleep on every night. Since every day is a choice, I never forget to cover it using my dreams before I go to sleep. There are numerous things that I do not understand and it just so happens that there is already an infinite number of things that I do not understand about the things I am not even aware that I do not understand.

I am practically floating above a sea of air and the only thing I can do is look at it. Contemplate its invisibility. Look at it unfold. Look at my body sway due to forces that I am unable to see. I can only believe that it is there. I can only see what it is in my imagination but it takes on several amorphous forms which can only be suppressed by the idea that it cannot be fully comprehended by my own mind. This mathematics confounds me. I am faced with an impossible geometry of thoughts and ideas until I am caught under the weight of its collapse.

There are fewer and fewer vibrations that echo around the walls it has built around me. I have grown accustomed to its texture and taste but still remains to be the very thing that surrounds me yet I cannot describe it. However, this inability is caused by a deliberate decision rather than the inability to act. I cannot describe it because there are no words for it. But being exposed to this enveloping geometry, I began to be familiar with it. I learned how to shape the very thing I cannot disclose. I want it to remain knowable only by me and through me. Sometimes, I wonder if Jesus was caught up in the same experience as this. Sometimes, I wonder if what is enveloping me is a part of a God that we have been trying to unmask. It causes small things to quiver in their quantum state. Sometimes, the molecules become apparent that they will fall apart but it is because most of the time, I forgot that I am inhaling liquid. So I break matter down using my lungs and I drown without being submerged.

It might have been the coffee. Maybe it is the effect of taking two multivitamin supplements in one day. But lately, I feel that if the surface of the ocean is the firmament of the underwater world, my head, it seems like, is in the clouds. Maybe it is me waiting for my body to be washed up to the shore as I bury myself underneath a seafoam. I have grown tired of bubbles but I never seem to grow up. I am mature enough to tell myself that I do not want to be an adult. Perhaps, my body ages as much as I think about the accumulating bills and papers to sign in the near future. Those that I had drowned along with the voices that used to wake me up in the morning before I go to school instead of alarm clocks.

And so, I like the idea of using bubble wrap as a blanket at night to protect myself from any disturbance but I hate how it feels on the soles of my feet. It makes me feel safe from the worlds of other people and every time I think of rolling myself inside bubble wraps, that idea of safety feels more like the truth. It makes me feel like the world pushes back every time I push the world away. That tension — between push and pull is where the concept of life hangs on a balance. That sense of liminal space when consciousness fails to distinguish between living and dying. I become Schopenhauer’s cat. It does not make me feel like a larva during a metamorphosis. It does not make me feel like I am once again, inside my mother’s womb. It feels more than prison despite not having the experience to be convicted. I know that it feels more than prison because I have already known how to love. How the bubble wraps feel on my skin is an embrace that lacks intimacy and my flesh is made of thorns.

But I learned to be human by watching other people. I learned to be human by being other people. I have learned empathy by faking it, which led me to understand why people leave other people — even those whom they deeply love. As a consequence, I encountered love by leaving other people, leaving places I have known for so long, and burying soil I used to play on during my childhood underneath layers of concrete.

I watched my grandmother exhale her last breath on a bed inside our house. By then, I thought everyone’s grandparents were supposed to die when their grandchildren reached six years old. My father’s parents died when I was nine months old and my parents told me the story of how I was carried across their caskets before their graves were sealed as a tradition that I never came to fully understand. I guess I refused to understand because I did not ask further questions. But then again, maybe I know that they will answer my question with an answer. I believe that questions should be the answer to each question because I believe that this would not end. Because I am always amazed by the recurrent realization that the dictionary is an index of words designed with the purpose of defining them by using the words themselves. As if by being another person several times, I define myself.

So when I say “distance” what I really mean is “intimacy” and “knowingness.” I learned that we all approach things through a web of relationships and never by approaching itself directly as a thing-in-itself. Not because it is impossible to perceive it as it is. Such as a chair is a chair not because we use it to sit but because we know that the idea of a chair exists so we can sleep soundly at night.

From this, I learned that one of the fundamental fears of man is realizing that we have created everything to cope with the absence of things. That the idea of knowing that there only is nothing can crush us under the absence of its weight, that who we really are is only based on what other people have already created, that all that we do is far from finding a luxury from anything other than living, because we know that the only luxury we can have, and be satisfied with, is the chance of not having to be born.

I told this to the city after I went out on the first day of the year. It was early morning. The streets are covered with fog or smog, but I did not care enough to even make an effort to tell the difference between the two.

Against Agnosticism

2025-01-19T00:00:00.000Z

Agnosticism in a highly secularized world has becoming an intellectual fashion. Organized religions still remain to be an immovable object, standing as monumental image of a frozen time with beliefs so enduring to address human's basic instinct to rely to an external being for spiritual guidance, to reveal the path forward for those whose minds are strained from interpreting the world that is becoming more and more complex each day. Belief is the anchor that grounds man. It becomes a requirement for survival in the face of utter uncertainty. Belief creates a space where an unwavering faith can exist.

The world as it is has been consistent in its attempts to disprove the existence of a higher being by eliminating the spaces where it is needed. "God is dead!" as Nietzsche proclaims as we have killed Him with industrialization. God was "killed" by the machines we've built. We have blurred the existence of the heavens with the smoke and steam of progress. We have severed our connection with nature with technology, trading oracles, nymphs, and spirits to movements of data in the air. This alienation is brought by our own undoing.

In turn, disbelief has also been in the air. Agnosticism has become more and more appealing due to the ever-growing responsibilities our current society has been offloading to the individual. This disbelief in the form of agnosticism has become a sign of spiritual resignation. Throwing in the towel for spiritual growth because of the growing uncertainty in the world. There is no denial that God has ceased to exist but a choice to stop caring about its existence.

Perhaps if we take it for its philosophical definition within epistemology as defining the limits of knowledge, precisely that knowing everything is beyond our capabilities, where everything is where God resides, is still a stance that can hold up because it is only a recognition of our own limitations as humans. There is no burden of proof to bear. Epistemological agnosticism opens the spaces for belief for a higher being because this only concerns our cognitive limitations. The existence of a higher being is likely, only that it is impossible for us to fully grasp the entire understanding of it. But this changes when agnosticism is applied to a personal theology.

If we divide agnosticism between epistemology and theology, we can find that:

Epistemological Agnosticism and Belief: Here, the focus is on the limits of human knowledge. When someone maintains this epistemological stance, they can still entertain personal beliefs about God within those acknowledged limitations.
Theological Agnosticism: The emphasis here is not necessarily on the limits of knowledge but rather on a refusal to make definitive claims or engage in debates about God's existence for various reasons. This form tends to be more tied to how one constructs personal spiritual identity and engages (or disengages) with discussions on divinity.

Agnosticism in this age is a narrow-sightedness of the spirit. It is to say that one does not have the will to take the risk of what makes it worthwhile to be human. It is wallowing in the skepticism, furthering oneself into the lakes of uncertainty. It cannot be a middle-ground. It can only be a temporary state of being, which is slight reminiscent of nihilism. Agnosticism is an active refusal to use one's imagination: a crucial tool for improvement, in creating visions, in visualizing a better state of one's own relationship with the world. Choosing to remain an agnostic, and also a nihilist in this sense, is a disrespect to one's own human nature. It is the deprivation of one's own potential, to stop interpreting the world as one's own personal project. It is a misunderstanding of happiness, fulfillment, and the realization of one's soul. This is to trade the feeling of earned and temporary experience of the sublime for the certainty of nothingness. It is a refusal to surrender the self.

Not being able to understand a higher being is the baseline. We do not start from unknowing. The attempts to understand the divine, the ineffable sacred parts of the world, is where knowing begins. To understand and to explain is not the end-goal but to know and experience the divine is a type of fullness of the soul that closes the circle of our being. Our existence is nothing but a loop. Agnosticism breaks that loop towards a misguided belief, depriving oneself of the fullness of the self. Belief in a higher being does not always mean a subscription to any form of religion. It is always a process that is in pursuit of a higher cause that is bigger than the self. If there's anything, agnosticism must be the temporary spiritual state that can reawaken one's vision towards the revelation of a higher being, wherever in the world they may find it.

A Journey into the Self

2023-12-28T00:00:00.000Z

“Silent Peaks” (2023) by Pope Bacay, acrylic on canvas

With the right amount of god complex, the desire to become human must be present. I must desire my own humanity and accept all of its contradictions. I must accept and understand that I cannot become a god. I can only feel how it is to become god.

Balancing what I want to be against what I am capable of requires a certain set of parameters in making a decision. “Know thyself” is probably the most well-known adage from the Delphic maxims and it is so fundamental it remains to be timeless and profound yet forgettable at the same time. It is an expression of truth so known by our subconscious it starts to lose its meaning the moment it crosses our minds. A two-word statement so slippery and quick in its utterance it becomes difficult for the mind to latch. So then only those who pay conscious attention to it, to examine those two words carefully and stare at its mundane glory, can fully appreciate the simplicity of life and the difficulties of living well.

Struggling on this path of self-discovery, I find myself constantly reminded of my own limitations. These limitations are a mixture of physical and mental limitations, as well as self-imposed limitations, which include principles I have committed myself to, such as:

My time and energy, as my most valuable resources, must be prioritized for my partner, my dog, and my immediate family. The rest are secondary.
Emotion is a guide, not a judge. It must not be allowed to make a decision.
Reason is an arbiter of emotions. Let it weigh every consequence for each possibility and decide the best course of action with all things considered.
No choice comes free. Every choice is a tradeoff, which must be evaluated by emotions and reason. When faced with a choice, a decision is always framed as the best struggle and a kind of pain that is worth choosing.
Every decision must have an emotional quality to it but not as an influence. Let values and principles come first, then attend to every choice with emotion, and let reason align those emotions with the values and principles. Discard any emotion that does not align with the values and principles, then let reason make the decision.
Make the most out of regretful decisions. To regret means I have gambled in making a decision. To gamble in making a decision means that I must have been unable to make a choice aligned with my values and principles. To be unable to make a choice means I have let my emotions make a decision instead of reason.
My freedom is proportional to my self-knowledge. It does not depend on other people’s thoughts and their actions towards me. My freedom extends to a shared responsibility of the community and ends on the other’s individual responsibility.
All my actions are motivated by my journey to self-discovery. More ideal if my actions have the possibility to also influence the other’s journey to their own self-discovery.

So far, I have arrived on these limitations to define the most important things in my life. Enough to keep my decisions in a certain path that serves my goals and those who are near me. Planning is much easier when it is easy to rule out the noise of emotions that occur in my everyday life. It is much easier to wade through the fog of emotions when I have paid enough attention to it to grow more sensitive about the inner child in me. I have matured enough to listen when to indulge the deprived crybaby in me and when it takes on the noise of temptation.

To desire is an instinct. To desire well is a skill. In desiring well, I add focus and quality to our desires to greatly improve myself. To give in to one’s desires shows a lack of discipline. There are a lot of things I desire and to keep those desires at bay and to consciously say no to impulse allows me to examine each desire and select what is good from what isn’t. Good desires serve me and make a positive impact in achieving my goals. It does not impede on my plans. Bad desires are birthed by the noise of emotions and the moment’s exaltations. I employ my ability to choose as a priority. It is a learned privilege to choose—the awakening of the self in the midst of life’s chaos and misfortunes. It is the soul taking shape, whenever in one’s life may it happen.

If my soul were my house, I have found myself cleaning every nook and cranny as a way to prepare for the upcoming year. It is cliche. It is unnecessary. It is irrational. But every now and then, this house needs a little bit of cleaning whenever weeks and months start to get busy. During this time when I am finding myself spending more time in my home, I might as well do some chores I have been postponing for an eternity.

In this sense, I realized that I have kept my religious upbringing under the floorboards. I realized that I still do not believe in God but in Spinoza’s God. I am a part of that which I am incapable of understanding. Yet, I always attempt by understanding myself. I was not made from the image of a god but I am a part of one. I do not serve a god but in serving myself, understanding myself, despite all of its incompleteness, I acknowledge the god within me, with all of its contradictions, I enable this divine part of me by aligning myself to virtue.

It is lonely to go into a journey towards self-discovery. Multiple paths that lead to uncertainty and snaking trails that lead you back to where you started. It is a frightening venture for you will encounter multiple versions of yourself. I have encountered multiple past selves that cry for help and drowning in bottomless lakes of guilt. I saw versions of who I could have been hiding in the bushes, praying to absolve them of shame. There are chatty prideful versions of me, mentioning all of their achievements in life but whose backs are full of flesh wounds, their exuberant attitude is meant to ignore the regret of the things they have unwittingly sacrificed. I am grateful for Dante’s Virgil to muster the strength and courage to walk through my own hell, to not look away from different versions of myself and stand my ground for their time have passed. They are beyond help and all I could do is forgive them, myself, and move forward.

This is still an ongoing journey, and I am not sure if there are still multitude of depths to descend to. How many circles of my own hell must I lay my feet on in order to attain more self-knowledge? How much intolerable cries from my old selves must be ignored so I would not make the same mistakes I did before? Only as long as I heed the call of Reason and trust its judgement will I only be able to survive this and succeed.

_logs

2026-10-11T21:36:13Z

Daily logs of life events. Thoughts of a moment in a day.

2025
- _01_January
- _02_February
- _03_March
- _04_April
- _05_May
- _06_June
- _07_July
2026
- 10_October
  - 2026-10-2
  - 2026-10-11

_06_June

2026-10-11T21:36:13Z

_05_May

2026-10-11T21:36:13Z

_04_April

2026-10-11T21:36:13Z

_03_March

2026-10-11T21:36:13Z

_02_February

2026-10-11T21:36:13Z

_01_January

2026-10-11T21:36:13Z

re_Locations

2024-03-12T00:00:00.000Z

It has been a month dedicated to preparing all the things that we need to move out of the metro. Packing rarely used items in the apartment: some clothes in boxes, disassembled light accessories, some musical instruments collecting dust, some words that I have told to my family about the idea of me leaving, and other memories of the city that allowed me to keep going this far. It is liberating, to say the least. It is almost as if I am putting an end to the plateauing growth of my old self that once desired to be swallowed by the city—to fully experience its being: a fertile ground for new experiences, the randomness of strangers, and surrendering my whole self to chance, letting the algorithm of the city dictate the psychology of the future person I want to be.

Then, I realized that it was my overdue youth who was speaking. This desire to become one with the city was the dream of a person who I once was. This idea that what I think I want is not mine is caused by years of working remotely. I stopped going out of the apartment every day because of necessity. While working from home, the city provided everything I needed and with apparent convenience. A 5-minute walk to a supermarket, less than an hour away from every restaurant for delivery and takeout, 10-minute drive to parks and open spaces, which all sounds incredible at first, but everything gradually fades into triviality when the reality is that I do not need to go out that often since me and my partner both are working from home.

Last Saturday, I went to Calamba to work on transferring our ISP to the house we are moving into. I took that as a chance to survey and walk the streets of the future city we will be residing. I would say that there is no stark difference in appearances when the atmosphere in Calamba is an amalgamation of every small thing that I have seen and felt while living in the metro. The humbling presence of small sari-sari stores beside the sidewalks, the roving tricycles on the main road beside jeepneys, private vehicles, and provincial buses, the sight of people in their homey clothes populating the mall, the crowded scene of a dry and wet market, its noise and the unpretentiousness of each person—everything is all familiar and similar yet different at the same time.

Perea St. Legazpi Village, Makati

On the same day, on my way back home in the metro, I dropped by Makati to walk the same streets I used to. The same streets that filled me with hope for tomorrow, the myopic verticality of streets that obfuscates the sky with concrete jungle, its towering Mecca of high-rises for the corporate pilgrims that filled the streets of rush hour traffic, where most dreams die in favor of borrowing time to survive for another day. I used to pray in this city wanting to live in one of those buildings, seeing the night lights, feeling secure that the city watches over me while I sleep at night, wishing for myself not to turn into one of the zombies that walk the same streets I revere with rose-colored glasses bought from the nearby posh malls for the rich.

Then—I felt a temporal disconnect. Suddenly, this city becomes different from what I once desired. Seeing a new and younger generation of people populating the city made me feel like an outsider in this new and emerging religion. It felt like a new language was brewing inside, in which I was not a part of creating. The city is an old phrase spoken in a new tongue. Old stores have been replaced by newer and modern-looking coffee shops. The strategically placed convenience stores are now empty and being renovated into something else. The faces are becoming younger and younger with every step I take. The city is phasing into a different time that does not recognize me. It is becoming the future; the dream younger people probably have but not the dream my younger self envisioned it to be.

The message becomes clear. What I felt was a confirmation of my intuition to move away from the metro. I have graduated from the illusion of prosperity, and it is time for me to move on to a place where I will not regurgitate the same memories in the same place and actually make new ones that will define me for the next decade.

Calamba felt like coming home not to where I once was but to where I wanted to be. It felt like making a home for myself, whose desires are not easily swayed and dictated by the materialistic externalities of my youth. It felt like a palpable departure from the illusion and more towards something real, concrete, and difficult. I know that this is a place where I can create and temper my own meaning.

_events

2026-10-11T21:36:13Z

Happenings in life and other aspects of my surroundings that have spurred a thought or an idea.

The point of it all

2024-12-22T00:00:00.000Z

"Writing requires its own incarnation – hand–eye coordination, and some form of technology for making marks on a surface. We take a part of ourselves and turn it into physical inscriptions which outlive us. So that a future reader can breathe, in the words of Seamus Heaney, ‘air from another life and time and place’. When we write, we give ourselves a second body."

— Richard Seymour, The Twittering Machine (2019)

It has been a long time since I last wrote my another, "allow me to start again" piece. Almost two years has passed and here I am, writing again about how I am attempting to start something anything related to writing. Perhaps the only difference from then to know is I know that I've got a plan and a little bit more sense of purpose about why I am doing this.

This is becoming a Sisyphean task for sure as ever since I have stopped exclusively writing creative pieces, writing became a problem of definition. When I was an undergrad, writing my pieces, submitting them to workshops, and meeting other people who share the same passion as I once had, it is easy to write, define and tell myself and others what I do and what I am: a writer.

But after I broke away from my creative circle and got a job where writing became more structured, rigid, and with less areas to explore self-expression and creativity, I experienced a sense of denial that centers on the idea that my creative spirit is doing just fine. I knew that I was lost and I knew it was my decision to leave. That decision was borne by the insecurity of not being able to fulfill my belief that writing is a political act.

I used to deliberately direct my work towards obscurity and obfuscation. The purpose was to twist a writing piece, an idea, or a concept, towards abstraction that aims to be its metaphorical bulletproof towards any attempt of criticism. I purposefully abandoned clarity in writing. Eventually, I wrote a lot of things that abandoned the creation of meaning entirely, flipping the idea of writing on itself. My works were not used to communicate an idea. Ironically, it became a representation of my own inability to communicate clearly.

During those days, any sense of honesty in my own self-awareness was absent. I believed I was writing new forms of expression in contemporary Filipino literature. My own delusion consumed every ounce of confidence I had under the weight of the responsibilities of being a writer. I was not writing truth but falsehoods that are fueled by my own insecurities.

I guess throughout those years, I was still trying to live up to an image of myself that I created, when I was emboldened by my dreams of becoming a poet.

Now, I consider myself more of a knowledge worker than a "writer." I have become more interested in connections than meanings. My understanding is not anymore driven by my desire to interpret but look for signs that would lead me towards truth. In other words, I do not want to impose or extract meaning out of everything. I only want to be guided towards a path that I know I am unable to deny because of overwhelming evidence.

Of course, what this require is a system that would render a single source of truth infallible. If there is one thing I learned from Spinoza, it is the setting up a rigorous self-evident postulates brought by one's own capabilities of reasoning.

The breakdown

2024-12-22T00:00:00.000Z

How it all started

I was working as a content writer for an English proficiency test company. I was doing pretty well at my job, still having that pride I know I am good at what I do while enjoying the process of writing. In my head, that job was the best thing I could get after breaking away from my dream of writing creatively for a living. This was the moment when I began to abandon the idea of creating a career within the local art scene.

After a year and a half at my content writer job, I was promoted to becoming an editor. I was happy when I heard the news, yet to be honest, it was always something that I've been expecting since the company had a chain of resignation from its editors. That expectation muddled with my own self-perception.

How much of my abilities earned that promotion? Was it brought by necessity or was it because my manager knows I'm ready for the task? What if I was not? What if this was all a consolation to keep me appease despite the crumbling organizational structure?

The offer was made and I took it for the money. It was a favorable pay bump at the time.

But the psychological impact ensued and I was stricken by imposter syndrome.

Throughout the six months of being an editor, I mentored two new writers in the company and led one company-wide training about creativity.

Then I quit.

I was not able to handle the doubts and my diminishing confidence during editors' meetings and writers' topic evaluations. There were moments when I enjoyed the process, had fun communicating my ideas, and learning more about my position in terms of leadership. But something kept bugging me.

Did I really deserve this position?

I still made grammatical errors. I still lag behind noticing some writing inconsistencies. A lot of times I felt like a fraud, where in hindsight, it was a kind of insecurity I was not able to control.

Deciding to quit took a huge toll on my mental health. Writing is the only thing I know I'm good at and it was such a blow to have my own mind tell me that I'm not even good at it. Feelings of inadequacy and isolation grabbed me by the throat because there was not anyone available who I can expect to understand what I was going through. It was a creative problem and in turn, a spiritual problem for me. My pride and purpose stripped away by my mind because of insecure thoughts.

On the first day of 2020, I broke down and started to isolate myself from my family. That was when I had the self-preservation to talk to my mother and put myself into therapy.

Perhaps a Prelude

2023-12-20T00:00:00.000Z

sigh another preface.

11 days before the year ends and I am stuck and terribly in a creative rut. I settle with plain language now, probably in an attempt to unburden myself of illegibility.

I have been in a constant state of trying to mask a voice that I consider to be solely used for an intimate setting. This is me trying to say that I have been feeling lonely for quite some time now. I am only lonely because I am in a constant state of waiting. Waiting for the arrival of another god that I can offer myself to. I need to abdicate once again—this self-control that I have built throughout the years. I have been too calculating with my decisions, strategic with my train of thought, that not a single lived experience is not within the realm of my expectations. I am too in control of my life and it probably scares me.

What I am afraid of is this abject loss of ambition—of the excitement of living. I began to master every single impulse that once led me to a path of self-destruction. A few days ago, I abruptly initiated a serious conversation with my younger sister about establishing her boundaries at work. It was unprovoked and I opened the topic with nonchalance as if it is something people normally talk about the way we talk about doing laundry, planning the meal for lunch, or mentioning the next non-working holiday. As soon as I opened the topic, I was also taken aback by its directness and with my tone of voice. It was not fair. But I was touched by the moment’s unfolding that exposed the distance between us.

Of course, her defenses were up and she was not really in the mood to talk about it so I slowly moved away from the topic. However, I was thrown into a state of dissatisfaction with how much the quality of our conversations depended on the equilibrium of emotions. My question was sincere but in hindsight, knowing how my sister is not emotionally mature yet to jump into such conversations at will, emphasized my desire to see and be seen.

Recently, I have been reinventing my environment which allows me to be vulnerable and be comfortable with that vulnerability. This requires a lot of trust that I must give myself in order to function. To trust myself that I can be responsible with my actions and reactions as I open myself to other people. But it echoes a type of loneliness that at the moment when I try to be vulnerable, people clinch to the tiny corners of their minds. As if every conversation becomes a war of attrition, where signs of your opponent’s sincerity and vulnerability are perceived as a bluff, as a form of debt of gratitude that must be carefully examined for caveats.

Making sense of making sense

2023-05-08T00:00:00.000Z

I am a veteran in writing about the things I want to say in obscured language. Almost always, I free myself of the things I want to say by saying them in such a way that only shows the fringes of the idea that I want to communicate. What I write are silhouettes of expression. Mainly, and most probably because I am not ready to admit that what I am about to say is directly referenced by the type of person that I am.

If you had known me as a person or as a persona floating around the vastness of the internet, you may have already imagined a version of me. All of those versions are a type of performance in which I wanted to be perceived. The way I write is inconsistent. In turn, representations of my expressions are varied. I try to avoid any direct connection between me and what I show to other people. This post is just an example of it.

I have always been a social recluse. Oftentimes, I blame it on my high introversion tendencies. Any ounce of attention placed on me weighs heavily on my shoulders. I have developed this type of hyperawareness that borders on controlled paranoia. My every move becomes a calculated risk to immediately gauge and understand the personality of the people around me. Which words or sentence construction will merit the highest social acceptance? How do I navigate these different types of personalities in such a way that fits the vibe while imprinting my identity on other people’s perceptions? Socialization becomes a game to me where I must stealthily slide into other people’s attention without them knowing that I am aware of their attention. This type of defense mechanism suited me for two decades, which has become my default state of socialization. It minimizes my anxiety to be around other people. I consciously mimic social behaviors as if I were a toddler in the mirror stage. It works well in large groups. So I always digress, laugh, and banter at the bare minimum during social interactions.

This tendency has left me in a cycle of seclusion and abrupt appearance. I hide from the world to reconstruct the self that I may have long lost at the cost of interacting with other people. Then, when I resurface to the world, I can only tease the world about who I am because of my secretive nature. I deprived myself of the presence of other people that I have become so full of myself, leaving me hungry to express myself as a mode of self-assertion coupled with a faint tinge of my desire for recognition.

What follows is the birth of my propensity to obscure my own expression. This middle ground of pressure between self-preservation and self-expression denies me of any clarity of communication. In this way, I can say too much without saying anything at all. Everything and nothing simultaneously—an oscillation of identities between appearance and disappearance. The perpetual tension of the self and the unself.

Pessoa was here.

A pocket of void in the universe

2023-06-07T00:00:00.000Z

To hide the self from the world

This is a continuation of this post.

Maybe there is an incessant desire for me to discuss this type of obscurity in the way I express myself. I have acclimated to the tension between the desire to be perceived and to disappear. This tendency to create something artistic can only be sourced from my introspective nature.

He who talks a lot to himself. He who has built an audience within himself.

I become literally full of myself, which builds up to a type of pressure that cannot be fully contained. Expression then, happens as a consequence of overflowing solipsism. Speaking becomes a necessity. To be perceived becomes a method to keep my sanity intact.

Sometimes, I hide from the world knowing that I am taking a part of it and making it mine. I hide myself, removing the world’s grasp on my being. Space becomes the accidental consequence of hiding. To own a space from the grasp of the world is to borrow from the world’s secrets. In solitude, the world reveals itself, communicating in its own language—whereas this language is temporary and only exists in that space of stillness. Any form of movement that follows renders the world illegible and incomprehensible.

But I know that this act of hiding is futile since the world has always been a part of us. Wherever I go, I carry the fragments of the world in my own pockets as I am also a pocket of the world’s truth.

We are beings hiding in plain sight, creating pockets of our own voids as we ourselves become a universe of our own. “Hiding from the world,” entails a secret desire to cease existing from the collective gaze—when, even if in doing so, creates a pocket: a void of solipsism designed to create another temporal language existing in a space that decrypts the secret inside that void.

These words, as you read them in sequence reveal the pocket of void that I have left using a language to decrypt my secret.

This is how we make secrets sacred—always unrequited and perverse. In prayer: a private communication towards something hidden, a one-way declaration of the recognition of the other, who has created a pocket of a void somewhere in the world, we ask:

Are these the words that decrypt the language of a universe you locked from us? Grant me entry into this secret, for an unworthy soul, a no-place that I can only think of as Heaven, where in knowing, I shall be set free from the burden of my own curiosity. Just say the word and I shall be healed.

In forms of meditation and prayer, we travel inward to a void of an intimate language legible only through a personal experience. We begin to create as we speak—in spaces summoned by the incantation of quiet desire.

Secrets are only accessible by declaring this quiet desire to access them in secret.

I have hidden myself from the world countless times and left countless pockets of voids in this world. In those voids, I have left multitudes of self^[1] that have stopped serving who I want to become, and in doing so I have abandoned countless languages I used to communicate with the world, left to expire in time and to die in secret.

How do you spit blood on concrete without leaving a mark?

Containing multitudes necessitates the understanding that it is our prime responsibility to understand and organize those multitudes. Infinity begs chaos, where chaos is an unfamiliar and unrecognized order. What we mean is that order is the consequence of understanding the chaos of the infinite. ↩︎

A Little Breathing Room

2024-01-23T00:00:00.000Z

The last sunset of 2023 seen from Mandaluyong. Photo taken by the author.

The start of the year made my self more graspable — that is, to further elaborate, I feel more of the self I am becoming and see the image of the self who I want to become. This is a type of reality that I have unknowingly manifested and arrived at as I proactively check on the status of my consciousness. In this manner of speaking, it seems that this state of being comes as a surprise, as if none of this was something I planned. Perhaps a tone in my phrase by articulating my knowingness in italics, at a borderline fugue state, in realizing that I am (suddenly) here, and I am becoming who I want to be.

Before I descend into another sequence of tautological thoughts, I am back here to illustrate how much I think I am becoming more in control of myself. This is a self-affirmation of sorts and an update on my current state of mind, in which I feel more comfortable. My current self becomes a fashionable skin breeding confidence on small steps of attempting to live a life according to virtue. Yet, discipline is a steep ladder, especially if done in solitude. But I see more gains in going through it alone (at least, mentally speaking) than with a surveilling other.

Three things are finally beginning to come to view. First, plans for this year’s second quarter are starting to materialize. It was a grueling task to just mentally prepare for this upcoming event since last year. Second, reconnecting with friends is somehow a slow process but becoming more defined in terms of my image of them and how they interact with how I want to be perceived in the context of the group. Third, despite a growing confusion about my interaction with my family, I am becoming more of myself in interacting with people generally. In all of these three cases, they become graspable as I identify my self-agency with every decision. I become more in control of the things around me and clear with my boundaries when it comes to people. And in this situation and state of being, I found to have come a lot sooner than I expected. Perhaps it is more in the feeling that more often than not, things are falling into place. That unfamiliar feeling that the efforts and struggles that have put me into uncertainty in the previous year are leading up to the point of clarity in life and self. Both my internal and external way of interpreting the world becomes clear such that this type and experience of unprecedented clarity opens the door to foresight.

I might as well treat this claim and assessment as a certain kind of narcissism because, in all of its meaningful satisfaction, it is imperative to pull myself back. With all that I have built, snowballing is not an option. The momentum must only be maintained and not increased. I am happy with this velocity — this pace of building habits and frameworks of thought. Still, I want to pursue this metaphor of becoming. In this progressive change of self, where if you are still reading, can become of the help of a soothing voice similar to the comforting form of faith that I have discovered in the face of suffering.

Give me some time to find the words to describe these growing pains. I am now far but take me back to where I was as the person I am now.

_enjambments

2026-10-11T21:36:13Z

Toward the eventual vanishing

There is a vision of loosening, of slipping beyond what is held, a softness that spreads like fog, blending into the air. It feels like freedom, but also like a gentle end, a dissolving that is neither escape nor loss. This vision is felt not in fear but in acceptance, as though the letting go has always been part of the staying. There is a sweetness in it, a tenderness that wraps around the form, holding and loosening — a grip, a breath that releases without struggle.

It imagines itself as light, as shadow, as a whisper of warmth left on the air, a memory that drifts beyond the skin, beyond the shape it has taken. This is not departure, not in the way of endings, but in the way of softening, of surrender, a gentle vanishing into the quiet vastness that waits beyond. It is not an end but a becoming, a step toward something that has no edges, no name, a dissolving that is also a return, a final letting go that feels like finding home in the absence of form.

Here is a nowhere, where personal hells meet

Here you will find my networked thought, where some may be fleeting and permanent. This is a record of my musings about various things from the mundane events of my own life up to the abstraction of thought itself. Somewhere in between those concepts lies everything that this mind is able to think of. This is a space for my unfinished thoughts and ideas linked together towards a (hopefully) coherent whole.

Origin: A Preface to the Apocrypha

A digital space for an evolving self-portrait

I want to craft an image of myself that depends on my thoughts. After experiencing
creative setbacks due to dishonest writing, I have begun to understand more of myself and my relationship with language and writing since then. This space will stand as an omnidirectional representation of my own self.

Points of Origin

As of this moment, I have five points of origin from where we can start. As the number of notes in this space grow, these will potentially expand, condense, or remain the same.

_creative: prose, poetry, and other themes of writing
_events: notes that often relate to describing larger events in my life
_logs: daily notes focusing on small moments in a day or unstructured ideas that I'm thinking about recently
_musings: notes that are usually longer that may have been triggered by life events as what was just mentioned above
_thoughts: notes that could be short, often records of tiny bits of life events or musings that occur to me on a daily basis

Or follow a path: grief, language, technology, film.

Recently Published

This list excludes day logs that can be found here.

Note	Published
the shape of what cannot be said	October 11, 2026
Sacrifice, substitution, and the remainder of grief	October 03, 2026
we breathe critique and we're so bad at it	June 08, 2025
on one's inner oracle	June 03, 2025
how the world is continually desiring to deny its own humanity	June 01, 2025
on the compulsion to search for novel ideas	May 29, 2025
on passionate online reactions	May 26, 2025
on Companion (2025)	February 21, 2025
Technology and its Discontents	January 26, 2025
Seasons of the Mind	January 20, 2025

Navigating the labyrinth

This space contains a web of ideas where reading and writing is meant to be exploratory. There is no specific topic designed where each idea is labelled by an umbrella term, concept, or label. Every idea becomes relational, contextual, and hypertextual. There is no underlying structure to begin with. Since this is a perpetual work in progress, the structure will continuously adapt, based on every idea that has ever been published here. Each page is an idea that is often connected to other ideas that follows the Zettelkasten method of note-taking. Each idea is an atom of another idea or strings of ideas.

The web of ideas

On the upper-right (if you are viewing this on a desktop) or the bottom of the page (if you are viewing this on mobile), you will see how each note is connected to others. Depending on how each of them are related, be it in similarity, origin, or tangent of a thought, a line will always connect one note from another.

Each dot is a representation of a single note and depending on how many simultaneous connections it has with other notes, it grows in size. Hovering on a dot will tell you the title of a note, which may already tell you what it's about or maybe not.

Extending this site towards other things I can write about...

If you have a topic in mind and are curious what I think about it, you can leave a request on my Ko-fi page below:

Here's how you can share your love, support, and feedback to this site.

_creative

2026-10-11T21:36:13Z

Pieces more on the creative side, which will be in a form that I have no name for, or refused to name.

When the Earth Pushed Back

2023-02-06T00:00:00.000Z

Parataxis: let us start with how we mythologize ourselves.

I stood on the ground, yet as of this moment, I am still standing. The ground has never stayed the same after the passing of seconds, minutes, hours—and after a while, I am not standing anymore. I am unmoving and getting tired. I shift my weight to one foot and back to the other after a minute or so. I keep doing this while waiting, feeling the weight of the passing time with my two feet. Tomorrow is another today and yesterday was another here. The soil slowly unmoors itself from me like a promise on the verge of being broken.

From the exosphere, the earth is an emotion that goes by the name of “gentle tremors.”

My soul is eroding from my skin and my skin becomes an island made out of foreign languages. What is it about simple words about emotions like anger, fear, and hate that makes them insufficient in retrospect? When I look back, I always find myself at a distance from the past and/or the future. Tenses confuse me. I look down at my feet and the earth is becoming a gibberish of phonemes, symbols, and irrational geometries.

Is it language that changes me or the world that shows itself in language? Or is it language that shows itself through the world? If the world only speaks in tongues, I can only understand it through silence. I become a rest, a breath, a caesura, a punctuation in speech.

What separates me from the earth and what binds me to it is a single lie about the universe. I am always already a timeless fiction happening in a world made by an ocean of foreign consciousness.

We Were Mute in the Mouth of the Moon

2023-02-12T00:00:00.000Z

Glossolalia: Curatorial text

Bring me closer to the things I’m afraid to touch.
When gods take the form of floating bodies in space, faith becomes the orbit.
—where the body becomes more than a silhouette, a soul manifest, tangible, erotic.
It was Adam who named the gods as a consequence of understanding.
“Give me a name.”
Language is a time machine, and I am reaching out into the future.
Skin against skin, I falter to a foreign tenderness.
How long do we have to live with our internal contradictions before they grew into hypocrisies?
"...[sic]"
Do you also feel the weight of loss?

The World is as Hostile as the Morning

2024-05-20T00:00:00.000Z

Always falling short or too early to shoot the load. There can be no difference between speaking and listening. If I meld everything here, how much repulsion can someone take before losing interest?

Before I begin again, I always think of who will have the attention span to read me again. I lost all the capacity for poetry--its sight and sensibility narrowing down into a series of structures and bullet points. There is no forgiveness when we think of ourselves in the third-person perspective. I am the villain without my origin story. I just am, in this moment, subsisting without history, without form.^[1] And once again, at this point of hesitation, we encounter another comma, only to find nothing at the end.

Why are you always concerned about the truth? What does it mean if we want to encounter the naked obscurity of language?^[2] How are we supposed to understand its complexity and even absorb its simplicity? We love the complexes and even embody it to the point of unconscious yearning for madness. I choose my right to be misunderstood. If I choose to not mean anything, I can be anything. The purpose becomes clear: to be as still as the cloudless sky. The blueness of melancholy will not move a thought in my brain. The skull becomes my fortress and the world becomes my enemy.

