Category: yung professionals

relegative existence

I think it’s super weird we have a present self.

—

The most unfortunate part of life is that we are only presented with one of them. We are presented with many possible worlds in our many lives we could’ve lived, but at the end of the day, we only have one timeline that relentlessly marches forward. We grow up, and it is saddening to understand that it’s impossible to undo growing up.

At any point in time, including right now, we are attached to a particular set of memories unlike any other time. Our thoughts are subject to recency bias, so we are only able to access the events that happened most recently, even with traumatic events that have happened in the distant past. The further distant we are between moments of happening and moments of memory, the more opacity builds within the pipeline occurrence and remembrance. This luckily means that we aren’t defined by any specific instance of our lives, but it also means that the memories we access now will not move with us into the future. When the future comes around, we will have a different set of memories we cling onto, and our identity will be quite different when that time comes than it is now.

Things that bothered me in high school don’t really bother me now. Some things that bothered me in college still bother me now, but a lot less than it used to. We are bothered by different things at different points in our lives. As long as we understand that all identity is temporary, including all facets of irritation and insecurity, our world becomes increasingly detached from the present. Our present is a temporary reaction to the near past. But once the near past because the distant past, we develop a temporary reaction to another entirely different near past.

I remember living in a world where the future was brighter than the present. There were a couple of times in the near past when I looked into the oceanic horizon, I truly believed I would be able to walk over it and cross into another world where things could’ve turned out differently. But as I walk towards this world, its doors drift further and further away. The more we work towards this other world, the more we realize we are further than we thought we were. By the time we reach the middle of the sandbar — our feet trudging on at this promise we’ll have what we want if we walk far enough into the depths — we fear drowning before we reach the end. The door to what we want is on the horizon where the sky meets the sea. It is close enough where we can imagine ourselves holding onto this promise.

It’s weird to think of my previously optimistic self. I remembered, in high school, when I got into Penn I thought that would be the end to my sadness. There were a couple of other times in college when I believed I would be truly happy because I met someone or discovered a new philosophy. We ascribe these new beginnings as a source of happiness, but I’ve come to realize that there’s nothing inherent about new beginnings offering a solution to the problems from a previous period of your life. We react to our past, but there is little rationality in how we process our experiences. In actuality, there is little that is “circumstantial” in life. There is little that is the result of natural beginnings and conclusions; our lives are products of our choices and not natural flows of vents.

There are a lot of things that are supposedly insignificant in our lives. Things in high school seems insignificant when you’re in college, and things in college seem insignificant once you become a young professional in the workforce. Yet, nothing seems insignificant at the time. Everything that is significant to the present self is solely significant to the present self. The past and future selves could not give a fuck. Things only become insignificant when we are able to assign distance between what has happened and what we remember happened. The feeling of insignificance only comes when we are able to assign separation between our past and present selves. The logic goes: My past self isn’t my present self. My past self is not me. My present self is my present self. My present self is me.

One of the cool parts of being human is that we are able to separate our identity according to different modes. We have all heard the “I only did xyz because I was drunk” excuse because it is pretty universal to the human condition. We demarcate different selves because they feel quite different from our current self. We commit to different selves when we are around different people. We remember certain things when we listen to certain songs. But, universally, but conceptualize different moments in time representing different identities. Above all, we privilege our present self over all of time periods. In college, my freshman self is different from my sophomore self and so on. We react to different events that have happened at different points in life, and we draw different markers in identity from our thoughts in those individual moments in time.

A big source of regret in our lives is that our current selves always know more than our past selves. Some of those things are inevitable with the passage of time; I know how to play violin a lot better than I did in the past, but that took a lot of practice that I probably don’t have the willpower to redo. Other things are less clear, especially personality traits that are particularly conditioned. At one point in my life I idolized sadness and toxicity. Should I? No. But it’s hard to escape our sense of aesthetics when aesthetics is all we have in absence of understanding. Without conscious choice, there is not much allowing us to escape the set of reactions we have to near-past events that formulate our current identity. Present self is the product of the past self’s reaction to the near past events. Unless we actively choose to react differently our past selves move onto the present.

We seek convergence of past, present, and future selves because that would mean we won’t need to separate our identities anymore. Once we converge in identity, then regret doesn’t exist anymore. We reach a maximum of understanding and living according to our values, and there would be no uncertainty in choice anymore. Once we establish a concentrated value system, the set of recent phenomena we experience no longer has an effect on us. At that point in our lives, we lose the freedom to change, but we gain another freedom — freedom from worry that our current choices will not live up to the standards of our future selves. When we stop making subsequent separations between present and future selves, we can be happy.

I have no idea how to reach that state. At every moment in time, we question ourselves if we need to change — if so, how fast do we need to change? There aren’t answers to these questions because they are all the products of final identity, which we cannot access until we have reached that particular state. It’s one of those thoughts that makes you wish you could just fast forward to the end of your life, so you understand what you value and how to live accordingly to those values. Until, all we can do is figure shit out.

the past does not exist

There are a lot instances where we could’ve died in the past, so I find it quite amazing that we ended up here, still breathing and relatively unscathed, in this reality. It’s one of those feelings that keeps me in a constant state of bewilderment, and I’m not sure if it’s a state I ever want to leave. I think about it like how I’m writing on my bed again, like I was doing around this time last summer, like I was doing around this time the summer before. I don’t think much has changed between every instance I write on my bed. Stylistically, my writing has remained fairly consistent. Content-wise, I have switched from being sad to being bored, which to some people are one and the same.

At any instance in time, we aren’t able to conceptualize the entirety of the past. At most, we are only able to remember a specific moment. When we do not recall a specific moment, we have an impression of a particular time, but never access to the same precision as that of a memory. In that sense, the only thing grounding our identity is this inkling that the past happened at all. In other words, we take it on faith that the past happened, and we don’t need to actually remember the past for us to believe that the past has affected us.

If you drink too much on a night out and black out, did the previous night even happen?

I’m not too sure. Can you be affected by something that you can’t even remember? If you have a really good conversation one night and can’t remember it the next morning, did that conversation happen at all? I’ve always found alcohol to be an interesting substance because individuals can have two completely identities when they are under the influence of alcohol versus when they are sober. When you consume alcohol, you access this friendlier and more outgoing side of yourself that you cannot otherwise access. Yet, I’ve always wondered why this state of friendliness doesn’t persist afterwards. If we remember what it was like to share intimacy with someone through alcohol, why don’t those feelings persist?

At present, we can only be aware of the present. We can only exist in one state at a time. You can’t be both drunk and sober, and you are only able to access one part of your identity at a time. When you are in one state, the other state doesn’t exist. You can access your memories, but that takes it on faith that your memories are accurate at all, which they usually aren’t considering how change is a necessary part of encoding memory. The only certainty that exists is our experiences at a given instance because it is the only state that is not subject to memory, which only represents a distorted echo of a past that doesn’t exist at all.

Something that I’ve always understood but never really quite understood was this idea that you only exist when you are aware that you exist. When you are sleeping, you aren’t really aware of your own existence. In that state, you are not aware. If you are not aware that your past exists, then it does not exist. If you don’t exist in the future, then then the future does not exist. The only existence that truly exists is the existence we devote attention to. As long as our existence is grounded in the present — which it inevitably is as long as we are conscious of the present– we can only exist in the present in separation from the past and future. I consider this idea to be simultaneously freeing and crippling.

Some things may have happened to us in the past. Although we may still have memories, these events no longer exist because the past does not exist. Although we are affected by events that happen to us in the past, there is nothing necessitating the past exist at all. If we simply forget about the past, then the past never happened at all.

