So it has come to this. Desperation. Loneliness. Call it whatever you want. Something always gets me writing.
Every point in life has a theme, a season, and a character. 2016 was the season of the jungle. Animals fighting in a world with limited resources. The war in the jungle continued in 2017, this time without grandpa. Grandpa had casually disappeared from the folds of time and space.
People step over each other to feed their families. And then strangely, some of us who are better off still face existential crises. One of the great riddles of our generation.
But I'm not really here to discuss that (although there is a high chance that I am one of those ungrateful gits). This account of my life will be all over the place and you will be at the mercy of my rambling. This is a memoir - of action.
Memoirs sound like passive memories to be stowed away. But they are fire to me. They give me the strength to say 'enough is enough!', gather my thoughts, and try to move on.
I too wonder how it all came to this. Am I ready? No. I will process this some other day. What's certain is that I am still the boy who wants to play computer games all night and catch frogs in the morning. Or the kid who would love reading good books every now and then, even as those opportunities now rarely come by.
It really isn't that scary though. Past her layers of intellect and maturity, my fiancee is simply a child ever curious about the world and people around her. So having found the most suitable partner to stare and gape at the universe with; I will persist on the collision course for marriage. Besides, who would ever be ready for one of the greatest human endeavours? Being an astronaut is probably easier, so either I don't get married, or I learn on the job.
I struggled in 2014-2015 and this was curated the 2016 post (delicate little snowflake, eh?). It didn't detail how I was without a job for 1 and a half years due to corneal erosion - which is the context of this post. I might even have been depressed, but I did get the help of the best psychologist I know. Physical and mental health aside, there was the money problem.
The then girlfriend (now fiancee) was looking at marriage on the horizon while I had nothing to offer. As a student, she even had to foot some of my expenses with meager part time wages.
Submitting over 50 applications with not a single result was depressing. Once upon a time, I could choose the job; and now it had to choose me. Something happened and I finally passed an interview. So I went into my new career stumbling.
2 years later, now, thank heavens I did well. Nothing glamorous, just a routine job that helped me regain my financial footing. I am grateful for the money, but I do have a bit of contempt for its swindling nature. But that does not compare to the dejection coming from no longer being set to work on the bigger questions of the universe.
It also didn't quite match up to a wedding fund (have you seen what it takes to pay for a wedding nowadays?). But I had seen this shortfall exactly 2 years ago and prepared for it.
2 years. Everything was for the marriage. Every thought, every move, was focused on fund raising. Many of my experiences will never come to light; I will never divulge them. It's enough to tell of how I roamed the streets in the middle of the night with my Uber service. The contents of my mind are a different matter. Just to be absolutely clear, I did everything legally. Uber was illegal on the outset if you insist, but it was legalized eventually.
It was surreal when I finally transferred the entirety of the wedding budget into my bank account. I even managed to nearly double the initial plan (which was miscalculated). There: cold, hard cash. I made it and still barely believe it. For the first time in my life, I had to make mistakes that really hurt in order to learn valuable lessons. There were some regrets too (despite succeeding, I could've ended up with triple the amount and that gnaws away at me sometimes). Many restless nights were spent awake in cold sweat.
I will always remember my first major loss. I drove out onto the streets in the middle of the night, hysterical and having felt suffocated by my small room. Like a loon, I sat in alone in a coffee shop to process what had happened between sips. Now, I must have the daily cup of coffee or I might fly into a rage. My soup of the day. I do not care for fancy brews; it must of the lowly coffee shop variant. There are other events I will never, in my life time, speak about. It was a means to an end. The important thing is I managed to emerge on the other side. It's all about the bottom-line, is it not?
It's now the time to pick up the pieces in certain areas of my life. Like pieces of toenails. For 2 years, my toes kept bleeding out in my worn badminton shoes. They became became mash potatoes every few times a month. The pain was real alright, but after travelling to my brain it never spurred any thoughtful action. Toenail after toenail was replaced. Until a week ago, when I strolled into a shop and bought a new pair of shoes without any thought.
