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Category: Meaning of life is 42

Today, I denounce Stoicism

Today, I denounce stoicism, I denounce modern philosophical tenets founded by European men.

I’ve tried and retried to capture my thoughts coherently, but I failed. So I’ll let my haphazard but authentic text messages to a friend take the stage, think of it as a contemporary ‘dialogue’ a la Socrates.

Q: [Redacted] said something to me yesterday that gave me final resolve [something that’s been] on my mind a lot lately.

Which is that dominant (European) modern philosophy, centered around logic, rationalism, empiricism and utilitarianism. As well as the revival of Stoicism, originating from Greek and Roman MEN – are not made for women.

I’ve studied the Stoics for 6 years Seneca’s letters of a Stoic, Epictetus’ discources, and Marcus Aurelius’ meditations. And modern continental philosophers for more, trying to emulate their rationality and stoicism — and suddenly I’m thinking. What the hell?

What made us think our rationality is rational, given our very extreme limitations as individuals, and give intersubjectivity?

Most of all. How can you expect us to be Stoics when we are BUILT to care, feel, and love deeply?

If a loved one were to die today (*knocks wood*), I would not sagely think that “I shall take only my portioned lot of the feast and let it move on.” (Epictetus, or one of them). I will bloody grieve and not get over it for the rest of my life, and I don’t want to get over it.

Even most renowned female philosophers, such as Simone de Beauvoir, whom I despise, write about feminism in relation to men, never passing the philosopher’s Bechdel test, and whom I think of as what today would be a pick-me girl. And yes, there are exceptions such as Hannah Arendt, who while primarily writes on political theory, tread but lightly on human nature.

I’ve a theory that the Philosophy of women must tend towards the mystical, and those whose works are known, preserved, and recognized, must be of value to the church.

Back to [redacted] – she really put the final nail into my denouncement of male-centric philosophy.

[A conversation led me to say] “yeah, you’re born stoic. But she said no, is 练出来的 (trained from life), but with my child I can’t be stoic, you see that’s who I really am.”

So to be woman is to suffer extreme love, which is our gift and our curse, and that modern philosophy completely negates, forcing us to go against our nature to suffer less.

I feel like my eyes are opened suddenly, I’ve always tried to be male in thought but I’m not.

I’m disgusted now at my 25 year old self thinking, wow, Foucalt and Kant and Rousseau were Enlightened geniuses, when in fact they were men who were not equipped to manage their feelings, and thus couched it as raison, räisonieren, reason, as ‘the state of nature’, as ‘utilitarianism’.

____

That’s all I have.

Tomorrow, I start over. I start with women who write not in an axis with men, nor within the structure of men (including the church). I start with Simone Weil. Then, I will read across the waters into other continents.

November 8, 2025

enlightenment, musings, philosophy, stoic, stoicism
Why must beauty be pain?

Why do so many beauty practices, especially for women, necessitate pain?

From teeth sharpening of the mbenjele, to feet binding in imperial China, to injections and fillers in today’s world.

Some practices can be explained (although, to me, not justified). Such as squeezing oneself into corsets to achieve an ideal waist-to-hip ratio, since evolution perceives a WHR suggesting high reproductive health to be attractive.

Others are arbitrary standards of beauty that pass with time. The suffering and permanent damage far surpass the constructed ‘attractiveness’ it promises.

Many of these painful practices, I have concluded, are a way to signal exclusivity, commitment, wealth, and thus social status. I.e. only when you have the money to survive do you have excess left to spend on fillers. Only the privileged in imperial China bound their feet, for they have access to medical services that ensure their survival after, and servants to carry out the multitude care it requires.

Even the teeth sharpening of mbenjele, I believe, is a sign that one is ‘committed’ to this arbitrary, but community-defined standard of beauty. The pain is an offering and sacrifice to show one’s extreme devotion to societal standards.

And it made me think of allll the things we are insidiously influenced – or even pressured – to do to our bodies. I look in horror at pillow faces of who were the most beautiful celebrities. Fillers moving about in faces. Starting skincare or facial augmentative therapies that are the norm these days, but finding oneself unable to just stop going for them any longer.

Anyway, I have made myself a vow. That I will not cave to needing to maintain my appearance or youth.

Firstly, I have never been known for being attractive anyway, so why is it of such importance? I’m no celebrity or influencer. As long as I’m keeping my base level of hygiene and am put together, all other preservations or augmentations are unnecessary.

Secondly, and something I’m very grateful for, is that my husband makes me feel undoubtedly attractive – to him! Which i think all husbands should do. As long as those who love me, and are worth my consideration, are content with my appearance, why should anything else matter?

Thirdly, I want to start practicing the mindset that it is okay to age, to not look ‘as good as I did before’. To be alright with my face and body changing and not what I used to deem ideal. Undo the ingrained anxiety of ‘not looking good’ by digging deeper and asking ‘so what?’