I was discussing with my friend the other day whether nostalgia necessarily defines the past in a positive light. I thought yes, and she thought no. Ultimately, we agreed that nostalgia is, above all, a state of indulgence, regardless of whether the past is viewed in a positive light nor not. If we enter a state of nostalgia, then we become detached from the present, so the present no longer exists and the past is the only thing that exists for certain at that particular moment. It is a reality that only exists because we assign reality to it. Yet, our memories is a perception of a mental construction of sensation, which is a lesser state to direct perception of sensation itself. Through indulging in nostagia, we reject the world that exists for the world we create.

Nostalgia separates our emotional existence from our physical existence, and that gives me bad vibes. The past doesn’t have to exist unless we want it to exist. I find that idea to be quite liberating — the fact that the only thing that holds us onto the past is the memory of the past. So why not forget?

I prefer to just look at the past as a night out, regardless of whether it was a good night or a bad night. It doesn’t matter what happened in the past. It happened, and nowe we are in the present, our memories of the previous night slowly decaying. Sometimes, we attempt to hold onto this memory because we believe our “true” identities to reside in the past in a moment when we were more authentic to ourselves. I consider this way of thinking to be a bit of a cop-out. I don’t think at any moment in time we move further away from our identity unless we choose to do so. At any moment in time, we can establish any identity we want. We do not need to cling onto the past unless we fear the freedom of the present.

A big reason we cannot forget about the past is because we find ourselves reminded of the past on occasion. This, is what I imagined what Sartre meant when he says, “Hell is other people.” If we forget that other people exist, then we can forget that we exist, and that’s a sensation to cherish. A lot of how we contextualize our self-worth depends on how we compare ourselves to others. If we feel more successful than the people around us, then we feel more satisfied in our lives. Vice versa, if we feel less successful than the people around us, then it does not matter how successful we are in life because it is not enough. If the need to escape the past is value-dependent on our present environment, all we need to do to escape the past is to reform our present with pure novelty.

Since around last year, everything about the past seems more and more dream-like. There were so many cold night I remember walking back to my dorm feeling so lonely and longing for this reality that may or may not have existed at all. But those cold nights feel more and more like a dream. I used to be able to recall the stinging winter winds as I took my phone out of my pocket to change the song, but I can’t feel that anymore. This was my past, but I’m choosing to negate it. The neat thing about not having a particularly good college experience is that you don’t need to worry about peaking in college. You don’t need to worry about all that “college is the best years of your life” jargon. It’s like I woke up from a bad dream, and now I have the rest of my life to live the best life.

how our freedom diminishes as we age

tl;dr I think people should become software engineers.

—

Achievement is a weird concept. To start, what we consider to be achievement differs from person to person. But you know what doesn’t change? Capability.

There’s a lot of research about what constitutes success in people and how to measure potential. I personally try to keep up-to-date on Angela Duckworth’s research — I even have an active JSTOR account to do so — but I recognize that Angela Duckworth isn’t the arbiter of how to measure latent success. There are a lot of people in the world. Some of them end up successful, and some of them don’t. At a certain point in life, it becomes abundantly clear which ones end up successful and which ones do not.

I’d say around mid-30s, you will have a pretty clear picture who in your high school ended up having the life they wanted — whether it be art, music, medicine, finance, engineering or whatever. Obviously, there are a lot of structural factors, but I’m going to shelve those ideas for now. The question I’m super curious to ask is: When did our success become abundantly clear? When did success become certain if it ever was? If we can predict how we are going to be when we are 60 when we are 30, then at what point in your life does the ambiguity fade?

One things happens and then another things happens and then bam you’re 30 and you don’t really get a say in how much you will achieve anymore.

I used to consider myself a determinist. The metaphor I used to really like to describe determinism was chess. In the beginning you have infinite openings to choose from. Some moves are better than others, but you can’t really know for certain. Unlike chess, we can’t hook up a supercomputer to calculate a decision tree for us. By the time you reach the endgame, the game is more-or-less set. You’re either up two pawns or you’re not. Your king is either active on the board or stuck behind a rook on the 7th rank.

The early game of chess is like adolescence. I start with adolescence over childhood because we don’t really make choices when we are a child. We more-or-less act on instinct. When you are a teenager, you have infinite possibilities for how you want to move forward. You could study whatever you want, make friends with whoever you want, do whatever you want knowing your parents have your back. The midgame is like young adulthood. You have been influenced in many ways by your childhood. A lot of things are set like what college you went to or who are your best friends or who are your exes. There’s a lot of baggage from the early game, but it’s still manageable. By the time you reach the endgame, you have carried so much baggage from the first two phases of the game, that the end of the game becomes increasingly clear. Redemption is always still possible, but unlikely.

Obviously, I’m no longer a determinist. I consider myself more-or-less a proponent of the Sartre freedom gospel (or whatever is the opposite of determinism). The only time you can exercise true freedom in your life is when you are young. When you are older, you are shackled to family. (I think that’s precisely the reason why Sartre and Beauvoir chose not to get married.) You always have freedom in your life, but your freedom diminishes as you age. One facet in particular in which it diminishes is achievement. As you age, you have progressively less and less the freedom to achieve, unless you give up your family to pursue something for yourself. You always have the choice to strive for achievement. The rewards to do so are just minimal to the point where it’s probably not worth it.

There is the first stratification in life when what college you go to. If you go to a good school, the opportunities coming out of college are pretty good. At least, you have a lot easier time getting what you want when you go to a good school. Then, that brings up the second stratification, which is what is your first job out of college. People say your first job out of college isn’t that important; I disagree. Sure, you can technically go to business school and switch jobs, but then you are also hitting a hard reset on your career, basically wasting whatever you could’ve done out o college instead of out of business school. If you don’t want to go to business school, you could also switch around until you get the job you want, but that also takes a lot of time that could’ve been avoided.

I personally prefer the path of least resistance, which is to just stick with the first job you get out of college until you retire. Your career is important for sure, but you know what is also important? Being Tik Tok famous. Or getting a following on Film Twitter. I don’t know. I wouldn’t know since I’m only still in my 20s, but personally I think by the time you reach age 30, you don’t really care about what you do for a living anymore. It’s just a job, which is superseded by more important responsibilities like family and community. My preferred mentality is: Just get a job that can feed your family; what you do isn’t that important; whether you enjoy your work or not is even less important. Why does it matter if you have achieved anything or not? I think it’s just better to call it a day and live far from society.

Achievement only is an idea when you have the freedom to pursue it. When you’re young, you tend to think you have the rest of your life to figure out what you want to work towards. I had this mentality in college. I wanted to hit the entire corporate trifecta — finance, consulting, and tech — before I figured out what I wanted to do when I hit age 30. I also wanted to do a PhD or Fulbright. But now that I’ve worked for a little bit, I realized how unrealistic these dreams are. I want to have kids when I reach age 30. If I do the trifecta, then I would have passed through three entry-level jobs when I start a family. Do I want an entry-level salary when I start a family? Very quickly I gave up on my dream of hitting the trifecta. Now I’m just content coasting until I reach middle-management, and then I can move to Scranton and live out the rest of my life selling paper.

People say that you can do whatever you want in life if you put your mind to it. For the most part I agree with that statement (even in the midst of all my cynicism), but with two caveats:

  1. You can only achieve what you set out to do if you are prepared to make the sacrifices for it.
  2. You can only achieve what you set out to do if you start early enough.

I think a good piece of life advice is: If you don’t know what you want to do in your life, become a software engineer. Achievement is defined as how much you succeed at what you want to succeed at. Regardless, I think people should be software engineers. What to become a musician? Become a software engineer. Want to become a writer? Become a software engineer. Want to become a software engineer? Become a software engineer.