I walked in, chose a pair on display that fit, and paid. My toes aren't bleeding ever since that 5 minute conjecture. Should I have done this 2 years ago? Oh, YES CERTAINLY, my poor toes! I don't understand it either, I can only say I was that focused on the wedding. Badminton used to be my life. At one stage, I stopped altogether. There was no reason to play anymore.
Exhausted and still plodding through the forest, I succeeded in doing what I set out to do in 2016-2017. I was watered down as a person. No more humanitarian ideals. No more silly dreams. I was demoted on Maslow's damning hierarchy with aspirations that were inherently material.
So that's all the bottom line was...empty in a philosophical sense. Maybe I thought I was morally superior. As a human being, I was a sentient, logical, conscientious creature. Until I'm not.
I know that humans can never make decisions without emotions clouding their judgment. I know how some suffer from the lack of emotions (more like zero. It's an actual medical condition). Given the choice of choosing between 2 identical options, like 2 apples, people like that will be forever caught in a dilemma.
But I'm not here to say that we aren't logical sometimes, and then comfort myself by saying it's okay to be human. Growth only comes from a place of discomfort. I'm saying we aren't even in control of ourselves half the time, and we overestimate how much our baggage controls us. I heard something along these lines from a Dr. Jordan Peterson. He did not originate the idea, but listening to him made me realize how even the little control I thought I had on a conscious level was overestimated.
Both traumatic and non-traumatic experiences have a greater hold on me than I had imagined. It might not be bad 'trauma'. It might even have felt good. Spoil a child when it grows up, and it will think it's entitled to the universe. Feels good at first. Then one day, the child will learn the hard way and it will be as though reality crumbles before its very eyes.
Perhaps not for you. You might believe in God, and that you are a new creation and have overcome the world. Good on you. You might believe in nothing, and what I'm saying comes across as the rambling of a weak mind. Again, well done for being the strong person that you are.
I've no qualms saying I'm weak. Many primitive drives control me. When I'm tired I get angry. In the dead of night, I feel alone. I feel alone as I wander the shopping malls everyday gathering supplies like a hunter-gatherer would. I lash out and explode at the very people I hold dear (this one personally has me mind blown).
Yet, some people consider me an intellectual. I discuss lofty things. The limits of tripartite theory in epistemology. The higher dimensions of the cosmos.
Even the basis of naming this blog is thought out. I changed it after receiving thousands of unsolicited views. It's based on the Dark Forest Theory by Liu Cixin, one of China's most prolific science fiction authors. Have you ever wondered why we are the only ones in this seemingly infinite universe?
Civilization's primary aim is to survive. If they manage to intercept communications from another civilization, a dynamic 'chain of suspicion' happens. Two civilizations who come in contact via deep space signals cannot know for sure the intent of the other due to the chasm of communication distance. A guessing game plays out and mutual suspicion only grows deeper and more convoluted. Therefore, the only rational choice is to send a star destroying projectile as the 2nd formal greeting. It's an efficient way of acting in a forest of millions of civilizations that - even if benevolent, are competitors for resources in the same galaxy.
So no one ever tries or dares to make contact.
By now you probably know that I think we are in this 'forest' at a smaller scale here on earth. We are all separated by little chasms of communication distance.
Much of our grandiose musings are but the revelries of a vicious animal. What about post-modernist society and other sorts of sophisticated sounding drivel? I don't think that means we're an intelligent species at all. Philosopher Dr. William Lane Craig enforces this by asking: How many of us can even differentiate the contents of rat poison and medicine?
We know of the Dunning-Kruger effect, where people of low ability overestimate themselves because of their inability to perceive their own flaws. The less we are aware of the infinite nature of knowledge, the higher we hold ourselves in our own eyes.