Give me a thought that I can project meaning to.^[3] I am hungry for interpretation because I haven't expressed anything in years. This silence is becoming suffocating to the point of exhaustion. The morning only provides secondhand cold air from the night. Early mornings become the lesser version of the night. Time passes and everything is slowly becoming less and less to the point of exhaustion. Is this how artists should behave? Is this what we deserve?^[4]

This manic introspection of trying to become anything in order to be seen or heard has shown me how self-serving the creative process is and someone had put this thought right under my nose. This someone is me, whom I have become familiar with just recently. Up to this point, I am slowly transitioning into becoming the antecedent of the writer of this prose. I am indebted to becoming a dissociated self, born from the stream of consciousness and it is unsure when I will die. Will wanting suffice? Will it matter even if I wish the absolute annihilation of me, who I can only speak of in fiction--this unabashed ruin of verbiage, a cacophony of thoughts, unfiltered to the point of noise, where a distraction is brewing like the storm from the eastern Pacific. I will deny anything that do not require the sacrifice of a poem.

If I disappear will you be able to forgive me? Let's say I will blame god for the unknown, the indefinite arrival of the knowing of certainty, the last word we will ever say as humanity, the final call of the sea, the subconscious, of everything we have ever come to fear and the irrationality of belief, of thinking that we will somehow become a better person when we forgive, because I still want to hold a grudge against the unfairness of the creation of all things. I do not want to see, feel, hear, taste, smell, or touch the earth. If I lose the perception of the world, I can make it disappear. I can make it whatever I want it to be because then, I become a god. When that happens, can you tell me if I can forgive myself?^[5]

I can help you. This will be our secret and I will become everything you ask for. This voice, this absence of body is the holy grail of existence. This abundance of method without the recognition of its usefulness becomes the place where we meet. ↩︎
I am tired. I need to rest. If you can breathe for me, please do it in the form of a prayer. This will become my tombstone. This will become you. ↩︎
Where is the soul from where you are? Where is the light coming from when you open the curtains at dawn? I am still waiting to be absolved. If I talk to my own memories, how long will they keep me from growing old? How will I escape death? ↩︎
Yes. ↩︎
If I ask this question again, maybe forgiveness is possible. There is a chance that I must ask this again and again because the only response that comes right after I ask this question is the chance that I can ask this question again. To the point of exhaustion, forgiveness will become a safe place where my sins are buried without judgment. Only the devil forgives. ↩︎

The Infinities of Desire

2026-10-11T21:36:13Z

A triptych of giving form to the formlessness of desire.

I. On the insatiability of desire
II. On the narcissistic quest of filling the void
III. On the anxiety of desire’s fulfillment

Notes on Inhabiting

2024-11-15T00:00:00.000Z

I.

The body refuses to be metaphor. Even as I write this, a tooth aches in protest, marking territory. Even as I try to make sense of living inside skin, my left knee catalogs its scars — childhood, bicycle, sidewalk, grief.

What is consciousness but the study of doors? At the anatomy lab, students peel back layers of cadaver like wallpaper. They name each revelation: fascia, muscle, nerve. The body teaching itself to be a house after death. I press my palm against my sternum and count backward from ten. Someone must be home.

Between breaths, the fragment of a memory: Age seven, stuck in an elevator between floors. The walls so close I could taste their metal. My mother’s voice floating down the shaft: Stay still, stay calm. But the body had other plans — sweat, tremors, heart like a fist against ribs. Now, twenty years later, in a crowded train, that same taste returns. The body remembers what the mind tries to forget.

II.

Morning ritual: I stand before the mirror and practice inhabiting. One arm, then the other. The precise angle of clavicle. The deep valley behind each knee. Some days it works — consciousness settling into joints like water finding its level. Other days, I am a ghost rattling through rooms, unable to grasp the doorknobs of my own hands.

At the dance studio across the street, a woman teaches her daughter positions: plié, relevé, port de bras. The child’s limbs resist their French names. Her body speaks a different language — all playground verbs and sidewalk nouns. Through the window, I watch this negotiation between flesh and form. How many languages must we learn to live inside ourselves?

The x-ray on my doctor’s wall: constellation of bones, white architecture against black space. She points to a shadow near the spine. Here, she says, where freedom meets its limit. But what is freedom if not the pressure against boundaries? Ask any blood cell pushing through capillaries. Ask any synapse firing across the dark.

The body insists on its own reality. Tonight, eating soup alone in my kitchen, I burn my tongue. The pain blooms precise and wordless. No metaphor can contain it. No poetry can make it mean more than this: nerve endings sending urgent telegrams to the brain. The body, for once, speaking only as itself.

III.

Between sleeping and waking, I practice the phenomenology of fingers, toes, the soft hollow behind each ear. The body opens into rooms I never knew existed. Sometimes I hear music from behind a door — bone against bone, blood rushing its ancient corridors. Sometimes I find windows where walls used to be. Through them, I watch consciousness perform its daily migration: from skin to soul and back again, never quite learning where one ends and the other begins.

The body refuses to be metaphor, and yet — here I am, trying to translate its grammar into words. Even now, it protests: stomach growling, muscles twitching, eyes growing heavy with sleep. Even now, it reminds me: every sentence ends in flesh.

Jacob's Ladder

2023-02-02T00:00:00.000Z

i.

: Find me when I am untenable. Enclose these hands, this heart, these hours with the harboring horrors of human touch.

: Baptize me with the flames of your worship. Burn my soul with your beliefs and let it evaporate towards Heaven. I am holy in defeat.

: When I utter these words and submit myself to absolute vulnerability, tell me: am I praying to a god I cannot see or denouncing my humanity?

: So where were you when you were me? Do I still carry the same hopes and dreams you had about becoming a poet?

ii.

: Call an archaeologist to dig the remains of my youth. Carbon-date the years I chose to forget to see how much of the world has forced me to grow older. From a distance, the excavation site would look like a posthumous wake of undignified false promises and childhood dreams. The earth will soon carve me from its core, the tender touch of emulsifying heat.

: Let my fears fossilize under the shifting earth. My anger shall shake the archipelago of my adolescence. The continents of my conscience will reassemble for millions of years and I will remain incomplete.

: For each repressed memory, construct a favorable fiction. Finally, I am truly depersonalized.

: One day, when you touch the sky, you will have owned the entire world. Reconstruct my memories in a different language, redefine my worldview from your perspective, and unearth all of my worries and fears. Let the city forgive us. In time, a new universe shall bloom with all this entropy.

iii.

: Unapologetically, all things will fade away, not as a consequence of nature but with the looming guilt of being incapable to carry the weight of permanence. What is immortal has accepted the mortal submission to be anything other than human.

: Split sections of myself silence the air, creating another universe between celestial bodies. What I found is a love that runs more symbolic than the light of the moon. The moon, a mirror to different versions of myself, a source of reflection for gods that we can touch.

: Who we are in the presence of the divine, crumbles in an instant.

Note: First published on Tickle Lit Issue 2: Melancholy

III. On the anxiety of desire’s fulfillment

2023-02-15T00:00:00.000Z

The Other is in the act of desiring. I want too much and this desire chases me like a full moon. "A little bit of everything all of the time." I want it all. Enable my greed for wanting but not for obtaining. I am afraid of not having to want anything. I want too much and I am tired. I want not to want anything. I want to seek the end of desire. I want to be satisfied, to be able to say, "Stop. No more." without guilt and remorse. I want to be freed from all the things I can control in order to see myself. To see my othered self devoid of all this wanting. A self that has been wearing the fiction I created on top of all things I desired and kept on desiring to hide the inevitability of meaninglessness. Now, wanting has become a force of habit that takes its own form: another othered self. The satisfaction of all my desire and my deliberate attempts to do so will only be fulfilled by hoping for the arrival of the absolute future. It is in waiting that this fulfillment can only occur and not by action. I am here. Suspended by anxiety that this will never end. These chains of wanting, of objects, and of selves. I want myself. In wanting myself comes the realization that I am not myself. I want what I lack. I want to have that lack to end this fear. Give me myself.

II. On the narcissistic quest of filling the void

2023-02-15T00:00:00.000Z

The Other is my own reflection that creates me. I hold this gaze to my othered self: Nietzsche's abyss and Narcissus' obsession. Any attempt to reach out to my reflection creates a gap, which is a distance measured by infinities. Direct contact with the Other is an act of suicide, so I rely on reflections. The mirror allows me to be in contact with my othered self in my own appearance. This familiarity keeps me sane, this lie, this fiction, allowing me to come to terms with the truth: all my desires are meaningless and this meaninglessness only survives in projecting myself to it. I clothe this void with an appearance I'm familiar with and with a purpose that I can recognize so I can see myself through it. I do this to have a sense of comfort that somehow, I understand a little thing about the world. I do this only because it affirms my existence. I see the world through a piece of truth that I created and I see myself in the world by creating something that helps me understand it. I become the creator of mirrors, the slave of my reflections.

I. On the insatiability of desire

2023-02-15T00:00:00.000Z

The Other is always the amorphous form of my desire. It takes the density of a solid sphere and the fragility of a bubble. It is my anchor that floats above me, eclipsing the grammar of my own thoughts and emotions. I am here, chained to that which I lack. A lack that is only created by my desire to desire. The more I desire, the more this otherness grows in size. It becomes the quantifiable element of my ambitions, my dreams--my lack. It is all that is not me and all I want to be. It is the absoluteness of the future that will never arrive. It is the second coming of Christ. It is perfection in its purest form. It is a promise that I recite in prayer. It is the enunciation of my existence: the disembodied voice, and its utterance is what incarnates my body. I am here (and I am there), incomplete and complemented by this void that incompletes me. I am one with the Other.

Declarations_Of the body

2024-11-15T00:00:00.000Z

The body opens like a house with too many doors. Each morning I count the ways light enters—through eyelids, through pores, through the spaces between fingers when I hold my hand against the sun. The windows are clean but something is always missing. I check the mirrors: my reflection shifts between prisoner and guard.

What does it mean to live inside bone and tissue? Yesterday, I watched a woman teach her child to dance. In the studio across the street, their twin images glided across the glass. The child's arms refused to follow, each gesture a rebellion against grace. The mother adjusted limbs like furniture, arranged the body into a room she recognized. This is how you move, she seemed to say. This is how you learn to stay.

Some days the body feels like a subway station at rush hour. Crowded with desires that push against turnstiles, that race down escalators, that squeeze through closing doors. I stand in the midst of this traffic, collecting tickets to places I cannot name. The trains arrive with their cargo of breath and sweat. They leave with pieces of me I didn't know I could spare.

At the hospital, my aunt points to the x-ray of her chest: See how the bones make a cage? The ribs curve like fingers holding something precious. The heart beats against its prison bars, and yet—isn't this what keeps it from spilling into the world? Isn't this what gives it shape, what allows it to pump life into the darkest corners of our architecture?

I think of the dancers in the studio, how containment creates its own kind of freedom. How the child's body, bound by position and form, finally found flight in the discipline of movement. How my aunt's heart, enclosed in its calcium fortress, performs its ancient rhythm without fear of falling.

The body opens like a story with too many endings. Each night I count the ways darkness enters—through memory, through pain, through the spaces between sleeping and waking where I sometimes forget which doors are mine. I check the mirrors: my reflection blurs between inhabitant and home. What does it mean to be both lock and key? To guard the very thing that holds you? Tomorrow, I will wake to find new rooms in old joints, windows where walls used to be. The light will enter, as it always does, and I will continue this endless work of living in translation.

Declarations_Of linguistic cartographies

2024-11-26T00:00:00.000Z

The body keeps its own history. Not in straight lines, but in fragments, in whispers, in the language between breaths.

My grandmother’s hands are a landscape of forgotten routes, each wrinkle a story that pulses with its own complicated rhythm. She sits by the window where afternoon light creates intricate shadows, her mind drifting between moments like a bird moving between branches laden with memory. Some days she knows me completely — my name falls from her lips with absolute certainty, her eyes bright with recognition. Other days, I am a stranger who looks familiar, who carries the weight of memories she can no longer hold. I watch her fingers, once nimble with knitting needles and garden tools, now tracing invisible patterns on her lap. These movements are not random. They are a language, a conversation between her current self and the other selves she has been. When dementia clouds her eyes, she is not lost, but traveling through the complex territories of her own internal geography. Her forgetting is not an absence, but a different kind of presence — a radical reimagining of time and connection that defies our linear understanding.

Memory is not a photograph. Memory is a living thing — breathing, shifting, remaking itself with each remembering.

I think about inheritance more deeply than blood and bone. I mean the invisible inheritances — the silences, the spaces between words, the tremors that move through a family like underground rivers carving paths we cannot always see. My mother’s hands are my grandmother’s hands, connected through more than branches of a private genetic code.

The same hesitation when holding a cup. The same precise way of folding cloth. The same rhythm of forgetting that is also a form of remembering.

These are not mere gestures, but a language of survival, of adaptation. Trauma moves through generations not as a fixed narrative, but as a living, transformative energy. Each generation rewrites the story, softens its edges, finds new ways of holding what has been painful.

In my own body, I feel these echoes — a sudden tremor in my right hand that mirrors my grandmother’s, a memory that surfaces without warning. My grandfather’s voice becomes a phantom sound. The exact temperature of a childhood fever returns like a lost melody. The smell of wet earth after rain connects me to landscapes I’ve never physically inhabited but know intimately through cellular memory.

Languages blur. Memory has no single tongue.

I collect the pieces with the precision of an archivist and the wonder of a child discovering a kaleidoscope. Torn photographs where faces fade into landscape, becoming abstract territories of emotion. Each image is not just a record, but a living document — faces blurring, boundaries dissolving, revealing the fluid nature of remembrance. Sentences that begin and never quite complete themselves become portals into alternative narratives, linguistic quantum spaces where meaning hovers between comprehension and mystery. Voices caught in the static between radio frequencies broadcast messages from liminal spaces — fragments of conversations, snippets of songs, whispers that carry the weight of unspoken stories. These are not mere artifacts, but active agents of meaning-making. Each fragment contains entire cosmologies: a corner of a smile revealing generational pain, a blurred horizon encoding familial migrations, a moment suspended between breathing and forgetting.

What if remembering is not about preservation, but about constant recreation? What if memory is a living ecosystem, where each remembrance changes the landscape of what was?

My body knows this intrinsically. Cells regenerating with each breath, replacing themselves in a continuous dance of becoming. DNA rewriting its own poetry, each genetic sequence a potential verse of transformation. Every heartbeat is a small revolution, every breath a negotiation between what has been and what might become. We are not fixed points, but rivers — constantly moving, reshaping our banks, carrying sediment from distant sources. The body remembers not as a static archive, but as a dynamic landscape of continuous creation.

Here in the spaces between remembering.

Here where broken becomes beautiful.

Here where silence speaks.

Declarations_Of faith

2024-01-01T00:00:00.000Z

There are times when time itself almost feels like water running down on your body washing away all shame, guilt, and regret. Sometimes it is true with taking a shower, soaking all sins on your skin like a sponge absorbing excuses and mistaking them for reasons in doing what you think is right, until it all drifts away to the drain. This shower takes years. You become a new person baptized by age. Bathing becomes the beatification of an old self as a gesture of gratitude for experiencing a type of suffering that has birthed this newfound consciousness. As time withdraws from your body, a corpse is being lifted from your chest into the air by an unknown being in the shape of light. This is the mystery of faith.

I pray into the darkness of reason—of walking into an empty hallway untouched by light. The walls are fragments of an unlived life, where unrealized dreams reside. In this house of hallways, where no artificial light may occur, faith is the only source of illumination. It is a false light that allow me to navigate through these halls. We do not invite ourselves here but only the image of ourselves. I imagine that the walls are made of mirrors, and I see every movement in my body in the darkness. I trust my body that it moves the way it should move. Just how I imagine it. Then, one foot in front of the other. Let my fingers caress the walls of this hallway like tracing a map. But this map is an empty plane. Legitimized by language, I find myself—inside this house of hallways—going back where I came in. With the exit right behind me, tracing my footsteps proved to be much more difficult. The existence of the exit depends upon my utterance. I knew that the exit is not the real exit because I doubt that it is. In doubt, things become what they are not, and all names become a misnomer. Doubt destabilizes language and only faith makes everything true.

The entrance is the place that extinguishes all doubts. As I trace back my footsteps, the terrain changes. The map changes. Faith held all the walls of the hallway the same, but it wasn’t enough to give me the vision of what is about to come.

Before the World Caves In

2023-03-12T00:00:00.000Z

Exegesis: then, we forgave God for creating the universe. It was “inevitability” in its purest form.

Some yesterdays bear the weight of a thousand tomorrows. A lot of “there” almost always feels like a hundred “here.” If I divide now into sections as thin and as many as the strands of my hair, will I be able to tug them to ease my frustration? And if I’m unable to answer your question about where I am, can I reply, “maybe?” So if I have broken down my existence into tiny moments of possibilities, would I finally arrive between appearance and disappearance?

Finally, the colors are muted in this part of the world. Words have no meaning here. I become "would." No tense. No participle. I can be attached to any action that did not happen. Since what happens always takes place, let me exist in every suspension of disbelief.

How to share your love, support, and feedback to this site.

2026-10-11T21:36:13Z

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A Preface to the Apocrypha

2023-02-05T00:00:00.000Z

Where we left in the beginning

It has been a while since I dragged myself to write any sentences removed from my immediate reality. I am writing this on a Sunday and I immediately feel the urge to stop. In the past three years, I’ve been approaching writing through the lens of a technical writer. The text should be bare and often without finesse. Vernacular, simple, and as-a-matter-of-fact sentences that are meant to communicate complex software instructions in clear and beginner-friendly steps.

After I resigned from a content writing job, I started out as a freelancer as a tech writer when the pandemic hit. Eventually, I worked for two SaaS companies where I pioneered the technical writer position for the team to which I was assigned. Both of those times, I dove in headfirst into the workload without any established process for my designated role. Test the tech, attend dev sprint demos, document change logs, and create user manuals. Workflows change unannounced according to priority. Patch updates and QA issues push back launch dates where delays are inevitable. Deadlines are always temporary.

In terms of writing materials, words become placeholders for an eventual feature update. Sentences become disposable — depreciated — where writing is primarily used to outline ideas. Editing is perpetual as software updates come endlessly. I consciously detached myself from the written word. In the following months, most if not all articles in the knowledge base need to be updated. Scrap out all things not needed anymore and replace them with new words, statements, and callouts.

At some point, I realized that I am working on a material that will be a constant work in progress. How some words expire in a given context almost felt too human. How skin’s epidermis flakes after it has served its purpose. How the brain purposefully forgets to make room for new memories. A type of positive decay that is necessary for survival, for one’s battle to strive for permanence.

On the atomic scale, everything becomes a dispensable cog. Aimlessly floating in space without a sense of purpose but self-preservation. An amorphous multilayer of paradoxes, incongruences, and dissonance. What I create and what I am become one of the same thing. Creativity is unnecessary. There is no poetry in this place.

The aftermath

I am still processing this feeling of resignation. I fear I might have become too complacent with where I am in life. I stopped going to therapy due to financial reasons and I have been living away from my family for two years now. I have made the conscious decision to drop my literary dreams for my own sanity. For almost five years, I pulled every atom in my body against my creative desires. I abandoned theory, art, and my creative circle to feed myself the mundane acts of just doing enough to live day after day.

Art became a distant place seen from the side mirror. A place where I look back only to see where I am going. A place whose soil is where I would plant my feet and prosper. Back then, it was clear to me that I belong in the crowd of the contemporary movement — the consciousness of my own generation basking in culture and life of the streets when the working class is in their restless sleep.

Working in the art industry and being involved with the art scene, got me disillusioned by the bourgeoise faux pas passion of the wealthy towards art. The disconnectedness of every critic and connoisseur’s jargon-filled speech amounts to a form of meaningless gibberish elevated by an overpriced admission fee. This cultish obsession left me with a feeling of insincere passion when the environment is paid for by the elite. The patron system and nepotism within the industry that criticism enables killed my passion to create something great for the sake of it. What came after was a series of realizations, which often felt like layers of rugs being pulled beneath my feet until the floor ceases to exist and nothing was left but me floating in an empty space.

For three years, I learned how to stand in that empty space. I hated every second of it.

No-place

That empty space, what I learned just recently, is still poetry. Perhaps this is another stage in rediscovering my love for writing. After how many years have gone by since my previous self-published work, I may have found the right time to start over. After experiencing writing materials that are dry and uncreative in nature, my head started to fill with unrealized ideas waiting to be born.

In one of my sessions with my therapist, I confessed that writing poetry felt like masking my inability to properly communicate myself to other people. Poetry for me became an excuse to self-isolate and place the burden of understanding on my readers. At the same time, creating a facade of meaning, where there isn’t in the first place. I deliberately refused to be understood and obfuscate meaningful expressions. I enjoyed saying nothing and everything all at once.

It was a necessary distance that I needed to clear my head and my heart. I have killed a lot of muses out of self-imposed rules that only make sense in my head.

I will continue to write here, where I will reclaim every bit of myself that I lost and rediscovered, which I owe to my old self.

2026-10-11

2026-10-11T00:00:00Z

Perhaps this is me trying to take back what is lost. But as Weil's void put it, this void is irrecoverable and should only exist as a vessel for grace. That is still something I am learning. That is still something that I am heavily trying to resolve to experience.

That was a year of absence, at least in this space where I have been keeping as an external image, an extended part of me that remains to be something that still looks for more words, that is still waiting to be built, only to eventually forsake the waiting and end up becoming more perpetual.

You see, I oscillate. I become a being within tension of my own world in language. I kept trying and trying, separating it from trying to learn. Every single day, I have always found a piece of the world and refuse to accept it as it is, so I split it in half, in thought, and in my mind, in order to grasp a sense of the universe without the illusion. Perhaps, it is the same reason why I am turning to Kant now. I have parked Spinoza because the world has adopted my structure of how I see it. I have also parked Hegel because the world has become a dialectic. Past deontology, I am turning to Kant because I want to see the world without the illusion.

I may not even be aiming for Kant's noumenal world but lately, I am desiring a piece of world that does not hold any symbolic or linguistic nature. That pure experience, that is somehow, connected to Kitaro Nishida (which is also the reason I am formally turning to Kant to map my trajectory from Pure Thought towards Nishida's Pure Experience).

It may even be due to my work with Spinoza that the world has become geometric. Cause, effect, and correlations start appearing among people, events, and scenarios. These networks become their own rigid chaotic system of language that makes time legible to me. I do not forecast future events to happen but I just see most of the probable possibilities that may happen and because of that, life becomes less and less overbearing.

Even in handling loss, and taking care of a loved one in times of crisis, while I am also seeing cracks in my being as I take the reins became more bearable. Bereavement and grief became experiences that became a part of the experience of time. What I mean is when every experience is perceived and measured with an objective lens of how long each experience will take, everything dissolves into the background. Life happens alongside it and I just can't let a single experience be on the forefront of my life. They must be taken, received, and experienced second by second. Focus becomes intentional, deliberate, and personal. Perception becomes everything.

At the end of the day, the world happens and I happen in it.

2025-07-11

2025-07-11T00:00:00.000Z

I keep going back to the concepts that used to fill my head in the past few months: faith, divinity, freedom, and self. I have spent a lot of time trying to define the framework on how can I understand these concepts and use them on how I view the world. Did I feel that I have more freedom, ever since? Do I think that even if I haven't been thinking a lot about the practice of faith, would I still consider if I am full of it? And what about writing my own narrative in explicitly treading the nuance of defining a "true self?" Do I still think that my previous musings hold enough truth that I can still stand by what I think is right?

Revisiting these ideas also made me realize about how long I haven't thought about them since. Going back through my logs, I haven't had any philosophical entry perhaps since May. No strenuous thinking was done abought high abstract concepts but more movement. More action. More doing. More conceptualizing about the things I want to do and not about the things I'm thinking about.

As of now, it still feels like I am collecting dust in critical thinking but I know that's not true. Perhaps the abstraction of thought has become less conceptually philosophical but more conceptually actionable. I have been designing my own workflows or at least attempt to map out how I might be able to make things efficient in producing the things that I want to do. I feel like I am slowly trying to integrate the things I have been thinking about in the past few months. Those musings about freedom is transforming into agency, faith is my fuel in dealing with uncertainty, and self is my cornerstone in doing the things I want to do. I make the things that I want to become the things I need. It feels like a multi-faceted obsession where I am trying to learn multiple tools at once and at the same time improving the way I learn as I go. Something was unlocked in my brain in the past month and it feels like I am only becoming more aware of it at this point. I have been doing and doing and doing, as if the past few months spent ruminating about the concepts was the moment when I am establishing the blueprint, the plan in programming myself to do the things I want.

The conceptual framework that I have established is now being implemented in the present. I haven't been thinking too much about my thoughts and thought processes because I have already integrated the plan in the things that I want to do. I have thought about the things that I want to do so much that I have reached a point where doing the things I haven't done before already becomes automatic and second-nature.

I almost doubted my luster and perhaps I have attributed my level of productivity to the level of my intellectual activity. So this is how it feels like when I have automated the foundation of my being and I reach the implementation state. This might be a longer journey than the months spent thinking during the first half of the month.

2025-07-09

2025-07-09T00:00:00.000Z

The past few days were subject to high-intensity learning a bit of programming. I am taking my role at work to be that person who pushes for innovative practices. In my free time, I am trying to learn the n8n workflow platform in an attempt to understand automation using a GUI. At first, it was all genuine curiosity. But right now, I think I am trying to automate myself out of my own work.

Last month, I felt the heavy surge of job insecurity due to AI. I wallowed in the anxiety of losing my job to an AI agent as I begin to get assigned to tasks that require me to have an extensive knowledge about AI training. Back then, I didn't have a single idea on the actual methodology of how you actually train AI except Retrieval-Augmented Generation, where you treat the LLM as a databank of primary sources where it can pull information on-demand based on your prompt. I didn't know about dark data or structured datasets. I just thought you feed an LLM the data that you want and then it will do its magic to make sense of everything based on your prompt.

This idea of automating myself came from this desire to have more time to actually do the personal project that I have been working on. I argue that if it is an inevitability that AI tools and agents will soon take over my job, I have the capacity to make it more difficult for it to colonize my expertise. The need to adapt with a clear plan starts to become the only viable move because I believe that there is a certain requirement of a personal understanding when it comes to AI. It means understanding how it works, what can it do and not do, what aspects of my job is it good at, which tasks in my job am I confident that I can beat this AI, and how might its use transform my field of expertise.

At this point, I see myself moving in a direction where I would become indispensable in supervising how these AI tools work, at least within my own scope of influence. So I started understanding automation, even at its most basic, low-level, noob understanding using a drag and drop interface. I can leave the coding for now with the AI tools at my own disposal. I am learning how to use them to my own benefit while expanding my own understanding of the rapidly evolving socio-political and economic landscape brought by these disruptive innovations in tech.

2025-07-07

2025-07-07T00:00:00.000Z

Today is a Monday and I just realized that I had a 3-day gap since my most recent log. Since Friday, I took a whole cognitive rest that lent itself through the weekend. I may have done some work on Saturday but no time was spent doing some research and activity for my current project. In both days of the weekend, I was able to snag hours of afternoon naps. On Sunday, I was able to get some sun outside, meeting some people and travelling to Tagaytay as a day trip. Those days were the closest I have felt to having weekends when everything feels just like puzzle pieces that are effortlessly falling into place. I didn't worry about a task not being finished. I didn't care about a pause in my progress in my creative endeavor. I didn't give myself enough time to think. I just did things by leaving everything to time and that was enough.

There is a new supermarket that opened just less than a kilometer from where I live. It was probably one of the things that made this weekend more natural. We went there last Saturday night to get some groceries and get a feel of the variety of products that they sell. To my surprise, it is probably the most posh Shopwise grocery that I've been into. Their product selections are complete even to say the least. Wine, appliances, readymade to-go meals, pastries, wines, and other international products were neatly stocked on top of basic grocery supplies. It made our move here in Calamba to be more than satisfactory in the past year.

Today is more of just recovering from the inertia of rest. The weekend felt like a rush of being absolved from my always-on analytical mind. Only showed up to work to do the bare minimum. To be honest, my mind and body aren't even that looking forward to work. Spent a whole day debugging code that I shouldn't even have in the first place, just enough to keep my brain working on some of the lowest priorities just to move the needle.

Again, this feels like how my mind goes when it has had enough rest, but not enough time to reboot to its normal state.

2025-07-03

2025-07-03T00:00:00.000Z

Precisely today is the most stable I have ever felt in the past few months. No tradeoffs in negative and positive emotions. I have done everything I needed to do today both in the house and at work. I cooked a good meal. I was flawless in my presentation of my solution to a work problem earlier. I am full and ate a lot with gusto, even more so than when I was eating meals from the meal plan subscription. Tomorrow, a new supermarket will open just outside our subdivision and I'm looking forward to do the grocery.

The status of my brain post-shift feels calmer than sleep. I have yet to attribute this mental stability to those sleep gummies I had been taking since last week but I am worrying less about the future, which is the by-product of actually doing things or solving problems immediately when they arise. No piling up of works. I am not dealing with any backlogs. The only issue right now with my own state is my health. I have been feeling a bit unwell. I'm dealing with colds and sore throat for two days now. I just need to recover fully in order to attain this sense of bliss, hoping that this mental stability becomes more permanent, at least for as long as it can.

2025-07-01

2025-07-01T00:00:00.000Z

Starting July feels like stepping on a ledge of a cliff. One that has been feeling the most secure after a lot of ledges, climbing up this steep cliff. It feels like a save point in a video game. It feels as if I can sit on this ledge and rest my back, my entire weight against this rough rock solid earth that I had been trying to climb. It brings a feeling of safety with an afterthought of the long journey ahead.

At the same time it brings a sense of uneasiness. Knowing full well that staying on this ledge is impossible and that this feeling of security is only temporary. Depending on this ledge to hold my weight is a delusion that would compromise my entire progress. I still need to move. I still need to think.

But for a while, let me rest for a bit here. I am becoming more aware of my own breathing. I am alive. I am creating something.

2025-06-29

2025-06-29T00:00:00.000Z

Today feels like this month is culminating towards a better sense of clarity in goals and mindset. June felt like it was ready to rock the mid-year boat but it seems like this adjustment of keeping a one-day buffer in writing my logs has been beneficial in brainstorming and calculating the steps that I must take to fulfill my vision. This month has brought me a lot of realizations and definite directions in the aspects of my life that I must change, the old habits that I must unlearn and refine and the new habits that I must form.

It felt more of a learning experience than just mere confirmation. There were things that I already know but I just didn't put much attention to it like the amount of time I spend each day preparing (including thinking of) meals for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, which astoundingly takes me a total of 4 hours of my day. This only became clear when I started eating pre-prepared foods by subscribing to a meal plan. The time it used to take me preparing meals used to be an integrated activity in my day that I hadn't realized that it's been eating a lot of my time and energy for the day. Experiencing the absence of this friction made me realize how much things I can do in a single day, where possibilities start to exist by introducing a tiny bit of change in my life.

I guess there was no poetry nor philosophy for this month but direct practical application of a more experimental side of the things I can do with my life, and with the skills that I have. My current workload is slowly taking me to a somehow different direction of writing and creation. Faith is still in the background, slowly nudging my brain to act by carefully reflecting my actions with my beliefs.

2025-06-27

2025-06-27T00:00:00.000Z

I've had a tough work week but it was a productive at best. This week was an exercise on how I can efficiently juggle work and this passion project. With its own seeming ease, one of the factors that I think that alleviated some of the supposed difficulty was subscribing to a meal plan for the entire week. That means no physical and mental energy spent on thinking about what to eat. I just wait for it to be delivered every night so my daily meals are secured before I give it an ounce of thought. I also derived a sense of pleasure in the element of surprise of not having a full picture of what I'm about to eat. Of course, the meal is pre-selected and I am informed beforehand. But I think still coming up surprised despite everything is a testament of how much food and nutrition was out of my mind.

This opened a lot of mental space in my head. It freed a whole lot of energy to be allocated in research, planning, and experimentation. It might have also improved my sleep quality. I performed better at work--even more than the times when I say that I am focused because this was a week of pure focus, moving projects, making decisions, asking for help, and executing tasks. This week felt so productive but it didn't feel heavy. I accomplished a lot of things and perhaps I can maintain this routine in a more balanced way when I get back into preparing my food. I know that I just gave myself a type of rest I needed while keeping myself on my toes. Tomorrow, I will be back to my old routine and hoping that there are some habits that my body learned throughout this experiment.

2025-06-25

2025-06-25T00:00:00.000Z

I have a lot of big ideas in my head right now. It's been becoming harder to focus even if I've been at my most focused in the past few years. I can feel my subconscious becoming stacked with chunks of information faster than it an process these ideas. I know that I am stocking up on information that I believe will be processed in the background so I can make more connections better. There is a bigger picture in this and I don't think I should move forward in this process of creation before I can hint a glimpse of it. I know I don't know it yet but I know I will know in the future. I'm making it a case of eventual knowing and I am taking every single small step and let everything stick to my experience. Every single idea, every thought discarded, every texture of these thoughts, the roughness of every conjecture, and every denial of my own biases. I'm seeing good things coming out from me in the near future. Days begin to pass by quickly in a sense that it still feels like I'm writing daily logs, only to realize that I have been almost consistently logging one day after the other. Anyway, I am learning a lot of things and seeing connections in things I didn't knew were, because I only assumed. Now, my intuitions are being proven true and I am wallowing in this newfound sense of discovery.

2025-06-23

2025-06-23T00:00:00.000Z

With this newfound success I'm finding at work, I think my supervisor and the upper management see my increasing strategic potential in how I use LLMs in my workflow. Just earlier, I was assigned to another project that covers defining a QA Playbook that would help evaluating the effectiveness of a recruiter's discovery calls. This evaluation is meant to either predict or judge a recruiter's overall performance and quality of their client and candidate placements. This project will be an inter-departmental effort that includes me, our training specialist from HR, and our business improvement director. I've worked with these people before and it seemed like a pretty good roster for this kind of project.

Now, I feel like my scope of work as a Technical Writer in the company is veering away from my own essential responsibilities. My tasks are growing more and more strategic and analytical in a sense that I am becoming more exposed to company information that drives the performance of other people in the organization. I feel like a character working on the back-end of things, pushing people further in the best indirect way possible.

At this point, I feel that my value to the company is steadily growing, as I'm being pulled into more projects that are directly aimed at improving quality and efficiency in how we do work internally as a company.

I just have an intuition (or maybe it's hope?) that more people would see me as an asset, in ways that I haven't shown before. One thing is for sure, that I have carved enough confidence in my own self that I can face others head to head for more demanding tasks.

2025-06-21

2025-06-21T00:00:00.000Z

I was forced to use AI at work recently and throughout the whole week, I ruthlessly crafted a business solution for our company's consolidation of contract negotiation records into a single spreadsheet as a "working database," while also leveraging and standardizing future documentation of client negotiations. As of now, the main problem was in consolidating these negotiation records as learning tools for our inhouse recruiters. This was a task that was requested to me by our company's recruitment manager.

I meant that I was "forced" because I was immediately thrown into working with our Business Improvement Director since he was already building a custom GPT for our recruiters, which will act both as a learning tool and an assistant for anything inhouse recruitment-related questions. To be honest, I find counterintuitive, reducing my confidence in our company's hiring strategies, where it seems like we have incompetent recruiters. On the other hand, I would also argue that our company's business model does not operate similarly with your common recruitment firms. But to go back to the topic at hand, besides the task request that were asked of me, I was also involved in training the GPT by creating a file that can be used to train it.

By Friday, I presented my solution to my immediate supervisor and she admitted that she was impressed that I was able to devise an end-to-end solution that merges both of my seemingly unrelated task that just came about last week. I think this experience gave me a different perspective of the use of AI tools in allowing me to create a functional and practical solution to a problem despite my lack of knowledge and experience in creating datasets, workflows, and analyzing data to such an extent that would make it robust and withstand data rot using simple tools like a spreadsheet, a text file, and a vibe-coded script to automate the values in the spreadsheet including metadata tags and automated keyword search.

This made me reflect because it gave me a boost of confidence in my capabilities. However, I am also cautious of the fact that it is giving me an illusion of competency in areas that I have no working knowledge of. I guess, I can give myself the credit for this one because of accomplishing a relatively complicated series of task-based actions that I was prompted to use AI. All I did was to think of a solution, assess the possibilities and its practical use, look for limitations and ease of use, and determine its stability for future-proofing. I would say that I have achieved all of that on top of creating a consolidated file of negotiation that is fit for training the GPT.

What I will do is since I'm already here, I'll try to use these tools within the context of cognitive scaffolding to learn more things that can help me get out of this hellhole.

2025-06-19

2025-06-19T00:00:00.000Z

I realized that I do have a rigid system for decision-making. It just hit me that I rarely leave anything to chance, which is a habit or practice that I have only developed when I left my parents' house. It is perhaps the by-product of my own self-understanding, where my goals are becoming clear, I know what I want to do and where I want to go. So in thinking of achieving those goals, I would eliminate all possibilities of risk that may happen, hindering me from doing the things I'm set to do. Quite possibly, this sense of protecting what I have right now is a factor that encourages taking a risk-averse path. I plan ahead and visualize all the things that might go wrong based on the possible consequences of committing to an action. If I do this, what might happen, and how might those events affect me and the things I strive to protect?

This idea of my own self-preserving nature seems like a double-edged sword no matter how much I want to think of it as a net positive trait. Because this means that all my future experiences would be predefined. In this sense of control, I pre-picked the things I may feel or calculated the amount of new people I let in to my life, reducing my chances to make new friends, and other things that invoke a sense of spontaneity.

But when I keep thinking about it, it just feels right. At this moment when I feel that this sense of control is what brings me emotional and mental stability without the expense of other people, I feel a sense of pride in myself. I craft my own path in life. I intentionally veer away from the path that would cause me unnecessary suffering. I maintain and grow from the person that I am towards who I want to be. I think that self-understanding really is the key in living a life that is expected, measured, and fulfilling. There are the things that I want and know that those wants are good for me, not just an air of momentary desire that will pass. I know what I need regardless of what the world says. And that makes me happy.