If you’re a software engineer, you could do anything really. You have money, which allows you to do things. Money is freedom. You have prestige, which allows you to do things. Prestige is freedom. And you have time, which allows you to do things. Time is freedom. Realistically, it doesn’t really matter what you do in life. We all search for careers and ideas that we hope would make us less jaded about the world, but that’s just an idea that keeps us going. We can’t really do anything about that — passion, interest, impact — they’re all just ideas that keep us going in our perpetual state of dissatisfaction. At least when you’re a software engineer you don’t have to worry about your job being automated away. We’re all here on Earth for a finite amount of time. Might as well get something out of it, like money.

If you want to start over when you are 30 and strive to achieve, you technically can, but the burden will be on your family. Do you want to do that to your family? Up to you. You could easily just not have kids, which would allow you to focus more on your career. It’s a sacrifice, but that sacrifice at the end of the day is your choice. It isn’t always mutually exclusive, of course. There are plenty of people who have both a good family life and a good career. There are also a lot that don’t. Is that a risk you want to take? If you want to start over when you’re 30, you are risking the possibility of happiness with the certainty of unhappiness, at least in the short-term. When you reach 40, do you think you will still care about what you wanted to do when you were 30? I wanted to get a 2400 SAT score when I was in high school. That didn’t work out, unfortunately, but I’m honestly pretty fine with it now. I don’t study for the SAT anymore (thank God), and this is just a desire to achieve that I’ve relegated to the past.

Realistically, life is pretty easy if you realize what you want to do early. If you like coding in high school, then you’ll have a pretty good life. If you don’t like coding in high school, you better force yourself to like coding — or realize what you’re passionate about real quick. Even if you realize you like coding in your 20s, you’ll have a pretty good life. The neat thing about software engineering is that you make a lot of money right out of the gate, so you don’t really have to worry about an entry-level job not being enough.

If you realize you like coding in your 30s, well that’s tough luck — you’re too late. When you’re in high school or your 20s, you have time on your side. You can redeem your life if you wanted to. If your dissatisfied with your current job or want to make a 6-figure salary, you can put some money into coding bootcamps and be a software engineer. If you’re in your 30s and have a family, it’s not that simple anymore. You don’t have as much freedom as you did when you didn’t have as many responsibilities. You could sacrifice your family for the possibility of changing up your life, but that’s still a sacrifice you would have to make you didn’t have to make earlier in your life.

With age, we lose freedom in the sense we cannot do as much as we once could. When we are 30, we don’t have as many friends as we did when we are 20. When we are 60, we virtually have no freedom to decide the rest of our lives. We cannot simply choose to work towards achievement because we have other responsibilities to our family. On the other hand, when we get older, we have money, and money is pretty great. Money is freedom, and we are able to live a free life by having money. Tradeoffs!

why the past seems never enough

tl;dr it’s super dumb that our future selves has to inherit the shitty decisions of our past selves

—

Part of me believes that if I had the discipline and ambition that I have now when I first went to college, I might have ended up a lot more successful than I am right now. I might have founded a startup that has just received Series B funding (or at least tried to start a startup) instead of doing whatever I did in college that ended up with me doing what I am doing now. It’s not bitterness, just longing.

Then I remember that I actually was quite ambitious when I went to college. I had a lot of plans, although the plans back then are somewhat different from the plans that I have now. I wanted to go into medicine or public policy or something. I didn’t get too far because I wasn’t particularly good at following through with things I was interested in, ranging from reaching out to professors for research opportunities, to scheduling a date from a flirtationship, to transitioning acquaintances to friends. It’s not my life didn’t end up the way I wanted — it’s just that I wish I had done more early and made more mistakes early, so I could’ve become a stronger person at an earlier age to accomplish more today. What I lacked back then — and what I still lack to a certain extent — was resourcefulness and ambition.

There’s this John Legend interview that I watched a little while ago that really changed how I thought about my relationship with writing. He talked about how detachment may momentarily satisfying on a social and personal level (i.e. I am too cool for xyz), but passion gets us a lot further in life. It wasn’t that I was absolutely detached from pursuing anything, but I did allow my passions to be shielded by a layer of detachment. In many ways, I feel like I use my career as a shield to protect me from acknowledging how little progress I have made with my passions. I have not published anything that seriously took dedication. All that I have to show for my writing is a trail of blogposts requiring minimal editing and published on the first draft. My music is even more behind because I didn’t decide to seriously pursue it until recently.

The thing is pursuing passion requires the possibility of failure on an existential level. If you pursue your career, at least you’ll get somewhere at the end of the day even if you don’t end up where you want to be. If you pursue your passion, you could try the hardest you ever could and still fail. When you prioritize your career, then you can check a lot of boxes for things that typically indicate success like financial independence and stability. When you prioritize your passions (assuming your passions aren’t career-driven) then there’s a chance you could be catapulted into public life as a D-list celebrity, but then there’s also the chance that you could end up with nothing. You could devote your entire life to your passions and have no traditional markers of success to show for it.

I think the objective of life is to understand what you want to do at an early age and then follow through with it. Oftentimes in life, our regret falls into two camps:

  1. Regret for now pursuing something soon enough
  2. Regret for not pursuing something hard enough

There’s always room to start something, but the depth at which you can reach greatly deteriorates the less time you have to follow through on your plans. I was thinking a lot about high school lately, how I wanted to go into medicine without entirely understanding what I was getting myself into, what sacrifices I would have to make, and what else would be available in the world if I didn’t. Eventually, I did figure out that I didn’t want to practice medicine, but in reflection, it took me a lot longer than I wanted. It was time I could’ve used to pursue writing or music instead.

One of my friends told me a while back that she wished they knew what college to wanted to go to when she first got accepted into college. Instead, she had to find out the hard way: by going to college and realizing that the culture did not fit, and then transferring out. At the time, my immediate response was that I was jealous of her. Transferring colleges is like having double the college experience. You have your college experience in one college, and then you have a different college experience in another college. She didn’t see it that way, and I think that taps into something really intrinsic about human nature — that the experience we have had is never enough. When we take our life in one direction, there is another way our lives could’ve gone. We yearn for the fantasy we created from a different life to compare to the dullness of the life that happened.

When I was in college I was doing a local maximization. I had a limited set of knowledge back then, and the choices I made back then were subject to my limited abilities back then.

The thing about immaturity is that nothing seems immature until you reach maturity. It exists in another dimension because we are unable to access our immature selves when we reach maturity. Things seemed a lot more difficult when we were younger because they were. I consider high school the hardest time I’ve ever worked in my life because it was the hardest I’ve ever worked. It was not because it was the most I’ve worked — my 70-hour workweek paired with my part-time Master’s program paired with studying for the CFA ensures that this part of my life is the most I’ve ever worked — but most does not mean hardest. In high school, I was a lot less capable than I am now, and that lack of capability made seemingly easy tasks now a lot more difficult than they should’ve been.

Academically, I worked a lot, but this does not mean that I had the grades to prove it. My studying was not nearly as efficient and focused as it is right now, and it all seems like a waste of time in reflection. I think that might be one difficult part of parenting. It’s hard to explain to kids how lazy they are until they become adults. No matter how much kids think they work, they will never compare to the work ethics of their adult selves. Studying in high school < studying in college, any day of the week.