Our knowledge only exists in little pockets strewn across infinity and yet we strut about everyday. So conscious of our greatness while looking down on those who are in our opinion, less great. Because we are monkeys and not frogs?
And we are into psychobabble like 'get rid of the toxic people in your life' or 'be yourself'. Others do not matter. Who are these toxic people? The ones who disagree with us? The ones who refuse to tolerate our toxicity? The ones who tell us the truth about ourselves? If they are indeed wrong, does it make us right? Who are we for that matter? Be yourself, the half-animal?
Raving dreams made me forget my place in the forest. Being in a garage doesn't not make you a car, but the forest sneakily morphs you into its image. Am I cheated by the existence of my own cognitive abilities?
If so, I must understand that critical thinking and irrational actions have never been mutually exclusive. I am a being capable of higher thought trapped in an animal; I am an animal trapped in a being capable of higher thought.
Then, how many events until the great reckoning? How many times until I say 'enough is enough' to self-destructive tendencies? I am my own saboteur. I upend my own relationships and my own career.
But I too, must leave this path. I have been the villain of my own story for a long time now. At the movies, I am unable to understand the psychological makeup of heros, while I identify mostly with villains.
I'm tempted to say I do not care for my own destruction. But that would be false because as a member of the forest, I am inherently selfish. More disconcertingly, I'd be a burden because others DO care about me.
I will not go into self-pitying tirade of saying 'no one cares'. That is a pathogenic narrative rampant on social media and it is simply not true. And if I can't see the sense in preserving myself, how can I actually care about preserving others?
So I will push away the animal with the same fervour I had with pursuing marriage. There was no try with the wedding. Either I had the money or I didn't. It might all be futile in the end, but my coordinates in the dark forest shall be brightly lit, even if for a moment.
Every point in life has a theme, a season, and a character. 2016 was the season of the jungle. Animals fighting in a world with limited resources. The war in the jungle continued in 2017, this time without grandpa. Grandpa had casually disappeared from the folds of time and space.
People step over each other to feed their families. And then strangely, some of us who are better off still face existential crises. One of the great riddles of our generation.
But I'm not really here to discuss that (although there is a high chance that I am one of those ungrateful gits). This account of my life will be all over the place and you will be at the mercy of my rambling. This is a memoir - of action.
Memoirs sound like passive memories to be stowed away. But they are fire to me. They give me the strength to say 'enough is enough!', gather my thoughts, and try to move on.
Suddenly, I am about to get married.
I too wonder how it all came to this. Am I ready? No. I will process this some other day. What's certain is that I am still the boy who wants to play computer games all night and catch frogs in the morning. Or the kid who would love reading good books every now and then, even as those opportunities now rarely come by.
It really isn't that scary though. Past her layers of intellect and maturity, my fiancee is simply a child ever curious about the world and people around her. So having found the most suitable partner to stare and gape at the universe with; I will persist on the collision course for marriage. Besides, who would ever be ready for one of the greatest human endeavours? Being an astronaut is probably easier, so either I don't get married, or I learn on the job.
I struggled in 2014-2015 and this was curated the 2016 post (delicate little snowflake, eh?). It didn't detail how I was without a job for 1 and a half years due to corneal erosion - which is the context of this post. I might even have been depressed, but I did get the help of the best psychologist I know. Physical and mental health aside, there was the money problem.
I was broke following unemployment and the payments I had to make for my car.
The then girlfriend (now fiancee) was looking at marriage on the horizon while I had nothing to offer. As a student, she even had to foot some of my expenses with meager part time wages.
Submitting over 50 applications with not a single result was depressing. Once upon a time, I could choose the job; and now it had to choose me. Something happened and I finally passed an interview. So I went into my new career stumbling.
2 years later, now, thank heavens I did well. Nothing glamorous, just a routine job that helped me regain my financial footing. I am grateful for the money, but I do have a bit of contempt for its swindling nature. But that does not compare to the dejection coming from no longer being set to work on the bigger questions of the universe.