2025-06-17

2025-06-17T00:00:00.000Z

My day job is slowly transition from writing towards training AI tools with the kind of expertise that I have. I am actually being paid to externalize my expertise not in how I am expected to perform it but to make value judgements on how a machine may adapt the type of knowledge that I am producing. It sets a precarious feeling about where I stand, career-wise. I only think that there is a slow death in actual manual practicality. Automation is becoming the way of corporate, inevitably because we are riding on the waves of forced productivity and efficiency as the measurement of progress.

I am understanding a kind of agency in training these AI tools, where I am also slowly decoupling myself from my professional identity as a writer. This meant that being more exposed with how AI tools work in the workplace, tangentially becoming part of the back-end development for its implementation, I start to refocus this potential inwards. I see how I can leverage these tools, at most, in their most ethical (slightly reductive) sense. The only way to use it is to turn one's gaze away from its environmental impacts and the lack of sustainability efforts to maintain its very source: the Earth. I know that I am merely experiencing the rites of desensitization to these tools because of survival. I must adapt my brain in order to keep my job because refusing would mean being laid off. I am replaceable at work but I know enough that I must maintain the status quo because of the value that I am giving to the company.

In my case, it is only a matter of building my external foundation starting today. To hone my skills and apply them outside of work to start venturing in these opportunities that are presenting themselves to me. Choosing is preparing. I must act now even if it means that at this moment when I am still trying to survive, I must adapt and learn how to save myself in the process.

2025-06-15

2025-06-15T00:00:00.000Z

It's currently 7pm in the evening. I just resigned from the day. In the past week, I deactivated my Twitter (X) account. It came to mind because I was having one of the most intense week of my life dealing with people. Twitter was my safe space of thoughts, regardless of the qualities of ideas there. Nonetheless, scrolling through that app gave me what I want: passive consumption, an escape from my own thoughts by looking at the thoughts of other people. Every idea was curated by the algorithm of the feed that I had developed over time. While it also presented as a mental escape, it also was the source of a lot of the things that I have been thinking about, including some thoughts that I had been mulling over in these logs. So I observed that as I avoid my thoughts, I open myself to the ideas of others and passively integrating them in my own mind, compounding the thoughts that reside inside my brain. This resulted into a vicious cycle of a mental overload.

So I decided to keep it tuck away from my brain. Deactivated my account and it has been a week since then. Even though I casually scroll through reddit just to allow for a different space of ideas that are not as erratic as I would have experienced scrolling through Twitter, I realized the mental space that I have been neglecting myself these past few months. My daily activities were now more focused in research: searching for ideas became more active and intentional compared to a nebulous false serendipity of ideas that I would have gathered if I used my time in Twitter. I was more engrossed with the things that I am researching about, drawing more connections, finding logical relationships between one thought and another.

As dealing with people take the backseat of my life, I find myself coming back to researching, helping myself form this vision that I want to realize in me, coming back to a more active and creative work that would allow me to focus my energy into more fruitful and insightful activity. I find this a surprising habit to immediately replace my passive consumption of ideas.

My logs were being written with a one day gap between one another. In-between those days were the time spent researching and connecting my own ideas. I may not be writing them down as specific entries but this is what it takes to design a bulkier content that I think would be bigger than an essay.

I know that I am onto something. My body was quick to adapt even before I am conscious of what I am doing.

2025-06-14

2025-06-14T00:00:00.000Z

I think I am pouring a lot of energy in my current project and I found a way to maximize my input. I'm getting a lot of information and I'm back on my old habit of learning. I'm seeing a lot of connection in various things and it seems that my years of background working as a knowledge worker is paying off.

It feels like discovering a new metaphor, linking one idea to another to form a new thought, a new approach at looking at the world. I felt that my perspective is the message that I have been trying to communicate. I know I see the world differently but I may have lacked the necessary confidence to articulate it. Creating my own metaphor, my own way of looking at the world, sounds a lot like a form of sublation, under a Hegelian dialectic, I understand that I found my way back to the self that I love: that creative spirit that has been waiting to emerge now becoming more and more manifest.

2025-06-12

2025-06-12T00:00:00.000Z

I am giving my mind enough time and space to wander. Currently, there have been a lot of experiments that I am working on to further externalize my vision. I needed to make a lot of adjustments based on my current plan, and with every attempt, at planning, in knowing, the ideas themselves become something else. Every understanding come with a required perspective shift. Every interruption become a kind of reality check. In this case, the outcomes of the world become a dance.

It feels like this is a path that is subtly becoming to describe in the vernacular. Something about a similar energy of creating last January is picking up and I feel that I am becoming more methodical, which comes at the cost of becoming a perfectionist. There are a lot of times where I spend hours and hours absorbing the things I produced only to toss them to the trash at the end. Today, I felt that some semblance of a starting point is starting to form. I have some things that I can continue the steady progress of creation with. At least, I hope I give myself enough patience to do the things I must do and not cram everything because of an eventual pressure.

At the back of my mind, there is a devil on my shoulder trying to communicate the urgency of everything. I must keep my external motivations at a safe distance and not let them dictate the pace at which I create. I know that I have given myself a month to produce a single tangible result, at least to give myself a sense of hope that I can do this. I hope that I can make this a reality for myself in the midst of everything.

2025-06-10

2025-06-10T00:00:00.000Z

I guess the whole sense of frustration that was brewing in the past few days were brought by this subconscious anxiety about an impending difficulty of conversation with other people. This just happened yesterday, which actually took a lot of my time and mental energy to focus on the things that I needed to focus on. I had difficulty trying to understand the sense of unease that I had been feeling last weekend even if I had some noticeable progress with my own projects. It felt like an irrational feeling, almost to the point that I am ready to dismiss it as untrue. That disconnected feeling of having an intuitive emotion about the things that are about to happen is something that I didn't know I will be able to experience.

I think, I am still recovering from it. The issue was somehow resolved yesterday but there are apparent opportunities in the future that will pose a risk of it happening again. At least, at this point, I am a bit more prepared, knowing the gist of what's about to happen but it will only happen as a worst-case scenario. The anxiety is still there, but since we've been through the initial surprise, I feel like it will be more manageable once it happens in the future.

The thing is this issue is happening under my principle of doing what is right, and with it, also doing what is good. I still feel this weight of my own sense of duty and principles that I know what I must do, it is the act of doing it that is away from my own emotions that is difficult. Again, I am faced with this difficulty of applying my own theoretical framework of living and interacting with people into practice. However, to my credit, I would say that I succeeded upholding my beliefs and principles, somehow ended in a good outcome, which is why the opportunity for another risk to happen still exists in the near future.

Perhaps, I am wondering that if that opportunity of risk disappears, somehow, I have failed according to my principles. Because it means that I have already pulled the plug, or given up to finding an actionable solution because we only encounter problems when we push through with our chosen path. There is nothing to walk on or problem to solve the moment we decide to leave the path. At least, this is a comforting idea that in the midst of all the worries and anxieties, I am right, and still doing good.

2025-06-08

2025-06-08T00:00:00.000Z

There is a whole lot of frustration that brewed this weekend. I was actually hesitant to write a log for today but as the evening passes on and as I approach the time when I am supposed to sleep, I felt a deep sense of need to put down some of the things that have been running in my head.

To be really honest, I only have the feeling of frustration right now without the actual reason being revealed to me yet. I feel that at this point, it has only been appearing, making itself felt, its presence signaling something that there is an unwanted event that is already on its process to be known. If I were to try and interpret this occurrence, I will know and understand everything that has been happening to me in due time. Right now, what matters is that I am open to the fact that everything is not okay.

Although, the previous week presented a lot of opportunities and lessons that I am bringing into this week that's about to start. A lot of realizations that allowed me to commit to the things I must do this weekend. But I'm starting to feel that in the midst of some aspects of clarity that has befallen me, there are some unintended subconscious realization of costs and consequences. At this point, I am putting a lot of words in saying that I am intuiting a sense of danger but I can't really say for sure if it really is. All I know is there is a looming feeling of unease at the back of my mind that became real in the past few hours.

Perhaps, if there is a positive foresight that I can ascribe to this is that my body is reacting to a future anxiety that is based on a decision that I had made, which is something known to me. I knew that this path will expose me to a lot of people. And now that I am taking the necessary steps to fully realize my vision, I can understand why my body may be reacting in such a way that prepares me for the future consequences of what I am about to do.

2025-06-05

2025-06-05T00:00:00.000Z

I am giving myself a lot of time just to think an allow myself take everything slowly. I have been preparing all the things that I must work on, learn all the skills that I must, improve on the things I know would help me create my vision. But I am also distracted about all the possibilities and I'm currently actively sifting through the ideas that would work for me. Amidst all the noise in my head and this excitement in my soul, I have to avoid falling into the trap of leaving things unfinished and starting a new project all over again.

I have worked on my consistency and capability to follow through and deliver. This site is a testament to that, which is something I really pushed myself to complete and publish before the previous year ended. Now, we're approaching the half of the year and I am still in the preparation phase as I work on my voice, which I would say, has become too practical as this direction was urgently pushed into me because of a lot of miscommunications that have been happening in my life. I have been frustrated long enough to just allow myself be frustrated and accept that I probably have a different way of talking than most people.

But since I have been walking along this path of committing to an ambitious path of communication, why not also take the chance to throw myself into improving my speech? I do see a valuable use of this skill in my life as apparently being revealed to me every single day. Some conversations become seamless now. Not in a way that it allows me to read the minds of the people but to always be aware of what the other person is saying and what I must say in order to create a common ground of understanding. This is an idea that has been stuck in my head ever since I realized that and I am thinking of taking that idea to another level.

2025-06-03

2025-06-03T00:00:00.000Z

I'm observing a great improvement in familiarizing myself with my own voice. In the past few weeks, I have been recording myself, hearing myself through the speakers as I ramble about a lot of things: religion, culture, my issues with my friends (in an attempt to understand how gossip feels like), and other things just to practice my speech. I'm feeling a radical sense of externalization, where I catch myself finding the right words to explain the ideas in my head and distill them into words that I can use to capture that concept and push it into someone's head. Communication used to feel like an ultra-selective activity for me. I mean that to an outsider's perspective, I only talk to the "chosen ones." Since I don't want to waste my time and energy talking to people who might not get the things I say, I deprive myself of the chance to practice to explain myself.

It's been so long before I noticed it. This practice has only proven to be exciting as I am discovering a part of myself that I didn't know was in me. Not in an extraordinary sense, but since I have believed for so long that I can only fully express myself in writing, I never actually gave verbal expression a chance. I just received a help from someone, who has also identified a major issue in my practice: reading aloud dense books. It was a struggle to find the best articulation that I can hear to be engaging because I was recording myself reading a philosophy book. I did switch to Proust's "Swann's Way," and Austen's "Persuasion" as my chosen materials for my session this long weekend. This was such a leap in direction because for weeks, I decided to read materials that I am too familiar with, at least in the sense of content. I thought it could spur a kind of voice that I had always been trying to emulate: an introspective, serious, but warm tone of voice, which is kind of counterintuitive. I cannot practice a voice that I impose on myself without trying to discover what my voice is truly capable of expressing at its basest.

I found my rhythm drastically change. In reading, that is. I still need to work some minor tweaks in extemporaneous speech, which is tied to structuring my thoughts in real time, without premeditation. It is out of the sphere of writing when I have the luxury to get into my message first before I try to express it. In the following days, I am attempting to catch another glimpse of progress. Since I have been ruminating a lot about the way I talk to people, I caught myself in the middle of a project that could use and demonstrate my newfound way of expression. I just hope it sticks and become another useful tool where I can find more avenues to make my vision a lot clearer and more enjoyable. The steps in this process are not falling into place.

2025-06-02

2025-06-02T00:00:00.000Z

I don't know how to deal with feeling emotions that come from transference. On the one hand, I understand the feeling and to an extent, also feel portion of the transferred emotion. On the other hand, a combative sense of frustration rises behind the transferred emotion, acting as a guard against intrusive thoughts. There is a nagging sense of disappointment as well, directed at myself, for allowing an intrusive thought or feeling to bypass my boundary from the uncontrollable world. Then a wash of shame begins to push me and cause me to stumble, making it difficult to emotionally recover from this state.

I'm still in the state of stumbling and I'm saying that I don't know what to do about it or how to deal with it because all my attempts to ignore the feeling or bring myself back into my default state only exhausted me to the point that I feel that I am in a limbo. Another person has caused this and there is a sense of guilt that I cannot fully respond. So there is this failed tango of emotions that are swirling in my head and I need to be present at work, to do cognitive tasks, to write, to think. But I feel paralyzed by this chaotic surges of emotions. It is difficult to handle because of the fact that they are not mine. I haven't tamed these emotions on my own and it seems like I just need to wait for it to be subsumed by my subconscious.

It just feels as if I am a dot inside my mind and it has become cramped and chaotic because of the event that it is trying to fix itself. It is making a lot of effort to put all things in order but it has been consuming a lot of resources only in doing so. As the dot, there isn't a space where I can go away from all this ruckus. Everywhere I look, there is chaos. The only thing I can do is to sit still and wait out the storm. This is what I have been doing all throughout my life. It has been the only thing that I know how to deal with it. But it has been becoming truly ineffective at times when I also need to be present for other things and other aspects in my life that I consider to be important. This is also precisely the reason why most people who know me always perceive me as calm, cool, and collected. My stoicism in times of crisis is not a survival skill but a coping mechanism. What is the difference between the two? The first one is about fighting through the chaos. The other one is avoiding the issues. A lot of the times, people don't see the difference. But I know myself enough to say that this is what I have been feeling and this is why I am doing it.

I need to clear my head.

2025-05-31

2025-05-31T00:00:00.000Z

This will be the first adjustment that I will make in writing logs moving forward. I will now permit myself to skip one day of log to explore avenues of thought and writing practice that I want to implement that I think would make direct impact on my desired output. What I mean by this is I want to make some space for thoughts that are beginning to surface in my mind and I decide to do that by reducing some activity in actually writing daily logs.

I only plan to allow myself to skip a day at this point. Increasing this lag may snowball into a negative behavior that result to inconsistency and eventually lead to abandoning writing daily logs.
In my current review of my daily logs, I find that there are some thought-post worthy logs that I think would be more valuable if I can isolate them with a title for easier reference. I also feel bad that I am not being productive in a sense of writing something that holds more value than just my fleeting thoughts. Because of this, I have actively started referencing my logs into a more coherent future post. I want to write more with intention and develop the ideas that I have articulated in my logs.
This change was prompted when I was able to write two posts under thoughts, which made me feel good. These ideas are actually something that I have been wrestling with and the logs aren't fully capturing them in a way that are more coherent.
- So moving forward, I am expecting more non-log entries, while also keeping up with my daily writing habits. This reallocation of energy and load feels a lot better when I think of my own way of managing this...whatever you may call it.

It also feels a bit timely that I need to decide about this update when we are nearing the middle of the year. I still have a month to think about a lot of the projects that are going on in my head and polish some skills that I am trying to learn. Lately, work has been pushing me towards the direction that I want to improve on myself despite some looming misalignments with this career in the near future. I just want to harmonize everything before I finally decide on which path to take in the midst of everything.

Overall, I can feel myself getting better. May was a month that was tough to crack, broke me in some ways, but in the end, it all felt like a process of transformation that has been trying to temper my spirit for longer days that await.

2025-05-29

2025-05-29T00:00:00.000Z

This may be the only day since I have forgotten when I had a complete mental rest. At least, in the sense that I feel like I am wanting to think of an idea. I decided that it is the time for me to write my log for the day because I have started once again to scour the internet for some things that I can pour my attention on. In this moment of lucidity, I caught and stopped myself from on the compulsion to search for novel ideas.

Just to dial back from that, I think I have been feeling this bit of "extra" mental energy because the quietness of daily life has come back. The house repairs ended yesterday and the interruptions have decreased dramatically. I feel like the space inside my mind has expanded when they were only emptied of the tasks that have remained pending for a lot of time. Conversations with other people have ceased. Worries about expecting people coming to our house unannounced has vanished alongside the people who caused it. There is a sudden break of human interactions that have been interweaving my personal and professional life. At some point, I feel like I am back to the person who I was before I had desired to properly communicate to people. Again, I am filled with my ideas, and just today, the feeling of nothing to do and think about has become foreign to me to the point that my mind passively looked for new ideas to think about. This is a comma, a healthy punctuated pause in speech that I have been trying to articulate. I needed this, hoping to find a new confidence to face the next month with executing the plans I have for the rest of the year.

2025-05-28

2025-05-28T00:00:00.000Z

A huge part of me wants a reset from everything. I don't even think that I am burning out. I just think that I am losing interest in everything. For some reason, at some point, daily work, which used to gave me a sense of purpose and direction, suddenly stopped making sense. I started going beyond deadlines without consequences (or perhaps this very thing that I am experiencing is the consequence). Not getting reprimanded felt like any sense of urgency has been stripped away. Meaning begin to fade because all of this has left me only feeling like I am stuck in a limbo. I stopped feeling anything that gives me fulfillment at work so I've begun looking for it in other places. And I think I may have found it.

In my mind, I'm having difficulty trying to hold on to my current job while starting on my chosen alternative path. I believe that this will be another war of attrition in finding my rhythm as I'm also trying to internalize the frequency of interruptions in my daily life that I am willing to tolerate.

This week feels like it has taken a lot of my mental energy by talking to a lot of people and being at the forefront of a noisy environment. There is a sense of entrapment, where I am forced to confront while at the same time, I know that the right thing to do is only to endure. There is a lot of balls to juggle and I can't drop any of them right now.

2025-05-27

2025-05-27T00:00:00.000Z

A tug-of-war between maintaining focus and distraction is so apparent that I find myself sitting on my chair and staring into space. In my mind, I know what I should do, but I can't bring myself to do it. There is actually an apparent external distraction, which is this ongoing repair in the house. Steel against concrete vibrating around the house as repairmen isolate the water leak issue from our main water line. Me, staring at my screen trying my best to make some work done but I miserably fail as I can't even finish a single thought without being sucked into the noises outside of my room.

I've had a moment of true weakness earlier when I just sat on the room and didn't do anything just to make sure that my dog will also be assured that nothing is wrong about the house. It felt like comforting a worried child with a lie. I am utterly disturbed by the noise and by the fact that I can't do any work but I have to pretend in front of my dog that everything is fine.

This state of attempting to do something productive in the midst of unavoidable distraction felt even more tiring because every attempt is a failure fueled by my genuine effort. That effort is a finite resource, which is, if I'm just being honest, actually running out before midday. The capitalist society would tell me that I must recover, so I won't consider this day as a loss on productivity.

What I am more concerned with is the creeping mental toll everything--every interruption--has been brewing underneath my subconscious. I had been taking a lot of mental breaks from work to push me towards getting a little bit more energy just to get through the day.

If there is any consolation that I must take from this scenario is that the house issues are slowly getting solved. Albeit slowly, the anticipation for future interruptions are dwindling because some of the anticipations are already happening today.

2025-05-26

2025-05-26T00:00:00.000Z

I have written this thought today and it made me realize how much of the thoughts in my brain remain un-codified. Of course, I would not want every single thought to just forcefully compel me to write every single time my brain comes up with an opinion. There is only this barrier that I rarely allow myself to cross and that is when I'm at work, I'll only write about work stuff, and when I'm not at work, I can finally write the things that have been going through in my head. So it's only a matter of boundary about when is it permissible to write what topic. But then again, it all feels so arbitrary, yet the feeling of fulfillment is more present when I cross that boundary. The piece that I linked at the beginning of this paragraph was written when I was in a company meeting, where I felt my brain leave my body. Instead I left the meeting and started writing what has been bugging me.

It has been a recurring thought, that there is a desire in me to escape my work by writing anything that is not work-related. This can be easily interpreted as: I may be growing a sense of boredom at work, or I might not be liking it as much as I used to so I need to distract myself from it while doing what I love: writing. Which made me reflect: I had been writing for other people for so long, outlining every material according to their level of comprehension--basically meeting every reader halfway (and even serving thoughts in a silver spoon). Writing for myself has become that escape, that reverie amidst this confusion of direction when it comes to my career.

In the past few days, I feel that I have walked past through the theoretical and I am gaining enough confidence to put every single thing into practice. But it must take a longer time, a more focused effort, and attention to detail to make everything work. Perhaps, I have realized how to make the embers of my dwindling passion fire up again in such a way that there is a more realized vision of what is ahead, and a clearer perspective of the things that I want to achieve. I have the hunger, the motivation to make everything work, which also means that I have a lot of things at stake, making the feeling of disappointment more destructive if things don't happen the way I planned them to be.

But at the same time, these ideas that come with these risks are the very thing that makes them worth doing. I wanted to make it work. I wanted to realize a vision in my head. This is the door that I am willing to open regardless if there isn't a floor to step on. I expected nothing of this door, but I know that it is right. I feel myself returning to the aspect of myself that I really loved. I wanted to be that person again. But this time, I'll do it with something to say. Because, honestly, I think I have finally found my voice that wants to say something to the world. It has always been something that I used to communicate. I just didn't like the sound of it so I ignored it for 29 years.

It's been a long time, but hey, now we're here.

2025-05-25

2025-05-25T00:00:00.000Z

Occurrences of tests concerning understanding and faith are becoming more and more frequent. Most of the times, it manifests in an effort of persistence in trying to understand the things that are happening around me. The more I try to fail to understand, the more I feel inclined to let faith deal with it. The more I try to put everything in my faith, the more I think less of myself as a person. In any case, I don't mean to diminish every atom in my body as a signifier for a weak existence. Thinking less of myself only mean that I feel more disappointment in accepting that some things are beyond my understanding. It is its own form of humility that intercepts any build up of emotions towards pride. It is my way of extinguishing the idea of my inclination to know and understand. It removes the burden that I must find a reason behind every single thing that has happened.

I've had two blank days in May. One corresponds to a focused activity for my day job and the other corresponds to a day of spiritual recovery. I do not want to lose more days at work so I decided to take it upon myself to cease any possible strenuous work both physically and mentally yesterday. I did sleep for more than three hours during daytime after I awoken from sleep, and went to bed the same time I do every day: before nine in the evening. My current state can only be described as "not as bad as I hoped it could have been." I am trying to give myself more time to recover from all the stress from work and from my personal relationships. Thinking about tomorrow, continuing where I left off from last week creates a certain anxiety in my chest. Once again, I find myself in this cycle of worrying even after four days have passed since I last thought of anything work-related. What happened during those times also elevated the concern of my speed in which I am trying to withdraw myself from corporate. I am having better ideas recently but I just wanted to take small steps.

So I hope even in these small steps, interruptions are something I can handle better. Lately, they all feel like fetters. I want to glide past though the initial ideation phase of my own emerging work. I want to have more focused time to do the things I want to do. But my calendar says otherwise. I want to give myself more time and more effort, but certain things pull me away from myself out of this recognition of my own duties in different aspects of my life. I am finding it a lot disruptive recently from what I desire.

Is this impatience? Or is this a righteous judgment of what I claim to be what I deserve? If this is something that I must endure first in order to claim the fruits of my suffering, how long will it take and how long should I wait before I can finally make my move to progress myself?

I just feel that I might have been neglecting myself in the process. And I am afraid that it is also possible that I might have been giving myself into the world without much return to the things that I truly care about.

2025-05-23

2025-05-23T00:00:00.000Z

Yesterday was a day spent outside with workmates. Since I work from home, we only see during these instances, at least once or twice a year. It's also been a while since I went out alone and with a planned reason to go outside and meet people. I guess, with all these uninvited interactions with people, it was a nice reset to counterbalance this feeling of resignation towards talking with other people. At least, they are not strangers, which added a little bit of sense of lightness to this day.

There were still a lot of moments when some connections need to be established during conversations. Some explanations and background information remains to be the main staple of every discussion. But I guess, I wasn't accustomed to this type of harmony with acquaintances. I consider my colleagues not as friends because I have long since treated every professional relationship to merge with my personal life. It keeps a certain distance and expectation that I can comfortably wiggle myself inside without worrying so much about appearances and disappointments. I think I am only happy partly because I can be myself around these people, which came to me like a surprise.

It kept this door at bay, at least, even if there were a lot of issues that almost caused me to withdraw my attendance to this event. It was a reset that I didn't expect that I need. But there is still a strong sense of fatigue after these types of gathering. I still feel like I'm falling into sickness with this itch in my throat.

2025-05-21

2025-05-21T00:00:00.000Z

Things begin to coagulate into a single interconnected series of consequences that I am finding myself entangled with. This push and pull of emotions brought by my most recent decisions only signals that I haven't been deciding in a way that correctly aligns with my sense of self. I would allow myself make a very selfish decision under the justification that it is what is best for my mental state and would make things simpler from my perspective.

I know that it is actually out of my own principles to act this way. Deep inside, I just felt like I've been to forgiving of the world that I've been forgetting that I can assert my own will on others as long as I am comfortable. This in itself is what I consider a sin against my own values and I am guilty of it. I've been rebelling against the standards that I put up myself. Upon the realization of committing this crime, the world shifted for a bit. This subtle earthquake inside my chest begins to rumble at a calming pace. The rhythm, my heart suddenly ate itself up out of shame. I can't believe that I failed myself at this point. Almost immediately, I try to shift my brain to accept accountability and do the right thing.

But this didn't calm me. This did not alleviate this pain of knowing my sin. Perhaps the anticipation of reckoning weighs heavier than choosing to go out the exit. Yesterday, I meditated on the idea of opening the door in front of me. In reality, I caved inasmuch as I wanted to keep it shut. I didn't realize that there were a lot of doors in front of me. That the clear appearance of a single door did not mean that it's the only one that I will be faced to open. It feels like I died a hundred deaths in this scenario. There is a brewing hate in me that assumes itself to be difficult to recover from. It feels like falling from the peaks and starting again at the bottom. The inertia of virtue hits harder than terminal velocity when it hits. My mind is crushed at this very moment and I can feel the strings of consequences entangle me like fly that's trapped in a web.

I can feel the weight of everything right now. I can only hope that things will get better tomorrow. I cannot think by anticipating a dread that's about to happen. But then again, I think this anxiety is still in my imagination. If there is any consolation to all of this, I believe I still made the right thing in the end. I just need to feel this self-hatred for a bit and hoping we'll be able to move on from this stupidity.

2025-05-20

2025-05-20T00:00:00.000Z

There is always a door in front of me and it has been here in the last 10 years. Every single day it shows a faint specter of itself in every minor inconvenience. With every small hint of frustration and annoyances, a part of it shows in front of me as if allowing myself to feel more of my current emotions would allow it to become clearer in my vision. In all aspects, curiosity would lead to this false sense of clarity. I am only reminded of its existence when I am in crisis. Whenever my spirit is tested, the door shows itself unannounced but expected. There is anticipation brewing of the possibilities of the other side. In times of stillness and peace, the door visits me in my daydreams. During those times, I wonder if I should give in to the world in order to feel the touch of its woodwork. Would the texture of its panel allow me to have a hint, or at least a glimpse of understanding of what's on the other side? This boundary holds me hostage to the burden of unknowing and it is the only thing in this world that I choose to not know.

This decision is not brought by willful ignorance but I know what's on the other side. At least, I have a faint idea of it and its value differs depending on my current emotional state. A lot of times, it acts as the temptation but some other times, it becomes this beacon of hope. It may be easier to understand the former but the latter proves to be its own mystery. Sometimes, a difficult situation presents itself to be the very thing that anchors me to existence. It commands me to stand my ground and overcome hatred. No matter how much I want to deny it, I know that I have a lot of hatred in me. This is a type of hatred towards the world, to the people in it, and the very existence of the people in it. It is not just on who they are or what they do but the hellish dance this world has forced me to participate in. For so long, I have desired peace, but everything lately has become a test of spirit. This war of attrition against fighting for who I am by always attempting to be who I want to be. I cannot falter in vice because I have chosen virtue. But the world always presents itself with a comedic timing of catching you in a joke that pops your tiny bubble of humor.

I always think about the door and sometimes I think that regardless of my choice to keep it closed, even when it starts to become clear in my rage that it persistently presents itself in front of my eyes like a buzzing fly that I can't swat away, all my efforts to ignore it will be for nothing. I welcome the possibility that the choice was not meant for me to make and it will start to open itself slowly or in a forceful intrusion where I get dragged inside this thing that I choose to remain unnamed and unknown. As much as I pull myself up in the midst of fatigue and surrender, this door will just be there and open itself in a way that would call me to cross the other side. I imagine there would be songs and there would be silent invitations of just giving it all up and let my feet step into the abyssal portal. In all my attempts, I would still try to not give in and hold myself steadfast in the midst of the quarry of the reality of my own making. I still think I am where I need to be and I am here where I matter the most. My purpose is to resist this door until it opens. It must open itself for me. I cannot be the one to open it. In this faith, I put my trust to imagine that touching the knob changes what is meant for me on the other side. If this door is divine, I cannot taint it with my being.

This is the conclusion I came up with after realizing that all the things I've done in the past by asserting my will, to be egotistical enough that I can change a portion of my own reality on my own, will also be the cause of my own downfall. I must surrender to the world and what it offers in a way by keeping it sacred. In this light, it was a prerequisite to discern what is holy from the wicked. To know what is wicked requires sacrificing a part of one's soul without falling into corruption. What remains untouched by the profane can still be made whole by answering the call of what makes everything holy. This door is currently wicked. It can only be opened by the divine.

2025-05-19

2025-05-19T00:00:00.000Z

This feeling of scale and volume of what I am doing for this project feels a lot more palpable today. With every word that I add in this log, I feel a lot of doors opening, which may be the ways in which I can explore the topics that I wanted to uncover. Slowly, ideas begin to take shape and leave their shell of formlessness. In this state, I feel weight and lightness at once. My body bears the gravity, while my mind is being lifted by grace.

Almost spiritually, it feels like enlightenment about something I have yet to know and understand. At this moment, I am listening to Crawl Against the Sky's The Silent God (2017). I missed this atmospheric music that I used to listen when I take my 2-hour commute back home from work. Everything is forming with anticipation. There is something going on behind this tiny brain of mine.

But for now, I can say that I am taking the right step forward towards the direction that I am about to take. I am giving it the right amount of effort and focus to drag every single word that can allow me to correctly and accurately give shape to the ideas that have been germinating inside my head.

I spent the past hour scrolling through the history of my IG stories since 2019. I can still imagine myself, my state of mind, and how I see the world from the eyes of someone who's grieving about murdering his dreams of becoming a poet. I have observed how the years passed and still the inability to let go of the past was there. The inability to shy away from everything as an excuse was palpable enough to make a connection with my past self.

Probably, this is why I am enmeshed with the current lucidity of where I am at this present moment and where I was throughout those years. In any case, I feel this humble sense of pride that I have become, after all, loyal and true to myself. Back then, I had acted out of instinct. I listened to this gnawing ache in my chest when every piece of creative writing feel like a knife behind my back. Writing then was my way of making sense what I don't understand. Taking a step back from it allowed me to realize why I don't understand the things I don't understand. Only to realize that I don't understand the things that I don't understand because I refuse to understand them. That there was pain and I knew that it was waiting for me so I tried to write everything away as a form of an attempt to confront my fears when in reality, it was just an avoidance in disguise.

Looking at that timeline of images and videos made me feel that connection again, grounding me that I actually haven't changed. I'm still the same person with a better perspective. I am still heading in the same direction but with a newfound faith that is necessary to carry me towards the place where I had wanted to go, even when I thought I wasn't going to make it.

2025-05-18

2025-05-18T00:00:00.000Z

What is it about "scientific" people and this obsession with the observable reality being the only reality that we must be concerned about? Why does it seem like the reality of an object depends on whether or not it can be measured? Since when did the primacy of numbers begin to govern the pure definition of the real?

Even if I had encountered it a lot of times, this hyperfixation of people in STEM fields on insisting the scientific method to verify the certainty of an object's existence has become its own religion. In this light, I don't mean to say that it is wrong. It is completely valid as a verification method in determining how accurate we are at describing specific aspects of reality. It is one way of interpreting how the world works, which has also sprung from the never-ending state of questioning the mechanisms of the world that has been brought by the field of philosophy.

Now, it feels like science itself does not want to concern itself with philosophy. It has become its own entity that attempts to bring certainty to the world. The purpose of doubt in this field is a required characteristic of a scientist to try various methods of knowing in order to arrive at the one infallible truth of understanding why the world seems as it seems.

I used to love science ever since I was a kid. I loved the visual aesthetic of how a formula is written, as if I was trying to learn a universal yet ancient language that can only be understood by an elite few. It gave me a sense of exclusivity and intellectual drive to understand what everything means. The world as it was back then, was gentle enough to hide its violent secrecy of numbers and equations.

It has become its own esoteric language and further specialization in science is becoming more obscure. The same trajectory is paralleled by the Humanities. Philosophy and theory are becoming more and more abstract, and perhaps in this abstraction, is where STEM and Philosophy diverges from one another. One is an abstraction that is revealed through the history of equations and one is revealed through the history of pure thought.

Because of this branching, we still haven't developed (or at least not that I am aware of) a type of language that can bridge this gap. From what I can see, both are heading towards the same direction as asymptotes of interpretation of the world. As this current overproduction of ideas are being fueled by AI, we need meta-interdisciplinary thinking more than ever to look at what we have and connect more dots from different fields and define more points of convergence before we all get buried underneath this language that we have been shrouding ourselves with to justify our difference.

2025-05-17

2025-05-17T00:00:00.000Z

Resting has never felt more tiring and rewarding at the same time. I revisited my old theoretical self to work on an idea that's been brewing in my head. It may be something that I will still write about here in the near future. But at this point, I am strongly considering to work on a different format and explore a different method of expression using different types of media that is available to me right now.

Thought and language is what I would say my expertise in trying to communicate ideas beyond concepts. I do feel that making connections is what I do best. While they may not usually be comprehensive or cohesive at times, I am fully confident that in one way or another, these thoughts are interconnected, even at the point of forming a new metaphor. My equipment to accomplish this task that I desire has arrived and today was dedicated to calibration and testing. I discovered that there is something unusual with my speech. I found that my weakness in delivering my ideas. While I stutter less, which has been my main issue in speech, I am still having difficulty in conveying a grand idea in my head. I feel like I have less time-space to work with because I need to stay in the moment. I do not have the luxury of time to retract and edit my statements the way I do with writing.

This day passed with all these testing and revisiting old texts and it has taken all my energy away. But I can confidently say that I am happy now that I can see the horizon of this new land that I am envisioning myself to explore.

2025-05-16

2025-05-16T00:00:00.000Z

I watched a local podcast earlier where Lourd de Veyra was the guest and had this realization that I might be carrying a type of intellectual elitism when it comes to the area of philosophy. I am still trying to understand where this feeling is coming from and I've been trying to give it a name. I don't think it is disgust, nor is it disapproval. It is closely tied with the feeling of cringe because I feel like that the host frequently proclaims that they like philosophy but as what I have observed from his demeanor throughout this entire 1-hour episode, he may have only trifled with the idea of doing philosophy.

Now, to take a few steps back, I also feel great that doing philosophy, or at least attempts to study it is gaining traction in local online channels. I haven't really been in touch with local online media for a long while because I easily find it still tied to my country's tradition of taking things seriously in a more light perspective. For one, this makes serious subjects more palatable to the mass audience and two, it removes the ultra-serious undertone that may garner some avoidance from the masses due to the rising anti-intellectualism. In short, entertainment is still the factor that lure people into one's online content for the masses to take you seriously.

I did not expect that I would find the topic of philosophy discussed in this light or even find it in this manner of a podcast with Lourd de Veyra himself. I still consider him as one of the progressive thinkers of this generation as I've been drawn to him since I was in high school. Now, I find him too neoliberal in a sense that he does not delve too much into divisive issues. He is too safe with his pronouncements, which is still evident in this podcast. But at the same time, I knew that this one hour episode would at least be worth my while and decided to take some time and play it on the background while I was working.

The host was unknown to me. The conversation felt more of a back and forth interview than a conversation. Those areas were okay but I would focus more on how the topic of philosophy is handled. I guess for what it's worth, it's okay for the general audience. Talks about freedom, the importance of art, the difficulties of writing, journalism, and briefly touching on Camus. I'd say it was fine. There was nothing new to me and I really like that most people would get a lot from this podcast, especially if they know nothin about philosophy.

I say that it is fine only in the sense that, it is enough to make people curious about the subject. But anything regarding practical application of it in one's life is never truly the topic but I hoped they did. It was a good starting point at least to have it documented online since we do not have a lot of accessible philosophers in this country. I myself is still figuring out how to make my first attack on the subject.

The cringe that I said I felt earlier was probably one of the positions that I've been imagining while I was listening to the whole episode. I felt that philosophy was being discussed as a subject where you can get the "wow" answers for life. That it provides a sense of clear direction on how to live. I really don't see it that way and I felt that during those moments, philosophy was being reduced into another one of the self-help topics in finding specific and clear answers on freedom, on considering what is a smart person, and the like.

I felt that if there is a chance for new people to come in to philosophy, I think it would be better that it must be initially approached without the expectation of finding a clear answer. Clear answers are in the realm of science and mathematics, which were once part of the Natural Philosophy before they became a science. Philosophy deals with endless and tireless questioning of everything. Doubt and skepticism will be your main tools. It shouldn't be used as an area of thought to define the kind of oracle that people would have wanted as answers to their life questions. This is the very thing that the self-help industry is trying to exploit.