Socially, I found it a lot harder to make friends and hold conversations than I do now. At a certain point in life, we learn how to feign interest in what other people are saying; this came to me slightly later than it did for most people. It’s weird to think about because I have access to a completely different personality now than I did in the past, but there was a point in my life when I was uncomfortable reaching out to strangers, uncomfortable raising my hand in class, uncomfortable asking people out for coffee or lunch. I can’t describe how I justified to myself now, but if I asked my past self he would have a reason for it. But since this old version of myself has died, all I am left with are the consequences of my older self. He was the one that made the set of decisions that led to my current life. Now, I am the one that has to live with the life he has left me.

But the old Taylor can’t come to the phone right now
Why? Oh, ’cause she’s dead 

Taylor Swift, Look What You Made Me Do

Whenever we make a decision, we make a decision based on the information we have at the time, paired with some emotional factors from environmental circumstances. Things only make sense in retrospect because we are presented with additional information that gives us a more complete image of the life we chose. Because we could never amount to the same capability we have now when we are younger, the past always seems never enough. As long as our future selves accumulate the experience and development our past selves never had, it always will seem like our past selves never lived up to their potential.

on virtue signals

A core facet of contemporary existence is that it doesn’t matter what you say as long as someone is hearing what you are saying. The execution of thought precedes the content of thought. For any communication — from speech to tweet to brainwave DM — the meaning of your words is reduced and modified through internalization. As long as someone believes the message that you are sending to them, it doesn’t really matter how it is sent or if it is intended at all.

Virtue signaling is the practice of publicly expressing sentiments meant to reflect good character or equivalent. It has become quite popular lately especially in social media, although I’m not sure exactly how popular it was in the past. Maybe there were some 18th-century professional virtue signallers who made a living off of convincing others they were good people. They would go around town to talk about how great of people they were, and then they would accept donations to facilitate their continued virtue. Sounds like contemporary politics, no?

Virtue signaling is an act oriented around others, but it is oriented around others precisely because identity is defined through others. There would not be the need to virtue signal if there were others to observe it. But, without others, we would not be able to prove our own virtue because we can only prove our virtue through the examination of others. In truth, we’re not really sure what to believe anymore. After religion stopped being the moral authority in which to live our lives, we turn to other sources of moral equivalency, like politics.

I think it’s really interesting nowadays that politics is equivocated with virtue. You believe a certain set of values, and you are virtuous, and if you believe another set of values, then you are considered by 50% of the voting bloc to be not virtuous. Confirmation bias accents this divide, so we selectively consume news that amplifies our conception of being on the virtuous side. In turn, we virtue signal to identify ourselves with the side we consider to be virtuous. Yet, I find myself asking whether virtue signaling is an attempt to convince ourselves that we live a virtuous life when we don’t have anyone explicitly telling us we do.

It’s like in Bojack Horseman when Bojack asked Diane if he was a good person, and expected Diane to say yes, but she just said, “I don’t know.”

I think that scene really captures how we all feel in this postmodern world. We want someone to tell us we live a virtuous life, mostly because we’re not too sure if we are living a virtuous life ourselves. We can’t exactly confirm that we are living a virtuous life ourselves, and there’s no one telling us we are. We need external validation because that’s how we can be sure that we exist at all, yet this validation doesn’t come as straightforward as it did in the past. We don’t follow a strict set of moral codes anymore, so it’s not like we can check off a list that says you are a good person. And since Aristotle said something along the lines of the meaning of life is to live virtuously, which somehow got baked into popular consciousness, we become convinced that the virtuous life is the only life worth living. Yet, without knowing what is virtue, we assign ideas like politics to replace it.

In response, I think a lot of the time we scream out in an attempt to get someone to listen to us and tell us that we are the good people we imagine ourselves to be. Oftentimes, those moral communities are centered around politics. The rest is just a process of reinforcement. We express an opinion about politics. We receive support from one side and receive contempt from the other. Since one side is giving us the moral validation we are looking for, we identify with one side over the other. The cycle continues as we receive more validation from one side and contempt from the other.

It doesn’t really matter what we believe in. As long as we receive moral validation, it gives us the comfort that we are living the virtuous life. It does not matter if we are actually living a virtuous life or not as long as someone is telling us we are living a virtuous life. In this contemporary world, belief precedes reality. As long as someone tells us we are living a virtuous life, we can resolve this psychic uncertainty we have about whether we are actually living a virtuous life or now. We adopt beliefs we are not entirely convinced of because we believe these are virtuous beliefs. We do so because we want to continue to receive moral validation. It doesn’t matter if we actually believe what we are saying or not. As long as we receive validation for our beliefs, that’s all that matters.

According to Wikipedia, our favorite source of straight truth, bad faith is “a sustained form of deception which consists of entertaining or pretending to entertain one set of feelings while acting as if influenced by another.” It’s not to be confused with Sartrean bad faith, which I reference frequently despite not entirely understanding it. My interpretation of traditional bad faith is that it’s a detachment of self, specifically between belief and conviction. It is the schism between how much you believe in something versus how much you think you should believe in something. And, when we only receive validation for conviction, it becomes natural to hold convictions on moral grounds to solidify our identity as a virtuous person.

I think our current society is abundant with bad faith, although I don’t particularly think that it is inherently a bad thing. It’s more like a thing that exists. Like poop. Poop isn’t good or bad. It just exists, and it is a byproduct of our existence. Authenticity is not encouraged by internet culture, and our postmodern reality isn’t really moving towards reform either. It’s just a product of the current reality in which we occupy, and we just need to scoop the poop.

I was thinking back to Arendt’s characterization of individuals as political agents, and I’m not quite sure I understand what that means. I read about politics for fun sometimes, but there has always been detached from political articles. Someone put in the time and energy to write about something they care about, and there’s not much I care about, especially not politics. I personally find myself more attuned to my definition of an economic agent, since very rarely does politics precede economics in contemporary society. We vote according to our economic identity, so where does politics come into our consciousness?

I’m pretty sure that 50 percent of Americans don’t even vote. I happened to vote, but not because I’m particularly captivated by any idea or movement. It’s more for social reasons more than anything else, so I can tell people I voted for who they thought I should vote for. Sometimes, I feel the need to be more political because people around me are quite political. It seems virtuous because they receive a lot of validation for expressing their political beliefs. What is the opposite of apathy, passion? Is that something you can cultivate, or is that something you are born with? I personally have no idea about what is the right way to govern. I don’t have leanings towards one side or another, yet sometimes I crave the validation that what I believe is the right thing to believe..

Communication is the process of sharing ideas. As long as the idea comes through, it doesn’t really matter how you say it. What matters more than articulation is accessibility. It doesn’t quite matter if you are descriptive with what you are trying to say; it matters more that you are matching someone’s brain waves. Then, they can tell you that you were right. And that’s all that matters in life.

the confusion between altruism and power

Throughout my time in college, I have met many people who want to make an “positive impact” on the world. I personally have no idea what that means anymore. What is impact? It seems like such an abstract concept. Impact. It is an idea without a definition that people strive for. Then, somewhere down the line, it struck me: impact is a synonym for power.

It’s weird because I also resided in the “impact” camp at one point. I wanted to go into international development because that seemed like the field in which I could do the most good for the world. I wanted to work at USAID or the World Bank or some NGO in some part of the world far from where I was born. I don’t remember when I no longer wanted to do these things. I think I was networking with some people who worked in international development in the summer coming into my senior year of college, and then I realized that working in international development won’t fulfill the sense of purposelessness I wanted it to fulfill.