It also didn't quite match up to a wedding fund (have you seen what it takes to pay for a wedding nowadays?). But I had seen this shortfall exactly 2 years ago and prepared for it.
So I was never working only at my new job. In my desperation, I ventured into things that would allow me to afford a wedding.
2 years. Everything was for the marriage. Every thought, every move, was focused on fund raising. Many of my experiences will never come to light; I will never divulge them. It's enough to tell of how I roamed the streets in the middle of the night with my Uber service. The contents of my mind are a different matter. Just to be absolutely clear, I did everything legally. Uber was illegal on the outset if you insist, but it was legalized eventually.
It was surreal when I finally transferred the entirety of the wedding budget into my bank account. I even managed to nearly double the initial plan (which was miscalculated). There: cold, hard cash. I made it and still barely believe it. For the first time in my life, I had to make mistakes that really hurt in order to learn valuable lessons. There were some regrets too (despite succeeding, I could've ended up with triple the amount and that gnaws away at me sometimes). Many restless nights were spent awake in cold sweat.
I will always remember my first major loss. I drove out onto the streets in the middle of the night, hysterical and having felt suffocated by my small room. Like a loon, I sat in alone in a coffee shop to process what had happened between sips. Now, I must have the daily cup of coffee or I might fly into a rage. My soup of the day. I do not care for fancy brews; it must of the lowly coffee shop variant. There are other events I will never, in my life time, speak about. It was a means to an end. The important thing is I managed to emerge on the other side. It's all about the bottom-line, is it not?
It's now the time to pick up the pieces in certain areas of my life. Like pieces of toenails. For 2 years, my toes kept bleeding out in my worn badminton shoes. They became became mash potatoes every few times a month. The pain was real alright, but after travelling to my brain it never spurred any thoughtful action. Toenail after toenail was replaced. Until a week ago, when I strolled into a shop and bought a new pair of shoes without any thought.
I walked in, chose a pair on display that fit, and paid. My toes aren't bleeding ever since that 5 minute conjecture. Should I have done this 2 years ago? Oh, YES CERTAINLY, my poor toes! I don't understand it either, I can only say I was that focused on the wedding. Badminton used to be my life. At one stage, I stopped altogether. There was no reason to play anymore.
Exhausted and still plodding through the forest, I succeeded in doing what I set out to do in 2016-2017. I was watered down as a person. No more humanitarian ideals. No more silly dreams. I was demoted on Maslow's damning hierarchy with aspirations that were inherently material.
I was triumphant simply because I grew to be more savage then the other animals competing for the same resources.
So that's all the bottom line was...empty in a philosophical sense. Maybe I thought I was morally superior. As a human being, I was a sentient, logical, conscientious creature. Until I'm not.
I know that humans can never make decisions without emotions clouding their judgment. I know how some suffer from the lack of emotions (more like zero. It's an actual medical condition). Given the choice of choosing between 2 identical options, like 2 apples, people like that will be forever caught in a dilemma.
But I'm not here to say that we aren't logical sometimes, and then comfort myself by saying it's okay to be human. Growth only comes from a place of discomfort. I'm saying we aren't even in control of ourselves half the time, and we overestimate how much our baggage controls us. I heard something along these lines from a Dr. Jordan Peterson. He did not originate the idea, but listening to him made me realize how even the little control I thought I had on a conscious level was overestimated.
Both traumatic and non-traumatic experiences have a greater hold on me than I had imagined. It might not be bad 'trauma'. It might even have felt good. Spoil a child when it grows up, and it will think it's entitled to the universe. Feels good at first. Then one day, the child will learn the hard way and it will be as though reality crumbles before its very eyes.
Perhaps not for you. You might believe in God, and that you are a new creation and have overcome the world. Good on you. You might believe in nothing, and what I'm saying comes across as the rambling of a weak mind. Again, well done for being the strong person that you are.