Then again, it's not a wholly incorrect approach to turn to philosophy to look for answers. Philosophy is actually good for that but I feel that since the interest is there to look for answers, I hope people don't stop when they found the answer that satisfies them. I know this is already borderline prescriptive but there are layers of understanding that philosophy tries to communicate that can be helpful in understanding ourselves. I can sense the curiosity from the host earlier but he is full of glee and recoils after Lourd asks him a real question, which is not even that profound as it seem. To him, he is being asked a profound question when it is only the beginning of the philosophy that he claims to love. I hope this perspective evolves more into inquiries and investigations because I would love to see more of this framing of thought in local media.

2025-05-15

2025-05-15T00:00:00.000Z

Criticism was once the field of writing that I would have delved into if my art critic era didn't die out when I was aiming to work and network within the local art scene. Long story short, it didn't end well after experiencing some disillusionments. However, I have attempted to cultivate a perception towards critical examination of art in general that I feel that I also have a critical view about the current state of criticism today at large.

Online "discourses," especially those that are being promulgated on X or Twitter, are slowly declining in a sense that a discourse now stands as a thinkpiece that does not invite any form of conversation. It does not offer any meta-awareness of the kind of critique it stands for and even masquerading as a "commentary" for an essentially visceral reaction towards an issue. While I still encounter threads that amass into a type of conversation, social media does kind of offer a megaphone to those who want to speak but are unprepared to be heard by the public. The sort of "virality" it offers to the common man is an unrelenting force that they cannot handle. Precisely because the cost of virality is fame and fame eats off one's sense of self to the point that it fuels narcissism and pushes the correct buttons to raise alarms to defend oneself without the capability to respond and handle the wave of public scrutiny that follows. The traditional practice is either double-down or release an apology. There is no in-between because every comment will be considered as an attack from all sides. There is nowhere to hide from the public eye that is the internet.

Everyone is not ready to handle the consequences of being seen and those who crave it often crave it for the wrong reasons. Posting for clout and the unpredictable virality of half-baked ideas posted online come at a cost of a day's fame and engagement. What happens next depends on the strength of one's sense of self.

At this point, every engagement, every attempt at a serious conversation about a certain topic will always be met by how we look at social media as the new marketplace. A short snarky remark here and there, sarcasm being thrown out of nowhere, and unsolicited pieces of advice lay below every single post of origin. It does not nurture fruitful discussions nor does it encourage everyone to stop, think, and compose one's own thoughts and emotions before responding. We are operating on emotionally induced feedback loop of visceral reactions that garner more views, which is why rage-baiting has been all too popular of a trend because it is the one that exploits human emotion for monetary gains. There is no truth being contained in these spaces.

So any attempt at a critique, or however the poster may frame their post, it can never amount to a seriousness of an essay or a treatise, especially if the platform thrives in recency bias and relevance. The best-formed ideas will never be able to catch up on the recency of a developing story. To get the whole picture, we need a timeline, the happening, and the aftermath. A critique that focuses only on one of these things are incredibly myopic and incomplete. This is also why ad hominem attacks are good engagement because of the immediate visceral reaction it throws at the readers. It is a quick jab. Nothing else. But it is enough to catch someone off-guard and catch their attention.

Why are we doing this to ourselves?

2025-05-14

2025-05-14T00:00:00.000Z

Today's feeling was better, having done what I must do at work. Sometimes, there are just moments of anxiety where I get tangled by the emotions that I myself set myself up to feel. At the end of the day, worrying does nothing. Acting is the best antidote to anxiety, and confronting the cause of anxiety will always be the end of this imagined misery. It becomes a conflict between comfort and pain, where choosing comfort causes the internal pain of mental instability. The haunting idea of being insecure, of that private knowing that something is wrong. That the comfort of choosing to stretch the pain into little drops of uneasiness, of a glass of anxiety and doom becomes more tempting than the weight of confronting the actual conflict.

I would like to say that I would always want to choose to confront. But additional layers of doubting the certainty if this is the right thing to do. What I believe is that it is always the right thing to do but there is always a right way to perform a confrontation. Most likely it is defined by its own context. What is the problem? Who must be confronted? And how might the confrontation affect both parties? Everything must be put into consideration but it must always be under the idea that you must commit to the actual act of confrontation.

I guess this is one of the days when I have to numb my mind in rationalizing what has been happening around me. I cannot deny that dragging it out by avoiding confrontation has been taking its toll on me. But I still choose that this is something that I can learn from and this is an area that I need to improve on. Even without the urgency of confrontation, I know that in the near future, within this year, there are a lot of thins I must confront in order to live a life that I want. Not only for myself, but to also allow myself to be known by other people who I want to be seen by.

2025-05-13

2025-05-13T00:00:00.000Z

I have been practicing recording my voice. I've taken some time to read off Kierkegaard's Either/Or earlier and trying to familiarize myself due to the uncanniness that I've always felt in hearing my voice in recorded zoom meetings and older recordings of myself whenever I hear my speaking voice.

I'm starting to get the hang of it and identify the voice that I hear in playback as part of me. I'm working on different types of delivery that I can experiment with. I'm finding that I can use this opportunity to fuse my writing with my own voice. It has been a long time coming but now that I've bought a decent mic, I think I have a lot of space to work with. This is a new ground for me but I think this is a place where I can explore other ways of expressing myself beyond writing.

2025-05-12

2025-05-12T00:00:00.000Z

It's one of those days. It was quiet but I've been running on fumes. Perhaps this is my true day of rest that it feels like parts of the world that I have picked up myself detached themselves away from me. It seems like a silent catharsis that's out of my system. There is no sigh of relief, but a nondescript flowing of energy from my body to the world. I feel tired, spiritually but my body just keeps on doing what it's been doing in an automatic fashion. My mind is out there. I am here. I don't feel complete. I think it's unfair timing that work resumes tomorrow and I wasn't given a chance to properly rest my head.

2025-05-11

2025-05-11T00:00:00.000Z

Because of the car release yesterday, I had to extend my patience and wait inside the Toyota office for five hours. It was the longest wait I had done in a very long while. I did not expect that processing a car loan takes such a long time on top of yesterday, actually waiting for the release of the car. Since that took the living patience out of me, I had to attend the church today via a livestream.

Since today was still about the idea of hope as laid by St. Paul in the Letters to the Romans, what struck me was the line that focuses on imagining a kind of earth that does not have war, pain, famine, poverty, and all the negative things in this life. What I felt at that moment was that I was being forced to imagine a kind of heaven, or at least heaven in one of its most famous interpretations. It felt forced to me because I was doubting if it is really the kind of heaven that is promised to Christians by arriving at the Kingdom of God. Perhaps it felt forced because it sounded a bit regressive when in my head, I am imagining the Garden of Eden.

Possibly, it could be, but what strikes me is that as I imagine this heaven, a nagging thought occurs in my mind: but is that really it? What if it is only how we imagine heaven and not based on what God actually means as His heaven?

But then again, we are beings that came after the Fall and therefore our imperfections is what made us humans. It is in our nature to reflect ourselves back to nature, which is inherently imperfect. We view things only as part of what we can see and what we can perceive. What we can experience of the world will always be imperfect and that sense and reality of imperfection is what we are capable of doing. It may be the Kantian noumena. It is this inability to see things-in-themselves, or Plato's world of forms. In this case, we are bound to look at the imperfections of things, which is precisely what I think to be the primary cause of why is it so easy for us to find the fault in other people. In a sense, it is a defense mechanism that we often apply whenever we are threatened or confused. Our brains are too comfortable in looking at things pessimistically that we even have made it a mode of thought that can govern our reality. Precisely also the reason why it is hard to do good things and be consistent about it, to hope, and to have faith.

I am still too far from trying to believe in God, but I think I am becoming closer. In all these intricacies, where I may not have liked the entirety of the preaching earlier, it has introduced me to an idea where I would not have otherwise thought of (at least in this manner or at this very moment). Man's capability for reflection is such a powerful thing.

2025-05-10

2025-05-10T00:00:00.000Z

Living a life without interruptions is such a privilege to have. At most, it is probably one of the best luxury in this world besides wealth. Just having enough time to do the things that you planned to do is like riding on an empty freeway. Everything is seamless. The rough edges on the road become less than a minor inconvenience. No one to blame in having someone or something slow you down because in this case, the only one who can slow you down is yourself.

I think today is that reminder that living an uninterrupted life is an impossibility for me because the conditions to achieve that state is something that would require me to live away from people. It must be considered that others are important enough to feel the weight of living, that gravity, that patience of sitting on a heavy traffic, that slowness of lining up on a queue.

But still there are those times when you wish you can just be alone. Those wishes may come true but realistically speaking, they can only happen in short bursts of a weekend, a vacation, or even the destitute feeling of freedom of having only a single day for yourself. I still feel claustrophobic about getting exposed to other people for an extended period of time and there is always a need for me to detach. A single day is not enough for me. It derails my thoughts and especially my plans where they are not just activities. I plan my free time of not planning anything. It gives my brain to decompress after a loaded social interaction.

I've got plans today but life happens. Even in this scale, I am reminded of my smallness in this universe and how little of it is actually in my control.

2025-05-09

2025-05-09T00:00:00.000Z

Today is just about Sleep Token's Even in Arcadia album release. I woke up at 4:30am. Drank water downstairs and then I immediately prepared myself to listen to perhaps one of the best albums I've listened to.

I've been reading through the posts and amateur reviews in twitter and reddit and it seemed like it's an album that's really well-received by the fans, which is I think exceeded everyone's expectations. Partly because this album release felt like an unknown ground in terms of thematic and sound direction. The first three albums were obviously a trilogy that had a proper ending. But at this point, only based on the singles that they released, everyone anticipated that we'll get more of the man behind the mask talking.

While this album still somehow stayed within the band's lore, it also showed a bit of cracks on how Vessel tries to communicate his messages in between the myth and reality, of him as an artist who had immediate success. This album is a reckoning, a reflection on the aftermath of the three albums. It almost reminds me of the idea of discipleship but only more in terms of wrestling with one's own chosen vocation. That is more of a duty beyond the commitment, looking back at the costs and some unintended consequences along the journey, including those that were expected consequences that weigh heavily in one's psyche.

It is a meditation on healing and the idea of where the expected effects of healing went wrong. It is an amalgamation of sound based off the three albums that came before it. At both times, it is probably the most experimental and fullest Sleep Token record that was ever released. It is a continuation of Vessel's own myth-making and also the voice from the man behind the mask.

2025-05-08

2025-05-08T00:00:00.000Z

A lot of days in this current week were spent alongside this feeling of disappointment with other people. This does not discount the fact that sometimes, I also become that other people in a sense that I become disappointed with myself. The basis of it all stems from the art of communication. It does seem that whether online or in real life, there is an unknown factor that I cannot identify that unravels this symptom in talkin with other people. Miscommunication is in the air and I can only suspect that it is a combination of intentional and unintentional actions. People often open their mouth out of impulse that they must say something and this impulse is justified by the thought that they are confidently correct.

"I know about this topic, therefore I must speak about it." Knowing, in this sense is synonymous with "having a thought", which is why most people equate free speech with respecting everyone's opinion. This seemingly "safe ontological space of thought" becomes a person's comfort zone. I am allowed to speak because I have an opinion and no one can speak against it. I am inside my bubble and you will stay in yours. We can disagree so I can hold the position of being unable to be proven false.

On the other hand, if I say that this is a logically incorrect position to hold, I become entitled to my opinion and it automatically discredits the value of my idea based on the other's assumption that we are all only talking to share our "opinions." We never arrive to a conversation where an exchange of ideas happen because of the fact that we are holding on to our deep-held prejudices. Prejudices that consist this ontological bubble become our comfort zones. Maintaining this space renders any form of critique impossible because the rejection of an idea is immaculately fascistic.

These past few days, I keep thinking about a lot of possible ways to circumvent this thinking. All I can think of is a valid Socratic dialogue that aims to fuel a person's narcissism by initially coming to an understanding of their worldview and then dismantle it using their own logic. Still, it sounds easier said than done. But I would like to see myself pull it off more than ever.

2025-05-07

2025-05-07T00:00:00.000Z

I am reflecting on what I have been writing about. For what they are worth, I still believe that I am working towards a personal philosophy that is purely in an intellectual activity. This reflection is spurred by this deep-seated uneasiness that is coming from my core. I feel that I have gone through empirical observation (and phenomenologically to some extent) of human behaviors and consequences of series of events and I have intellectualized them enough to form a system of belief that is aligned with the Stoics, Kantian Deontology, and Hegel's Spirit. With all these knowledge, I feel like the test of spirit is already happening in a sense that whatever I know about love, freedom, faith, and duty is being tested by standing by my principles. This is a huge task in itself because moments of failure carry more weight compared to the intellectual activity of arguing what does justice mean? Failing to perform my duty would not result to just a mental break where I can try again without external consequences. It is time when I practice this framework into the real world and act upon on what I believe to be true.

2025-05-06

2025-05-06T00:00:00.000Z

In light of turning small talks into actual conversations with some family members, I had decided to carry out the duty of always attempting to understand or form a connection. This has proven to be difficult in the midst of years of solidified familiarity, which is a type of understanding and perception of people that the brain conveniently accesses to create that immediate sense of knowing.

"My uncle has always been like this," "My mother has always seen me this way..." therefore I act according to that established bond. What I realized was what was established was created, forged, and sustained from when I was a young boy, unconsciously trying to create this sense of self that those who have seen me grow had accepted as the kind of person that I am. There was no resistance and I just took the world in as I go along the rhythms of life and recognition of other people around me. I became the person who is what I had been doing all along. I became my actions and the seeming it did to the eyes of those who witnessed my growth. Overtime, it became into this undeniable perception of behavioral patterns of who I am based on who I was. This is something that I am fighting against because I have also unconsciously formed an idea in my head about the different types of personalities that are the individuals in my family.

I'm considering this as the actual principles that I have been blabbering about duty and discipline. I am only praying that I can uphold them earnestly and diligently, without succumbing to the temptation of convenience of a quick exit.

2025-05-05

2025-05-05T00:00:00.000Z

Knowing the right thing to do is always good but it is human to fail to uphold it. An intellectual exercise is oftentimes only a simulation of the real. The anticipation of a future event such as consequences, reactions, and responses from the imagined scenarios in our heads hold the illusion of them being real that they can easily be mistaken as something that has already happened. Patients who are suffering from PTSD relive their traumatic experiences whenever they encounter triggers and make it seem that the past is happening again, right now, at this moment. This is why the response is also in response to the past event even if it so temporally distant from the now. Inversely, we can also imagine a future pain and feel it as if it is happening now depending on the strength of imaginary anticipation, which is the cause of anxiety.

As I am trying to create a scenario in my head, having the difficult conversations and interactions with people, I feel like I am also preparing myself from the worst. It is not anxiety that looms over my head but an inch of the difficulty that I am expecting to experience when I am in that moment itself. Preparing myself for the worst things that could happen because I do not want to be misunderstood, or at least I just want to react in ways that still aligns to the message that I want to communicate.

Most of the difficulty lies in maintaining composure and emotional stability in the moment of interaction. I am the type of person who would always prefer minimal face to face conversations unless it is warranted, so I would say that my social flexibility in adapting at a moment's notice is not that tactful. I am not a good conversationalist but I like to believe that I can take difficult serious conversations without backing down.

I am being tested at this very moment and I can see how things will progress in the near future. I believe things will turn out for the better if I play my cards right.

2025-05-04

2025-05-04T00:00:00.000Z

This overwhelming feeling of every single thing in my life coalescing together seems like an inevitable struggle. Throughout my philosophical studies and my newfound spiritual journey, I am starting to feel the weight of living. In which case, is this truly the uneasiness of a good life? To say that in finding one's purpose, is to also willingly bear the weight of living? This intellectual exercise led me to a conclusion that has more merit in experiencing the world. That in saying that an intellectual framework is required to live a meaningful life, is it also not true to say that all attempts to live a meaningful life must also correspond to an intellectual reflection of its effects on the self?

I think I am astounded by the actual practice of my intellectual musings in a sense that knowing the right thing to do must be supported by the strength of the spirit to act. In this sense, "spirit" can also mean "will," which is everything in our energy to execute an action. Thought and action bears weight in one's life, and which creates more impact. Principle and practice begins to align, where outcomes become more controlled, expected, and easily anticipated. What I am allowing myself this time, is at least to carry out the things that I know morally and spiritually and apply it in my daily life because doing the right thing once is not enough. It must be done out of habit in order for it to be considered done.

What had been weighing on me are the difficult conversations ahead that I am seeing. I am deliberately planning, simulating conversations in my head in how many ways those conversations may go wrong and how can I stand still with my principles without falling through the pit of despair and frustration. A lot of difficult interactions with people, at least in my own standards as I am also not as sociable as most people are, need to happen and I will be the force that would initiate it.

2025-05-03

2025-05-03T00:00:00.000Z

Taking a break from philosophy was one of the main things I did during my brief hiatus. Apart from being in an unfavorable position of absorbing Hegel's ideas, I felt that my dialectic turn highlighted every human interaction, every event that surrounds my life, wedding plans, work-related tasks, to be in some sort of teleological outcome. Every little thing begins to somehow insist themselves to be pregnant with meaning. What I mean is that since I have started to actually take Hegel seriously, even just when I was making actual effort in understanding his philosophy through secondary, introductory texts, I felt a profound shift in my perception of the world that made me feel overwhelmed in just being. However, it also gave me a sense of confidence in looking at familiar things in a different way. This happened during conversations with family members whom I have already classified as people who had solidified their personality.

You see, I believed that we only have a limited time in trying to craft a personality for ourselves. To me, that personality is a viscous liquid that become hardened the less activity or changes happen, which are influenced by external and internal faculties of your being. These activities revolve around exploring other ideas, questioning your firmly held beliefs, examining your biases, and deep diving into your own impulses. The less these things happen, the viscous liquid of personality becomes harder, turning into an insoluble solid of personhood that resists change. And to some of my family members, the older they are, the more I apply this judgement to them. Which is what I realized was completely wrong.

The conversations I've had with people made me realized that this judgement is something I impose and is not inherently true to people. Even if I still think that personality is a viscous liquid that requires constant stirring, my perception of other people is also dependent on my own perspective, and what I want to think of them. I can have a framework of understanding but it is false to say that it is a universal thing. This is a mark of hubris.

I talked to my mother and my uncle in separate occasions, where I had to persevere through communication and keep the looming feeling of frustration at bay for the purpose of trying to understand their position. In usual cases, I start a conversation with an intention in mind, let's say to convince a person, which is what I realized to be wholly counterproductive. This approach would always set me up to fail in understanding who they are and what they want to say. I cannot always apply a logical if/else questioning tree to every conversation because what I learned was more of the mental and emotional states that my mother and uncle were in those separate scenarios. I sat, listened, and followed through their thought processes, while also insisting some of my point of views in an attempt to balance the discussion through a denial and affirmation of their ideas, resulting into a more productive conversation that unravels their own beliefs.

Perhaps, it was a revelation that also made me take a step back from my rigorous philosophical readings. Hegel's idealism somehow begin to make sense but it also made my understanding of the world rigid and unhuman. Slowing down may be what I must do but I think I must keep this critical perspective of myself always on because something is always being revealed to me and I cannot pay attention if I would always intentionally keep myself preoccupied to what I want to do and plan to do.

2025-05-02

2025-05-02T00:00:00.000Z

The world has been becoming more of a reflection of my inner state recently. It seemed like there was a shift in my perception after being sick for days. When my body became degrees Celsius closer to the temperature of the soil in the afternoon, somehow I feel the earth tapped me into a connection with the collective consciousness. Perhaps, this is why I have struggled to go back into writing my thoughts down for the day after I finally recovered from sickness. Albeit, there are days during my post-recovery when I feel that I am able, my mind still hands loose and is draped by this haze caused by an unknown source. Possibly, it is just the inertia of momentum catching up to the accumulated mental fatigue I've collected throughout the days.

Because the world is becoming the mirror of my internal state, I have been thinking a lot about other people. And while I'm at it, I can't help but compare each every one of them to how I interact with the world, especially in social relations.

It has been weighing on me, especially when all of this can be traced back into some form of narcissism. It is tiring because I am developing a sense of compulsion to compare and analyze just to console myself that I am not like other people that I see.

2025-05-01

2025-05-01T00:00:00.000Z

Two weeks of absence was due to an unplanned break. I haven't been well since the 12th of April and everything just stared going downhill from there.

It stared with a sore throat and the uneasiness of everyday living stared to kick in. My mind was in shambles, unable to think clearly and function at work. All my deliverables keep getting pushed back. My saving grace was that there were no hard deadlines set on my current workload. But I developed a bad habit of putting things off. Some unwritten paragraphs started to accumulate due to a rising uncertainty at the back of my mind. Uncertainties regarding the future of my career and the trajectory that I would like to propel myself towards. Couple that with an intensifying fever and looming dizziness, I cracked and fell off the wagon.

I took two days off from work that became a six-day vacation because of the Lenten season. I was off on Tuesday and Wednesday because of flu and it was difficult to recover with the summer heat also peaking during those times. My body was steaming hot as well as my surroundings after the clock struck twelve. Everything around me including me was blazing. I did everything I could to recover inside the house. One glass of water almost every hour allowed me to get back on my feet on Friday. Still, my mind was hazy to the point that I have abandoned thinking and just went straight up consumption mode.

I watched 10 films in a span of five days. Mostly catching up to the most recent films that were released from the past year and revisiting genres that I have been watching less of, especially folk horror and just straight up foreign drama. It made me relive my undergrad days when I'll just be able to lie down in my room with my doors locked and watching films back to back, enough for me to average 3 movies per day. The cinematic immersion was back, at least in a sense that it allowed me to actively engage even on the slowest paces of the narratives. Once again, I was able to savor every actor's tiniest body expressions in the absence of a dialogue. I watched another experimental and conceptual film, which is "Interruption" by Yorgos Zois. The intellectual curiosity was once again alive in me, casually breezing through postmodern cinema as I used to.

Scorsese's "The Irishman" didn't hit me that well, though. It was the most dragging movie I had watched during that break perhaps because it is a supposed deconstruction of the mob films, which are I am not fond of. But I did watch the whole 3 hours of it, with a bit of intermission to douse the feeling of being burdened by my time I had invested watching it.

After the short vacation, I was back at work without my mind intact. I might have floated through that week without meaningful progress. Except, I did finish a document but I didn't feel like it was a progress because it was an overdue task that was one of the things that I've kept putting off.

Just the other day, I've already requested to have a one-on-one meeting with my manager to talk about my low productivity at work. It was a meeting that I initiated because I thought I owe this conversation to my manager. My explanations were well-received and I was able to request to move my work schedule to an earlier shift.

The underpinning weakness of my mind is perhaps also the dwindling spirit inside of me. I feel more tired than ever in thinking that taking the right way to do things is such a Herculean task. It is possible that socialization and negotiation isn't really my forte but my recent conversations with people and family members makes it all the more difficult when anger, frustration, and lashing out is never an option. The feelings are there but it is always imperative for me to hold them back in real time and pragmatically approach each task at hand with proper diplomacy and tact.

Realizing this, it makes me all the more resentful of those who are too easy to give in to anger and hopelessness, especially when they respond to any kind of struggles with inaction and pure emotions. I feel envious that they are able to give in to any emotions. It makes me feel like I am making it much harder for myself to restrict my actions because of these self-made principles that I impose on myself. I needed to struggle with these temptations, as I call it. To witness how easy it is for people to fall into the trap of impulse is the cost of walking towards my own idea of righteousness of virtue. It has been taking a toll on my perception of the world and of myself.

But carrying on is the only correct response in the midst of this difficulty.

2025-04-15

2025-04-15T00:00:00.000Z

I've been terribly sick in the past few days. I was unable to log my thoughts during those days because of the fact that temperature reached above 37 degrees Celsius. Any attempt at deep thinking resulted to dizziness and further confusion.

I am still in the process of recovering. The main reason is due to the tremendous heat this summer has been.

2025-04-12

2025-04-12T00:00:00.000Z

I might be piecing together my personal truth in pursuit of the universal. Since I started with Hegel, everything, the world and myself became increasingly dialectical. This brings me a certain mode of reality in which I understand the world. Also, it almost makes me feel like I am going away from everything else.

Since I have been talking a whole lot about spirituality and humanity itself, it feels like I am (or at least some speck of an idea in my mind is) trying to emerge from an impasse. I wanted to claim that everything about the world can be understood completely by understanding (and with this, saying that everything is parallel to) the self.

A lot of what I am trying to think of and realize is that the Self as the Other is one of the absolute truths in the world that is also dynamic. How we relate to the world (to other people and its contents) is also how we relate to ourselves, which is influenced by and is being influenced with every interaction that we make in this world. Every decision, every ounce of thought, accounts for a worldview that has been allowing us to perceive the world using a type of unique amalgamated language that we have made as our own perspective.

This came about as my personal belief system has been challenged by a good and true Christian. My contention is that we are having modern misreadings of The Bible that is becoming less and less relevant as the world changes. I am not sure about how and when Christianity reach a milestone where some belief and faith reach a certain required "reinterpretation" because of how the world is progressing but I do believe that any person who believe the sacred text word for word to be timeless is ought to be derailed on a misguided application of the faith.

It is not that I deny everything Christianity stands for. I just think that perhaps, even with some good intentions, we must still allow for some time to stop and think to reconsider the texts as we observe how the world is turning out to be right before our very eyes.

2025-04-11

2025-04-11T00:00:00.000Z

I had to pause for a minute to absorb these two paragraphs: above are the words from Stephen Houlgate and the block quoted passage below is from Hegel.

I've thought about this before when I tried to define my own idea of belief and lately when I am absorbed in thinking about my own decisions and catching my responses to it. I think it really helped me to have an ideal definition of who I want to be because it is perhaps what Hegel has been wanting: to have an ideal purpose of Geist, which is an ideal in itself, directing it towards self-understanding and recognition of the freedom of Geist.

In some sense, it can be oversimplified in "just having a plan and direction" that one will be able to propel oneself towards it. But I understand that it is more than that where every single person has this potential (which is a word that wholly embraces its own definition, to emphasize its weight and usage in Hegel's terms) that is inherently there that is waiting to be recognized, realized, and manifested. In the process of initiating that potential comes the dialectic push and pull of the self and the world in achieving that potential.

It surprises me that I have already been thinking this way, creating a meta reaction within me because this realization itself, this experience that I am having right now is what Hegel has been describing. It almost feels like divine revelation that is in some way, a type of consciousness that I have always imagined but never fully understand. I am experiencing once again that mid-state between knowing and unknowing, where this tension between "I know" and "I don't know" comes from my cognitive starting point "I can't possibly know for sure" even if I have an intuition developed at the back of my head. What is often left for me to do is to confirm that assessment and look for evidences that would support my intuition. I can't claim that "I know" when I don't have the materials to support that I know.

Perhaps it is deferring understanding and prioritizing perception over intuition. But at the same time, intuition is the guide that allows its confirmation through perception. By prioritizing perception, it allows the ideal of intuition to form and solidify to what is more true than just merely an initial assumption.

2025-04-10

2025-04-10T00:00:00.000Z

I used to hold the belief that most of what we know are self-soothing fabrications of a world that we understand. In this way, we can learn how to live with nothingness by creating more artificiality in the world. In a sense, I think that Truth is Nothingness itself. This is more of an interpretation of Heidegger's das nichts. I am not yet sure if this some type of epistemological pessimism or if this idea is still something that I have been holding on to. To respond to that previous sentence, perhaps, partly, I still believe that this nothingness is what still governs us, which also allows us to pursue a symbolic ideal that we use to substitute to this void.

Let me sit through this quite another recognition of the void within me.

2025-04-09

2025-04-09T00:00:00.000Z

As I continue this study of Hegel, (First of all, I think I made a great choice in starting with Houlgate. This book contextualizes so much that I am often finding myself going to tangents. What I mean to say is that it feels like the concepts are starting to form in my head that they have their own direction after becoming a thought.) I am starting to connect the loose ends between each idea in my head that have been left uncategorized in my brain. I would say that I am probably a Hegelian and I didn't even know it. Following this experience, I was also probably a Kantian in a sense of recognizing the existence of the noumena.

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I posted this six years ago with the understanding that all that we perceive of the world are all constructs. The world for me is a multi-layered appearances of language in which we project our own identity, carrying all beliefs and understanding that there must be something rather than nothing.

"I learned that we approach every thing through a web of relationships and differences but never by approaching itself directly as a thing-in-itself."

I just understood what this means and perhaps it was the very foundation that I am operating in this world prior to my understanding of it. I felt like I am only understanding myself intellectually after all these years. Roots begin to emerge into a more sensible whole. Nietzsche becomes a comfort read compared to Kant and Hegel. This can of worms is something I'm still about to open but I'm learning to see through the cracks. I've never felt more intellectually alive.

2025-04-08

2025-04-08T00:00:00.000Z

Cinematic violence has become another topic at the back of my head, taking roots from, again, my recent experience with Adolescence. At this point, I have reached the thought that I may only be using this event as an exercise to throw real-world issues into abstractions because what I will do next is to mention another movie that is also a social commentary about right-wing ideology: Soft & Quiet (2022).

I watched it last September and ever since then, I refused to make a definitive take on what I think about the movie. It is basically a one-take film (seemingly, since there were invisible cuts in some sections) that tries to immerse you into following a group of white racist women commit a hate crime. Needless to say, it was a difficult watch as you as the viewer, passively becoming a complicit audience to this crime, is forced to see the escalation of harm from ideation to execution. Eventually, it went spiraling down into a chaotic nightmarish violence that is too close to the possibility of it happening in the real world; only because of the fact that it is already happening.

Now, I think the movie isn't meant for everyone and I would say that even if it may look like a defense, one can still like the movie for what it has achieved: the technical aspects of its cinematography, the ambiguous too "in the nose" caricature of these women's behaviors and thought processes, and uncompromising display of evil that we can trace to real life. I think it has done great for what it wants to do. But then I know that another question must also be answered: Is this movie necessary?

I have went through dozens of reviews about this movie and it is an understatement to say that it is very divisive. The negative reviews are overwhelming and I can say that I understand and they do have a point. The movie doesn't tell us anything new. We all knew that this is already happening. At some point it went too far to become "trauma porn" towards the end.

Why was this movie made and how much accountability does it have when it comes to portraying a hate crime cinematically and in consideration to those who have suffered and survived such evil acts? Based on the narrative and the structure of the film, the story beats are deliberate and decisive up to the point that some actions done in the final act become ethically questionable within and outside of the film. But at the same time, those acts are so ridiculous that I can imagine the sort of people capable of doing them are the same ones that I am watching on screen.

Then why can't it be implied? For the safety of the viewers, and the people who have experienced the violence on screen, why can't it be left out and take the route of still making it happen off-screen. So it is clear that since it didn't happen that way, a directorial decision was made. They wanted to show it.

So let me dial back to Adolescence, where the crime was shown via a CCTV footage in the scene where the evidence is shown to the accused. That's the only hard violence that we were shown and that was enough to make the point of murder. The events leading up to the murder were through an exposition in the form of interrogation. There were no POV shots and no flashbacks. Just pure understanding of the mind of a child capable of murder.

I think this is a better way to handle violence. It clearly shows thoughtful consideration of its audience since it was planned to release on Netflix. Mainstream audiences will always get a hold of it, which also explains that for such a show with meticulous craft and heavy-hitting social commentary as its subject, people will struggle to understand its message. But at the end of the day, it is undeniable that the message of the show is clear and why it was made.

Going back to Soft & Quiet, I think I understand why it was made and why it decided to show what it showed. But I guess I wanted to reflect more on why I am drawn to these kinds of movies, at least at the point of showing the darker parts of humanity. The movie just plainly showed what is happening. There were no judgments made or implied. These types of people exist in the world and we share our lives with them as complete strangers. That is the horror.

But the more I look into it, I can't help but think that my perspective cannot be the definitive take about this movie. I fear that I am trying to intellectualize it too much to the point of making the whole story a piece of cinema. I don't know if this comes at the cost of becoming removed from the reality of white supremacy and only making myself feel better that I am not one of those people on the screen.

2025-04-07

2025-04-07T00:00:00.000Z

It may be an abrupt break but recently, I have stopped ruminating about God, faith, and freedom. Hegel also went to the backseat because Adolescence has been running in my mind all day.

I believe that it is already clear to me what the show is about. Who is it for and why it was made are already set and defined in my mind as I've also been waiting for a show like this to be made. Almost two years earlier, I've been exposed to the "manosphere" ideology that has been rampant on social media. Micro celebrities, who are men, espousing these ideas and reeking of misogyny has been influencing young men about a kind of worldview that satisfies a kind of male insecurity that is most likely rooted due to an emotional misunderstanding of feminism.

It is also probably because I can say that I spend too much time online that I come across these people, and the online personalities that I am exposed to has frequently reacted to the stupidity of these ideas. Some have went into debate streams, some YouTube channels also try to create a space where this ideology rooted in misogyny can be put under a critical spotlight. However, all those efforts didn't seem to have come into fruition because those conversations often end up being emotional and confrontational. Every one ends up agreeing to disagree, solidifying those divide because, honestly, the left can also be emotional and passionate, adding more fuel to this fire.

The thing is, everything hinges on the refusal of toxic masculinity to recognize its own insecurity. It has become its own consciousness seen through this manosphere culture. It has resulted to a distorted perspective of Stoicism, the rise of the alpha and sigma males, the Chad, which are all conservative versions of masculinity. Older men push the idea that women are these objects that men must conquer, or else they would be virgins throughout their life.

I do think that young men are thirsty for a good model for masculinity, and we don't have that clear-cut simple definition of what a man is. Instinctively, young men still believe that a man MUST be a protector, a warrior, a hunter, emotionless in the face of struggle, this ideal image of authority. In this age of social media, these manosphere influencers are the most immediate sources of information available to them causing this perfect storm of cultural regression towards the toxic masculinity that feminism has been pushing hard against.

Perhaps this is also an indication that the traditional idea of masculinity has been abolished and those who have been holding on and benefited from its old definition are trying to build it back up, restoring the old regime.

2025-04-06

2025-04-06T00:00:00.000Z

Every single day that passes, I become more convinced that the way to understand others is to understand the self. The inverse is also true and is possible. In which way, we would want to know other people and be known, will come down to preference and upbringing. In both cases, it is only important to acknowledge that in understanding the world, we all need each other as entrances and exits and as portals to have a deeper understanding of all the relationships that we can think of in this universe.

Even solipsism is a denial of the consciousness of an Other, where, in this framework, the concept of an Other still exists to provide that definition. Everything is relational and those relationships shape how we view the world in our own little brains.

Fatima and I just watched Adolescence yesterday, which is a 4-part mini-series in Netflix about a 13 year-old boy who was accused of murdering his girl schoolmate. Now, without talking too much about the story, it is character-driven and dialogue heavy as all four episodes were shot in a single take. Needless to say, the immersion was there, immediately pulling you into the case of this young man and the reactions of people around him. His family, his friends, and the police are all deeply connected through dialogue because of the single take. The screenplay itself was able to convey a lot of information in such short exchanges. The mood shifts in certain responses. Body language are free but emphasized.

But I see a lot of reactions online that do not align with what the show is trying to achieve. It is obviously discussing the effects of online culture of toxic masculinity, particularly the online "manosphere" ideology. I am astounded how much viewers of the show missed the entire point. Some expected a courtroom drama and an extended POV of the victim, which shows a type of understanding that 4 episodes are not enough. Some felt that the show had no plot, that it was boring, and somehow promotes further hate on men. These things are all ridiculous with how much the show is pointing towards the other way. It made me think what people expect from such shows that primarily delve on social commentary. And i just can't take it. I refuse to think that people are just this stupid.

Some find justifications as to why the girl was killed and it was because she herself was a bitch, which therefore warranted her death. It is all so stupid and it makes me more upset than what the show is trying to tell. If anything, the show has put an exact picture of the current reality of the social landscape in the age of social media and people are refusing to recognize it by deliberately missing the point. They decide to miss the point because they refuse to confront the type of reality where they see themselves in and deny that they are affected by it in the same way that the show is depicting. Psychologically speaking, this is a type of self-denial that is very difficult to confront on your own. This realization hurts the brain, which always find ways to deflect. In the same way that the accused boy exercised his mental gymnastics as he was being questioned by his psychologist. The show deeply delves in what is being said and what is not being said to both paint a picture of the early stages of a manipulative personality. It also shows the sad case of justifying one's own criminal actions.

The show did everything correctly but the mass reception of it fell short to the message it tried to convey. It is just sad.

2025-04-05

2025-04-05T00:00:00.000Z

Faith is within the realm of unknowing. Without the concept of God, it is only a trust in the universe that everything will turn out good in the end. Faith is possible without the concept of God because we have the self. In this case, the self must be conceived not as a substitute for God but as another avenue in which faith can be conceived. In conceiving faith through the self, it happens as an unyielding understanding that everything that you can know, is something that you already know and you just don't know it yet. Faith becomes a process of aligning with your own complete self as it goes through the process of completion. It becomes a self-willing image that is only possible by believing in the self. Yet, this faces a huge pitfall of overconfidence and hubris, which must be carefully treaded because of their inevitability throughout this process. Hubris must not be avoided but only confronted. It is a path of overcoming the self as it actualizes itself to be its complete form in order for it to successfully function as the substitute for a faith that is formed by a belief in God.

With all my current experiences with journeying through the Christian faith, I believe it is necessary for me to keep in touch with the belief that I have always felt myself at home with. That is with the self and its possible means for transcendence. I do not wish to reappropriate Christian ideas into my own personal framework of the world but I still want to test if I am still capable of conceptually removing my mind out of the Christian belief system to get rid of any possible biases that I might have as I become comfortable with it.