The reality of that we feel powerless in this globalized world. Hundreds of years ago, when we would live in the same village our entire lives, we could shape the world around us. The only world we knew of is the village, and we contributed to the village in ways that was necessary for its survival. We could collect berries to feed our village, which would give us a sense of power. We could kill animals to make clothing, which gave us a sense of power. People relied on us, and we could exercise the power of God over animals and plants. In that world, we had the feeling that we had power because the world was so small.

It is quite different now. It doesn’t really matter if we were born at all. The population of the world is close to eight billion people now. If the world had one less person, it wouldn’t make that much of a difference. Collectively, we sum up to be humanity, which is everything. Individually, we are just a shadow of humanity — a mirror reflecting the conditions in which we were born into — an entity that does not need to exist at all. In a village, we could have been everything. In this world, we are nothing. The world continues to grow, technology continues to advance, and everything continues to function without us.

In War and Peace, Tolstoy discussed how we, as humans, like to attribute historical events to particular actors. In the Napoleonic Wars, we tend to think Napoleon as a catalyst for everything ranging from reclaiming France to mistakenly invading Russia in the winter, but we often ignore other forces of history that don’t fit into this simple narrative of a single individual dictating world events. We attribute major world events like the Indian Independence Movement to Gandhi, but we forget the historical context that catalyzed these players in the first place. It is easy to consider single actors as the catalyst for major historical events, but I consider them circumstantial more than anything.

The world continues to have movements regardless of whether we partake in it or not. This is a very structuralist position to take, and I generally consider myself a post-structuralist. Even if we lead a movement, we did not create the movement. We merely partake in it, and the movement labels us. People in history attempt to create a better world by making an “impact” on it. Collectively, that is what determines history. Individually, it does not matter if one individual partakes in it or not. The movement would have run its course regardless. That is the paradox we are presented with: We want to feel like we matter in the world, but the only way we can matter in the world is through our relationship with other people. We do not want to feel reliant on other people, which is why we want other people to rely on us.

We say that we want to have an impact on others, but what we actually want is to feel like we matter in a world that doesn’t really care about us. We could live or die — why does the world care? But we want it to care, which is why we convince ourselves that we want to help other people. It gives us a sense of power over others, which in turn gives us a sense of control. It is a coping mechanism to escape from the reality that our lives doesn’t really matter in this world, that we don’t have as much control over our circumstances as we want to have. We want it to matter — to derive a sense of control in a world that does not allow us any — and we are willing to do anything to convince ourselves that it does.

In high school debate, when the topic of ‘does truly selfless altruism actually exist’ came up, I said it didn’t. At the time, I didn’t have any philosophical basis to ground my thoughts; it was just an intuitive thought I tried to back with logic. At the time, I boiled all altruism down to “feeling good”. Now, with a little more philosophy under my belt, I think the motivations for altruism is actually a derivative of Nietzsche’s will to power. Altruism doesn’t exist. It is just an act to make us feel more powerful when we feel powerless in this world. Through altruism, we exert power over other people. For a temporary moment, they become reliant on us, and that sense of purpose derived through reliance is a high that we return to again and again.

It is truly a contemporary phenomena to understand the extent of the complexities in the world. I suspect that this sense of awe or dejection towards the immensity of the world will only grow in our popular consciousness. We will feel more powerless as we become more familiar to the world that exists outside of our immediate awareness. But why does it matter if you make an impact on the world or not? I think I prefer to fade into nothingness.

how modernist ethics ruined the good life

We live in a society.

—

I read this op-ed on the WSJ today talking about deleting social media. I had the same cynical reaction that I always do when someone announces they are going to be deleting their social media temporarily. For one — anyone who would truly wants to remove social media from their lives probably doesn’t need to write an op-ed about how their going to remove social media from their life. So, the mere act of writing the article already negates the purpose of the purge. But also — I consider this to be fairly intuitive, but I guess not — purging social media won’t purge the influence of social media in your life.

I think it’s quite naïve to believe we could return to a pre-social media world after we have lived in a world where social media did exist. The concept exists, and by choosing to not using it we are negative it. It reminds me a bit of Sartrean conception of emptiness and negation. Without social media, we can perceive a lack of something. It is our childhood bedroom with its contents stripped out. The interior no longer exists, but the emptiness speaks just as loudly as if it were still present. It is the same with social media.

Social media is life. Social media is structure. Social media is necessity.

Addiction is a necessary component of human experience. What we chose is what we happen to be addicted to. There isn’t a world without addition. Pretty sure God made they abundantly clear when he made humans addicted to water and air. Our lives mirror our instincts, and our most primal instincts compel us towards water and air. Without water and air, we die. If we don’t get what we need, then we die. It seems pretty clear to me that we weren’t born to not have addictions. If that were the case, we would just exist in absence of necessity, allowing us to live the contemplative life by diving deep into the depths of the ocean and never resurfacing. That would be the dream. The one thing standing between me and this dream is my addiction to air. Lame.

Clearly we were born to be addicted to something. Humans happen to be addicted to air. Cockroaches seem to be able to live without air, so if we’re being honest cockroaches are transcendent beings and we’re just fodder. Somewhere along the line, we confused our physiological needs and psychological needs. You might ask, can’t we control our psychological needs? The answer is yes. But never entirely. We can certainly tame ourselves from our animalistic instincts the same way you can train a dog to stop taking a shit on your carpet (except mine), but we will never reach a state where we are fully free from the psychological needs. The same logic applies here. If we weren’t born to have psychological needs, then why would we have them? Checkmate. If God really wanted us to be free from worldly desires, then he wouldn’t have created them in the first place. Since none of us are free from psychological needs, it is clear our anatomy wasn’t designed to live a life free from psychological needs. I say we lean in.

People say they want to be free from things — from social media, from consumerism, from want. Do they actually? That in itself seems like another want in itself. If we weren’t born for wanting things, what’s the point in being born at all — to not want things? That seems a bit ridiculous to me. What’s the point in challenging our nature? It seems like just an extension of this death wish that never left us since we were born. Why would you challenge your own life when you could just as easily embrace your wants and figure out how to reconcile the life you want and the life you think you want?

Realistically, I think a lot of people spend too much time doing what they think they want instead of what they actually want. Psychological defense mechanisms ranging from deflection to repression to projection make it very hard for us to truly understand the core of our psyche. Instead, we have a psyche that is all over the place and a sense of false rationality to make sense of our emotions. We have inherited too much from Early Modern thought. You can read Kant or Hume or whomever and think you have your thoughts straightened out, but that’s so last century. There has never been certainty, and if this century has told us anything it’s that nothing should be trusted — especially not your own thoughts.

We are detached from our thoughts as a byproduct of postmodern ethics. A major critic of postmodernism is that it is an illegitimate aestheticization of politics and discourse. I say, aesthetics precedes ethics, so nothing is really illegitimate. Claiming brackets of legitimacy and illegitimacy itself is a very modernist way of doing things, which is exactly what postmodernism is trying to avoid. Why does there have to be inclinations to do anything. All the exists is post-structuralist individualism, which is deeply internal and absent of canonical inherited ideology. The only thing that truly exists in our postmodern reality is our skepticism, our detachment, and our irony.

I personally like drinking tea a lot. So much that if I went without tea for a day, I would probably be very unnerved. Does it qualify as an addiction? Well, if I can’t live without it, probably. But it’s better than being addicted to soda or cigarettes. At least when I drink tea, I only ingest a couple of calories as opposed to a bucket of sugar. At least when I drink tea, I wouldn’t have to worry about increased risk in lung cancer when my hair starts to turn grey or putting on weight in my twenties when I’m supposed to stay lean for dem Insta photo ops. The only thing that really matters nowadays are Insta photo ops. You can get lung cancer treated, but you cannot redo a bad photo op. That shit stays with you. Some people think the meaning of life is to create art or make money or make a “impact” — whatever that means. The only sense of meaning I find is from detachment and skepticism. Personally, I think the meaning of life is to be Tik Tok famous, and that’s the direction I’m working towards.

