Your lifestyle depends on what you do
Purpose depends on why you do it
Happiness depends on how you do it
Experience depends on who you do it with and where you do it, and
Success depends on when you do it!

If you want work-life balance, think about whether you want success or keep your lifestyle sane, happiness or experience, and let your purpose drive your priorities.

Simply, there are two kinds of foods: food made for our senses, and food our senses were made for. Our brains evolved so that we find pleasure in food that are nutritional to us, according to its availability in nature - and we're made to stop eating when we have eaten enough. Our bodies were not designed to overeat. Except that it didn't imagine that we can ever manage to hack nature so much that we can live without exercising, and that we can hack our food so much that our brains can no longer tell the nutritional value of food.

Twenty years apart

Twenty years apart
In a different city, a different life
I remember the boy who looked up
At an immense sky wearing nothing but the moon:

His eyes and his heart
Open like camera shutters,
Were learning to moan to the pleasure of that unfathomable pain
As they hungrily swallowed the moonlight that pieced him
In a million places with such speed and apparent intent.

It made him forget in that instant
The unnerving restlessness that wore him like he were a mere accessory,
The swinging at every turn.

Twenty years apart
I look up into a different sky
Moonless, autumn, but no less immense
My eyes no less unsettled than the stars that would have been there
Desperately opening into a heart
Still freshly pierced
Still no less unaccustomed to waking up
Wearing this body like a mistaken tattoo
That fades only ever so slightly
And then all at once.

#myworld #rant

#myworld #rant
Why does discrimination exist? I am of the opinion that if anything exists for a long time, it might have been selected to exist for reasons that have not yet been completely taken apart.

Maybe the reason evolution has selected discrimination is so that the unspeakably talented live in an unjustified fear of the majority, so that they are forced to show us the patience we refuse to show the less well-adapted minority.

But once in a while we are overwhelmed by raw talent, before whom we are conceivably utter rubbish, those who in their lifetimes know how to live as they will, turning whole societies upside down, leaving a legacy we take generations to digest.

We find ourselves caught between the statistical bias we see in them and our own survival instinct, which rationalizes that we are on the disadvantageous end of the equation.

We feel uneasy about this conflict, and rush to call it the hand of God or karma - to save us from having to come to terms with the fact that the same statistical distribution that put them there, could also have put us amongst the minority we feel the least comfortable around.

We are acutely aware that limited resources means without redistribution someone will get less, but we don't want to think about it.

We don't want to think about how helpless we are. We would rather invent an emotion we call guilt - so that we torture ourselves inside than admit that we are not brave enough to look beyond the statistical bias, to see beyond the hand of God.

And when we feel overwhelmed by guilt, we invent discrimination. We explain away the guilt that we invented, and create a reality that stacks the hand of God against the minority - no matter which end of the curve they come from. Not realizing that we, the majority, are the eye and the mind of God, moving the powerful hand of discrimination against the lesser parts among us that would have made us whole.

The other 5%

The other 5%

Terrorism is scary because we cannot rationalize how it changes how long we can reasonably expect to live. But even within a peaceful environment, statistics and experience often tell difference stories.

Learnt today that life expectancy is a misnomer. It isn't the number of years you can expect to live to in the manner you can expect to get paid a salary for your month's work.

Its more like the age you start realizing that you have more friends who are dead than those still alive.

Let's say your country has a published life expectancy at birth (LEB) of 75. What they may not tell you is statistically the standard deviation is 15.

From an engineering perspective, the layman idea of "expect" can be expressed as "having a 95% possibilities of", or, statistically, the range between plus and minus two sigma (standard deviations).

This translates to mean you can be 95% confident of not dying before 45, and 68% confident of not dying before 60!

And these are the numbers that look a little more real to me, on a personal level. It makes me remember the other 5% - and their final Facebook posts. It makes me remember the time when they took hold of life and lived the day, and looked damn fucking good owning it.

Honestly, retirement and longevity is a really terrifying twosome. But I feel strangely comforted that life is more unexpected than I normally (read: "Gaussian-ly") imagine, and that living with pain and on a budget until you're 90 years old isn't the only future I should imagine. I don't buy Pascal's Wager : life finds a way.

Lesson of the day: life is risky. Take the leap, take the fall, and make sure you're looking fucking good owning it.

Maybe organized violence is like über: it happens because existing institutions fails to capture both the needs of the people, and the talent that would have revolutionized their strategy. It happens because customer satisfaction has become a servant to shareholder satisfaction.

Except that for organized violence, we are the shareholders who are asking our economies and policies to please us. We are the once who are turning a deaf ear to the needs of the unseen; we are the ones who give up on the talent of those whose existence are an inconvenience to us.

Hurt is the beginning of healing. Healing is the essence of living. Whatever happened before the hurt is the past, and no matter what they tell you, the past is always about power - allowing the past to empower you, or allowing the past to overpower you. I don't like thinking about the past. I think it is empowering enough to know that for a little while, we are able to hurt, we are able to heal.

What if every religion had its own version of the prosperity gospel that fund hungry leaders but at the same time reach out to young people disenfranchised by mainstream norms? While its vile that leaders make millions off it, isn't it useful to be able to keep young people out of the reach of violent extremist organizations that are actively fighting to win and own the vulnerable?

My 2-yen worth

My 2-yen worth
1. Facebook is not a news media
2. Neither is Twitter. But something can be said about forming a network of news leads around the world.
3. Many reputable non-English local/foreign platforms have English versions of their publications.
4. Good stories don't write themselves. If news is important to you, pay for news. Some news vendors have a hybrid free/paywall model. If you like their free news, consider subscribing. Your readership and subscription fees help make journalism a viable full-time job.

By all means, pray. By all means, color your profile pic. But if your conscience made you feel guilty for not taking some kind of action, then no, prayer does not absolve you from that. I wouldn't go so far as to say that religion is futile, but if people out there are suffering because somebody took whatever form of his religion like his life depended on it, then keyboard Samaritans are no less guilty, pleasuring themselves with religion like it were a sex toy to reach a kind of moral orgasm, exploding with prayer like a fierce ejaculation, which for all practical purposes is a load thrown at an imaginary friend. I am not religious, but I respect religious people, not because I think highly about their religion, but because I think there is something inherently admirable for being able to believe in something a sticking to it. If the people you call terrorists are moved in religion to cause fear, then it is only right that people move in religion to take that fear away.

We discriminate because it's a cornerstone of the human identity. We have a need to believe that we are somehow better than other species in order to legitimize what we see as our birthright to do what we please with the planet and its non-human inhabitants. The need is so strong we'd rather participate in fancy mind-games that help us create these reasons, than to believe that we are simply the most brutal species on the planet. Personally, I'd rather believe that I'm unapologetically brutal. I want to be in touch with that half of me that is so inhumane that makes me perfectly human.

Random words

Random words

We become the city we eat:
Between flights we stitch together
Delicate organs, carefully curated
To make us more whole, as if
We were born broken;
We have leant how to hide the seams underneath,
Turning our Frankensteins inside out
Wearing Culture like spandex.
Not even our breath gives away
How our tongues and our intestines
Can be continents apart and held together by knots of ligaments:
We breath glitter too beautiful for that.
We are too beautiful,
Too out,
Too proud,
We'd do anything we can
To push deeper into the closet
The parts of us that cannot be seen
Falling together.

Second chances come 60 times a minute - you just have to learn how to jump on one quickly enough.