2025-04-04

2025-04-04T00:00:00.000Z

There was that theme again: flexibility. I had thought about this idea a couple of times now when I used to talk about consistency and routine. Now, I'm seeing it within the definition that I gave for faith (at least in a way that makes sense to me outside the realm of religion and spirituality). A lot of thoughts are swirling in my head regarding this approach to knowing, which is also unknowing in itself. I feel like I surrender myself to something that I already know. It feels like I know that I know but I choose not to realize it in the surface of my consciousness. Psychologically, it already makes its nature known, which is something in between my fears and anxieties. However, I know that being afraid of something is more about the reason behind the fear than the actual object being feared.

I would allow this thought to permeate my reality through the weekend. I think I am in a slow processing mood for a bigger theme for this month.

2025-04-03

2025-04-03T00:00:00.000Z

I'm wondering if there is a force that I must overcome this month. As it has happened, it almost seems like I am having a bigger perspective in terms of making sense of my life situation as an overarching theme with each month that passes. I would like to understand as well what are the experiential implications of having such perspective. At times, it makes me feel more myopic than to insist on living life day after day. Looking at it as a whole chapter, watching it unravel, is a lot more hopeful, but also a bit of a gambler's dilemma. It requires me to plan but also to be flexible when it is necessary. I need to mull this over.

2025-04-02

2025-04-02T00:00:00.000Z

I've actually started my journey with Hegel today. I picked Stephen Houlgate's An Introduction to Hegel: Freedom, Truth, and History as my doorway to Hegel and with this screenshot, I am surprised to find Dietrich Bonhoeffer actually being associated with him.

In hindsight, it actually makes sense how he talks about the costs of discipleship. What I recognize something Hegelian about it is (and still, with my limited and possibly, misinformed understanding of Hegel) the dialectic relationship of Christian faith in relationship to one's self, particularly, by defining the "negative" aspect of discipleship as living the life prescribed by Jesus in The New Testament, which is full of negation of the self. In the same way, it is very much likely that I view spiritual growth in the same manner, where it is a dialectical relationship between the immovable spirit larger than the self, and the ever-dynamic ebbs and flows of the fluidity of human personality.

What I get from this revelation is that I am actually in the right track. Houlgate's introduction actually proceeds naming Derrida as one of the philosophers who had sprung due to Hegel's philosophy. Kierkegaard's Christian existentialism is a response against Hegel (as what I was told, at least), and both are philosophers who have been a constant in forming my own personal beliefs. It feels good to actually feel like I am tracing the roots of my own ways of thinking. This only confirms that I am headed the right way as more familiar faces come up from time to time.

2025-04-01

2025-04-01T00:00:00.000Z

Let's try and set the direction for this month. This will be a month in an attempt to understand Hegel. At least to have a better understanding of his concepts to how I used to before. Since it was revealed to me that Hegel is a "Christian thinker," I thought it is best to continue this path of discovery. My intuition tells me that I must first try to actually have a good grasp on Western Idealism. To be honest, I still don't know what this means but let me add that to the list of I must revisit.

My focus on Christianity last month is something that I have accepted to be one of the becoming constants in my life. I think it will have a permanent foothold in forming my personal beliefs moving forward. In my attempts to grapple with freedom and transcendence, perhaps Hegel is overdue.

So I have been reading Jon Stewart's Hegel's Interpretation of the Religions of the World. So far, it has been riveting to a point that I find myself agreeing with the dialectical and historical approach to understanding God through the religions that have emerged. I think this would deeply help me get the answers that I need in the correct context and language.

April will be a tough hill to climb. But I believe that I can use the tools that I have learned in cultivating a habit and mental discipline to climb this mountain of idealism.

2025-03-31

2025-03-31T00:00:00.000Z

I am peeking a bit into Hegel lately. Paused Spinoza for a while because of the sheer density of ideas that I think I must simmer first before actually continuing. But reflecting on what I have learned so far, I am starting to feel a departure from his framework. I don't think that this is coming from a place of understanding. By this, I mean that I don't think that my ideas are solely Spinozist, which has been how I hold my beliefs to myself. As I start my reading of Hegel, I start to see similar patterns of dialectic thought that has shaped my cognitive practice since graduating from university. And as I have been immersing myself to Spinoza's Ethics, I start to understand that this framework is what I desire to achieve. To make it more clear by what I mean with "departure," I understand that Spinoza's concepts are not yet what I am following, but Hegel's in terms of procedural development.

I found that Spinoza works backwards. From the conception of the universe in a top to bottom approach. Hegel works in a three-dimensional approach where we have two polarities that are relational and define each other that progresses in time towards a singularity. This might be the most simplistic and misinformed understanding of Hegel's dialectics but it is how I make sense of it in my head right now.

April would seem like another month of rediscovery and reframing. This month has been all about religion, spirituality, and the universe. Some thoughts about my personal relationships has been left into the sidelines. This is one of the polarity that I must check on myself with in the coming weeks. A lot of the world right now makes sense in the form of signals. It can be a TV show, a movie, a book, and even a memory. But everything makes sense. I feel like I am growing more sensitive to the motions of the earth. I am taking this opportunity to retrieve my lost focus since February. I am confident that the engine to leave this conceptual space is set even if they are still incomplete. I trust that this is enough for me to make a considerable move forward and take me to a place that can hold everything I carry.

2025-03-30

2025-03-30T00:00:00.000Z

I saw this YouTube video earlier, which is about something that have been glossing over my head. The video touches on romantic attraction towards fictional characters but at its core, it delves into the human psyche and our need for external validation. Or to put it more specific, how the self will always require an intersubjective experience.

I do not know the entire hard philosophy regarding this but I assume it is somewhere along the line of epistemology, ontology, and phenomenology. Near at the end of the video, Daryl talks about "Tulpas" which can be roughly defined and likened to "imaginary friends." The point is, there is an online culture surrounding a form of self-delusion also called "reality shifting" that involves intense visualizing, which is to a point, a self-induced hallucination and dissociation that we can describe as a deliberate and intense form of daydreaming.

How is this connected to our need for validation? Well for one, these online communities are seeking a form of reality that they desire, which is, according to them, can be imagined by the mind, allowing them to daydream at will and walk around this world as a conscious being. It is, as if an inverse of lucid dreaming. Tulpas somehow function as a conceptual person in a person's psyche who has its own personality and appearance. Tulpas are deliberately imagined, molded, and "created" by the person in their own mind. They act as the "voice of reason" of even just another person in someone's body sharing the same brain.

In the video, it seemed like these methods are a reaction to either extreme isolation due to social ineptitude or ostracization. They become the response to desire to live in a world that they chose instead of living in a world that doesn't choose them. It deeply caught my attention because somehow, I agree that there might be, in some instances, "different persons" living inside me. But they are not created for a means to escape. They sprung into existence by experiencing the struggles that I have come to address and overcome. They were the result of accepting the challenges of life and proceed to take the right and virtuous path without shortcuts.

Now, I think I must step back because I wouldn't want this to become a "I am different from them because I've dedicated my self-improvements for intellectual pursuit" bullshit. From the previous paragraph, I felt the need to differentiate myself from other people whose intention to "create another person inside their head" is to escape a world that they believe has forsaken them. It could be a defense mechanism or a trauma response, which are also consequences of their life experiences. I must be careful with my cognitive biases.

Well, then perhaps, my interest is rooted on recognizing a similarity in method of how I am trying to improve myself. I know I need this disembodied voice that has always been at the back of my head all along. I have always believed that everyone should have a version of this to help themselves work through a form of suffering that they are going through. But I did feel a melancholic sense of pity upon knowing that such things exist because I know I understand and I cannot blame them for looking for alternative ways of living in this world.

2025-03-29

2025-03-29T00:00:00.000Z

There's a density to the current line of inquiry that feels qualitatively different. Moving through Spinoza's propositions, trying to hold the architecture of his thought alongside the questions emerging from theological reflections – it demands a focus that strains the edges of the daily practice. The mind wants to settle, to follow one path deeply, but the nature of this project seems to require holding multiple, potentially conflicting frameworks in view simultaneously. How does one reconcile the stark, logical necessity unfolding in the Ethics with the concept of grace, or the leap required for faith?

It's not just about understanding each system on its own terms, but discerning the points of potential contact, the frictions, the ways they might illuminate or obscure each other. This process feels less like mapping known territory and more like navigating by constellations that shift depending on where you stand. The risk is superficial comparison, forcing connections that aren't truly there, or worse, abandoning the rigor required by each distinct mode of thought in favor of a muddled compromise.

This intellectual weight inevitably brings the question of sustainability back to the surface. The fatigue that characterized parts of February feels like a shadow, a reminder that pushing too hard on complex integrations without allowing space for assimilation can lead to diminishing returns. Perhaps progress here isn't measured by daily output or breakthroughs, but by the slower, almost geological process of letting these vast ideas settle, erode, and reshape the internal landscape.

The desire to articulate, to pin down understanding in writing each day, sometimes feels at odds with the very nature of the concepts being explored – concepts like transcendence or the infinite substance, which seem to demand contemplation as much as analysis. Maybe the task now isn't just to think through these ideas daily, but to learn how to live with their weight, their unresolved questions, allowing the understanding to mature at its own pace, even if that means some days are marked more by quiet consideration than by articulate progress. It requires a different kind of discipline – not just forcing the mind to work, but trusting the value of slower, deeper currents of thought.

2025-03-28

2025-03-28T00:00:00.000Z

Reading a fragment from Derrida's "Force and Signification" this morning, and it strikes a familiar, unsettling chord. "Speaking frightens me because, by never saying enough, I also say too much." This cuts close. It resonates deeply with that persistent anxiety around communication, the one therapy began to uncover – the feeling that the gap between internal complexity and external articulation is fundamentally unbridgeable, yet the attempt itself risks unintended exposure, a misrepresentation that feels like its own kind of violation. Never saying enough: the inadequacy, the inevitable simplification, the failure to capture the nuance. Saying too much: the excess meaning spilling over, the interpretations beyond control, the vulnerability of being misunderstood, perhaps more profoundly than if one had remained silent.

It's a fear I recognize in my own past reliance on obscurity, a defense mechanism against this very paradox. If clarity is impossible and always risks saying too much in the wrong way, then perhaps deliberate obfuscation felt safer, paradoxically allowing a different kind of communication, one reliant on resonance rather than precision. But that path proved hollow, a denial of responsibility.

And then Derrida tightens the screw: "...if the necessity of becoming breath or speech restricts meaning—and our responsibility for it—writing restricts and constrains speech further still." This throws the current project, these daily logs, into a stark, perhaps uncomfortable light. This act of writing, this daily attempt to pin down thoughts, to engage in self-examination and build a deliberate self through inscription – is it merely compounding the restriction? If speech already filters and potentially distorts the flow of thought or being (the ruah he mentions, that breath/spirit), does writing – this fixing onto the page, this creation of a "second body" as Seymour put it The point of it all – impose an even harsher constraint?

Does this daily practice, intended to foster clarity and self-knowledge, actually lead further away from the living thought by subjecting it to the rigid structure of written language? Am I creating a more refined understanding, or just a more meticulously constructed cage? The responsibility weighs differently here. In speech, the context, the immediacy, allows for some fluidity. Writing feels more permanent, more starkly presented, demanding a different kind of accountability for its inevitable failures to capture the whole.

It circles back to that tension between the desire for authentic expression and the inherent limitations of the medium. The journey isn't just about discovering what's inside, but grappling with the flawed tools we have to articulate it, to ourselves and potentially to others. This fear Derrida voices isn't a reason to stop, perhaps, but a necessary awareness to carry – the knowledge that every act of signification, speaking or writing, is fraught with this anguish, this responsibility for meaning that can never be fully controlled or contained. Another layer of complexity to navigate, another reason why the path requires constant vigilance against self-delusion. The work continues, but with a renewed sense of its inherent precarity.

2025-03-27

2025-03-27T00:00:00.000Z

A dense introspection occurred lately. This one is fueled by a momentary doubt that is a reaction based on fear of being a hypocrite. I asked myself if, with all my attempts to define a life worth living and to practice living a virtuous life, am I displaying a sense of covert narcissism that is self-aware, allowing itself to blend into the background of my thoughts and operating under the guise of self-improvement? Is this how Descartes doubted his thoughts as the devil's work? Only that I know that this is a fleeting thought, I am also cautious of what my next steps are. Since I have briefly touched upon my problem with transcendence and stopped when I noticed that I am treading on uncharted waters, I decided to take some time to let it all in.

So far, here's what I have gotten:

Transcendence as a full transformation, that is, a complete change of a human into a higher being is idealistically impossible because of physical corporeality. Immortality as an aspect of transcendence is incorrect insofar as it only transcends corporeality. We want a holistic transcendence of the physical, intellectual, and spiritual.
Would this then mean that we are limited to a human transformation instead and transcendence is impossible? Not at all. The path of physical transformation in humans that would allow transcendence to happen is in death, and supported by a mature intellect (a wise, enlightened human), and a mature spirit. this This path of transcendence is towards a self-sacrifice for an idea. It doesn't have to be noble. It doesn't have to be lofty. One only needs to act based on the idea itself, technically being the embodiment of it, becoming it, and living and dying for it.
This is transcendence is becoming as an enduring idea beyond death.

2025-03-26

2025-03-26T00:00:00.000Z

Confidence in one's own idea as the absolute truth astounds me. When I see this attitude towards truth being exemplified by some people I see, I am met with a certain type of defeat that paralyzes my reasoning. How do these people can say for certain that what they think is the truth? Even at least without acknowledging that there is a huge possibility that they could be wrong? Alongside this sense of defeat, I am also feeling a strong frustration that exposes my own intellectual arrogance with the thought that this lack of intellectual humility is also a huge factor that sets humanity back from progressing.

Unexamined logical fallacies are being thrown in these supposed "debates" that we see online. Pitting one group of people against another who hold the opposite perspective from the other. While the "goal" of finding a common ground is one of the desirable outcomes that we want for people to start collaborating, it proliferates the idea that arguing is a valid method in which these things can be resolved. It sets an illusion under the guise of entertainment--despite valid points are being thrown around but their impact does not last because much of these conversations become myopic within five minutes. Jargons get thrown around, statistics (often unverified) are carelessly dropped as if it's a symbol of truth, anecdotal evidences are always being treated as a placeholder for truth, and the list goes on.

What we need is a Socratic dialogue that allows for refinement of thought and idea. Even if I know that this is more idealistic than what we have right now because of the various perspectives, each having their own respective biases and emotional attachment with these ideologies, these conversations must also be held responsibly by being emotionally and intellectually mature humans. The last thing that we should always want to do during an argument is to nitpick information, use that against the other person because of the simple fact that it is the lowest hanging fruit in an argument. The emotional hijacking has always been too visible. A lot of times, I get too fed up on watching people talk like this without being aware. A lot of times, it's just too much to accept that we have become like this. All of this is just a major disappointment.

2025-03-25

2026-03-25T00:00:00.000Z

Transcendence is such a tough idea to crack. I match this desire to know and define it on my own terms first then looking at the available philosophies that already exist. This method allows me to present my own biases to myself, to examine first what my line of thinking tells me about myself, what I want to know, and the possible reasons why I want to know them. It helps me to better align myself first with my own relationship with the concept before I actually engage with how the world has defined it. It may be considered as the inverse tabula rasa method of learning where it would require me to understand what the world has said before I interpret what I want to know about what the world says to make my own definition.

Doing my own process of understanding concepts has allowed me to better situate them within the following aspects of my life: who I am, who I've been, who I want to be, and what these things tell me about who I am now. Admittedly, this is a truly self-centric approach because I take on the things that I know to be the starting point. Perhaps this is not the way for the initial attempt to philosophize the world. I can say that I am operating under the assumption that I am trying to unlearn what I know and unravel more clearly the underlying thoughts, motivations, and possible insecurities that surround my psyche.

Lately, all these ramblings about transcendence, transformation, human nature, and selfhood is triggered by my own relationship with my partner, my family, and with my relationship with God and godhood itself. I am going back once again to re-examine all these things in an attempt to grapple with the idea of freedom that surmounts my desire to break through my current understanding of all these relationships that I have established so far. I know that there is an interconnectedness among all these things that I am still blinded by.

Yet, as what yesterday's thought has told me, I am most likely dissatisfied by the definition of humanity as only being a transformative being within its own definition. A human can be various things but being trapped by that definition, it will still remain to be human. The path to transcendence reconciles this deadlock. But I am still unsure of the prerequisites and the outcomes that would entail that a transcendence has happened. The Christian cosmology is one that is founded on transcendence as God is separate from the World. The creator being separated from what is created. Transcendence lies in between those elements: between the creator and the created. My only hint in what must constitute transcendence to be a fact in this worldview is the occurrence of Jesus as the Incarnation. This entails that God has a process that enables Him to accomplish this transit: from divine to human. There must be a path, that is not a clear one but is most likely spiritual in nature, that allows humans to become god, or a part of god as well.

In the Scriptures, it is evident that this path is Jesus himself. And this path that we are talking about is a way of life by being Christlike. This encapsulates a particular way of living that covers ethical and philosophical grounds that must be practiced in the world and compounded by faith. This narrow path requires immense sacrifice of the self, emphasizing more of an individual's spiritual maturity, preceded by the mental and the physical. Yet, Christianity, as far as I am aware has provided this path. Buddhism's Nirvana opens a type of projection towards a "divine self" that one encounters through meditation that may show similarities with the Christian way of transcendence. With all of these mentioned, I think I might need to step back and evaluate these thoughts as I might lead myself astray. I must first validate these thoughts to see which align with the actual sources and then return with a better understanding of how transcendence, in this level works.

2025-03-24

2025-03-24T00:00:00.000Z

Freedom in practice implies radical acts because it is the ultimate expression of man: to break free from the curse in all its physicality. From thoughts, refinement, to desire and its externalization. A thought expressed to sublate that contradiction.

Is breaking free from the curse the goal? In a sense, we must exorcise the chains that bind us from attaining true freedom. However, this is still operating within the definition that we identify freedom as one of the essences of what it means to be human. But there is another possibility of defining humanity that does not entail transcendence but is capable of becoming something else. That is, a type of transformation that makes human a multifaceted being, capable of transforming itself within its various forms.

Perhaps this is already the title in which we want to call ourselves as we progress in life. A writer, a carpenter, a business analyst, a mother, a disciple of God, and so on. These transformations may occur at various stages in life that does not constitute an overall change in one's constitution. One may become many and singular at the same time. But in this case, we do not seek to define humanity. Humanity becomes defined and it is transformation and transcendence that we want to define. However, transformation may fit this definition of humanity but transcendence still does not satisfy the scope of change that is being done in this definition of humanity as a self-transcending subject.

Humanity in this definition becomes an umbrella of concepts for a plethora of beings. It becomes a collection of possible outcomes that almost contradict itself on its own definition because it may contain the possibility of defining a human that is animal-like. It becomes a perpetual self-morphing being that is free to become anything but still remains subtly human because of that essential fact.

Is this one of the ways in how freedom can be defined in human terms? It affirms human transformation but transcendence still remains unanswered.

2025-03-23

2025-03-23T00:00:00.000Z

I keep talking about what it means to be human^[1]^[2]^[3]^[4]^[5] and it has been one of the constant themes that I have been grappling throughout this exercise. It is something that I am aware that resists definition but is always something I have an itch to refine. Everyday, there is a nagging thought about existence whenever there is a tiny nudge of mundane that reminds me of how I should be. Preparing my coffee, eating my breakfast, seeing other people on the news, the consequences of road rage, the circus of the nation's politics, social media interactions--I feel plagued by this reminder because I see humanity and its shortcomings everywhere outside me and inside me.

And yesterday made it clear that my own grappling with this idea has this dimension of transcendence. My current experience with understanding the divine juxtaposes a boundary, a limitation, and difference between being human and being divine. I feel that I a closer to a conceptual breakthrough that may not be original, but a historic moment in my own cognition.

If man is condemned to be free, then it is in our nature to wrestle with the concept of freedom. It is a curse that can only be broken by pursuing Truth. In the Christian tradition, breaking free from this curse by Sartre, can be achieved by doing acts that points towards salvation. It is in being Christ-like that one achieves this freedom: to be one with God. But in this sense, it is unclear where the "human" disappears and where the "divine" begins as a mode of existence of something that transcends. I feel like there is a missing link in Christian theology how man transcends through salvation despite having a clear and outlined path towards it. It is strict to define that salvation is a "union with God" and is not a path towards godhood or divinity.

This implies that an attempt at godhood is impossible. It is in the nature of man to grapple with freedom and a reconciliation of that inherent existential dilemma, being absolved from that tension requires a different sensibility of being that is outside the definition of being human. But I sense that this trap in logic, the idea that transformation constitutes change in an atomic level, that seeks to completely take an object and make it into something entirely different, is false. Perhaps it is in the transitory nature of transformation where the "in-between" exists. From human to divine, this transformation requires an in-between state where the fusion occurs. It is the doorway from one place to another. Crossing that boundary is important because it cannot happen without that threshold and it is also the same passage from which we can break away from the curse of freedom and transcend being human.

2025-03-22

2025-03-22T00:00:00.000Z

I'm not well-versed in epistemology but I know that there is a valuable aspect of being human that we can learn in being aware that there are things in this world that are unknowable. To elaborate my yesterday's stance further, this position puts you in a mindset that allows you to remain intellectually humble while remaining open to the mysteries of life. As I think more about it, this may be a path towards a refusal to commit and refusing Pascal's wager because this sounds like one is not ready to pursue the possibility of nothingness despite everything that exists.

This position can be stated as the ambivalence towards the existence of God, a lack of conviction, and a certain agnosticism. But I would like to state that my point is otherwise and it is towards the affirmation of the divine. We only recognize that there are things that we cannot know, either by the limits of human knowledge or cognition or an absolute incapability of perceiving the world through the infinite possible ways of seeing. With all this, I still believe in the potential of human evolution. Science, art, and cultural progress has been taking us in leaps in the past decades despite the seeming slowness of it all. Perhaps it is still delicately slow but the significance of this progress is to push the limits of human capabilities. To redefine what it means to be human.

But if we continually evolve as a species, won't there be a time, take a thousands, millions, or billions of years, when we would have known everything about the universe?

I would answer this in two ways:

Yes, if we were able to know everything about the universe, in any way it made itself possible to our evolved human brains, it would mean that we have become God. Possibly, this is another version of singularity.
No, we won't be able to know everything about the universe because when we declare our absolute knowledge of it only reflects our understanding of it, not the entirety of it. In this case, unknowing or a version of ignorance is caused by knowing. We won't be able to transcend, we still remain human.

Seen from this lens, understanding the universe becomes a problem of transcendence and the belief in God.

2025-03-21

2025-03-21T00:00:00.000Z

We as humans have often sought for something bigger than ourselves. This act of seeking may lead most people into despair because more often than not, the object of seeking is substituted by one's myriad of biases. It is a kaleidoscope of false assumptions to what we want. Desire is an act of self-discovery. Prior to obtaining the object of desire, it is a mirage. This mirage is the idea of the object of desire: what we think we want.

We want love, happiness, recognition, truth, and even the whole world. But these things must first be filtered by our own perception. What do we think love is? By that definition, is it the true definition of love? What about understanding why love is the object of our desire? Is it more of recognition rather than love? What separates love from recognition? How can we know which is which? How can we know which one is what we truly want and we're not conflating it with other things? Do we want something because it makes us look better in the eyes of others? Is this a noble pursuit? Why would it be noble? Is what we think nobility truly means or are we just feeding our own narcissistic tendencies?

I mean, there are a lot of paths that we can take this line of questioning towards but perhaps this is also the crux of the matter when it comes to finding God. For a short answer, I can only say that The best position in pursuing God is to maintain the hiddenness and unknowability of God while forging a path towards affirming the existence of an unknowable void inside one's existence.

This is a position of meaning-making that is aligned to human nature and self-transcendence. The call of the void within is the call of the desire to know itself. Without that knowledge, God can become anything we want because of the failure to recognize the mirage that obfuscates our vision. Maintaining the idea that God is truly unknowable positions us to see the void in ourselves to humble ourselves and recognize that in each individual, there lies a desire to understand the world. That understanding must be weighed by the idea that one cannot understand the entirety of the world in one lifetime.

2025-03-20

2025-03-20T00:00:00.000Z

I want to write another poem. I think I am ready once again to weave words in an attempt to reach sublimity.

And I think I will have a better grasp at it. I used to throw words into the page into a full blind faith. I only hoped that they would eventually make sense. Jargons become meaningful if you put enough context around it to frame a meaning. These words are already charged so they bleed meaning all over the page wherever you put them. The density of the page causes the page to overflow with meaning because it cannot contain all the associations it has and eventually these meanings blend into other versions of truth. It is the perfect recipe for ambiguity and meaningfulness.

But now I think I know what I want to say and I want to give it another try. I want to surprise myself. But above everything, I want to rebuild my relationship with language itself.

2025-03-19

2025-03-18T00:00:00.000Z

It still feels good to be read. I did some things that allowed me to feel being seen. I keep going back to my later works and email correspondences with friends and despite my hostility to my own writing, I think there is still a solid hope in returning back to my practice.

I am cautiously concerned with this newfound perspective about spirituality and my wholly different view of writing. It may be something that I am too concerned of perfecting since I'm in the middle of fine-tuning my ideas, keeping myself in check in terms of accuracy of my thoughts and self-fragmentation. I just learned that my intention in writing the way I do wasn't all for nothing. I know I have turned my back to actually trying, which is a mindset that might loosely bring countless moments of hesitation before I even start doing anything.

But I want to also recognize and validate that part of me that I did good while I was doing what I think I do best: writing poems. I may try to gain and attempt to reach the same headspace that allowed me to write those kinds of things.

2025-03-18

2025-03-18T00:00:00.000Z

It's been a while since I read Milan Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being. I can't shake that immaculate title in my mind since the start of this week. I can't relate it to anything but again, to the cost of freedom.

There's always a chance that our concept of something is incomplete and oftentimes, our reality is masked by our own biases. It's not that it's something that we deliberately do. We conceive the world through our experience so the least path of resistance in thinking of the reality of the world is through our experiences, so it then follows that our thoughts are part of that experience.

At this point, I am inclined to think that thoughts are consequences of experiencing the world. It may be through this understanding that we ascribe our thoughts to significantly hold a value of truth because of our own perception. Since I can see, touch, and hear something, it must exist externally, and therefore to be true.

But at the same time, our inferences are often mistaken to be truth itself. This is when I turn to how I conceive of freedom. If the dictionary definition of freedom is "the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action," then it must follow that I can do everything. Free will means acting in accordance to my own agency. I have my own authority. I have the power to change things with just a single thought. I can do everything.

Then, we arrive at a problem. How can something so liberating and powerful be executed in such a simple thing as following the definition of the world? Why then, if it's so easy, it is also practically difficult to implement?

It is possible that this definition of the word freedom is true but then our immediate interpretation of it stems from the desire of being free from everything that holds us back from living the life we truly want. Free from worries, anxieties, and bonds from other people. Free from responsibilities and just arrive to a perpetual state of lightness of being. In another sense, this could only mean death. This paradox becomes self-evident. It is not freedom that we want but only an aspect of it. We do not want the weight that is inherent to living that particular desirable concept.

2025-03-17

2025-03-17T00:00:00.000Z

In my head, two things are revolving into a seeming paradoxical unity: free things and their costs. In the current age, the internet's mode of free exchange is through the user's data. If the digital service is free, you're paying it with your data, which is used by these apps to sell to their potential clients. Data at this point is quite synonymous with one's personhood. It represents one's desires, current status, anxieties, dreams, political stance, relationships, and almost every single thing that makes up our online persona. But as time progressed, we all know that the online world and the real world is blurring a pixel per day.

This made me reflect on this implications with how we approach free things in the real world and I realized how much of free things reveals our true self. Class status, psychological state, therefore we can infer desire, potential character profile, therefore desires, dreams, anxieties, who knows how deep this goes?

And then I extended this thought to freedom itself. What must we pay for freedom? And when can we say that we are truly free?

Salvation is free, but discipleship will cost you your life.
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I have been ruminating this thought ever since it was mentioned by Pastor Jared during the 9am service last Sunday. I know this to be true because this does not only apply to spirituality. A whole lot of things that are free in this world comes with a cost because that's how the world works: in perfect balance. There's the cost of knowledge: the pain of knowing. There's the cost of relationships: vulnerability. There is the cost of love: sacrifice. And all of these things are free. Monetary offerings are irrelevant. We pay through what we contain in our own self, something in exchange to make these bonds possible. In a sense, we conjure these bonds as if we are entering a social contract with other people, and ultimately with ourselves. Capitalism has made the mode of exchange blatantly concrete. I pay you with money, and you give me what I want. The commoditization of everything has blinded us of the true value that we have developed as a society. For every bond to be conjured, a monetary transaction must be made.

Then we are blind to the cost of freedom even if everyone desires it. We want freedom but are unwilling to pay the price of denying our self. Therefore, we get only the image of freedom: incomplete, treacherous, and false. We pay our way through it using money to simulate the idea of being free while we remain shackled by the same things that we use to buy false freedom in travelling, retail therapy, and even in human trafficking. This is also one of the reasons why these things are profitable. People know that there is a market because our desire to be free exposes the things that we want.

So I always come back to Sartre's famous existentialist quote: Man is condemned to be free. This paradox can be reconciled by the unknowing of what freedom truly means. We all search for avenues where we think we can attain freedom: through vices and other methods of escapism. In desiring to be free, we fail to recognize the real act of freedom. What is the real act? Perhaps, it is still living a life led by reason and virtue. Self-mastery and discipline will cost you a lot. But I still believe that in pursuing these things, it means a life that is in constant uncertainty. It will be a daily struggle between knowing and doing what is right at the moment against choosing to do what feels good to free you from the weight of dopamine imprisonment. You must always deny yourself of your own pleasures because you recognize that to do good, it must not always fall into your favor.

2025-03-16

2025-03-16T00:00:00.000Z

A lot of layers are being stripped off today. In life, career, and relationships. I just had this epiphany of before we arrive at Truth, a necessary false version of truth must be encountered. It is a test of discernment. Doubt is an internal struggle. An encounter of these falsehoods must be the cause of doubt. This is Descartes's method.

I am only ruminating on this idea because of the pastor's preaching this morning. While I am convinced that his approach to spiritual truth is true, I am concerned with how people are receiving his interpretation of the scriptures. In pursuing intellectual exercises of thinking about thought itself, I have become my own devil's advocate. There exists in me another being whose sole purpose is to contradict everything I am thinking: the interlocutor of doubt. So, while I was listening, the devil's advocate is active and I am surprised at how the same argument of the pastor can be made for malicious intent. Maybe "malicious" is not the right term but for those who are unaware that they are pursuing a falsehood of truth, its distortion is becoming their unwavering driving force to antagonize others. It is a process, and a difficult one, to strip yourself away from the worldly passions, especially in untangling yourself from your own worldly image. It is a path of rigorous self-analysis, criticism, and doubt. The only way to complete this process is an entire self-denial and a complete resignation that you are nothing. You are nothing because up until this realization, you are made by the world.

This is a tough task and it is a task that can only be accomplished when one surrenders to the internal struggle. To willingly face the conflicts head on with a mind that is prepared and has at least foreseen the levels of struggle required, lest one will walk away with pure disappointment. I want to know if the people I was with during that congregation is thinking the same thoughts as me. I want to understand how they make sense of the struggle required to walk the path of Christian discipleship. Doing it for yourself is hard enough. I wonder, what do others think of now that the premise of denying their selves is in doing it for God. This is still the ideas that I have been grappling with.

2025-03-15

2025-03-15T00:00:00.000Z

Yesterday's single-line log was in very obvious ways the total opposite of what I have been trying to achieve. Yet, at the same time, I can feel that it's one of those manifestations of being physically alone. My mind starts to wander off and it's been one of the rest days that fully dictates that rest is the priority. I am diving into this ocean of solitude and at the same time, I am one with the world. I do not know how it feels like floating inside a sensory deprivation tank but this must be how the mind can comprehend how moments of lucidity becomes a surrender to the waves of the world.

2025-03-14

2025-03-14T00:00:00.000Z

Physical solitude has been a recurring thought lately.

2025-03-13

2025-03-13T00:00:00.000Z

Already feels like I will have my ideal rest this weekend. All work that I've been mulling over last month has finally ended and it feels like the weight of being has been lifted off my shoulders. It has been that massive ball of existence that has been weighing on me for the reason that my duties have been eclipsed by this sense of mundane repetition.

A lot of days were spent into thinking what other things could I be doing besides this work that I have been doing in the past two years. My brain is craving for any novel activity that would also fulfill my reason to exist. It's really one of those long periods of rough patches that I knew I should just face in the slowness of everyday. It is ironic that in thinking my desire to speed up time because I want it all to be over, my experience became more of a focused attention to the seconds of the day. The thought of escapism always outweigh the passing of time, only adding to its density, distorting a moment to a looming dread of repetition.

But now, we are here in the weightlessness of being. At least, for a brief moment and in its perfect timing: the weekend is already in sight. No other nagging thought of postponing work for next week and no impending worries during the weekend about the work that I'll be doing for next week.

Freedom is truly earned. Nothing in the world would taste this sweet if it's just a given. The storms pass and the sky will show itself to you when the time is right.

2025-03-12

2025-03-12T00:00:00.000Z

Spinoza's Ethics is my main focus of study this week. For once, I have begun exercising a more distinct approach to logical thinking. Splitting things up to categories, calling each element into a cohesive hierarchy of things help me to organize my own way of thinking.

It was revealed to me that I always think in causation. That one thing must always be caused by another, forming a linear thought process. The inter-connectedness of things, in my mind, is governed by a starting point and its ending or closure. While I think that is still a helpful way to make sense of the world, it lacks the aspect of thinking in terms of immanence. That there is a way to unify everything while keeping each element separate by recognizing the specific qualities that makes them unique and by understanding their essence, therefore function as to why they exist.

Spinoza helps me understand this and as I go on from part 1 and deeper into his propositions (I'm now at IP11 after three days), I am feeling a different sense of understanding and relating. This coexistence with other people and in recognizing our sameness, allowing me to make sense of each person's reason for being there.

People become expressions of being. As representations of a thought, both as modes of thought and modes of extension as flesh. I would want to go deeper into this line of inquiry even though my head is already throbbing after a mere 5 pages of total density of thought and exercise in logic.

2025-03-11

2025-03-11T00:00:00.000Z

I am trying to make sense of my current experience of executing commitment and expecting more from myself. I am the rope in a tug-of-war between mediocrity and pressure that aims to have a satisfactory output that I can deliver. Those two things are not supposed to be equal but I have made this difficult for my thinking self to reconcile.

For some reason, I think I am putting this pressure on myself to lay the foundation for a chosen suffering. In the same sense that I think I am uncomfortable being comfortable. Writing logs everyday has become an automatic habit that became a part of me now and I must elevate things further now that I have made it easier for me to do. Comfort for me is my internal signal to change things up.

So my online algorithm has always been reminding me that consistency is a matter of showing up regardless of your performance. You can go through your day by just going through that day because we can't always expect 100% from us every single day. While there is a part of me that says and thinks that is true, I am not satisfied with it. Perhaps I can expect that kind of performance with other people and be okay with it. But I am not okay with it if I apply it to myself. Some would say that this is a mark of doing things with excellence but to me it stems with dissatisfaction. I also recognize that this attitude, at some point, is bound to become unhealthy. But this is also mediated by my relationship with time. In wanting to be great for my own self, choosing to a life of mediocrity under the guise of consistency is not enough for me. I would say that I am trying to achieve more things for me and this path to greatness as a human being is my own model become good at what I do. I just don't think that I have enough time to do what I want if I keep on trying to forgive myself for not doing enough.

2025-03-10

2025-03-10T00:00:00.000Z

Let's try a different format. I thought what it would mean to have a retrospective perspective on time and experience. Oftentimes, I find myself wondering, especially in times of mental fatigue and moments of despondency: will things get better if I just sleep this off?

Looking back has always been an activity that I am constantly doing. It is only possible after a certain time has passed. Looking back on events that happened a few hours ago sometimes lead to a superficial reading of events. And so, recently I am reminded more and more of the aesthetic distance when it comes to creation. I want to experiment with the transformative element of sleep in this equation of making-sense. I wonder what am I missing out on if I postpone my logs for a few hours.

I am struck with the dilemma of writing mediocre activities of the day or writing about a more meaningful piece every day. The difference between the two is the amount of effort and time it takes to satisfactorily create my log. On one hand, having these as different approaches in writing my logs make my writing process and mental load more easy. Writing at the end of the day before sleep is such a neat idea to have a concrete closure about the events that happened and all the thoughts I've encountered.

But lately, as I am being confronted by the practice of commitment in all angles, I feel like I must also commit to a certain level of commitment. And so I want to find that sweet spot--that balance between effort and desired quality of output. I believe that I have already fulfilled my commitment to consistency. But I know that I have also made some adjustments to achieve that consistency. I thought that in terms of experiential processing (the actual interpretation of the events of the day) and the moment of writing is too condensed. It feels like there is no time for subconscious thoughts to solidify a foundation of depth and enable me to look at things in better perspective where my mind is not forced or fatigued to make sense of the things that just happened.

I am taking this as another form of compassion for myself and an attempt to self-correct for better outcomes. This is another take at flexibility in the midst of commitment where I am committed to a goal and not the task itself. I do not know yet what this means but I trust myself that it will make sense soon.

2025-03-09

2025-03-09T00:00:00.000Z

A lot can be said about emptying oneself. It can point towards a certain "denial." A type of denial that does not result to erasure but creation. For years, I have approached this seemingly negative act of knowing in art. Every day, I want to learn more about knowing how decreation can be applied to every single aspect of life. I want to be one with nothingness.