I ask — what’s the difference between an addiction and a necessity? Addiction is an aestheticization of negative necessity. But why any necessity bad? Addiction, allegedly, is bad. Addiction wasn’t always bad. Addiction, in many ways, represents the pursuit of freedom — to want something the modernist world doesn’t want us to want. The subsequent vilification of addiction presents an attack on the fundamental freedom of being. The modernists did that to us. (Remember, if you want to blame anyone for anything, blame the modernists. The meteor that destroyed the dinosaurs? The modernists. The fall of the Roman Empire? The modernists. COVID? You guessed it. The modernists.)

I think it’s time we reclaimed the world from the modernism, starting with addiction. Obviously, we don’t consider eating food or drinking water an addiction. But, then again, there are some foods and some beverages that we do consider to be an addiction. If you drink too much water, it’s not called an addiction, but if you drink too much vodka, which is 60% water mind you, then it’s considered an addiction. If you eat too much raw spinach, it’s totally fine, but if you eat too much fast food all of a sudden it’s considered to be an addiction. At present, the medical community, specifically the psychiatry community, dictates what is and what is not considered to be an addiction. Why do a bunch of doctors who don’t have an interest to understand us get to label us as sane or not? While necessity carries the connotation of acceptability, addiction carries the connotation of undesirability.

It reminds me of Foucault’s Madness and Civilization, specifically to his point how society organizes individuals into desirable and undesirable categories and how science has authority to dictate this categorization. I think that’s totally out of wack, mainly because medicine has its own set of priorities that are not necessarily in line with what is considered to be accessible to most individuals. The role of medicine reinforcing certain conceptions of addiction in some aspects of life over others maintains its authority in dividing the world between acceptable traits and unacceptable traits. Who cares if you drink to much? I think most college kids drink to much. They turn out fine, so why do we give so much authority to scientific and medical communities to dictate what is right and wrong for us? (It’s because of the epistemological association between scientific knowledge and truth. Who came up with that? The modernists.)

I ask again — what is addiction and what is necessity?

I’ve picked up a habit of drinking a lot of sparkling water lately. Is that an addiction? What if, hypothetically, my sparkling water habit got in the way of my life? Well, it does, technically. I probably am unable to function without sparkling water. (Believe it or not, if I go one day without sparkling water I dry up into a raisin and can only be revived in a bubble bath of filled with the most pristine sparkling water from Costco. I generally prefer the store brands, but I guess I could settle with Perrier. It was a very unpleasant day, and I don’t want to talk about it.) When I work, I have to go downstairs every couple of hours to fetch a new can of sparkling water. It affects my life greatly in that sense because I could have spent the two minutes it took to go downstairs and back upstairs a lot more productively than I did before.

That brings me to another idea — productivity. A lot of the medication definition of addiction predicates on how the habit affects our life. Productivity is a virtue according to who? The medical community? Who cares if I’m productive or not? I generally like moving around, that’s really a personal preference. If I want to lay on my stomach for five hours while I listen to some Mitski every day of the year, then who cares? What is the medical community going to do, diagnose me as insane?

The medical community operates off a modernist sense of ethics, yet it portrays itself as an arbiter of truth. It holds a consensus over what is a good life and what is a bad life, and that begs the question — what is a good life and what is a bad life? The closest idea of what we have to a good life is a productive contributor to society, which is a spinoff of modernist thought, of which the medical community operates. Sometimes, I’m on the same page with this definition — I do like me some productivity — but I also recognize that a lot of people don’t necessarily have the same definition of a good life as me. It begs a series of questions: What is productivity? How do we measure productivity? Is productivity a virtue?

One way that we commonly use (but is pretty wrong a lot of the time) is income generation. The idea goes: if something makes us money, then it is clearly a productive use of our time, which means if you are make a lot of money you are pretty much immune to whatever the medical community throws at you. Medical ethics are tied with neoliberal ethics. This is a lot of layers of abstraction, but it’s still under the same philosophical system I’ve been using until now. It’s like this restricted laissez faire approach to medical science. As long as you continue to live a high-functioning life, then nothing you could possibly do could count as a negative practice of necessity — of addiction, for example.

I like listening to music when I study. If I don’t listen to music, I have a hard time studying. Is that an addiction? Well, I like listening to music. Since it’s in service of studying, which indirectly will help me make money in the future, it is not considered an addiction. In fact, it seems as long as I continue to live a life occupied with the same level of productivity, it seems that nothing I could do would qualify as an addiction because it does not adversely affect my life. If sparkling water helps me make money and remain a contributing member of this society, then I immune to sparkling water being an addiction. It is what we would consider to be truth since it came from the medical community, but it is far from the truth. The negative connotation associated with the etymology of addiction shouldn’t be there at all. Addiction is an inevitable part of life. The definition of addiction is political.

Life is quite boring. Even when you have things to do, you will still find opportunities to be bored. It’s that ingrained in the human condition. A good way to alleviate boredom is to preoccupy yourself with something. If you preoccupy with something often enough then it becomes a habit. The question is — when does a habit morph into an addiction? I personally don’t think there’s ever a difference. Habits are addictions, just innocuous ones by our standards of what is considered to be acceptable and unacceptable behavior based on criteria we don’t entirely understand nor agree with coming from the medical community. Ingrained in the idea of addiction is a set of values of what is considered to be an ideal life, and what is considered to be an ideal life differs greatly from person to person.

I have my idea of what I consider to be life I want. This life involves me drinking at least three cans of sparkling water a day. Some people would find that to be weird, and I would see where they are coming from. But, under my set of values, I consider drinking three cans of sparkling water a day to be a pivotal part of my life. There are many lives we exist in simultaneously. There is the life we have, the life we think we have, the life we want, the life we think we want, the life we don’t want, the life we think we don’t want, et cetera. This intrapsychic identity amounts to the internal representation of postmodern ethics. There is only way way to live life and that is by rejecting modernism.

temporal disassociation and existential detachment

My friend recommended that I play the game Undertale at the start of last summer. Since he shared his Steam library with me, I thought why not. I got about an hour in before I decided I wanted to do something else. The plot of the game is simple enough. You’re a child who fell into the Underground, and you are trying to make your way back home. In many ways, it’s eerily familiar to the angsty landscape I imaged adolescence to be; I’m sure the imagery was quite intentional. It exists in a weird transitional state between the beginning of the game and the end of the game. Similar to The Binding of Issac, it exists in a sort of purgatorial state — transitional — between one state of existence and the next. There is no beginning, just a middle and an end that I will never get to. A lot of darkness, weird supporting characters, and a constant sense of confusion — yup, seems exactly like my teenage years.

This game came out in 2015, but it has the feeling of one of those games that came out in the early 2000s — you know, the ones that demanded a lot of grinding before you could get anywhere, partly because they didn’t have the technology for more complex processes but also because they probably didn’t have the money to hire new software engineers so they copy-pasted some of the mechanics. There’s something about games made in the 2000s that demand a lot of attention out of you. It was a time when commercials still existed, which meant that you had to sit through something annoying and unpleasant before you get what you wanted. Nowadays, I just watch everything on Netflix or YouTube (but my Ad Block prevents ads from popping up there). I don’t think I have the patience to sit through commercials ever again in my life. I have the money to afford services that don’t have commercials, and I think I’m going to stock to it that way. I don’t even watch through shows in their entirety anymore. I just skip through scenes until I have a vague understanding of what’s going on, and then I call it a day. I don’t think I’ve had that much attention to watch commercials much less play a game like Undertale since I was a child, and I definitely do not have enough commitment to finish this game. I have no idea what happens in the end; I’ve heard that there are different endings depending on the choices you make throughout the game, but honestly the game is too hard for me to finish, and I don’t care to get good.