I want to be a happy old person, to embrace aging. Not someone inching with dread towards the inevitable of more wrinkles and white hair. Why, really, does it matter so much? If the people who love you still love you? Who are we really trying to impress, or keep up appearances for?

April 20, 2025
This reality

Sometimes I’m hit with a pang at how fundamentally fucked up beyond repair the world is.

It’s bone-chilling that we live in an already dystopic world and have been for centuries. In which our basic survival and needs are shackled to a man-made construct: money. More entrenched than ever, and as a result with power more dangerously consolidated than ever.

Is it not completely illogical and horrifying that work that brings the most, and most direct, value to our lives, such as shit shovelling and trash collection, for health, hygiene, standard of living, are paid the least?

And the most useless – or most times malignant – work are most highly compensated? For instance any work that makes people spend more, manufacture more, without any positive impact to our well-being, health, survival, or propagation. Beyond a few seconds of dopamine boost. Not only is it a harm to humankind but also the soil we are rooted to. The earth that gave us life.

Is it not depressing that 99% of us work tirelessly for ONLY, and I stand by this ONLY, the benefit and luxury of the undeserving 1%? I say undeserving because all deserves basic necessities, but NO one person deserves a $2 million piece of accessory, especially at the expense of many, many other’s suffering, but they do.

I strongly believe no one person should be a billionaire. Or a multi-millionaure. There should be a universal cap on one’s personal wealth, for what one person could need or use so much? Just a tiny fraction of their assets brings about a larger than proportional benefit to individuals, and then a ripple effect to the rest of society.

When I’m feeling shallow and unthinking, I tell myself I ‘love money’, it’s fine, what’s the point of fighting a system I can never change, why not just work within in and make the best of a futile situation.

Other days I’m in shock that we let humanity spiral to this state. When such a mood strikes and come face to face with the bleak reality, I question where most of my efforts are expended.

In my ideal world there is no consumerism. We live to live: eat what we need, socialize, reproduce, have a community, simple entertainment through art and music.

Currency is but trade of skills. A baker’s loaf for a weaver’s basket. The way it was before the first shekels changed hands.

It is also in a bout of these musings that I rethink my ‘love’ for money, struck by the irony that I chase after the one thing that oppresses us all, and start thinking about what I can do that doesn’t perpetuate this rot, but rages back at the machine, even a little. Throwing starfish back into the sea kinda thing.

Ultimately, I’ve not been brave enough to begin on the harder path that aligns with my inner belief. Yet.

April 16, 2025

capitalism, consumerism, dystopia, social critique, social hierarchy
The end will be slow

What they don’t tell you about the beginning of the end is this:

It looks nothing like you would imagine.

The world rumbles on as it did before. Memes are made and sent, a new TikTok user shoots to fame. Thinking about which bars to visit this weekend, making a mental note to get brussel sprouts from the grocer’s this afternoon. YouTube-ing “How to skateboard”.

In some parts of the world, a teen plays with their cellphone – a model two years outdated – not knowing he will step on an explosive by the end the day.

Somewhere else, a family delights as their child squeals at her first rain.

Not a single nuclear detonation; not the wide sweep of a biological virus – nor a technological one. Just the slow, steady turn of the everyday, until one day you find it inches off orbit.

A dispersion beyond land and borders: many into space, plenty into bits of packaged information. Yet others packed clumsily into earth as the ones before them.

Where will you be?

August 28, 2021
be good

Be kind. Be slow to anger. Precede judgement with understanding. Don’t second guess your instinct to help.

Be generous. Share all the good that comes your way, even with acquaintances, even with strangers. Be genuine. Listen not to reply but to empathize. Connect with new people.

Be open! To all things new and challenging. Accept failure and chase after it. Embrace the difficult bits of life. Enjoy the mundane and seek meaning in the grind.

And let go of fear: fear of reaching out, fear of speaking up. Forget about how others see you – do what is right by yourself.

Live your best life!

#reminderstoself

#Qing2019andbeyond

November 21, 2018
words from the future

My somewhat (very) superstitious mind likes to believe that the poetry I’ve written over the years are prophetic. A vignette of a future yet to come. To be more academically accurate: my subconscious realization of what might inevitably happen manifests itself in written word.

I wrote this with him in mind. It would be more than a year before we ended.

We remember each other in fragments.

Years later the 4 by 6 glossy you’ve kept is nothing. She is looking at a separate you and has a smile you don’t recognize. You scratch guilt thoughtlessly along the edge where a date (of what?) was scribbled. Her blue-black ink, immutable from time and travel, doesn’t smear.

Instead it comes back to you in the most heedless moments: autumn in the subway, your own face flickering back at you like a broken picture-film. There in a panic is her: above, the clink of gold against teeth; a slide of citrus sealing in feinted sleep, your own laughter filtered in a cloud of hair without subtitles.