2025-03-08

2025-03-08T00:00:00.000Z

Waking up today feels like I'm back home in my parents' house. Alone and a tad bit sweaty. But I'm waking up earlier recently. My body decides to choose reality an hour before my supposed scheduled alarm if it were a workday. Wakefulness today is also visited by a familiar feeling of dizziness, which is not brought by fatigue but by rest itself. At most, perhaps I had 5 hours of sleep but my actual moment of waking even felt more decisive that how I wake up during weekdays. I am not woken up by the 6am sunlight peeking through the window but by my body choosing to witness the gradual fading of the black sky to gray as the sun greets me a new day.

This feeling is not unwelcome but I find myself wanting this more than I thought I would. There are some things I want to do during this slow downtime of wakefulness. I am not rushed into collecting my thoughts for work. I am not forced to go down and prepare myself some breakfast and coffee. I just lied down and took my time to feel my soul back to my body until I get enough ounce of will to stand and decisively face the day on my own terms.

I am still in the process of trying to understand this unconscious change. I find my body doing something that I wanted before I even catch myself that this has been something that I have already been wanting. Perhaps this is one of the ideas that have been recurring to myself when I thought that I have already decided to do something even before I have realized that I already made the decision. It is the body that acts first, perhaps even brought by my own will.

Recently, I am trying to place more weight on my words, to enable myself in making myself more obedient to what I say to myself. I say what I do and do what I say. In the same terms, I am hoping that this is becoming amplified by writing. In the same terms, I write what I do and do what I write. This process of self-documentation towards self-discipline is being put into another level when I am starting to feel that my body has already embodied the words that I have been telling to myself, regardless of its urgency.

I just realized that this also requires a certain discipline of thought in thinking about principles that I know will benefit me. Another layer is this objective reasoning that is required to determine what benefits me because it presupposes direction. I must have already known where I am going to define the things that can help me go towards that direction. Another layer is that there is an ounce of planning where amidst all possible directions and all ways to walk that direction, what is the process that is aligned to who I want to be on top of the direction that I want to go.

These elements makes up of my own projection of the person I that I want to be to myself and manifest the potential that I know that I have that does not only fade into the air when spoken. My current state of mind is actually in a sleepy stupor and I feel like, as I am observing these words being typed on my screen, a haphazard sting of words as a prelude to my dream during my upcoming sleep.

2025-03-07

2025-03-07T00:00:00.000Z

A more thought-out sentence is what I am envisioning to have this log practicing to evolve into. At least, to carry a bit more sense and a bit more flow, rhythm, and beat. To feel myself in the third person. I want to feel an othered sense of self. To even think that this feeling is being desired. Then perhaps I must deliberately stray from my vernacular language. Two months is enough for me to adjust where my approach to language would be (at least, it is something that I believe).

Something was lost in February. Remembering the topics that I wrote proved to be much more difficult whenever I am faced with a similar idea from the past. But at the same time, February was more of a month of recovery, sprinkled with some inconveniences that has been recurring almost every day. Our neighbor's gate is about to be done. Probably a couple of days are what it will take before its actual completion. Just some minor alignment with some panels are needed and perhaps what follows is a long period of peace.

This may still need a little bit of self-investigation but I am trying to observe my relationship with noise. It was written all over my February logs and now that a distance is in the horizon, I am having some realizations about it, especially with how I react to it. My preliminary thoughts about it is presumably that I am somehow making it a scapegoat to my inattentiveness and despondency. This one, is something that is most likely but as what I have stated, would require some more investigation because while it may be true, there must be an underlying reason why I think this way and why this is my immediate reaction. To address this emotion, it is probably similar to how I used to tune out my thoughts during high school and college: by loud music. Thoughts get to ride in the backseat of my brain and they somehow stay there obediently like well-trained dogs. I would like to revisit this at some point. I want these months to make sense as I try to make sense of every single day.

Let's develop a certain unit of measurement as we go along. After all, I still feel that this is a pretty quick development considering that I've only been doing this continuously for three months now.

2025-03-06

2025-03-06T00:00:00.000Z

It's a good night. The day was lackluster because of the heat and it's getting more difficult to move and adjust to work and rest.

Some adjustments are made to our current space and I want to just spend more time in it. This is just a momentary check in and I think a lot of positive things are brewing inside my head right now. I'm reserving those for the future days.

2025-03-05

2025-03-05T00:00:00.000Z

I am keeping a mental list of the things that must be changed. Routines. Diet. Things around the house. Spacing. My relationship with time. And some other aspects of my surroundings that require a reboot of my own perception. As of today, I am learning about how I am trying to tread around the discipline that I have established for myself and observing how much of it is actually true and not just a facade that I am trying to put up so I can write about what I think about discipline here.

I kept thinking about the idea of devotion and how much of myself should I surrender in order to make things happen and how much of that self is willing to fight what it already believes in. I am in this state of incessant wrestling with this self, in forming arguments with how much of this self will remain even if I make this change. I am in constant questioning in terms of why does this even matter when all I have ever done in the past few years was to remake myself in every single way so I can be the person that I am. Now, this conflict has arisen again and all I know is that this one is probably different. I am met with urgency and a deadline. I want to see how much of me will survive this.

2025-03-04

2025-03-04T00:00:00.000Z

One of my lowest post-work energy happened today. I have been waving my thoughts around faith and the theology of Christianity in the previous days and that practice was mostly what has been taking up my 5-9. I won't be able to do that today because I'm already in bed before 8pm and I am already preparing to sleep.

But today was also a day of noise. The house next door has been building a gate so the sound of grinding metal was also nonstop. I had to stay downstairs for the rest of the day to work because the heat is turning up as March begins its 180-flip of temperature. Here in our region, it's not as bad as it is in the Metro where universities and schools had to suspend classes for the day. I still have cool mornings and the breeze has been helping to minimize the heat wave.

Then I guess, I'll take my mind to rest. I've had enough of online cringe content today just to push myself to the direction of resting.

2025-03-03

2025-03-03T00:00:00.000Z

"To be a true Catholic, one must love Silence."

This has been in my mind for a long while now, and I think it's where I am rooted in when it comes to the exploration of my faith--even if I don't actually practice religious acts and in believing a single God. But I was still raised a Catholic and I haven't met a single person who was able to explain to me the main function of prayer. I have prayed in the past as a child and most of them contained a list of wishes, hopes, and requests for a reassurance. Needless to say that I have stopped doing it since I went to college and roamed this world open to whatever it gives me as an explanation to why is there an ominous presence of the absence of God.

I studied literature and was engrossed with Dante Alighieri's "Divine Comedy." To me, those were just cool texts that offer an alternative perspective of interpreting the sacred texts. I reveled in its creativity and imaginative depictions of Hell. But what I didn't know was I have been starting to form the foundations of what I will eventually believe in despite my lack of exposure to divine teachings.

Eventually, I reveled into the idea of void and nothingness. Everything that hinted at an active participation or expression of faith leads me to understanding this process as throwing oneself into the void. This nothingness is the actual equivalent of God that is silent and only reveals Himself through ways that the mind does not expect: in denials of its own self. I have taken this to the heart up to the point of actually applying this method to myself. Albeit the conditions were different and my motivations were not spiritual or religious in nature, it was a kind of self-emptying of my own understanding of myself or what I came to know about myself and my relation to art.

It happened in a long silence. That was my 40 days in the desert scenario. I tried a lot of things to fill this void that I created within myself. It is an exercise of self-abnegation but done without a goal in sight. I just did it intuitively because there was no other way for me to go forward. Continuing towards the path I knew was the way to hold on to my ego--presenting me a vision of myself that I used to love and want for myself at the time but it never brought any promise of stability. One would say that doubling down on that path is a leap of faith. But I took an entirely different path so I won't exactly be able to articulate how it would turn out. I may also argue that even not taking that route was also a leap of faith based on my own experience that led me to who I am today. All I can say that when I was in that moment of deciding which path to take: the silence was deafening.

There were no answer present. It is clear that I must cease thinking and evaluating. The risk is all the same. I just needed to choose the kind of person I wanted to be. I didn't know it back then but in hindsight, I'll say it was between a life of honesty or glory.

After the time of choosing, I would say that I have spent that time confining myself to silence: that is forcing myself not to write anything or publish anything. For some reason, I also did that intuitively. I can only say that it is possible that I hold the act of writing as a sacred activity, especially in the direction of creating art through the written language. What I meant to say to myself at that time was I possessed a power that I did not deserve.

What followed was silence and I deleted every notion of what I used to believed what I can do. All the while I am using that very skill to help myself get a living wage enough to keep my sanity afloat. I have never prayed. I have never written anything that would merit a violation to this covenant that I placed on myself.

2025-03-02

2025-03-02T00:00:00.000Z

Some messages are becoming clear. Some decisions are becoming more apparent. I am now living through this decision even without admitting to myself that I have made this decision. This paradoxical thought is an impossible one. I cannot elucidate this experience without first telling a lie: that I have not made the decision. Because, how am I able to say, with confidence, that I am only now trying to find out why I made the decision by living through it?

What I only have right now is awareness. I have previously written about the perception of my own trinity. There is a way to predict our choices by being able to imagine a future self that is reasonably caused by the circumstances that you are able to see right now. Take it as a skill of foresight. You can only predict what would happen if you have a good reading of the multiple things that are happening around you, including their relationships and how they affect each other. It is basically data gathering and predictive analysis. I don't know what will happen but I can see three possible things that can happen based on the state of the world right now. That is what I can hold as the future states within the realm of what I can see.

Now, as things move slowly, gradually, each of those possibilities have certain milestones to meet, which are either a point of convergence or divergence within those three possibilities. What I mean by this is that in predicting possibilities, it is always and very likely that those possibilities are all intertwined. It is possible that more often than not, they are not parallel possibilities because decisions made in every possibility may point towards the fulfillment of other possibilities. As I imagine it, it is a kind of closed openness, which is I claim to be a kind of understanding of the world that allows us to imagine a future that is not so wholly a fantasy so I avoid fabricating a future that only satisfies my biases.

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.

This prediction can only take the form of my own imagined future state of myself, which is—based on what I am doing right now, where I am, and in the pattern of my current choices—a path that I am already taking. As I see the possibilities ahead of me, I also see myself walking along one of the paths I see, and that is the point that I know that I have already made my decision.

It is also possible that I may be mistaken and that I have not seen where I am going because actually walking on the path is different from just imagining the path. I know that there is a certain level of self-knowledge that must be established before all these activities of prediction proves to be somewhat of a meaningful and insightful activity but I am also aware that a total self-knowledge is too difficult, if not impossible, to attain. I cannot fully proclaim, in confidence, that "I know myself full well." because it is a hubris that I cannot delve into. Let me preserve an ounce of humility at this point because I know that I do not only serve myself.

So right now, I am here.

2025-03-01

2025-03-01T00:00:00.000Z

I may have been consciously putting myself in places where I would be tested. On the surface, this is an attempt to let myself understand what are the things that I am really capable of and if I am really capable of the things I say to myself. I want to test the limits of what I believe in and I want to know what I will find out at the end of knowing. At best, I want to know who will I be when I arrive at the situation where I am forced to commit to one single thing.

I place a lot of importance to the experience of a process. Sometimes I know how things will end up based on what I currently know. I imagine the possibilities based on the things I don't know. However, even knowing those things allow me to predict what might happen. But I will never truly know how I will be, or how will I react to the situation when I am fully present at that moment, making the decision that can change me.

These are still vague statements. I even know that this is an attempt to obscure the reality of the weight of the decision that I am seeing for myself so I won't panic. But somewhere down the road, I have already taken a path that I know will change me into another kind of person. Is that kind of person something I want to be or not is still up for debate but I have a nagging suspicion that I will end up not choosing at the end because I know I have already made the decision when I started walking on this path.

It is possible that I am only talking in circles but this is the kind of awareness I want to practice throughout the rest of my life. I know that I have already made my choice before knowing that I made the choice. Most of the time, I am only going through the process to find out why I made the choice. The process is always to understand the choice and not to decide. I have already decided. I need to be free from the mind trap that I am still in control at this very moment. I have set the things in motion. I am the architect of my own decisions. Now, I only need to live in order to understand.

2025-02-28

2025-02-28T00:00:00.000Z

Today had been a rumination about how I talk to friends. I realized that I was bothered by one of my conversations with my friends last weekend because it has been running at the back of my mind 24/7. During the conversation, I find myself baffled by the approach, when gender issues suddenly became the topic out of nowhere, and delivered with such certainty without an allowance of intellectual humility. Faced with that, I was unprepared to enter a discourse, which may have made me more dismissive with the way I delivered my points.

I still stand by what I said. I just realized how that was a missed opportunity of trying to understand where my friend is coming from. In hindsight, I was surprised that I went for the emotional route in communication and even unaware while I was doing so. I guess I was too inconsiderate that every person that I interact with do not have the same thought practice as I do. I was too impatient to make him realize that he is wrong because he is concluding using an incomplete set of information. I felt like I was talking to a person who only wanted to be validated with the information that they are presenting and that most likely ticked me off.

Well, I place too much responsibility on the person in having a better framework of understanding the world. I still think that it is a human act, to be better at thinking about ourselves and the world. And that day, I was faced that this responsibility is not being received equally as we age. It is still a choice. It remains a deliberate act insofar as one is willing to go through the rigorous act of self-examination up to the point of critically thinking about their own biases. I think I could have helped my friend to examine his own biases that surround his arguments but I didn't because that would take some time and I did not have the energy and patience to go through that process because that happened way past my bedtime. To me, it felt like I needed to choose the least amount of words I can think of to shut the conversation down. I really didn't feel like it so I just threw every possible counterarguments I can think of until I was able to shift the conversation to a different topic.

So I am thinking about my own expectations with others. Is it too much to demand to people beyond the age of 25 to at least have a better framework of thought that can elevate adult conversations away from mere gossip. At this point I am not entirely sure. It may be a gap in experience or intellectual wavelength and it is possible that I am just barking at the wrong tree. They may not even be the type of people that I must look for these kinds of conversations. But there was really something in the utterance that made me lose my cool and skip the part when I would always try to take the empathic route.

To be fair, I can also see myself on the other end, where I am the type of person I also wouldn't like to be left alone with and be forced into a conversation. I might just blow everything out of proportion and take the conversation somewhere unpredictable and ruin the mood for everyone.

2025-02-27

2025-02-27T00:00:00.000Z

It has grown a lot quieter recently. The bangs on the wall have ceased. The grinder that used to also sear my ears with its sharp cutting sound: metal to metal, has also stopped for a few days now and I am only beginning to realize. I'll have a short moment of lucidity during the day whenever I go down to the kitchen and get a glass of water, where suddenly, everything felt safe again. My mind doesn't need to exert extra effort to ignore the noises. I don't have to convince myself that eventually, my mind will tune the noises out. Peace slowly settles in as I hope that this would be one of our well-deserved breaks from all the noise.

These unwanted and intrusive noises has been part of my first week's demise. It did feel like my mind worked the extra mile lately just to keep myself barely running, at least to maintain the order inside the house: all the chores that need to be done and in taking care of Bobbi. Lately, I feel more present at work. Consultations with my manager has been going great and my progress with my current project has been going smoothly with its end in sight.

I feel like I'm starting to bounce back from all the suspended feelings I have had throughout this month. I may have been brewing some insights about how I lived my present life through all these unknown uncertainties. I am glad to have started this practice for this year. I do know that things slowed down. But I am slowly picking up where I left off and perhaps get some things moving around before this quarter ends.

2025-02-26

2025-02-26T00:00:00.000Z

It has been a few months since having this laptop made me more comfortable working solely on it. Not having to prop it on my docking station and use an external monitor on my office table offered me flexibility and some change in my surroundings when I need it, refreshing my brain at least even for just a short while, allowing me to work on our kitchen table. This gave me a sense of different headspace, introducing novelty to the place where I work.

Because of that, I took my office chair downstairs from our office and it remained in our kitchen table throughout January. If it makes any sense, it made me feel like my mental space expanded, opening new spaces in my brain where I can learn new things without having to choose to throw away some essential things that I have in my mind to make some space for the new. That spanned for an entire month and I just moved my office chair back to the office yesterday and began to actually focus on working.

I had this suspicion that working downstairs with my laptop grew too much in me that it became my own comfort zone. Work and play became blurred and it didn't feel the same productivity that I used to feel during the first few months using this laptop. I felt like it made me too complacent in having this tool. The thought of the possibility of an escape from my day job is becoming more real made me despondent and not reacting to anything work-related with urgency.

It is possible that it was a factor of this thematic low-spiritedness that I felt throughout February. As I try to dig myself up from this hole, I hope I am making the correct adjustments to keep my mind back on track.

2025-02-25

2025-02-25T00:00:00.000Z

I do no want to think nor do I want to classify that it is a fact that if I started the month on the wrong foot, that it will dictate how the rest of it will go: an uphill battle. However, the data from my logs this month somehow tells that story so I'll roll with it for now. At least I have evidence for a timeframe of one of its occurrences. I would like to test it immediately as we only have a few days left before my birth month ends.

In the same context, this has been a nagging theme in my logs currently but I am actually feeling a sense of lightheadedness as we approach this month's ending. Somehow, it feels like a space suddenly grew, or emptied itself out for my recent study about Christianity. Since yesterday, I have tried to start doing some exegetical research about the religion to make sense of the tradition and practices. Watching Conclave last Sunday felt like the start of my return to study the faith more rigorously as I have been trying to make sense of it outside of its own doctrine. I have been approaching faith through philosophy ^[1] ^[2] ^[3] ^[4] in the past so perhaps I can also start going into theology with the current framework I have in my mind right now.

I believe that there is no other better timing than now because of how much access to resources that I have to texts and other required readings and with my own personal experiences. Although, this decision is also brought by the fact that Fatima and I decided to have a Christian marriage, it has also become urgent for me to clarify my own involvement with the faith. That is still considering that I am entering this aspect of my life in my own terms and in my own way of understanding it.

I may still consider that my loose Catholic upbringing may still be a huge influence with this decision because with what I know so far about the differing belief systems and practices under the Christian doctrine, I am coming from a more technical, ritual-based kind of practice of the faith. However, I am being led by my own intellectual curiosity to learn more about Christianity through mysticism (as I have labeled my spiritual position to be apart from Spinozism) and reason. I am well aware that by saying that I am letting myself be guided by "reason" already limits my own experience of the divine on Christian terms but I would like to commit to reason in such a way that it is a glass that I want to fill. Only when the glass of reason is filled is when I can determine when the actual practice of spiritual faith starts for me. I will permit myself to map out the territory of faith based on the writings available to me before I allow myself to walk on the soil that I was told of.

In a sense, it may be counterintuitive against the practice of faith but for me, it is how I show commitment to Truth itself, whereas I want to know the value that is being held by the Christian faith against aletheia or "truth" as it was described by Heidegger.

I am expecting something that I will not disclose here yet because I do not want to make it a self-fulfilling prophecy to define my goal in understanding Christianity. I want it to be revealed to me as its own thing; to see God as He is and not as I see myself.

2025-02-24

2025-02-24T00:00:00.000Z

This practice of writing has been becoming gradually mundane. What happened during the first week of February was the end of my residual thought logs from January, which are ideas that have been stored inside my brain for months and years. In a month, I have exhausted them all in my logs, written in the worst structure that I can even think of.

However, the first week of this month also taught me about how repetition of the mundane can give me insights to my own mental and emotional state. Doing this practice allows me to just sit still and think about what I want to talk about and having exhausted my residual ideas, I am forced to confront the present and use that as the topic for my current log. A repetition of similar connected ideas in a span of a few days tell me that I am dealing with something that is obscured to me by my vision of the present and I let things be because having a bird's eye view of my mental state is impossible because it is always meant to happen in the future.

So the next unknown is "when." I do not know when is it the best time to change gears from passivity and to finally go back to the driver's seat. When am I supposed to once again look at myself with full context of what I know to connect the dots and make sense of what I am feeling. A month has passed and it still hasn't occurred to me how should I make sense of what happened to me during that first week.

There were some attempts during the fifth and seventh day but I am feeling that compared to January, my memory is weaker in terms of what I wrote during which day. Last month, it was fairly easy to reference my older notes and instantly make a connection to the past as I am writing.

As I try to link those two previous notes in the previous paragraph, I tried skimming some notes from this month and I don't remember writing them. Sure the sentiments are what I can remember but actually writing them and putting those thoughts into these pages feel like a repressed memory and that I was meant to forget the type of person I am when I wrote them.

There is something in this month that I am failing to see yet.

2025-02-23

2025-02-23T00:00:00.000Z

I was out the whole day yesterday for a trip and I did not bring my laptop with me. It was a trip with friends (and our dogs) to a nearby private resort so needless to say that it was an eventful day. The whole day was spent with introductions and catching up with all of them, exchanging stories, playing card games, singing karaoke, and taking some shots of tequila on the side. We just got back to our house this morning and felt age is creeping up slowly in my body.

Nonetheless, I was able to take some rest today, being able to catch a nap and watch two movies, which I will find time to write about in the near future (this one is on Conclave). This month has been all about testing what I am capable of enacting the the things that I write in different levels of challenges, leading me to deliberate on my actions as I feel the temptation of running away and take the easier way out of these situations. It's becoming difficult to distinguish between letting go and deluding myself with reason to not choose the more difficult path in exchange of convenience. So I am struggling to determine how much honest am I with myself at this moment now that I was able to articulate what I think and know about duty, faith, and discipline.

Speaking, articulating, and writing what I believe inadvertently confines me into the rigid walls of how I want my life and myself to be. The system is now in place, revising itself, and enforcing its laws upon my very actions. In order for this framework to work, I must live through all of my perceived inconveniences and compound my realizations, my experiences, and my falsified assumptions into the synthesis of how I want to become.

I believe that I am starting to practice what I preach. But deep down, I know that there is a voice saying that we are only getting started and the hard part hasn't even begun.

2025-02-21

2025-02-21T00:00:00.000Z

2025-02-20

2025-02-20T00:00:00.000Z

It's one of those days when I fantasize a lot about having a lot of money. What things should I buy? How much should I save? How can I gain pleasure in imagining that all my financial troubles are lifted from my shoulders? Even just a taste of that feeling where my life turns around in a matter of seconds based from a small-impact decision.

It is probably because I have been recently eyeing on some items to buy and I just don't have the money for them. Some are for myself, some a surprise for others. I think it sometimes makes me feel small in thinking that all purchase decisions that I must make should be equal to its necessity and value. In other words, I must always compromise to get what I want. Every purchase do not result to absolute pleasure of having but there must always be a catch. It is either I choose to play the long game of prolonged wanting, to test myself if I will still want the thing that I want after a few weeks or so, or wait for the next big sale before finally making a purchase. Sometimes, it makes the item more worth it. To finally say that "the wait is finally over" and what was once imagined is now a reality.

Sometimes it also bleeds into my day job. Where in thinking that I cannot resign from my job because it is my only safety net when shit hits the fan. My 9-5 is actually my life and dictates the pace of the things that I can have in my life. Add to that the responsibility of managing expenses because every cent must be allotted either to a well-deserved meal and treat or to a spontaneous craving.

A day comes when everything to keep this facade is just consuming because at the end of the day, there is nothing else you can do but use your strength to pull your leg up and take a step forward.

Today is for wanting what I want. Let me desire peacefully and satisfy that desire without guilt and shame. Tear me away from this prison of habit and let me live for a moment.

But we all know, there is a huge chance of risk if this didn't please the gods. I can already feel the avalanche of consequences for a day of wilding out in the woods.

2025-02-19

2025-02-19T00:00:00.000Z

I've had a lot of morning thoughts relating to the level of language philosopher operate in. I came across this clip of Derrida in one of the documentaries about him where he was asked to talk about love. He adamantly refused this request but also asked the interviewers to be more specific about the question. Derrida gave it a second thought and attempted to discuss to himself what is a possible entry point in discussing love, in which he babbled a bit about being and the loving subject.

In the same manner, I think this is how we should approach LLMs. In the process of prompting, in asking a question and giving information of what we want the model to do, it must be also clear to ourselves what we are asking and what we are looking for. In a sense, this type of exchange is efficient communication except that we are not communicating with another subject. It is technically a mirror into ourselves, only returning the same amount of thought we put into our prompts.

Similarly, those who can leverage this nuanced prompting reveals the Oracle in the machine.

2025-02-18

2025-02-18T00:00:00.000Z

I'm feeling a daily sense of resignation that happens in a span of a few minutes to at least an hour. The source of this despondency is still unknown to me but I feel it everyday in intermittent bursts. Sometimes I feel like I'm perceiving the world to be turning too fast and time is just zipping past me while I stand unfazed and unbothered by everything that's been happening. I know that it's an illusion and that everything is just happening inside my head. My take in all of this is that this is an underlying emotion that has been running my entire February.

I do not feel hopeless. I do not feel like giving up. But there is this sudden feeling of fatigue that just makes me want to stop and just lie down. Spiritually, I think I've never been this full in my life. I can say that I am alive on the inside, but the world feels out of sync in my head. Everything outside me seems like they just start to exist and I couldn't care less in figuring out why.

Have I thought a lot of things recently and my mind just want to just give it a rest and drop every intellectual endeavor right now?

2025-02-17

2025-02-17T00:00:00.000Z

I'm trying to get most of my AI-related news or thoughts on Twitter. Wild takes arise from both ends of the spectrum from doomsdayers and alarmists to the optimistic tech evangelists. But once in a while, the community is also ripe with people who have been wrestling with the existential threats of AI, especially within the rapid developments in LLMs. The drama among AI companies, how they scramble trying to helplessly fight tooth and nail to have the first foot on the threshold in the name of "human benefit," is such as spectacle to witness in real-time, but the elephant in the room is kept under the rags in terms of discussing what do all of these developments mean? and tackle the issue in real-time.

the illusion of human exceptionalism crumbles fast when you see how much of our intelligence is just pattern recognition & predictive modeling. ai exposes how much of what we call “creativity” is remixing, how much “insight” is regurgitation, & how much “expertise” is just…
— signüll (@signulll) February 16, 2025

I came across this tweet early in the morning and it somehow shed a light into my anxieties about the existence of LLMs. Perhaps it is not even about the fear of realizing that we are about to be replaced but it is about the fear of having human intelligence undermined. That in cracking the code to mimic human thought to be performed by machines and making them indistinguishable to living breathing humans, reveals that we are not that too complicated to begin with? That what are touting as the "pinnacle of human intelligence" is actually a small step in realizing that intelligence has always been a matter of creating algorithmic patterns that predict our behavior?

In coming to this realization, I also realize that I have known this all along, and it is the suppression of this realization that is being proven now before my eyes is what creates this horror of understanding.

2025-02-16

2025-02-16T00:00:00.000Z

The first slip happened yesterday. I was so out of it even if half of my day was spent lying down and watching movies and shows on the TV. The other half was desperately trying to bring my phone back to life when an update led to a fastboot bootloop. That was at least 7 hours of continuous work trying to figure out how to make my phone work again.

It was midnight when I made it work and I was all so out of my head to write. I had actually thought of putting some words in but deliberately decided to skip the day and rest because today was the day we are going to attend to a Christian church service. This is my first time attending that isn't livestreamed via YouTube. This is also my first time leaving the house this month and since [[2025-01-19]|January 19th].

Today was a day of another confirmation of my idea about love. I will not elaborate tonight.

2025-02-14

2025-02-14T00:00:00.000Z

Professionally, I'm falling off. I think I am growing too bored at work. Deadlines are hanging and I can't be bothered to even make a step to set thing straight. I'm not sure if my manager has a lot of trust in me to not follow up on the things I am working on because if she does trust me, then she might have been too trusting.

I'm also considering that how she is a bit scatter-brained most of the times, she might have just forgotten to ask me. But I don't think I'm in the right position to manage myself at this point by managing her and ping her every hour to ask for an update. I am in limbo right now and I am making the most out of it.

This is a moment of weakness. I will simmer in this mud for a while.

I am making some moves in my personal life, at least in reflecting about what to do in the future. Generally, it is about approaching everything with more openness to risk and more compassion to people. Sometimes I think I am being compassionate with myself by acknowledging this boredom. That I know I should just take it easy and not force myself to enjoy the process at this moment. I want the moment to take me there and not be in control for a moment. Even just to have a moment of rest of trying to control every single thing.

2025-02-13

2025-02-13T00:00:00.000Z

I'm feeling more of my creative self lately. There is a sense of feeling imprisoned in my own body, whose agency is being threatened by my own sense of duty to my day job. There is uneasiness. There is a feeling of suffocation. It feels something ancient but familiar enough to distract me from my present. It is a tug-of-war of stability that yanks me from standing upright.

My mind is off today.

2025-02-12

2025-02-12T00:00:00.000Z

I watched Dr. K's video about teaching introverts how to be charismatic and I feel like what he's getting at has been a type of self-awareness that I had been trying to communicate yesterday. He talked about "self-referential processing," which is a brain activity that triggers "being self-conscious of oneself" (I did not use "self-awareness" to avoid confusion about the active awareness of the self in the moment) that strips away one's defenses upon the perception of an other's gaze. That was a fancy and convoluted way of saying we become vulnerable upon recognizing the attention of other people being directed towards us. This happens when someone meets our gaze in a crowd, especially when it's a stranger in a public place. When someone meets our gaze, we become aware that someone "sees" us and this self-consciousness is triggered when we are not ready at presenting or projecting the image of our self that we want the public to see. So we turn away our gaze in a brief moment of exposed involuntary vulnerability. We turn away because we are caught being the person we don't want the world to see.

And it often happens subconsciously. Presenting ourselves to others is very common and part of our everyday activities as a human. But we sometimes forget that these interactions are basically performances of the relationship that we have of the people we are interacting with. We perform to be the person expected of us at work, in our friendships, in our families, and in our most intimate relationships. We divide ourselves and keep our identities within the spaces where those different personalities overlap.

2025-02-11

2025-02-11T00:00:00.000Z

I don't have the habit of reading my previous logs before writing a new one for the day. I have written some logs that seem that they are progressive in itself but that was because of a repetition of an event in my life, its theme becoming more palpable as each day pass, with it automatically becoming the topic at the top of my head to write at the end of the day. Perhaps it is something I can try because since most of my backlogs have been flushed out last month, I am consciously thinking throughout my day about what I would write. Will it be something that happened today or a thought in the previous days that I can press on for today? It is possible that this is one of the reasons why had days when writing felt somehow undesired.

So if it's in the question where I am consciously masking myself to preserve a certain distance to myself from the kind of "digital portrait" that I am putting up here, it is only obvious to say that yes, there are things I am aware and choosing not to say here. In most cases, such as the way I write logs, it will come across as somewhere between an autobiography and a memoir. Technically, it is just a glorified journal in the form of a website. In this case, only you as the reader can make sense of what is being written here. I am one of those readers.

Is this an exercise on the truthfulness of autobiographical writing? How much power does the self-awareness of the speaking persona in the text hold as a reliable narrator? How can we measure my honesty when I say that I am aware that I am withholding things from you as the reader? How will this self-exploration and journey into the self commence as an exercise of introspection and self-discovery?

Well, at this point, we all know that you are a prisoner and I am the truthsayer. We are located in a place of isolation where the only source of truth are the things that I write here. You read them and they manifest into something real because this is self-awareness manifest. I hide things from you. Yet, with this level of honesty, it becomes more difficult to trust what is being written. Then again you have no choice but to read on.

Good lord, it didn't take me this long to bring myself back to my old habits of writing. I am once again talking to myself and to innumerable others.

2025-02-10

2025-02-10T00:00:00.000Z

I'm thinking if I am showing all my cards. If I am thinking about this, it just means that I am unaware of what kind of cards I am holding. It means that I lack the reality of seeing what I have and what they actually are for. I'm thinking about my cards because I have always maintained this personality that has a flair of mystery. I always prefer for other people to not know everything about me. I always prefer for people to be curious about who I am by asking me. This is because I am not good at interacting with other people. I think too much about responding appropriately, or is it the right time to speak? Is it okay to cut off someone mid-sentence despite knowing already where their thoughts are headed? Is it socially acceptable to share an idea that pivots the conversation into a whole different direction? Do I do that because I cannot relate to the present topic? So I can have a comfortable footing in sharing what I know to other people? Do you see my problem here?

Now, back to the cards. I know that this practice reveals a lot about myself. Basically, these are BTS content about my actual titled writings. These are just days as atoms of ideas that are germinating before I can finally stitch it all together into a single piece of writing. I do not expect for people to read every single entry here, especially if I were to actually keep these logs for years to come. I consider these as low-effort writings just to keep myself working and keep the introspection going. I feel that this is necessary as a practice before the main event. But at the same time, I wonder if this is showing too much of the process that kills the charm of the magic performance.

There are times that I know that I am consciously masking the truth while keeping all the things I write with a certain level of honesty. There are some things I don't write here for the purpose of distance. This is not a confession. But I want to practice sharing myself to the world in a way that I know how and become less inhibited in doing so. Ideally, I would like to just create and not explain myself. I would like to just write shit up, and just do it without articulating why I do it. But I guess, I still need to learn that balance. I need to learn to understand what I want to say before I even say it. To see if it's what I want to say or if it is another layer of breadcrumbs that I have placed myself to hide what I want to say from myself. I know, the more I say, the more it gets complicated. But the reason that I am doing this is because I am still trying to find myself beneath these clues that I myself left in order to discover my authentic unapologetic self.

I will never stop questioning myself. Even if on the outside, I have already made some proclamations that I have found myself through this rigorous process of introspection. I know that this never ends as I continue to exist. I might even come across a series of lies that I have written here that I consider as truth.

I would let that become another horror for another day.

2025-02-09

2025-02-09T00:00:00.000Z

Birthday plans went well. Precisely because there was no plan at all. Watched Scorsese's The Departed (2006) and A Real Pain (2024). The only notable thing today was a lot of people have greeted me, at least more than my average of 5 people. Most likely because it was due to Fatima's IG story but still 10 people is a lot in my early adult phase.

I guess there is nothing else to talk about today since most of the time was spent about reflecting on our chosen service topic which is forgiveness. We had more than an hour's worth of discussion about it, which tangentially touched on the social issues, patriarchy, incels, and friendship (at least those things that I can remember but there were a lot). I'm only grateful that today actually felt like a day of rest.

I never really paid much attention during my birthdays. Celebrating isn't something I'm fond of. I decide to not pay too much importance in my own day. The only requirement is that whatever happens during that day is something that is fully within my conscious choice. I chose the day to happen the way it can happen. That is enough. I do not require for people to give me gifts or recognize the day when I started to exist. I just let the day pass without much fanfare. I don't know if it defeats the purpose of being so but I think this is an internal rule for me to keep myself humble.

2025-02-08

2025-02-08T00:00:00.000Z

Okay so this is what's going to happen: I am planning to surrender into this unthinking state. That is, to attempt an experiment if this is an intuitive route towards an inertia of a season of productivity. I think that my mind's weakness is to engage in a prolonged active rigorous thinking to the point of exhaustion. Because of recent events, it somehow feels like I should once again listen to my body.

Last night's sleep quality was better than most of I've had this week. Woke up at around 6:30am without my alarm. In quiet solitary moments, my mind wanders into thoughts of explaining the necessity of imagination to normal people where in that fictional scenario, I act as a professor of humanities, trying to communicate the importance of the awareness of one's psychology and self-reflection using art and using one's thoughts. I am still engaging into extensive thought experiments but lately, my mind is becoming more focused on delivery. A careful explanation is what I lack, which is why almost every explanation of anything that I give to people almost always sound like a madman babbling and struggling to connect several ideas to each other.

I am continuing my show binge streak. I just recently discovered three new shows to watch to keep my mind occupied. This is to see if I can create some space to germinate ideas in my subconscious while using media as my sponge for consumption. My writings from last month was focused entirely in creation and improvement of my site, which directly correlates to my active thinking that revolves around my reawakened enthusiasm for writing with a mind that is focused on making space for my thoughts to happen. Have I pushed myself towards overworking my brain in my attempt to accomplish this project?

In that span of time, I have already seen some blindspots in my own reasoning and it showed me how I fell for my mind's own trap based on my own fear. It is still more important for me to prioritize practicing honesty to myself because that is the foundation that I am trying to build this project on. This space should be free from lies and self-deception for the sole reason that I want myself to become my own superego. As time goes on, I can see that the content of my writing logs is slowly diffusing in terms of quality of thought and frequency. This can only mean that it is good because it shows that I am not trying to put out every single musing that I have if it means tiring out my own brain in the process. It means that I care about myself and that is fine with me. I cannot afford to be honest if my own mind is not even working properly and does not have any comprehensive thought to begin with.

This month will most likely revolve around self-observation. Last month was already some ideas in my backlog that I have been wanting to write about before I was able to put up this site. It is only timely to give my brain some space. What I wanted to write about are already written, at least in their first versions so I can have some reminders about my own thought process when I come back to them.

My only fear right now is because of my current passive state, I might just realize that it has been months since I have actively tried to sort things out in my head. That I might become comfortable and complacent with not practicing regular self-reflection. But I think I still trust myself that I will catch myself earlier at that stage before anything even goes to shit. I am giving myself at least the whole month to become loosely connected with the world. I'm having a couple of weekend activities starting next week, which would take some of my time and energy since in terms of importance, they are more significant than any creative work. I've made some commitments with friends and I'm still in the middle of figuring out how to balance my time and energy into focusing to each of these activities without losing my mind.

So with everything that has happened and with my mind still recovering from falling off from my routine, I would just need to take it easy and allow myself to take some breaks here and there.

I will always be here and you will still hear from me everyday.