I keep on going back to St. Augustine’s notion about the past and future — how they don’t exist, and that they are just constructions by our mind to make sense of time. If Descartes was the first dude to quantify tiers of metaphysical reality through the count of attributes, what would he say about our spatial understanding of time (or was this Boethius?)

But how is that future diminished or consumed which as yet is not? Or how does the past, which is no longer, increase, unless three things are done in the mind that enacts this there? For the mind expects, and considers, and remembers, that that which it expects, through that which it considers, may pass into that which it remembers… Future time, which is not, is not therefore long; but a “long future” is “a long expectation of the future.” Nor is time past, which is now no longer, long; but a long past is “a long memory of the past.

-St. Augustine, Confessions

I reflect back on my past memories. They aren’t particularly real. There is this sort of air of falseness to it. Honestly, a lot of my memories are pretty distorted because I can only reconstruct them through pictures I review afterwards. It is the same with history – around 75 million people died in World War II, but it seems quite distant, and I can’t quite conceptualize it. It wasn’t that far ago — only 76 years since the end of the war. That’s literally one person’s lifespan. All that separates bloodiest modern conflict and now is just one person who was born at the end the world who is in retirement now. If you go back further the Black Death wiped out 2/3 of Europe’s population. That’s even worse than when Thanos snapped his fingers with the Infinity Gauntlet. Around the same time, the Mongols were literally burning hundreds of cities to the ground. If you really want to go back, you can curse the meteor that killed all the dinosaurs. That wasn’t all that nice.

The point is: All of these things happened, yet we don’t particularly care about it. Sure, WWII happened. It sucked, but how many people still feel connected to the events that happened to WWII? (It is probably quite a lot of people.) Sure, the Mongols basically destroyed centuries of scientific and cultural progress in their conquest for world dominance, but no one is really mad at the Mongols now. I’m not getting anywhere in life by not ordering Mongolian beef whenever I go to a Chinese food truck. I guess there are people still mad at Spain and Portugal for basically wrecking political institutions in Latin America (only me tbh), but definitely no one mad at Genghis Khan. The Black Death happened, but you can’t really be mad at a disease. I mean, you could be mad at Genghis Khan for spreading it, but then again no one is still mad at Genghis Khan. But, if I’m being honest, I’m still pissed at the meteor that killed the dinosaurs.

I try to be detached from my memories because they don’t seem to be quite real, but I still don’t understand why Augustine thought that our current present is more “real” than the past or future. What is causation in this case? Are we detached from the past because it is not real, or is the past not real because we are detached from it? Does our mind originate our reality or does our mind perceive reality as it is? So many questions. If we really want to be idealist about it, then nothing exists in reality and everything is in our mind, which is probably true but also a lame answer. There is some choice we have over what type of reality we wish to perceive. All I know is that I don’t feel particularly attached to my present either. Sure, the past is whatever. But why does that mean the present isn’t also whatever?

The present very quickly becomes the past. If you really want to get technical, we can say that we’re not experiencing the present at all; we’re just experiencing a phenomena the moment it becomes part of our past. Things happen in the present. If we do not react to them in the same way we do not react to things that happened our past, our actions do not speak to the reality in which they supposedly occupy. With this way of looking at the world, everything is reduced to passivity, and once we embrace passivity we no longer are can observe our life passing in the present. It is a choice how we perceive our lives — whether in the past or present and how much in the past we want to perceive our lives. While reflection is a necessary component in living a “free” life it is also reductive to existence in absence of activity. When faced with these two contrasting realities, our perception serves as a the fork in the road to the life we want to lead.

It’s weird — the only thing that supposedly separates present from past is placement. The present is placed at the foreground, and the past is relegated to the background. However, if we simply move the present to the past, then it becomes the past. There is nothing grounding its present-ness (presence?). It is just a temporary state of being we could negate by not perceiving its relation to the past. If we perceive the present as we perceived the past, then it automatically becomes the past. In other words, the present isn’t a standalone thing. Its reality is given through perception, which means its reality can also be negated through the lack of perception. If we refuse to acknowledge the present as forefront, then there is no reality to it. If we refuse to allow presence in phenomena, then there is no difference between past, present, and future.

All we know is that we feel something, but even that is a jump to make. If there’s any concession to make, it is that the present accompanies stronger emotions than the past. We can recognize that our past carries emotions as well. In another world, I would also advocate the future carries emotions (literally just from watching Dark lmao), but since I didn’t just fall into a swimming pool of LSD, I think I’ll shelve that idea for now. However, there is a difference between passive and active emotion. Depending on the magnitude of relegation, individual consciousness transcends passive emotion. Active emotion is a product of the near past. If I recall correctly, the Cannon–Bard theory suggests that emotions are a product of neurological reactions to neurochemical stimulations (it could very well be the James–Lange theory, but I’m definitely not going to double-check). We perceive active emotion through active stimulation, while passive emotions exist as internal reactions found as conflicting memories are probed into existence through subliminal consciousness.

If we are detached from the present, it does not mean we are detached from reality. There is a false equivalency between present-ness and real-ness in the sense that their respective phenomenologies are constructed through different epistemological structures. While reality cannot be negated through transcendental idealism, presence is subject to transcendental selectivity. It is subject to perception. If we do not perceive the present, the present does not exist.

consumption and redemption

Mom, get the camera — I found the meaning of life. It’s to buy shit and make shit.

—

I don’t particularly like ascribing modern phenomena to capitalism because I think capitalism is actually a very small part of our way of living. A capitalistic society is a society before it is capitalistic. Rhetoric criticizing capitalism has gained a lot of popularity over the past couple of years, but I think these criticisms are misplaced. They are critiques against society, not against capitalism. Society exists as a formulation of collective identity, and capitalism is a trait of society.

It reminds me a bit of Spinoza’s distinction between modes and attributes. Capitalism is the mode. Capitalism exists as a trait of society. Society is the thing with essence. Capitalism cannot exist without society, but society can exist without capitalism. Yet, in a non-capitalistic society, would the same problems that we often ascribe to capitalism go away?

One such problem is comparison-derived unhappiness. I once wrote a paper on the metaphysics of price — how the existence of price backed in currency allows us to compare objects against each other, which translates into our psyche a need to compare all things in life against each other, which leads to unhappiness. At the time, I ascribed it to capitalism because bombasting capitalism is quite popular in critical theory (read: I wanted an A on my paper), but I don’t think price as a concept is inherent to capitalism. There are markets in socialism and feudalism and other -isms as well. In fact, markets are a bare function of society that transcends whatever political and economic systems that exist within it. As long as society exists, comparison-derived unhappiness is inevitable. Since society is an inherent part of human nature — in the sense that human nature cannot exist without society — it also seems that comparison-derived unhappiness is necessary byproduct of nature.

One such way we try to overcome unhappiness is through art. I think Proust articulated the idea of artistic redemption the best through his 1,267,069-page magnum opus that I never actually finished reading nor will ever finish in my life (read: I think reading original texts are convoluted and unnecessary compared to reading commentary… Marcel, you obviously have the hots for your mom. Gilberte doesn’t like you; get over yourself. Why aren’t books skim-able like TV shows?). But the thing about Proustianism is that it assumes you’re actually doing something with your life when you are creating. Art has purpose; therefore, by creating art, life has purpose.