I've no qualms saying I'm weak. Many primitive drives control me. When I'm tired I get angry. In the dead of night, I feel alone. I feel alone as I wander the shopping malls everyday gathering supplies like a hunter-gatherer would. I lash out and explode at the very people I hold dear (this one personally has me mind blown).
Yet, some people consider me an intellectual. I discuss lofty things. The limits of tripartite theory in epistemology. The higher dimensions of the cosmos.
Even the basis of naming this blog is thought out. I changed it after receiving thousands of unsolicited views. It's based on the Dark Forest Theory by Liu Cixin, one of China's most prolific science fiction authors. Have you ever wondered why we are the only ones in this seemingly infinite universe?
Liu Cixin claims that it is because civilizations are all frightened, vicious animals in a dark forest that is the cosmos.
Civilization's primary aim is to survive. If they manage to intercept communications from another civilization, a dynamic 'chain of suspicion' happens. Two civilizations who come in contact via deep space signals cannot know for sure the intent of the other due to the chasm of communication distance. A guessing game plays out and mutual suspicion only grows deeper and more convoluted. Therefore, the only rational choice is to send a star destroying projectile as the 2nd formal greeting. It's an efficient way of acting in a forest of millions of civilizations that - even if benevolent, are competitors for resources in the same galaxy.
So no one ever tries or dares to make contact.
By now you probably know that I think we are in this 'forest' at a smaller scale here on earth. We are all separated by little chasms of communication distance.
Much of our grandiose musings are but the revelries of a vicious animal. What about post-modernist society and other sorts of sophisticated sounding drivel? I don't think that means we're an intelligent species at all. Philosopher Dr. William Lane Craig enforces this by asking: How many of us can even differentiate the contents of rat poison and medicine?
We know of the Dunning-Kruger effect, where people of low ability overestimate themselves because of their inability to perceive their own flaws. The less we are aware of the infinite nature of knowledge, the higher we hold ourselves in our own eyes.
Our knowledge only exists in little pockets strewn across infinity and yet we strut about everyday. So conscious of our greatness while looking down on those who are in our opinion, less great. Because we are monkeys and not frogs?
And we are into psychobabble like 'get rid of the toxic people in your life' or 'be yourself'. Others do not matter. Who are these toxic people? The ones who disagree with us? The ones who refuse to tolerate our toxicity? The ones who tell us the truth about ourselves? If they are indeed wrong, does it make us right? Who are we for that matter? Be yourself, the half-animal?
Raving dreams made me forget my place in the forest. Being in a garage doesn't not make you a car, but the forest sneakily morphs you into its image. Am I cheated by the existence of my own cognitive abilities?
If so, I must understand that critical thinking and irrational actions have never been mutually exclusive. I am a being capable of higher thought trapped in an animal; I am an animal trapped in a being capable of higher thought.
Then, how many events until the great reckoning? How many times until I say 'enough is enough' to self-destructive tendencies? I am my own saboteur. I upend my own relationships and my own career.
For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do - this I keep on doing, laments Paul in Romans 7:19.My lack of control has always caused collateral damage to people who deserve it the least - the immediate people around me. For that they have the right to leave me, ostracize me, or shun me to the end of time. As long as they are able to heal.
But I too, must leave this path. I have been the villain of my own story for a long time now. At the movies, I am unable to understand the psychological makeup of heros, while I identify mostly with villains.
I'm tempted to say I do not care for my own destruction. But that would be false because as a member of the forest, I am inherently selfish. More disconcertingly, I'd be a burden because others DO care about me.
I will not go into self-pitying tirade of saying 'no one cares'. That is a pathogenic narrative rampant on social media and it is simply not true. And if I can't see the sense in preserving myself, how can I actually care about preserving others?
The dark forest does and does not exist.
So I will push away the animal with the same fervour I had with pursuing marriage. There was no try with the wedding. Either I had the money or I didn't. It might all be futile in the end, but my coordinates in the dark forest shall be brightly lit, even if for a moment.