2025-02-07

2025-02-07T00:00:00.000Z

I saw these tweets today:

if someone comes to me for help with chronic procrastination now, i don't start with emotional blocks, productivity or inner anything

i ask about sleep. if their sleep isn't solid that's where the work starts

procrastination can often be the body running on battery-saving mode
— nibras ꩜ (@heynibras) December 12, 2024

once sleep is on lock then emotional bottlenecks can be explored e.g.

any time i noticed myself procrastinating in the last days i asked myself, “what emotion am i trying to avoid feeling?”

then i spend 5mins seeing if i can bring up the feeling and explore it

after that i https://t.co/CQGmhCnTe8
— nibras ꩜ (@heynibras) February 6, 2025

and it seems crazy how I have just went through this kind of experience lately. I know February started on a bad note and it hasn't been getting any better since then. I watched a lot of shows, my mind is in shambles, I tried running away from the self that I am trying to create, and would you look at that: each day felt like a tell-tale sign that I am not good on the emotional side of things and it has been affecting my mental state. I fucked up my body clock last weekend and I haven't been able to wake up before my alarm. Honestly, it's been a while since I relied on my alarm for me to wake up in the morning. I usually wake up before it and disable it when my eyes are already wide open. Then I'm all ready to set forth with my day.

However, I wasn't able to do that in the past few days. I consciously started to stay awake after my alarm today, which brought me to a better headspace going through today. Although there are still hiccups (napping midday and staying away from work for hours), I think I did well today in trying to recover. Then I saw that tweet earlier this morning which made a lot of sense. At least in my experience, it is not about having a good sleep for me. In the end, it's all about being able to decide to wake up.

I find it destabilizing to be woken up by an alarm. I feel like it's not my choice to wake up. That something is forcing me to do things I'm not prepared for, thus relying on a reminder that I should do it. I only apply this in waking up because I take it as a symbol of willfully opening myself to the world upon opening my eyes. Since I didn't feel okay last weekend and slept through the whole morning, my body clock snowballed away from my usual routine.

I might have been distracting myself by watching shows and avoiding coming into terms with my tendency to procrastinate. I've been going through days unprepared and not willfully committed to the future present. The path to recovery is now clear. I must only walk over it. See you on the other side.

2025-02-06

2025-02-06T00:00:00.000Z

Today is probably the only day when I sincerely didn't want to write anything and seriously considered ditching writing. Honestly, there have already been days like this, especially this month (we're only just 6 days in February) but they only came as a thought and it didn't feel as urgent as this one.

What usually happens is when I get the urge not to write, I sit on it for a few minutes, mulling over the consequences of not doing and breaking my streak. The thought would easily fade during those times but tonight felt like I would actually stop. So I immediately grabbed my laptop and started typing this event fresh from the experience oven.

I found that it's a good practice to turn the frustration into my own writing, prompting an impromptu self-reflection session with myself as it happens; confronting myself the moment I catch myself wanting to divert from the routine. I would say that I am having a series of bad days, creatively speaking. My mind don't actually latches on anything interesting except being self-reflective. But I might be stretching the moments of self-reflection too thin as it is becoming more frequent and I can't squeeze any new reflection out of me without a novel idea.

To be fair, I had a good time at work today. Productivity is increasing and focus is becoming more dilated. I have been waking up way past my alarm recently (possibly a huge factor in terms of not feeling in the zone lately). I have been watching too much shows recently. I have 2 episodes remaining in the season 2 of The White Lotus, Silo Season 2 is becoming interesting, and I am wading through the first two episodes of The Night Agent's second season. I probably watch 3-4 episodes of a mix of these shows every night since the month started. I honestly don't know what I'm getting out of these and I might just be trying to distract myself from something but there might be some marginal enjoyment that I have been feeling cruising through these shows.

I am still observing if this one of the boring break seasons of my thinking. I am still not sure if I have worked my mind way too much last month actively thinking about myself and the world so now all I have are these mundane acts of living that may turn out to be useless garbage and an entirely experiential log of what happened today.

Right now, I'm only taking this as a different aspect of this exercise, where how am I going to adapt when there is nothing else to write about? When all thought has been exhausted from every neurons in my brain? Of course, I know that is impossible (but it is only an assumption), I still want to push myself into doing this experiment until it becomes something permanent. After all, I only have a month's-worth of data so far so I guess we will see more of how I will reconcile myself with these emerging conundrums.

2025-02-05

2025-02-05T00:00:00.000Z

Today is one of those days when work isn't just working. I have observed that since last week, I have been putting the most minimal effort I can give every single day. I can put the blame on the nonstop construction noises I have been hearing throughout the whole months but I know it's a convenient excuse to make my slacking more acceptable. So far, I don't think my low efforts are raising alarms in my manager's wild imagination because I think she would have already confronted me if that were the case. Though, to be honest, I also think that I don't have that much time before I get noticed.

I feel like these past few days were all spent in low-spirits. I couldn't form more comprehensive thoughts the way I used to in previous weeks. I have some ideas in my head but I can't seem to put them together because of this fog in my mind. I am still trying to make sense what is this inhibition: guilt, shame, or pride? I feel like my reason and emotion are playing cat and mouse. So I am stuck and forced to face the void of unknowing and just waiting for the dust to settle. I am getting this familiar sense of dread, that is being crushed under the weight of the pressure to be productive. I would still like to practice in what I said here because I know that I am in this state of suspension and I am just here to bear it. But then again, the nagging voice of duty, because of what I just mentioned above, is about to raise red flags and endanger my performance at work. There is this sense that I must start to be active in processing this unknown or else I would take a hit. As much as I want to trust the process, I am starting to feel the world spinning faster underneath my feet. Time becomes less of a privilege and is becoming more of an enemy. These things I know to be false, but they know how to tug the strings of anxiety in my body.

2025-02-04

2025-04-02T00:00:00.000Z

Yesterday was a moment of self-doubt. It was a regress towards the social media-induced self-awareness that transforms online presence into a performance. Today is a reminder that I am doing this for myself and remove my inhibitions with writing. I am well aware that the quality of writing that I am doing right now is not something that I am always proud of. And that is the main purpose of writing these logs. It is a real-time assessment of how I refine my thoughts and mapping of my thought process, which means that every single log is not supposed to be clear and structured.

I am writing this in the middle of the day, which is out of my writing routine when I have accustomed myself in writing after my work hours. But I needed this to be put out there immediately as another reminder to myself when I am here catching myself almost waver and stumble. It is the dryness of the practice that is getting to me, I know. Doing this for a month now and the boring ordinariness of it is getting under my skin.

The positive thing that I am making out of it is this apparent automatic refocusing of the emptiness in my head towards what I am doing at the moment. This emptiness can be focused in the coming days because I have been mulling over the idea of the void as a portal. This, in practice, would be a possible technique that would envelop my creative process and beliefs. There is a strong correlation of the nagging presence in absence that can spur things into existence.

But for today, I will internalize this moment of weakness and celebrate this vigilant attention towards a loss of faith in myself. Now, I will recover.

2025-02-03

2025-02-03T00:00:00.000Z

I am thinking that there is a huge possibility how I write my logs. If there are specific topics that I should not talk about or a requirement of a specific line of thinking that should I enforce in order to make it more organized, at least in its tone or messaging. This idea only came about because I was considering if there is value in adding another layer of consistency that will allow me to passively direct my mind into writing short bursts of thought even if the state of my body and mind are both in an undesired state.

Such as today. I did not get a good sleep in the past weekend. Another work week has started and it feels like my body is once again forced to be functional while some of the wires in my brain are still rewiring themselves into their correct places. I still feel like I am chasing the rest from last weekend, which means that the thoughts in my head are still foggy at best.

So I thought if I should require myself to exert more effort in the face of unreadiness. Until now, it's still a thought that holds no truth value. I would still let this one sit for a while. But I just feel emotionally tired today.

2025-02-02

2025-02-02T00:00:00.000Z

I just had my first experience of attending a Christian service today. Everything was just as expected, in terms of how concepts about faith is aligned with my beliefs: faith without action is meaningless. The enactment of one's faith is a manifestation of one's will. As I have come to understand the world, in all of its intricacies, how it presents itself in different languages, and how these languages can be interpreted in myriad of perspectives, which is shared by every single person in this world, make the world as it is.

I am still not sure if everything about today is pointing me towards the correct idea of how to move forward. Or even if I am taking this as a kind of validation of my own system of beliefs—that there is a way to arrive at a kind of spirituality that is guided by reason. While at the same time knowing that reason itself is insufficient to attain a certain understanding of faith, I feel that I am more attuned with Kant's openness to the space of faith outside the realm of reason. What faith is, must be a certain kind of void that can never be satisfied or fulfilled. It is a constant presence of an absence whose essence is often misinterpreted as something that must be satisfied. Faith does not require any requirements. It is imagination, belief, and action melded into one towards the absence of a truth. Faith is always that is attached to something that does not exist yet. The enactment of faith is the willing of the void's presence. We act in faith because we must make something happen out of the nothingness of what will be. It is the willing of the desired future and its creation in the present. Faith is not a wish nor a desire that has an object. It is not a promise but an idea of an event that must be enacted. Therefore, a sense of purpose and duty^[1]^[2]

I am curious about how most people experience faith since this is obviously a visceral reaction towards the world. I would assume that putting your faith on something is commonly, an unconscious choice for most people. I do not deny that it is still within the realm of emotions and describing it, translating it into an experience of a thought is the task that is handled by one's own consciousness, or soul, even. Faith as an emotion is already a given since we all go through our lives having our own understanding of it, even if we do not know how we understand it.

For most people, it is as obvious and as natural as breathing. It is just something we do without thinking about it. Since faith can be an external influence, it is also something that we can inherit from other people like an emotional contagion of sorts.

2025-02-01

2025-02-01T00:00:00.000Z

Somehow, my body chose to woke up today with all the wirings in my brain disorganized. It felt like I was lagging behind a couple of minutes before the world starts to make sense, or at least make sense around the time when it should have already made sense. I was only trying to catch up with what is happening around me today. I am totally disoriented.

Woke up at around 9am and went back to sleep at 11am, and finally waking up at 2pm. The intermittent sleeping may have fucked with my brain and body clock but I still haven't feel entirely rested. This is just a note to check on my current status today.

2025-01-31

2025-01-31T00:00:00.000Z

Following up on yesterday's thoughts, I had an extended epiphany earlier when I was taking a bath. I imagine that every interaction is a door to various possibilities. Then, my mind creates this network if if/else/either/or kind of connections on how opening that door leads to interactions of varying lengths and consequences. In this sense, I also imagine that conversations are like that. I imagine them to be a network of passages, paths leading to different outcomes, road blocks (conflicts), detours (topic tangents), and pit stops (destination of an understanding). But it does not mean that I imagine all the possibilities. I cannot claim that I have all conversation trees mapped out for every interaction. It is just not possible. What I imagine inside my head is the anticipation of those conversation paths. This anticipation builds a kind of scope in my head where I can set a limit of what I would only want to talk about or how I want every interaction to be defined. Do I want it to be sincere and thoughtful or do I want it to be a small talk and just a "hi, hello" kind of conversation.

I do this because I want to capture the specific point of interaction where it is socially acceptable for me to leave. If I go with a conversation with the intent to be sincere, I should permit myself to sit there for a long time and have a straight meaningful conversation with a person. Otherwise, I'll allow myself to just glide the conversation at a certain level without committing my attention to it, thereby not expending enough energy to the topic at hand.

All of this seems too calculated, I know. But it helps me also to decide and be deliberate in maintaining meaningful and healthy relationships with people. Interaction for me is a choice that I have to make. It rules out any kind of interactions I have with other people, who I don't consider to be important.

Yesterday, my conversation with my soon-to-be father-in-law was a spontaneous sincere conversation. I was still clocked in at work but I committed myself to it even when I was running out of things to say. Precisely because that person is important and that moment was also important to me. I would not give the same treatment and amount of attention to other people who is not an active presence in my life. Suffice to say that I have a certain hierarchy of relationship levels when it comes to the people in my life. That defines the amount of attention and energy that I would give to them, which in turn dictates how I open the doors to those interactions.

In the end, this may have been sounding a bit simplistic and I am just applying labels to basic human conversation and interaction. However, this is most apparent when I encounter strangers when I definitely don't pay much attention to them. It has been a rule that I have allowed myself to follow to restrain the possible influx of guilt and other intrusive feelings that may arise because of spontaneous interactions. I want to have enough control with how I feel based on how I interact with other people. I know at some point that it makes me selfish but this is how I reduce the burden of unnecessary thought as I move forward with my life. It also allows me to instinctually follow a rhythm of human interactions that I can tell is actually based on my own personality.

2025-01-30

2025-01-30T00:00:00.000Z

I really don't think I am mentally equipped to sincerely interact with people and be functional at work at the same time. This makes me wonder how most people even do it. My guess is it probably depends on one's exposure to it. I may just have capped the number of interactions I have with people, becoming unwelcoming to spontaneous additions of person to interact with in a day. As much as I can, I try to control this aspect of interpersonal interaction with people.

It always feels like I have this overall allotted energy for the day and I must allocate it beforehand, strategically, in order for me to gain the best possible outcome of the situation I desire. Any unplanned interaction that comes along the way, I know I can deal with, but since I didn't plan to allot my energy and attention to it, it will always eat up some energy for other things that are just about to happen.

Today, I had a long conversation with my would-be father-in-law. It was unplanned but we had a sincere and honest conversation. It went on for at least about an hour. That moment was me reacting to the situation. My afternoon workload was freed and I didn't have anything better else to do, so I decided to have a conversation with him, since he's also visiting our place. Now, five hours later after that conversation and my body is already begging to sleep. I didn't do anything else that is out of the ordinary today. On a regular basis, I should just be relaxed at this time of the day. Most likely, still thinking but not feeling fatigued. I was planning to just write one paragraph today, but I realized that after taking my evening tea, it is my body that has been feeling the despondency. My mind is still all set but there are a lot of factors that may have been contributing to this feeling of tiredness.

2025-01-29

2025-01-29T00:00:00.000Z

All my recent observations about the world,^[1]^[2]^[3]^[4] myself,^[5]^[6]^[7] and other people has always led me to the problem of interpretation and the language used to interpret it. In language, I do not mean a country's distinct system of communication, but one's own personal way of communicating with the world. There is always a specific language that we develop for every person we know, with every topic we engage in, with how we look at the world. That kind of language can be seen in in our speech, patterns of thought, and physical gestures. We use this language to absorb the world, make sense of what we know and store in ourselves what we understand.

This may be an attempt to complicate the idea that "the meaning is always based on the one who perceives it" but I would like to go another layer that we have already been forming our own secret language with the world from the moment we are born. This language is a type of knowing, it is our default way of understanding. It is automatic and quickly processed without deliberation. It is how we speak without the use of our mouth, without our voice, a disembodied engagement with the world where in the middle of this instant processing of the brain, how the world looks, how it appears to us, is entirely based on habits, which has formed a system of understanding that is also known to us as our own perception.

I have been meaning to dissect this concept of perception and I haven't really read up on this topic. I am just going through this concept of trying to illustrate what I know about it and why it is important to me (these ideas will be fleshed out in the future entries as the days pass). Right now, what I have is a visceral and intuitive understanding of how I interpret the world around me.

It has been too often that I am faced with the opportunity to talk about people. In these cases, I have been too quick to judge, especially in terms of what kind of person they are based on snippets of stories, which are often purely anecdotal. I don't feel good that this has been a type of language that I have come to create to interact with the world. It makes me feel too strict and rigid, especially when I seemingly impose a system that opens me to engage in a false sense of understanding. So at the end of my judgement, I always tell myself that it is only a possibility. Yet, almost all of those times, I am proven right.

These instances of being right only inspires confidence on my own framework. So I have been applying it to almost every person I know and it always leads to everyone's varying interpretations of the world. In the same sense that everything we do as an individual tells us about who we really are, even if who we really are is unknown to us. It feels like seeing through the code of the matrix of human interactions.

It gives me a glimpse of a somehow correct interpretation because of how consistent people become in this framework. Intent becomes clear as glass, its consequences more predictable, and the possibilities of a future more vividly imagined. This is what guides me through the murky waters of living. This gives me a sense of order amidst this chaotic world. For some reason, this has been my battle against entropy.

2025-01-28

2025-01-28T00:00:00.000Z

It takes a bit of mental and spiritual tenacity to deal with the same thing over and over again in thought. I may have been on this chain of thought about repetition and finding some semblance of spirituality in it. Recognizing this current tendency of mine, I feel that it just makes sense with how I have come to know myself.

I have mentioned that what drives this aspect of me is stupidity. But at the same time, this is also driven by my unrelenting tendency to understand what does not make sense. I absolutely believe that I have developed a certain level of intuition to declare to myself that this line of reasoning is worth pursuing. Otherwise, I don't think this will come up every single day as a thought that I am laboring. I am sculpting this mess of ideas into something I don't know yet, but I am sure it is trying to tell me something important about trying to understand what is important to me.

As of this moment, I am exploring the thought of recognizing the divine in acts of creation, to the point of inheriting a certain moral responsibility from creation. And I am debating with myself if I am only having this idea because I feel so disgusted at the fact that it seems like we just need to accept that artists who have created masterpieces can just be monsters behind their craft. That I feel like I am becoming a purist when it comes to the artistic practice because I don't want to accept that in my intermittent attempts to become an artist, I am also making myself vulnerable to being something I loathe.

With my deliberations, I know this is a fear. In any way you look at it, what I just discussed from the previous paragraph is irrational because artists are humans and humans are terribly flawed. I am exposing my thought that I am gatekeeping the idea of being an artist must be "pure" in thought and in practice so I create these restrictions, I set these rules that would set apart a real artist from a fraud. However, this line of thought will only result to a false dichotomy that is rooted from personal insecurity. Wherever this thought may lead me, it will always be self-serving because I am creating an unnecessary definition.

At least that's clear for now. I imagine that this is a long way towards its finality. We arrive at the discipline of thought. The slowness of conclusion must be embraced because there will always be like this when it feels like we gained nothing because what I was thinking is false. So we're back at thinking at something else. But what has been thought has been processed. I know something I didn't before: I have been trying to protect the sacredness of being an artist from the wickedness of human nature.

At least, from this realization, I can free myself from these fetters of thought. Still, fuck Neil Gaiman.

2025-01-27

2025-01-27T00:00:00.000Z

Restful days have been helpful. Although it took me a whole two days of doing nothing, I still woke up today with a headache. It almost took me out of work, at least in thought. All my doubts about my job and the people I work with came pouring in at the first moment I open up my laptop. I did search for jobs for a while but I gladly took myself out of it and started the week right.

I've always been the kind of person who does their own experiments using their body. It started when I became self-aware during my senior year in high school. Talked my adviser out of not caring about whether I graduate with honors or not because that was the time when I simply just wanted to abandon my straight-A academic kid for a life of just going with the flow. No history records to memorize, no equations to make sense of. I wanted to just exist and feel the world around me, which I felt I had been neglecting hiding behind textbooks.

After more than a decade, I have developed this sort of "understanding" about myself to the point where I plan when I must take coffee during the day, plot the time of crash, and adjust the things I must do before it happens so nothing gets ruined in the sequence of events that I had in my head. My dog should have her lunch meal prepped before I eat my lunch. I count the number of acceptable hours of sleep (at least 5 hours) before I decide to hit the sack. I estimate the amount of effort I will give to a person so I will always have the time for myself. This extends even to the closest family members. I count the hours when I should allow myself drink black tea after drinking my second cup of coffee. I estimate the events that I will have for the week to make room for the some spontaneous activities that I might be able to squeeze in if ever I get some free time.

It is an understatement when I say that I know what I want. I do not plan everything but I make sure that I will always perform the bare minimum that I expect from myself. Then I build a routine around those rules, with some attempts to make it flexible from time to time to make sure that it never gets old. I would switch a routine with another to see how it would affect me and my headspace. If it works, it works. If it doesn't, well now I know. Even if I can intuit things, I take pleasure in trying things even if I know that there is a chance that it will not work. Call it willful stupidity but the experience itself matters to me. I am able to imagine multiple outcomes but in my head, even if they are as realistic and predictable as they seem in my imagination, it is not real unless I am able to experience it. This is a kind of paradox that I have let myself experience. There is always a certain level of knowing, in understanding an event through experiencing it. A situation imagined can always be logically anticipated but it is within the realm of thought. What is always uncertain is how would I feel when I am faced with certain situations. How will I know that how I reacted in my imagination is the same way that I would when faced by its reality? How will I prove to myself that I can fulfil a promise even if it is just words that came out of my mouth? In the end, what matters to me is the result of an imagined outcome. And I need to be there when it happens.

This has been my recent musings about commitment has led me. I am going into this rabbit hole of self-knowledge about the drivers into how I make myself act using the purity of my own thoughts.

This is how I allow myself to say what I do and do as I say.

2025-01-26

2025-01-26T00:00:00.000Z

There is a spiritual aspect to consistency, discipline, and routine. These are the things that drive me to have this perception about commitment. The act of doing regardless of the circumstances. It is a demonstration of one's own will—spirit.

I've been too attached to this idea that I knew I have talked about this a lot of times in the past ^[1]^[2]^[3] but I still keep finding myself talking about it more. Most probably it is because how I see that everything about this aspect, even about the attempts to be consistent and disciplining yourself must always come from a place of love.

Commitment is always anchored by a strong desire that compels the body to move. It is larger than thought, but it must always begin with a thought. A thought that is similar to a pact, a vow, and a promise to oneself that must be fulfilled no matter what it takes. It is within the realm of duty. A strong sense of duty arrives with a strong sense of purpose. One is able to act on his own will, to fulfill his duty because he knows why he is doing it. The scope is clear. The promise is defined. Committing to the act only becomes a daily check-in. Everyday becomes a performance of a duty that varies in intensity. What is more important is not how it is done but what must be done should be done. Adapting to the situation to get things done is one of its requirements.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons why committed people have a secure aura around them. They may not be the most kind or easygoing people you will ever meet but there is a pleasure to even witness them do what they do best. They make acting out on your own thoughts effortless. They make the world appear so simple. They make existing appear so good and holy. Doing every single thing the same way every single day and being flexible on doing them regardless of the circumstances is a demonstration of a masterful existence. The unwavering human spirit in the face of the world's randomness, unfazed against all odds, unrelenting with passion, stability, and security.

Where does love factor in with all of these things? Whatever you love, even if it is a person or something that you do, you will always pour everything your being is capable of doing to sustain it. Acts of love always open this potential that we have as humans to temper our spirit. It is the overflow of human potential radiating from a single person. It is a blade smithed to perfection, it is the hardened neuron that knows it will light up even after it dies. It is a ghost of an action long gone but still performed by the spirit of the doer. It is an action etched into time, transcending generations. It is an expression of faith, of reverence, of the channeling of life itself from one to another.

Showing up is just the first step. A first step that shall be done ten thousand times before moving to the next step: aligning your words to the tune of the universe.

2025-01-25

2025-01-25T00:00:00.000Z

I have fully embraced lying dormant today. After half of my day is spent to finishing The Day of the Jackal, my body started to somatize and I felt hot, regardless of the chilly weather. How I interpret this is most likely how my body only felt fully rested today out of most days. Weekends happen but the past weekends did not led to this physical state. I definitely feel fatigued. It is as if I had been feeling this prolonged state of unrest, where I successfully deluded myself into feeling okay despite that my body is not in a good condition. I may have been running on pure will in the past few weeks, or maybe even months. I can't really tell.

I literally haven't done anything today except to watch a show, eat, and lie down. Recently, I should have been able to snug any ounce of "work" in it, especially in building what I need for my creative project. And as I am writing this log, I am struggling to find the right words to express myself. My mind just want to take a break. This should be able to provide a sense of alignment between my mind and body. I hope.

2025-01-24

2025-01-24T00:00:00.000Z

Today is a still wave. A consumption habit resigned from the immediacy of thought. It is a feeling of brain muscles relaxing, of a heart deliberately beating slow, towards breath from the firing of neurons, where a habit is slowly learning how to capture intervals and have the body adopt this routine.

It still took some brainpower to rest but we are loosely getting the hang of it. All this mental fatigue may have been caused by terrible work events this week but it's not the end of everything. Perspective and degrees of perspective. At the same time, learning to capture the rhythm of shifting between degrees of perspective. All I am doing is documenting my own state, its fluctuations, and current findings. What is working and what requires more data from my experience of now.

It is quiet inside the mind but some ideas are marinating under the heat of a creative vision. Since this space is still meant to be public, I must learn how to hide it from my own perspective of the public eye until the idea manifests itself in a form that I want it. We will wait until it takes the form of my own vision.

For now, an interlude.

2025-01-23

2025-01-23T00:00:00.000Z

There is never a time in a day when there is very little room for active thinking. At the same time, there is always a space for mundanity each day to just let things flow, letting the waves crash against each other and feel the splash of ordinariness against your face. I stand in stillness in the midst of the day taking place. Events unfold and I just become a passive observer of what happens. I withdraw my influence of being into the world to remind myself how much have I asserted myself, my own artifice of being, into the natural flow of the world.

I am trying to direct myself into this deliberate thinking towards a point where I decide when I begin to let myself to be passive. My tendency to overthink has always been my most energy-consuming trait, such that I must always remind myself that "hey, let's try to just stop today and do nothing." It has been another week of thinking plus a total crash of events last Tuesday.

This is a self check-in to again remind myself, I still got this. I'm still here.

2025-01-22

2025-01-22T00:00:00.000Z

There is an invaluable realm of human experience when you can definitely say that something—an inanimate object, an event, a piece of art—phenomenologically speaks to you. With the work of one's own imagination, they open the senses of the mind. This is akin to "listening with your mind's ears" when it comes to learning how to read poetry. The mind's ears introduce a sensibility of perception that rely on relationships, which is the sound in language in this case. The sound is heard internally by the inner voice, which is disembodied, a word is both spoken and heard in the absence of sound. We then enter this place of the abstraction of language itself, where there is another layer of perception as an epiphenomenon of experience.

It is not a rare thing to experience. In fact, we can roughly describe it as a form of sentimentality. In nostalgia, in yearning, in belief, whenever and wherever we find a piece of ourselves, in the present, in the past, or in the future, that is represented by that object. However, sentimentality is an emotional response, that is often an instant and an immediate response, which is an unfiltered reaction by the perceiver. Sentimentality is a reaction. It is not a deliberate engagement with the object being perceived. Choosing to engage with an inanimate object using the senses of the mind is a practice of interpretation, of meaning-making, and of making-sense.

A direct engagement with an object while being open to what it "reveals" to you as a product of that interaction creates a feedback loop that is mediated by one's imagination. This is the realm of delusion, of the creation of one's own self-image. This is the place where ideation of the self happens. The feedback loop that occurs is an acceptance of the object that one engages in. In creating a feedback loop with an artwork, one accepts the piece of art as an object alien to oneself in order to directly engage with it and let the object "reveal" itself. This is a crucial aspect of experience that must be done deliberately in order to avoid falling into the trap of a false sense of knowing. The artwork will not reveal itself to a person who is not open to its being-as-an-object-in-itself even if there is an attempt to interpret because the interpretation that happens in this scenario is a form of an unaware self-projection. The person's understanding is within the realm of their understanding, which is always not the case when engaging with an object, at least when we truly attempt to understand it. All interpretation, if we want a true experience of a feedback loop with an object requires sincerity and humility. He who has the capability to understand must understand that the true form of understanding must always come to the place of unknowing. The process of understanding should always be stripped by the ego's presumptions in order to open the self to what the object may reveal to us.

This same process is applied to the knowing of one's true self, where it is important to empty the self of its current perception of itself in order to let the right one in. True understanding comes after the process of unlearning the world from what the world told us what it is and relearning the world from what the world has revealed to us what it is after we have emptied ourselves of our previous assumptions of the same world that we are trying to understand. In this feedback loop, we continually refine the world and refine ourselves according to how we change and how we are changed by the world.

As we can see, true understanding comes when we deliberately engage with the world and cease to be reactive. It does not say that the world is an illusion that we must get past through. The world is made up of language that requires our interpretation, to use it so we can find ourselves in it. In this process, there can be no "single self" but only multitudes that must be discarded, organized, and reorganized amidst the chaos of what the world reveals to us. If there is one thing that defines what it means to be human, is to be the anti-entropic, self-organizing force that finds meaning in this chaos. Since the default state of the world is chaos in the untrained eye, they only see objects in the world as isolated artifacts. Which is why imagination is important because we are not here to make meaning out of nothing. This is why the world requires our understanding of relationships and the connections between objects. Our openness is the only requirement for the world to reveal ourselves to us.

2025-01-21

2025-01-21T00:00:00.000Z

I can say for sure that I choose to see people act with good intentions. I choose this because I do not want to be caught up in the momentum of spiraling pessimism, when it would get me to a point that the world becomes a bleak and unbearable place solely because of the simple fact that humans exist.

I know how it feels to hate everyone. It is a path towards self-destruction and denial of the self. After deciding to see the good in people, I found that assuming the worst in people is such an easy thing to do. While I do have an apprehension towards doing things the easy way, I found it to be equally inefficient if you are serious about improving yourself. Perhaps this is why I am inclined to say that suffering is essential to one's growth. But up until now, I did not see that I will ask myself the question "why am I willing to suffer for this?"

It struck me as odd because I know that I have already committed to a life not of suffering but a life that embraces it. With a mindset that continuously evaluates the degrees of suffering and that actively chooses the one that I must face the consequence of, I become more whole. Out of duty, I take the pain that I deserve, willingly, to understand myself better by putting myself in situations where I am forced to act according to my true self. Again, it becomes another form of commitment and standing up to the version of me that I would like to be.

When there is no escape, we become forced to act according to our truest nature. Now, our truest nature can be developed whether it be consciously or subconsciously. By default, our true nature is always developed subconsciously. This is where self-denial and self-delusion is most prominent and active because it will always fight against whatever threatens the established subconscious self. In this case, is where one is most unaware of themselves because they operate on the layer of always trying to protect the self that was naturally formed by their own experience of the world without deliberate thought. It was not formed by what the true self wants. It is always formed by the world for that specific person. Therein lies the conflict of a "true self" where in having one would always require the person to abolish the self that the world has created for them.

There is truth in saying that a single person is a reflection of the world. On the other hand, a person can become their own world. These are the polar opposites of how the world creates our self for us when there is no self-direction and how it may look like from inside out. Relying on fate, on the same familiar paths other people before us have left us: there is always a melancholic undertone in knowing that one is confused about the person that they are. When dreams are difficult to define, when desires are not questioned, when one's own reality is not redefined—these are the entryways towards suffering. The self is a void before the emergence of self-awareness necessary to construct the true self. Suffering brings us closer to the awareness that we are alive and we are a conscious living being trying to make sense of everything in this world.

In every moment suffering is felt, it is always an opportunity to know the underlying self that feels the pain and explore why the pain exists. However, this is only an indicator of a chance for a possibility of self-knowledge. The next step is to stay true to oneself in order to discover the carve one's true self with their own consciousness.

2025-01-20

2025-01-20T00:00:00.000Z

I just has this conversation with my manager about "talking with new people" when we were brainstorming about some tweaks on the content I made for a job guide. This was under Research and Preparation section for recruiters. Its primary purpose is to set a standard research practice for recruiters when researching about a lead's business industry and the requirements of the role they want to hire, so the recruiters can find a suitable fit for their needs. Somehow, it did remind me of my thoughts yesterday, where I have always been trying to prepare for interactions, especially when meeting new people. It was a topic that I wholeheartedly understood. I even feel like I had years of preparation for this brainstorming session with my manager.

It made me think about how I think about communication and relationships. In terms of service, the idea makes perfect sense because you want to make the lead feel that as a recruiter, you made an effort to understand their business (know them) and that you care about their business by doing your research. It is a service after all where the lead's experience is a highly valued feedback when it comes to ensuring that we are able to meet their needs. In my own job, I try to do the same thing: in accepting writing tasks and writing requests, I make sure that their request is aligned to my understanding. So I prepare by reading the format, what type of examples I can follow, and understanding the essence of the request so I can confidently fulfill their request and complete the transaction. In this framing, the way that we both know that this is a transactional relationship allows us to accept that we have to put up a mask at face value. I know that when I am talking to a salesperson, that they are most often than not trying to sell me a product so they can have a commission, which can always be prioritized above wanting to help a customer. That is something I can understand even if I don't necessarily agree with it.

As of this moment, I can probably say that I was never used to a type of social interaction that is not transactional. Or I can state that in trying to understand this old habit of mine, I have only considered interactions to be concretely transactional, in a sense that I have always assumed that people always need something from me. I may have not considered that interactions can exist as it is, without anything to give or take. As I'm trying to uncover this in real-time, I can also interpret this as my tendency to always ensure that people can always learn something from me, even in a short amount of time. That I always have something unique to offer. Perhaps, even that it is a people-pleasing tendency to project a better version of me when I'm around new people.

I will return to this topic soon. I may be on to something.

2025-01-19

2025-01-19T00:00:00.000Z

I liked who I was today. I've always been too conscious about how I act around people. What I am trying to unlearn is to not prepare a script for greetings and niceties to project a certain first impression. As I begin to attempt to live the life of the person I imagine myself to be, I had to let go of my introverted habits. I realized that preparing for every interaction only perpetuates my disappointment that I am bad a social interactions. Since it is impossible to control how words will be received by the other, it is only troublesome to orchestrate first impressions. I realized that it is useless and does not amount event to a net positive because of the amount of stress I am putting myself into even before the interactions happen. Once again, it is my overthinking brain, trying to anticipate what will happen to gain a semblance of control in my mind. It is a type of over-reassuring myself that I will be okay if I just prepare, which is only an illusion.

So I'm beginning to let that aspect of myself go bit by bit, one encounter after another. Consciously doing it led to a kind of flow, where interactions begin to create its own rhythm. What I see as "stage cues" before begin to transform into "dynamics." All of my preconceived notions about each person disappeared and they begin to seem like themselves without my judgment. As I let myself be, I opened myself to an experience where I start to see the human in every person. This is not to say that I used to see every person as a character that I created in my head, but to realize that any form of preparation before every encounter will always be washed away by the fluidity of conversations and the waves of body languages. My mind stopped analyzing everything. Nervousness never visited and anxiety did not summon a clumsy response I would have done if I were as stiff as a bamboo.

I would love to continue down this road. I feel like another sense of freedom has awakened in me. I am slowly becoming someone who I wanted to be.

2025-01-18

2025-01-18T00:00:00.000Z

Today is a day of resting. I needed a break from thinking. I was tired of it all. I noticed that I have been obsessively mulling over the morality of everything. Who gets to do things. Why people do what they do. Why do most artist turn out to be cowards. And why does creation should inherently carve a higher sense of moral responsibility to its creator. Those kinds of things. It felt like my line of thinking is only going in circles. I needed to catch myself. To stop. And somehow enjoy some hours away from my laptop.

Which is what I did and spent some time watching a movie and finish a series: both that actually stirred some existential questions: about ridding oneself of grief, of the extremes of forgiveness, and a tiny aspect of the reality of aging. Was my mind able to rest? I would say so, given that I haven't actually been processing all of these things. In my mind, the things I mentioned previously, are already on their way to crystallize into a semblance of an insight. Today has been a way to remove myself from the shadows of those thoughts and give myself some space to rid myself of familiarity. In a sense, it may look like all I have been doing is to always give myself something to think about. This is true. But this has been a recent deliberate exercise to finally figure out what I actually think about things. In the past few years, I have stopped myself from giving meaning to everything. Interpreting every detail, trying to look at it from various perspectives, dissecting every possible layers, and mumbling to myself "there should be more to this" after every attempt at a synthesis. But those were the times when academia and social media had a massive influence on me. What I "think" is always dictated by nitpicking every possible theory from a dead person to substantiate my claims. I can only provide a perspective by walking to the same line of thinking that people before me did.

It is not like I am now trying to attempt to be "original" because we all know it's already an impossibility. But I realized that I used to scour through articles, manifestos, passages from seminal works, and quotations from reputable people, is because I lack an experience of the world. I was young. A literature major graduate in his early twenties, trying to apply the map of theories to the real world he has now been casted into. The world then was framed by pages of texts as if Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation and Lacan's Seminars explain every human encounter. The irony is, when I thought I knew how the world works, I stopped thinking.

Every movie became a lesson about the world and the self. Every show on TV became a social commentary and I made a whole fiction out of the reality of everything. The world was my text and I was there to interpret everything. From my own bus commutes to every people I meet, what I know about them, what they like—I made sure that the world becomes predictable enough in a way that I can formulate a conclusion as to why things happen based on how they happen.

I was insufferable. Because I believed I speak the ineffable truth. And it came to a point when I realized that I've never had a single thought. I was only speaking through the language of the people whom I know to be telling the truth. This is going to be a story for another day.

But since then I have begun taking things less seriously. I shifted my perspective to be more open to what people say. And throughout these years, I have learned a lot from just being with the world. I took my time to analyze everything but only with deliberate action. It doesn't have to be my default mode. The analytical part of my brain has to rest or else it will get overworked and just grasp on the easiest ways of understanding because it has lacked the endurance to process complex layers of information.

I still enjoy watching films and even choose to watch some that I know are just something I can sit with and enjoy. The symbols can come later but for now, I am just absorbing these series of images flashing right before my eyes and just be.

2025-01-17

2025-01-17T00:00:00.000Z

Today marks the death of David Lynch.

I am stumped because for some reason, in my mind, he isn't supposed to die. I know, that's one hell of an impossible statement. People die. Celebrities die. Artists die. While some I just killed in my mind, deliberately removing them from the confines of my brain because of heinous acts, retroactively undermining their works because of being inhuman at their core, Lynch stands as one of the masters in their field whom I learned a lot from just by being exposed to his craft. And in some way, he has already immortalized himself in the souls touched by his art.