The fault in this is that it assumes that art has purpose at all. The act of creation — at maximum it’s just a feeling derived from the need to have meaning in life. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with that per se, but it I often find people (including myself) attempting to say that art is anything more than attempt to console yourself for issues that are inherent in human nature. Feelings are feeling. Feelings can be a great guide for us to live our lives; maximizing the amount of good feeling in our life is probably a lot more enjoyable of an experience than living with a lot of bad feeling. But at the end of the day feelings can be reduced to their corresponding neurochemicals. In absence of these reactions happening in our brain, feelings do not exist. The essence of art is derived from chemicals. The phenomena of art is derived as a product of chemicals. It is a mistake to believe the phenomena of consuming art can exist in the absence of neurochemistry.

Existentialism is a branch of philosophy that studies the relationship between existence and essence. Because, as Sartre annoyingly put it — “existence precedes essense” — we’re in a bit of a pickle of navigating life in absence of inherent validity to define. We exist initially in a state of ontological absence before we figure out how we want to identify ourselves. But, by then, we are already too far in life to control how we want to be identified. We have control one way or another, but identification isn’t instantaneous. Identification is a product of creation and consumption, and it is only through the act of creation and consumption that we are able to do anything at all with our identity. In absence of these forces, we are relegated to beings who do not have the freedom to identify.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that lately I’ve been feeling extremely detached from what I create. I don’t see a point to it, yet I’m still doing it for some reason, deferring to the same logic that got me here in the first place. There is a sort of schism between what I want to say and what I actually say. What I actually want to say is that my life is a lot more boring then what I write about on occasion. My thoughts are not as interesting as those I put on paper, and my near past is not nearly as glamourous as I try to convince myself it was. There’s not much going on, if that wasn’t clear, and I’m living a sort of purgatorial state — when this part of my life is just a phase that leads to the next phase in my life.

I have lived quite a different life from some of my friends. For one, I write on a regular basis because I am also sad on a regular basis, and that doesn’t seem to be a common experience shared with those around me. I have my writing habit mostly because I encounter something that makes me feel a little discomfort, and I write to ease the discomfort. We all have our coping mechanisms; this just happens to be mine. I am also extremely bored on a regular basis, and this seems like the thing to do. The thing with Proust, however, is that it supposedly creates meaning out of your experiences, whatever that means. I definitely do not see any meaning out of this.

Sometimes my friends bring up how they feel guilty not creating something of value all the time. Then, I remind them that we’re all going to die and that none of our life experiences are going to be remembered, so there’s no point feeling guilty of not creating something of value in your life. The position with the most amount of power in the world is probably the US president, and I don’t see anyone fretting about not becoming president. If you’re not president, you probably can’t influence the world in the way that you want to, and your impact will always be less than if you were president. So, it’s quite unfortunate that we can’t all be president, but it also doesn’t matter because if you can’t become president what’s the point in trying to leave your “impact” on the world, whatever that means? If you really want to think long-term, Earth probably won’t be around in a million years, so there won’t be enough “impact” made where it would transcend thousands of years; it’s all local.

It always struck me a bit dark how messed up the world is. But, at the same time, how do we know we have a stake in the world at all when it does not matter in an existential sense whether we intervene or not? Arendt kept on going off in about how evil exists when individuals are stripped of their political identity into economic agents, but why is politics necessarily an aspect of identity? Why cannot economics be the sole factor in our identity — after all, Bataille did say that we pursue self-destruction through Eros, so what is there to say we do not seek self-destruction through economic alienation?

Occasionally, I engage in some retail therapy. The other day, I bought a Tumi messenger bag. That was probably the highlight of my life for the past year. I mean, graduating college and finding a job is pretty nice and all, but personal accomplishments can never measure up to enjoying consumerism in terms of raw emotional output. I haven’t been able to use my Tumi messenger bag yet because I haven’t left my house for the past eight months, but it’s nice to have around. I’ve never seen any marketing materials surrounding Tumi, but it just seems like one of those bags that young professionals should have. By purchasing it, I am further solidifying my identity as a young professional. I’m not even sure that I want to identify as such, but how could I possibly understand this identity without its corresponding consumption.

The other day, I was thinking of buying a Rolex for the meme, but then I thought better of it. There’s only so much you can do for the meme. This is not one of them. I was bored, and I wanted something to make my life interesting. Since I’m living with my parents again, there’s not exactly that much going on in my life at the moment. I spend most of my free time studying more exams (even though I have already graduated) and attempting to kick-start my career as a late-blooming, k-pop star. It’s not going that well, at the moment, but I’m optimistic. I just finished the k-drama Startup, and if randos working out of an apartment in outer-city Seoul can make it in the tech world, I can definitely become a k-pop star at this point in my life. Life is a k-drama, after all.

For some arbitrary reason beyond my understanding, owning watches is very tied up with masculinity. I haven’t seen any girls who are very into collecting watches (how is that actually a hobby?), but I could name a couple of guys who are. It’s like why… watches are just moving pieces of metal associated with a brand that gives it legitimacy to charge premium prices, but I guess that’s also a lot of other things in life. I get having watches that look cool. Design is important in modern life. There’s also the obsession with automatic and mechanical movements, which I guess makes it slightly more interesting than battery-powered watches. Rolexes are watches whose identity is predicated on the idea that if you reach a certain level of success in life you’ll buy a Rolex. Then, there are the other watches on the same “tier” as Rolex but no one has heard of. Like IWC or Zenith. Or watches on a “higher tier” as Rolex like Vacheron Constantine. What the fuck is a Vacheron Constantine?

I thinking back to how Baudrillard thought we used our consumption habits as a proxy of identity. We buy things because we don’t know what kind of person we would be if we didn’t buy things. I didn’t buy a lot of things for most of my life, mostly because I didn’t have the money to buy things I wanted. Now, I do have money, so I am able to create identity through consumption. Without the money to consume, I do not exist. Writing and singing and gaming are fun and all, but it doesn’t lead to anywhere. It’s an activity for its own sake, while consumption is a directive authority in quantifying the translation between capital and happiness.

Benjamin thought of boredom as a force that affects all social classes, although he also thought that boredom affected the poor more since they couldn’t spend money on not being bored. I see the sentiment, but I don’t entirely see the logic. Nowadays, there are tons of things that are free that all social classes consume equally — like reality TV. I’m not sure exactly how tied together boredom and consumption are. I think most of the things I do — like writing, singing, and gaming — don’t really require that much money. Well, a WordPress Premium account costs like $60 a year, which is money that I really don’t need to be spending, but I’m also narcissistic and like sharing my writing, so what the hell, right? League of Legends is free though.

Who came up with the idea that the only way to be fulfilled in life is through consumption? It’s quite an annoying little piece of ideology that somehow makes it very hard to live a fulfilling life outside of consumption. Unfortunately, per the nature of consumption, it also means that it is very hard to live a fulfilling life without the resources necessary to take part in consumption. No argument about consumption would be be complete without mentioning people who have the capability to consume but still lack some sort of meaning in life. Well, in absence of cultivating relationships with others (which according to Angela Duckworth is the meaning of life), there is also the absence of creation, which fills the gaps that cannot be filled through consumption.

In life there is nothing in the beginning. It is only through consumption and creation can we make anything out of ourselves. Consumption serves our future selves for the person we want to be; creation allows us to make sense of our past and redeem our regrets. It is only through both of these acts can we achieve some sort of equilibrium in our lives. Our consumption habits direct us towards the person we want to be, and our creation lets us move on from the past we want to forget.