You let it rumble through you – freight train of years past – and surfacing, find yourself the same person as before.

•••

I have not written, properly written, for a long time. If I were to put a date to it, since I’ve met HS. The syrup of love is sweet and heavy, it cloys the literary of my brain into lethargy.

There is no want, no tension between our wants. There is no spiralling into insanity (anymore). There is, by extension, no juice to fuel my poems. For they are always truthful, always an extrapolation of what I see feel think or touch.

What can I write about that isn’t trite? The way holding your hand relaxes every atom of my being? Or how we laugh at the same beat of a joke and there is nothing I cannot say to you?

In our relationship, I’m the one with all the words.

I tell you, in the minutiae, why I like you, what I like about you, how I would feel without you, what life was before, with, after you.

Your words, though they are much, are not for feelings. You show in actions how you feel. But you let me and my myriad of words do what they want to. I’m not sure if they do anything for you, but you listen patiently and carefully anyway.

•••

I wonder when I’ll next write. Why do I only ever get inspired by loss, death, or insanity? Sometimes a combination of all three.

July 12, 2018
Content / Muse

Some art is borne only out of asceticism. The self creates when in want and deprived. Hunger can be inspiration; is the sole route to inspiration. Then to be fatted with content is to be fettered – satisfaction the gleaming oil surface of a lake slowly losing its life beneath.

To make an artist you don’t offer them a paintbrush or a chisel. You take away something essential. The married man writes no love poem until his beloved succumbs to illness; 3 weeks in an empty room and a crazed man would chip out masterpieces with his thumbnail on blank walls.

Art is starvation, desperate strokes making sense of loss, it is there when there is desire for more. Excess is to want art, not create art.

June 2, 2016
On the neural bases of altruism

Just did my reading on ‘The Neural Bases of Altruistic Punishment’. I’ve always suspected this, but now I’m pretty convinced that in a psychological sense, there is no true altruism as we define it.

By (almost) all definitions, humans are absolutely capable of altruism – that is, acting in ways that benefit others even at the expense of incurring costs to self. This is how we conceive of altruism socially, biologically, legally.

But neuroscience has shown us that when we get to the deep of it, altruism is a goal-directed behavior to achieve expected satisfaction. It is analogous to a a person having that chocolate bar because it releases endorphins in their brain.

Personally, this doesn’t makes altruism any less beautiful. Maybe some find reducing a selfless act to activation in our dorsal striatum rather unromantic, but i for one find it fascinating; that over millennia, human interaction has shaped within our brains mechanisms that encourage the survival of other human beings – related or not.

Altruism is borne of something greater than itself: the desire for humankind as a whole to survive. An overarching desire that binds us all as a species, producing a tendency within us that binds us together too. It’s just… amazing.

February 11, 2016
So many things
This semester has been nothing short of eventful.

For once since awhile, I feel not just content with the present and nostalgic for the past – but hopeful (and kinda excited tbh) about the future.

Things of significance from the past four months:
1. I now have clearer idea of what I want to do when I graduate, even if it’s nowhere near fixed. And most of all, I’m doing things towards this direction.
2. I want to create, perform, make art. This semester, for some reason (or maybe I subconsciously pursued it), so much of what I used to love doing came by as opportunities. (Ok these next time then say). While dozing off one day I had a vivid half-lucid dream (partly thanks to Spotify’s amazing ambiance playlist). In this half-dream was a dance sequence in which I had the most striking revelation that what I really want in my life right now is to find the self I want to know, and that to do that I need to create because that’s when I can most wholly express myself.
3. That… I may have misunderstood change. For so long I’ve struggled with keeping up with the me that has been since uni started. I catch myself being more thoughtful, quiet, even shy. (Friends may stop laughing at this point, tqvm.) There are aspects of this me I like – someone who is able to pause and control and reflect. But the side that was uninhibited and kinda weird and mostly insane, that was a me I missed and thought I’d lost. These days I find myself laughing a little more freely, not caring so much about what others think, and generally just losing my volume control. It makes me wonder if I’d gone quieter because of maturity, weariness, or because it was what I’ve been implicitly told to do by others. Because I don’t feel weary; and I’m slowly realizing that the new me does not need to replace the old one – they can co-exist perfectly well. Maybe I just need the right audience.
4. It amazes me that at the age of 22, best friends can still be found and made.
5. Between being a complete masochist and a hedonist, I’m learning to be less self-punishing, especially when it comes to academics. It occurred to me how narrow and pointless a path it is to have my grades take even one of the central stages in my life. There are things in life I want more than that. Empty roads just for me at 3am. Meiji milk at the top of the playground. Spending the whole morning in bed with my uke.
I said I wanna find myself again, and it’s actually working.
December 8, 2015
Too Many Things

December 5, 2015