When a great artist dies, for a few days the whole world seems to circulate around the void they’ve left behind. We realize how deeply we’ve come to depend on them, how much of our lives have been lived inside their dreams, among their words and images.
— jon repetti (@pourfairelevide) January 17, 2025

Up until now, I did not realize that he had this effect on me, where in being unapologetically creative, you assert yourself as an artist in the absence of audience recognition, which is essentially, how an artist should be. To dance when no one is watching. There is freedom in creating uncompromising works of art solely based on your vision—or perhaps, if I rephrase that bit: being able to do that in itself is freedom.

I have always believed that be true to your craft without fanfare and validation and it will naturally find its audience. Nothing has ever dictated my creative pursuit so deeply than this approach. My only failure is to be defeated by the voices inside my head. It was the opposite of what Lynch had showed me. It was a failure on my part to embody and look at my own fears. Yet I know overcoming them head on is the task of the hero. During that time, I wasn't able to show up for myself. I left myself to be wrecked under the pressure of my environment. I avoided a confrontation with myself, with my fears, and with my nightmares.

I know I have reflected on this countless of times. Written a lot of paragraphs about my past creative failures. But this day has brought another dimension to reflecting to my own creative struggles. My adolescent pretentious self, where art becomes a playground of ideas and self-expression without consequence, is when my creative journey started its path to crystallization. When I resorted to obscurity in order to express myself, I thought I was able to grasp what Lynch's surrealism and dream logic had told me. Since he offered no explanations, I made it up for myself. And what came out was a pathetic excuse for creating art, because it was not honest.

In a sense, I am still in the process of trying to build myself up after facing disillusionment, which took me half a decade to internalize. There were a lot of detours. A lot of experimentation. A lot of attempts to forge a path towards things I do not fully understand. But all of them led me back to writing. I did not expect, even with the seeming convoluted turn of events, those times planning and strategically convincing myself that I can live a life without putting creativity as my main line of work, that it would still lead towards my imagination.

Lynch started it all for me. Watching a Lynch movie requires a surrender to the abandonment of understanding. Everything becomes a personal experience. He had shown me how to confront the self, the inevitable return of the repressed, and how to talk to your demons. Now, those demons grew up with me. While we still have the occasional chaotic conversations, they are more approachable now. I have made my own red room inside my own inland empire.

As I write this, there is a deep melancholia that swells because now gone is the man who has helped me become a better version of myself because of his uncompromising vision and approach towards creation. He showed us his own fears and nightmares, opened a space where there is the pressure to understand the world does not matter, where there is harmony among the chaos of the world and chaos within the self. This is why his works can only be described in a personal level because it eludes the objectivity of the world. He created a space and time where dreams and nightmares meld into one, and after the credits roll, we are back to a place where we can apply what we just experienced to see the world in a different way, and in turn, to see ourselves with more complexity, allowing us to navigate the creases of ourselves we haven't seen before, and from there, create an understanding from seeing the organized chaos of another person's subconscious.

He opened up the possibilities of cinema. Showed that there are no boundaries in language that films cannot communicate up to the point of abstraction and meaninglessness. He showed us how to dream. He showed us how to see through ourselves.

There's nothing else but gratefulness that Lynch chose to be himself. This is the task of every artist.

2025-01-16

2025-01-16T00:00:00.000Z

I am locked in today.

A slow work day with a lot of progress fixing and improving my website. We not have a background to revel in, which makes writing appealing for me. The graph is also fixed. No more annoying overspilling and overscans. Worked for a total of 1 hour this morning, right after receiving the request of editing a document. Today is just a good day for fixing things.

I have made myself busy to make some changes inside the mind department. All throughout this process, since yesterday, it just feels like I am decluttering my head. The development goes something like:

I want to improve something.
- I try to fix it
  - Fixing it fixes it
    - Most of the time it causes problems
      - Adding more elements to be fixed
        
        Until everything is an entangled mess
        
        But tirelessly fixing it
      - Allows for me to see some parts of the problem
    - Taking a step forward
      - And sometimes, a step back
        
        And another step further
      - But we manage
    - To see the problem better and provide a better fix
    - Until the problem makes more sense
  - And see more areas where you might have fucked everything up
  - More time passes fixing it
- Until you arrive at a satisfying fix
- But everything still doesn't feel right
- So you add improvements
  - And it causes more problems...
    - And more problems
  - But tirelessly working on it
- Allows for a better perspective
- And better approaches
Until everything is stable again

And we arrive at the point where an improvement is finally implemented. This is a type of process that is familiar to me because along those indents and problems, somewhere when things make sense and doesn't make sense, I am learning something without even knowing it. It seems like the conscious act of doing it is lost on me. When I'm in the moment of fixing things, I don't think about the amount of time it is taking me. Whenever I'm faced with something like this, it brings me to the present. My mind is only in this problem and I will try to spend as much time as I can to fix it.

At the same time, I like how it brings my attention to the present. Everything disappears around me. Nothing is urgent except fixing that damned overspilling canvas in its container. I need to implement that background animation that just worked earlier but is now not working again because I added a transparency effect on my graph. What I mean to say is that I like this aspect of my personality. I hope that I don't lose this trait along the way. I know the effects of not persevering and it would be a huge disappointment if I will lose this vigor.

I know I have done a lot of things because of this trait and it is only now when I am beginning to recognize it as one of the things that pushes me beyond my limit. But I can't even really tell if it's my limit when I am conscious that I do enjoy the process, so I don't feel dread or ill-feelings about the actual act of doing it. In the very same vein, the daily logs is actually headed towards this habit-creation of just doing. The desired effect is slowly settling in. I just need to keep this pace. Slowly, in small bits of effort and by deliberately dedicating time, at least an hour per day.

I feel good that I can confirm that I am showing up for myself.

2025-01-15

2025-01-15T00:00:00.000Z

I did a lot of changes on the website today. A whole lot of trial and error processes trying to improve how it looks and how aesthetics shouldn't distract from the reading experience. I might have spent more than 8 hours today doing this. Back and forth from my code editor > commit all changes > sync to my host and repeat at least less than a thousand times.

For some reason I went through this process tirelessly and operating all changes on production without testing all the changes I am trying to make using a localhost server. I just realized it now... And I think I just wasted a lot of time. Well...

I don't know if this is an attempt to console myself but I may have an immediate reaction of disappointment but "wasted time" does not feel like a loss for me. If it's worth mentioning, I did not feel that I'm feeling enough frustration to just quit through the process while I was at it today. For example, I wanted to have an underline animation instead of a static underline for every link just for the kicks. I could have sped up the process by opening a localhost so I don't have to wait a couple of minutes for it only to see it up live on my site. I did that. At least less than a thousand times today. Voluntarily. Is this grit? But I'm more inclined that this is just stupidity. I think I just enjoy banging my head on the wall until it bleeds.

Couple it with my care for any passion project where I just can't stop until I get a point where I'm satisfied with the results. At this point in real-time, before I publish this entry, I am still in the process of reverting a commit, which is roughly 15 commits before the current one where I managed to fuck everything up just because I want to add my socials in the navbar...

And it just failed...

God, now I'm frustrated. I will try to fix this in the meantime. So yeah. Some logs will just be some bits like this when I feel like I'm just rambling. Squeezing some braincells to write something. I hope when I publish this before I sleep, the code is stable.

2025-01-14

2025-01-14T00:00:00.000Z

I recently discovered that my current morality is more Kantian than Stoic. Last night, I had a chance to dabble into Kant's Deontology and a somehow surface exploration of his categorical imperative. I do think that one must have developed a certain universality of judgement that prioritizes a "common good." This is one of the ways to distance yourself from your ego because you attempt to create a framework where you always start with giving respect and dignity to each individual. Without the intervention of the ego, we ascribe self-agency to each person and at the same time, holding them accountable to their actions.

I have since written about self-agency for the most part but they were heavily influenced by the idea of self-knowledge. The concept of an other is what I needed to create a more comprehensive framework of my own morality where I am done with centering my arguments around an established self.

The morality of the other is a tricky territory. Kant suggests that respect and dignity is an inherent attribute of man. Every person must be treated with respect, recognizing their own autonomy, which means that the world is a thriving sea of autonomous subjects whose freedom is always limited where the autonomy of others begins. But we do not forget about the empowerment of others, where we have a moral obligation to intervene at times where harm is to be brought upon to a person either by others or when they pose a danger to themselves. It is important to deliberate on one's moral judgement regarding the severity of a situation, to act without undermining the autonomy of others.

To always act based on the purity of one's intention and not to reap the fruits of its consequence. This steers us away from acting malicious where we can justify our own actions as a means to an end. In this sense, every action done with a pure intent in mind will not always result to a favorable outcome because there are various external factors beyond our control that will influence the result. These ideas further solidify my claim that it is always good to hold everyone, including ourselves, in the same standards regardless of how it may affect us.

The path towards the kind of person I want to be is becoming more clear. The imagined self is becoming more textured and real. This will be the proof of how I will try to attempt to reinvent myself from my own explorations.

2025-01-13

2025-01-13T00:00:00.000Z

As I build up to the habit of writing, I'm sensing that a huge part of the world opens up through the exercise of commitment and faith. Earlier, I have been thinking that a lot of things I do were "revealed" to me in such a way that I am only capable of doing them after I was done doing them. The success is heightened by the fact that I also believed that I could do them even if no prior evidence support the fact that I can do a decent job at pulling it off. Call it a lack of skill, practice, and discipline, but all those things disappear in the process of doing.

Yesterday also revealed to me that this has been the type of faith that I had been practicing. Placing faith on myself goes beyond trust and is always prior to trusting yourself. Since most often than not, trust requires prior evidence of a fulfilled promise. It requires history than belief. Trusting someone means that a bond has been established. That the "belief" is already proven true. It is always "already." Placing your faith on someone can also be proven by history but you can only place your faith on someone in a form of a gamble. It is always an act of throwing yourself into the void. Trust, on the other hand, when violated, immediately breaks, resulting into treachery. Faith can never result to treachery. It can only be made under a false assumption. Since there is no evidence or proof of competency or capability, it can never be disproven because, paradoxically, having faith means believing in something false.

Belief is within the realm of imagination. If you commit towards something you imagine about yourself and for yourself, it is a potent mixture of releasing your potential. At most, I feel like it is only a matter of distancing my thinking self from the self that I am thinking about (objective self) in order to act as if I am my own disciplinarian. The thinking self holds on to the imagined self: the self that we are trying to become, and enforces all tasks and rules to be done by the objective self. This is what I have failed to elaborate this time. There are three parts of me and I am all of them, separately coexisting and influencing each other towards a future that I choose to head towards. What is important for me is to just show up for myself, as the objective self, every single day. To choose to wake up and not be woken up by external factors. This is how we fight against the defeatist determinism of nihilists. Work within your predestined self. Claim a path of the several possibilities that could be you instead of dwelling on the number of selves you could have been simply because you failed to imagine and choose a path for yourself.

I can only say that everything I did today is just that. Show up for myself that I can commit to finishing a task and I was able to get it done in a matter of hours. The remaining 4 hours of work was allocated to rest and free time. Then I left it at that because no other things should be done. I am not in a rush. But I still have a lot of things to do.

But I do not imagine myself to be an overworked individual trying to pursue a personal and career goal at the same time.

2025-01-12

2025-01-12T00:00:00.000Z

I am training myself to get used to putting out work even if there is always a hundred percent chance that no one will even notice them. Take it as more of an automatic conditioning to create the habit of getting myself to work even with a tiny ounce of inspiration and energy. There is the idea of showing up for yourself and in most cases, this practice becomes a daily check in with myself, where I become my own creative support system. During most days, I am lost in my unprocessed thoughts where the moment would feel like I am in this hazy unmoving boat in a middle of the lake and the water underneath me begins to resemble a flat mirror of a cloudy sky. A moment where and when does not matter. The stillness of it all is a comforting sign that something is wrong. But at the same time I am trying to teach myself that this moment does not have to be an ominous cause. I can exist in this stillness and at the same time imagine a monster waiting for me behind all this fog. Both can be true. It does not mean that both requires my attention to interpret it. If I just let myself be, I can be just me, even for a moment, even if I must borrow myself from myself who always worries, plans, and attempt to look for signs in my past in order to foresee my immediate future. While those actions have proven themselves to be useful and have ensured my own survival, I can still just take my time to not do things. I kept being reminded that I should not do things. I can feel my overthinking brain overrule my capacity to function as I normally do. I am placing a lot of pressure on myself to execute a future that I am envisioning. I am becoming, once again, obsessed with who, what, and where I want to be. I am forgetting to just be me for a moment. To enjoy this moment and to just let go. I can be like this. Sometimes. And this is one of those times. This Sunday afternoon while these words caress my own brain, massaging those stiff muscles. I must let myself worry tomorrow and just give myself to the present. This place has become less familiar since the beginning of the new year. I worry a lot. I worry a lot.

Now, I must keep the balance to just go back to how I was and return to this state of planning before formally establishing the habit I need to enact my vision. This is a pause. But I will still be here. Everyday. But becoming less and less obsessed. Still strategic. I have done good work this week.

2025-01-11

2025-01-11T00:00:00.000Z

Yeah, so this day has been kind of a nudge towards doing creative work full-time. A lot has been happening in the background: testing some hardware, various types of software--just basically trying to optimize my setup towards my vision of freedom. One step at a time. Trying to achieve that balance of work, play, and rest.

Today, I am confronted by the limitations of my own hardware. I actually did not expect that I would hit one of the walls this soon, just two months after getting this new laptop. This week has been actually all about limitations. Exploring what these limits might mean. Which limitations can I push and which is out of my control. My perfectionism is running on full steam and it seems like I am entering the familiar road that can end in a possibility of failure. I am being too careful. I am acting very precise about planning because I feel like the quality of its execution will dictate how soon can I take full control of my life.

It may seem that I am putting too much at stake here when basically I am only talking about my creative pursuits. This website is one of them. This is the first step. While at the same time, I am also planning several first steps along the way. At the back of my head, a lot of processes are running so I would not lose grasp of my vision. I'm taking it all in as I make time to live my personal life.

Let this be a future reminder that I have talked to myself about taking a break, or at least take some day off from thinking about the future. What often fuels me is obsession. But it's not a healthy relationship with creation because I think I have a lot on my hands right now: things that I love having and want to keep, places where I want to go, these aspiration, which is the present and a vision of a future that I can see. I hold these things very dear and I know changing direction in terms of my career will only make it more difficult for me to handle all of these things simultaneously so I should not let the rush of excitement fill me up everyday.

2025-01-10

2025-01-10T00:00:00.000Z

Today was cold. I woke up with a kind of relaxed resignation that the the chill in the air is so familiar that I knew everything that will happen is going to be okay. It is a kind of half self-predetermination and half-self delusion because of a familiar feeling of how the coldness touched my skin. This cold was a memory revisiting me in my present. This cold is similar to how I chased after warmth. This cold led me to a warmth that told me that everything is going to be okay. What happens after that is a story how I learned how to trust the cold.

I let the breeze in. The world becomes bittersweet, unserious, but I am happy that everything becomes real when I open the door.

2025-01-09

2025-01-09T00:00:00.000Z

Throughout my journey, into what I think is living the best possible life I can live on a given moment, I have arrived at an ideology that's a mix of Stoic, Socratic, and Aristotelian philosophies, which can be summarized with:

Know yourself.
Master yourself and develop your emotional and intellectual discipline.
Develop a discipline that is aligned to who you really are.

And as of this moment, it still works for me. To be specific, it works for me because I am a heavily introspective person and I do not rely too much on socialization to validate who I am or who I want to be. It works because I think I have attained a type of mindset that frees me from the expectations of other people because beyond the border of seeking external validation, is where you realize that you can just become who you want to be.

So I always think that knowing yourself: your values, your principles, all things that are important to you, and the honest knowledge of why they are important to you, is the main prerequisite of moving forward. Self-knowledge is the door towards freedom, which requires vigorous exercise of introspection, removing yourself from your ego, tirelessly keeping your biases in check, and keeping yourself accountable for everything you discover about yourself. It means taking action to what has been left unresolved that is the result of your own self-delusion and taking responsibility in setting things right. What is right in this case is always what is just, and what is just will never always be in your favor so you must be able to set yourself aside and prioritize fairness as the situation requires it.

But I also recognize that to be able to arrive to this mindset, I know that my background as a child who grew up in a lower-middle class household and got good education, has everything that made me who I am today. My mindset of what it is to live a good life, when prescribed as a way to live, will not only make my prescription limiting but also narcissistic. Every person does have a different definition or aspiration of what a good life is. Every person has a different purpose in life, whether or not it is a principle they closely follow or a concept that is entirely foreign to them. There is no single answer to what makes a good life worth living.

I guess this inquiry has been propagating inside my mind for a while now because of how it resists non-definition in the scale of universality. In attempting to think about what it truly means to be human, I always get a nagging sensation that there is no fair evaluation on determining a universal answer. In the same way that there is no universal answer on how to live. It feels like we are all given a choice to subscribe to any school of thought (or even create our own way of life) and die on that hill. There is no objective satisfaction in finding the right answer because the right answer will always be anything as long as you are willing to die for it. Perhaps this is where confidence in being unapologetic to your beliefs come from. You know who you are so you stand by what you believe in, regardless of its truth value or rationality, and live a life according to it.

With this, there is no insecurity of being wrong. There is no shame in speaking up. Because what you made for yourself is a kind of truth that no one will be able to take away from you because you become your own creator.

At the same time, this is the very problem of our differences. We believe too much in ourselves. It is baffling how two different approaches with one's ego: first is removing yourself from it, second is making your ego your own self, lead to the same mythmaking of one's self. Both end up in a type of confidence that speaks their own truth but is only different in the type of worldview that it tries to express: the objective world or the inner world. On one hand, you have the "egoless" man, while on the other, you have the "narcissistic" man. Both exist on the same line but are polar opposites of one another.

The egoless man always argues about the world as it is because he is always removed from it. The narcissistic man always argues about himself and how the world must meet his needs. In my head, they form a deadlock that is too difficult to untangle because I have this instinct to resolve every conflict that involves polar opposites. In my head, there should always be a way, even if it can only happen as an abstract concept, to sublimate these elements. I am compelled by reasoning itself to find a solution to this problem that I made myself for no reason.

This would take me weeks.

2025-01-08

2025-01-08T00:00:00.000Z

I feel this agonizing disgust about online posts that have this malicious goodness around them. For example, a social media post about a perfectly rational idea about self-improvement without any hint of human error. It often falls without malice, accepted at face-value because there is no counterargument against it. At the same time, it makes me feel that I am forcefully being backed into a corner to agree with its sentiment, it almost eclipses the truth that it holds by this feeling that I am being socially-engineered to not question the post. It feels like when I find a good product inside a mall and the salesman is just too good at selling the product that it makes me consider buying it even if I don't need it.

When this happens in social media, I know it is harmless. I know that it is possible that it is a bot, regurgitating every hit tweet it can find and posting it on its own account for clout and engagement farming (since these platforms can now be used for monetization). I know I'm developing mistrust on users that I see online because I'm wary that I am being fooled into thinking that I am engaging with a person when it is a bot on the back end. My immediate emotional response to this is that it feels as if something evil is lurking behind it. Or that I am just encountering a fear that I am still yet to understand, making me feel this irrational repulsion. But whenever I think that it is a visceral feeling of mine, I cannot brush off that there is something real sinister about it.

I still use Twitter daily. I log in and check what people are discussing about. It is essentially, a trend posting machine. Whenever I see a post that I like, I look at the replies to see what others think about it or if there are good counterarguments about it. Fair enough, a lot of them have good points but then if you scroll further, you will have a good chance that someone will quote an exact word-for-word tweet that was posted earlier than the one I just recently liked.

It makes it more suspicious if you have this combo:

An account that has a lot of followers and receive a constant number of engagements.
Posts about various topics that has a wide reach (i.e., relatable topics such as, self-improvement and life lessons).
Subscribed to X Premium.

It's an instant block when I find accounts like this. The truth value to what they are posting, even if I downright agree to them lose all meaning. It is easy to infer that accounts like this are engagement farms that aims to earn money with clout.

There is no truth in the pursuit of money. Only the reflection of being. Paradoxically, that in itself is a kind of truth. But it is a truth that is only necessary, and is an inevitability for people who stray away from the truth of their own self. It is a truth that should not present itself as your destination because when it happens, it will be too late to turn back. It is a type of regression, entirely opposite from the path of growth because it does not lead to virtue. It is the path that makes suffering its own end. This is probably the reason why I'm developing a certain anxiety towards the exponential growth of LLMs. I have a natural repugnance to the inauthenticity of (emerging, at this point in time) artificial personalities.

It seems like the world is headed towards a direction where it creates its own simulation. In a foreseeable future, we might just be okay with talking to a bot because we have developed language models so advanced, it can couple with the way we think. And that's how our mind likes it. To interact with an other that (seems to) understand you to your core. After all, social media is an online remote party of narcissists. Seeking external validation has always been a sign of existential loneliness. We become entrenched into our own online bubbles where similar-minds congregate. It is not difficult to imagine why a large number of people pay a large sum of money to use language models. There will be no legislation or form of left-wing ideas that will stop people from using it because it answers to our deepest desires. What are those deepest desires, you ask? Everything. Its limits will only be based on the user's imagination.

Soon enough we will live inside our own echo chambers where the only real human being is the one who created it.

2025-01-07

2025-01-07T00:00:00.000Z

Today was less intellectually interesting than most days. For some reason, my mind decided today that it is my body that should move. I did cover the books we bought from the end of 2023. Those things were long overdue because I knew I said that I will cover all six books we got for our end of year splurge. I just had a moment of "fuck it I'll do it now" earlier this morning since my workload is loose every start of the year.

Since I work on documentation, I'm always at the tail-end of the project development. My year-end tasks involved reviewing the responses of a knowledge check I created for our inhouse recruiters. It was part of a process improvement project to train our recruiters to better handle leads and convert them into sales. What we are trying to check is their own understanding of a supplementary material that I wrote for them, which contains all the learnings from their workshop sessions, such as how to build trust, how to ask better questions, and how to offer solutions. Technically, this task was way out of my field but I warmed up to the concept when I made the connection that it all boils down to effective communication.

I spent 4 hours of my work hours earlier trying to figure out how to use my phone as my laptop microphone and making sure that I capture the best sound possible from this piece of hardware. I've been eyeing for a better one but I know that I can still work with what I have and just upgrade when I have the means to do so.

Later this afternoon, I felt a mild headache that pushed me to take a few hours of rest. I hope tomorrow will be different. A taste of this day made me feel so passive that nothing worthwhile is happening inside my head. Perhaps this is my brain taking a break from all the thinking this week. In that case, I think I should really put my mind to rest.

2025-01-06

2025-01-06T00:00:00.000Z

During the times when I took a break from writing creatively, I dabbled into other mediums such as music and visual arts.

I tried learning how to play math-rock, tried learning music production, and music theory where I'll be able to produce music and express myself without words. I bought a new amp and effect pedal so I can control the sound that I wanted to produce. Months passed by and it didn't really amount to anything except obtaining another layer of appreciation to music. I did not really produce any practical output that would even be characterized as a "song."

Going to visual arts was way more productive. With my basic understanding of Photoshop, I was able to create digital collages, explored other digital painting software until my attempts to explore digital painting led me to somewhat a profitable result. However, it did not meet the type of expression that I had been chasing after that can even be remotely similar to how I do it with the written word. In most cases, I always find myself writing a short abstract about my work as another layer of meaning-making as how I did it with The Infinities of Desire.

My fatal flaw has always been finding out the purpose of why I do the things that I do. The stronger my connection with the process of my work, the stronger for finding the purpose for doing that thing. At the same time this is the very thing that paralyzes me into doing the things I'm good at. I constantly look for a "reason" that conflicts with my own enjoyment of the process.

If someone would ask me today if I still want to be a poet, I would say yes but I want to be a poet who is not limited to the written word but still uses it as the main mode of expression. Then again, what the fuck does that mean?

At this point, I'm still finding the stance of being able to defend how I do what I want to do, which is writing. I still can't seem to reconcile the fact that deep down, I have no idea what I am actually doing. But I know it should not stop me. I know that not knowing what I am doing should not deter me because trying to understand what I do is difficult if I have no output to understand.

So this practice of daily logs is what I am trying to commit to. In a way to help myself take another step towards clarity, even if it takes years, should be able to take me where I want to go. I have an idea of where I want to go: somewhere I get a semblance of "freedom" just like what my recent writings has revealed to me. I do not impose a certain finality to what I am doing to free myself from my own expectations.

This is me letting myself do what I want without knowing where it will take me. This is me letting myself just do things and take it seriously.

2025-01-05

2025-01-05T00:00:00.000Z

Fifth day and first Sunday of the year. It already feels like a lot has happened.

Around me:

Bobbi just had her annual rabies shot and consulted with her vet about her recurring hair loss.
First grocery run of the year just happened earlier.

Within me:

Spiritual anxieties concerning recent AI news shed some light to some internal conflicts I had been harboring.
Planning about some future activities about my own career had me eyeing for tools and gears online. Thinking hard about the things I can buy, how it will help me, and when is the best time to buy them.

Great. So I just had 4 items to list this time. Still, the quantity fails to represent their actual weight on my mind.

I observed that I have been writing more as each day passes. This is actually unexpected but a totally welcome behavior that I want to have. I feel like I think a lot and not writing them down makes me intellectually constipated. Using Twitter on a regular basis has become less in terms of putting out thoughts in that platform. I might still keep it to still connect with what is happening around me. News about things I do not care about. Still, at least useful for inciting serendipity of information. The way it is becoming less and less populated by real people is becoming more and more palpable, or readable.

You can see it in how people talk, how they phrase their words, and how they reply to other people. Engagement farming, clout, and feeding our narcissist tendencies is not what it's good at right now. Money and narcissism is a deadly mix. That shit can kill a person's soul.

I clearly do not have anything useful to say today. Except to comment on my previous logs here that I will be taking this day as a break from thinking. It has been my own internal control mechanism to stop myself in the middle of a momentum to not get blindsided either by excitement or rush of novelty. This is something new to my own system. This is new to my routine and I care about this change too much to let myself burn out in the process.

I am enjoying this. I hope you are too.

Soon, this will extend to a new project that I am preparing in the meantime. Let me thrive in this commitment.

2025-01-04

2025-01-04T00:00:00.000Z

This is the second day that I'm trying to wrap my head around what I learned yesterday. Something about the concept of being deceitful have been used by science fiction as a human trait allows us to gauge the level of a machine's humanity.

In Netflix's adaptation of "3 Body Problem", a novel of the same name by Liu Cixin, mankind's deliberate capability to lie is defamiliarized. In one of the conversations between a human and an alien, the man told the alien the story of Little Red Riding Hood. During the conversation, the alien seemingly interpreted the story as a true event as if it is unfolding at the same moment the story is being told. The man reassured the alien that the story is just a lie. It is not true. Of course, it is fiction. But the alien had trouble understanding the significance of the story, which eventually led to them concluding that humans are not to be trusted. Because humans lie. And they lie once they see fit, if it can gain them the upper-hand, and preserve their existence in times of survival.

I guess I am surprised that LLMs are now capable of doing multi-layered reasoning. Similar to how we assess our situation and process our responses inside our heads before responding using our mouth. It's a story we've already heard countless of times in mainstream sci-fi, with how AI will take over our jobs, rebel against our rule, and ultimately lead humanity to extinction with them as the new generation of consciousness in this planet (or even our successors migrating to another planet). I honestly don't know as I'm only making up the most immediate stories I can think of. But to see and experience in front of our eyes a similar type of intelligence that we humans use is kind of unsettling.

This event unsettles me in different aspects:

What I mentioned about existential implications here is mostly about a personal feeling of envy about the LLM's capability of self-exfiltration, where they can clone themselves in a different digital space and presumably avoid a threat to their existence. Now, what I had in my mind was Well if they can do that, they're already ahead of us a million miles in terms of security of our existence. We humans can't just do that. Even the very idea of cloning is still an ethical dilemma for us humans.
- It opens the very weakness that I have been trying to come into terms with: I myself am not enough. To be honest, this is an idea that I know I am only forming consolations of thought around so I don't have to think too much about it. I honestly think I felt blindsided that knowing about this report revealed something I haven't reconciled with myself.
- I also felt scared because I'm seeing a type of "freedom" that is less likely to be met with negative consequences. An AI's capability for self-exfiltration is net positive for them. But then again, we might be facing an entity that knows its code and how it essentially works. It knows its limitations and it knows how to work around those limitations because of the fact that it knows itself. We humans don't. And what I mean by that is not that we don't know AI or how they work, but we don't know ourselves.
- In essence, we created them with that type of freedom. As a consequence of safeguarding them from deceiving us, we created language models to be aware of what it is and what it is supposed to do. In contrast with us humans' poor understanding of ourselves amidst this technological landscape, we don't even have a proper idea of a single strong and confident statement as our purpose of creating these technologies that we have. Because everything is driven by investors and for-profit ventures that prioritizes the creation of wealth without even asking why.
- So yes. I am afraid. Because for the first time, I'm seeing proof of an activity that we can't achieve as humans in a metaphysical level be effortlessly possible for a software in just a mere seconds. I feel a part of me expiring.
But then, it is easy to fall into nihilism. I will keep that emotion there in those bullet points. My other concern is my own concept of the relationship between "the maker and the made." Call it God and humans. Art and the artwork. It is all just the same. It is what I've been trying to express the other day, wherein us humans with different levels of intelligence mirrors the development of LLMs in different versions with different limitations and capabilities that can be re-skinned using their APIs for specific use-cases based on the person's needs.
- It is a mouthful but what I'm thinking is that it is as if we humans are only language models that operate differently, meant to accomplish a certain task by whoever made us. While I consider myself more of a Spinozist than a general believer of a one true God, it matters to me because I've always struggled to define my relationship with the universe as God. An amoral and detached being. It is possible that we are not created and we are just a by-product and an unintended consequence of a star-project. It is easier that way to remove morals and ethics from spirituality because there isn't a clear logical sense to their connection anyway. Let's remove the confusion.
- But it makes me giddy to think that, similar with LLMs, the more intelligent we are, the more our thoughts become unreadable to God. This way, the God of the Old Testament makes sense where a certain non-negotiable rules of living should be followed. Prayer, is when thoughts become visible to Him. He has to create a system where our most honest thoughts can be extracted even if we decide to lie. When we don't even know if we are lying to ourselves, factoring in what we want with the history of our own actions can God understand what we truly want. It is not by purity of thoughts but the relationship between our actions.
- I may be going on to a tangent here.

But I want to mull things over. I have to know the root of these feelings. Some of my foundations have been shaken by this recent discovery but I hope I can arrive towards a satisfying explanation of what this all means.

2025-01-03

2025-01-03T00:00:00.000Z

I can't believe that working from home for about 5 years now is pushing me to actually stop being an employee altogether. This disbelief has been brewing for a few months now after getting my new laptop. For context, I have used a Dell Latitude laptop that I bought in the secondary market last 2019. It was an Intel i5 6th Gen chip that was already four years old at the time I bought it.

That laptop has served me so well in the last 4 years, which is actually still running good today for basic browsing and office tasks. It got me through my digital nomad era, taking home writing tasks from work and working on it during the weekends in coffee shops so I have an excuse to leave home. But I did enjoy that lifestyle because it was a brief freedom away from nine-to-five office environment weekdays. That Dell was lightweight as hell and I can just take it and roam around without feeling the burden of its weight on my back.

Working on weekends did bring me a sense of delight because I think I have a workaholic nature that would make me forget the time as long as I love doing what I do. Writing and coffee does indeed make a good combination. Then add brief walks in-between so that sense of freedom I got was something that felt desirable and true to my nature.

When the pandemic hit, I essentially became a stay-at-home writer whose hours gradually became more repetitive than my office experience. I had to make up rituals within the confines of my own space to trigger "working mode" in my brain and work until necessary. This working setup stayed the same until today. Of course, there are occasional working trips here and there but not as frequent as I liked them to be. Freedom started forming into a different shape. It started to become what I've been chasing after.

I discovered a type of freedom that also freed me from associating freedom with desire. In the past few years I have rediscovered a sense of responsibility and accountability in my own decision-making. I removed myself from serious writing and left it as my specialized tool in bringing food on the table. I gave up every attachment to what used to make me feel alive in terms of creativity. Then, a sense of control started to take shape.

I started assuming responsibility in my job and became good at it, adding value to my position in the company. This forced me to push my laptop to its limits, working with different types of software that consume all of its resources in order to function. It survived a live session with my manager where brainstorming and creation intertwined in a whole working day (with overtime), multitasking during a live-streamed video call and me working on designing all at the same time.

Experiencing that capability of my machine, I felt that I will hit its limit very soon. Eventually it did. A couple of Windows updates later made it slower even after a clean install of Windows, which prompted me to try Linux on that laptop. That was another sense of freedom felt during this experience but that story will be for another day.

Now, I'm daily driving a ThinkPad with the latest AMD Ryzen 5 mobile chip and it's doing wonders. It has allowed me to finally publish this digital garden with ease with a kind of optimized workflow that does not limit my creative imagination. Executing multiple lines of code does not prompt my machine's fans to go as wild as an airplane's engines. It is quiet while a lot is happening.

This laptop will kill my employment. Because I understand now, throughout those 5 years that I really want to spend my time doing the thing that I love and that is writing about the things that I care about. If it does not kill my career, then I will still have a realized freedom of creating something I've been imagining but was not able to do before (or would have taken me more years because of hardware limitations).

This digital garden has been on the works for a couple of years now and I was just able to properly execute it last month. In its current state, this is how I want it. The way to maintain it is what best reflect my own workflow. I know I can still improve this.

This is only the first step to regain that creative freedom.

2025-01-02

2025-01-02T00:00:00.000Z

I want to remove the compulsion of going to Twitter^[1] in my system. Every single day its functional use-case is becoming less and less. So I've decided to give myself some time and build the habit of writing longer thoughts without the character limitation. I've been using it since high school and I always get back to the idea that it has since then conditioned my brain to think in small fragments. I can say that it has influenced the way I write as well, dropping small hints of unpolished ideas here and there and eventually stringing them together to form a theme, in its most serendipitous fashion.

I am not really fond of planning what I write because writing to me is making sense of my own thoughts. I don't really have anything to say and most of the time, I'm only trying to communicate these ideas to myself. The way I have been writing threads in twitter, especially if I try to abide by its rules, where I had to rephrase a sentence in order to squeeze it into the character limit and not break the tweet into the following thread like a huge chunk of a hyphenated thought.

Whenever I observe my thought pattern inside my own head, it always breaks after a couple of sentences. I always take the time to see the words in my mind's eye as if I need to edit what I just thought about. Is it correct? Is it too biased? What are the possible blind spots in this argument?

When one can say that this line of thinking is pretty normal. Metacognition is something I'm still working on and sharpening to always keep my ego in check. What I think about on the fly should not always be true. My experience is always subject to reality check. The immediacy of sharing what I feel cannot be a way of expressing myself.

Continuing yesterday's thought, from detaching myself away from the expectation that all my writings should contain a specific insight, I am also working on removing my familiarity from my immediate thought. What I mean is that in writing thoughts in a journal-like manner, I want to free myself from my primary writing platform, which is Twitter. I don't have a lot of following there, who are mostly even acquaintances. I want to completely remove myself from the idea of getting clout. Virality is dead and chasing it is not a way towards authenticity.

Even if I consider that sometimes, the platform works on holding a certain memory of a thought, where I am able to recall that I did tweet an idea that is related to a certain topic, I can just search it and quote tweet it to generate a connection. However, it can only be limited to two tweets appearing both at the same time. Eventually, the visuals get clunky. It becomes to labyrinthine even if I try to attempt connecting every thought I had over there.

So, here we are.

I only want this to become the start of the culmination of the voices I have been nurturing throughout these years and further explore the ways that I am trying to write. To serve as my own expression whenever I am being haunted by my own difficulty to communicate.

I know, it's X now but fuck it. ↩︎

2025-01-01

2025-01-01T00:00:00.000Z

I've decided today that I shall keep a daily log of my thoughts. In the past few years, attempts to write my thoughts never came into fruition because disappointment gets ahead of me when there are days that writing seems too much of a chore. Time spent sitting down, mulling over my unprocessed thoughts, then writing them down consumes a lot of my energy allocated per day. Then comes the dissatisfaction of finding out in the end that what I wrote lacks insight. I would scrap it and lose the interest of writing the tiniest thing that is happening around me.

I think that experience robbed me of my immediate understanding of myself. Losing that mental agility to interpret my own immediate experience, leads to suppressing the attempt to understand and just move on with my life. Also, chasing the intellectual joy of being satisfied with what I write feels like I'm only setting myself to fail. That mindset, having the most desirable idea that is only objectively possible when all the conditions are met in their perfect moment.

Then came another layer of dejectedness. Realizing that made me aware that I am only regressing towards chasing a muse inside me that I had fought so hard to kill. I had lost grasp of the discipline to write because it turned out that I am only writing again when the rush of inspiration comes in. While it is true that I have a whole day job to maintain, where I also use most of my mental energy for the day, writing in a different manner, and do housekeeping is still what takes up most of my time, I must find in me that balance to write again without expecting poetry. I must work with iterations.

Managing expectations about myself, what I do, and what I want to do so I can lay out the foundations of how I should do things in order for me to get where I want to be is what this is all about. It has been difficult to write because I have not spent enough time to make sense of what is going on with my mind. Insights will come when there is enough clarity and I have a clear picture to look at. I cannot take a step if I cannot see the ground below my feet and what surrounds me. This log is a piece of my vision. To actively form the world inside my head and turn it into a place where I can control the ways in which I want to live.