The source of conflict (Revisited)

Very few visitors to this site know who I am in real life since this is not my main website. I consider that a good thing because then there are no strings attached to what I write here, and I can write about topics thinking the audience is no one yet everyone. Some know who […]

Mental health

I keep a dreams log. I forget all my dreams, so I write them down the moment I wake from them. Here’s some of what it says. I’m actually a pretty normal person in real life (I think). I don’t actively think about any terrible thing, yet they always revisit me in my dreams. My […]

Our Brave New World

Increasingly, I ask myself (and one or two close friends) the question – would you rather live in 1984, a totalitarian society of mass surveillance and repressive regiments or Brave New World, a “negative utopia” (as the author put it) of corporate tyranny that uses behavioral conditioning alongside other scientific advancements to enslave its people […]

Why I think people I know ignore me

“The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.” – Friedrich Nietzsche On the vibrant, sprawling campus of Stanford, everyone seems to be on some teetering center of mass between academics, social events, and sleep, so it’s understandable that some social cues […]

The Source of Conflict

I don’t think conflict occurs because (groups of) people have different standards. Conflict occurs because of the illusion that those of different standards can work together. It is this illusion that leads to the buildup of grievances collected from compromise – and for two sides of different value systems, every compromise is a negative-sum game. […]

Unhappiness

The wisdom you’re about to read comes from the mind of a person who has suffered the cumulative trauma of an average’s person life many times over, and who has the mental age of a death bed patient. *cough* If every human action is driven at the core by emotion, and all emotions are determined […]

Hong Kong

Attack on Titan is my favorite anime of all time. In it, humanity is caged in walls and their survival constantly threatened by incoming Titans who try to eat humans alive. The anime is notoriously good for its unforgiving brutality, plot twists but ultimately its characters, who touched many of the owners of its 100 […]

Chess

Recently I’ve become an enthusiast of chess. It was summer 2019 and my internship hours were slowly eating up my right brain. Famous scientists and philosophers have echoed that creativity comes in bursts, and I was living right across my company, so I decided to extend my daily working hours by interspersing intellectual diversions throughout. […]

Nihilism and Nietzsche

I came across a good Nietzsche and Nihilism series by Academy of Ideas. If it’s too long, here’re the points: If you’re not a nihilist, you believe in some version of a true world. A true world can either be a) the future of our earthly one (i.e. Marxism), part of us already (i.e. Hinduism) […]

Sugar

I just had my first boba tea in recent memory. I asked for no sugar, yet it was sweet af. I thought, the sugar in my sip does nothing more than make me take the next sip. It has no nutrients other than unnecessary calories, yet the very fact one sip makes you take the […]