eat me henger

when adulthood comes along, our worth starts to get measured monetarily. we seem to have an innate desire to measure ourselves. it starts out with grades, but as soon as you get a job you're measured by income. it's a good proxy metric for our value. with good grades, it makes it easier for employers to filter job applicants. with good salary, it makes it easier for us to live comfortably, it's numbers. it's practical. it's economics. and if anything, i'm a man of economics. unfortunately, i don't find the allure of such value appraisal framework. i've had enough money to know that there's more to life than material wealth. there is no significant difference between my life when i was barely scraping by and now that i live in abundance. i just have fancier things and plentiful meals. and since i have more of them, i've taken them for granted. i still have the same 24 hours a day, and with more money, the only difference is the variety of options....

modern life is so rich that what i can do in an hour today would've taken me half a day to do back then. i've gotten used to the convenience of most things being a click or tap away, that i've taken for granted their accessibility. i'm quite forgetful and the deluge of content has only highlighted my limitation to keep information. i must've forgotten more than i've seen or heard through my many screens. and it's been mostly like that, even before we're forced to be locked in our homes. majority of what has happened in my life has been virtual. and thanks to technology, we are given the opportunity to immortalize real moments by uploading them somewhere over the cloud. but that just adds to the activities we'll do virtually. the abundance granted to us by technology diminished the significance of each memory. our desire for more and more have lessened the impact of individual moments. in as much as we want to consider every single thing important, we...

i haven't got my soul recently. three whole months of no writing here. i was still writing though - for work, for school - in other places where my authenticity wasn't as valued as the approval of an authority. having responsibilities in the real world means being fake for the sake of a paycheck. and really, what does a paycheck get us? shiny new things, filling food, fun pastimes. life revolves around the next unnecessary purchase or upcoming leisurely activity. the things we spend money are just as artificial as effort required to earn money. the human soul will search for meaning. no matter how superficial or profound, purpose is our destination and fulfillment is our fuel. as idealized as we'd like to think of the story of our life is, we're just as imperfect. sometimes we're running full speed ahead, sometimes we're simply cruising along on an empty tank with the momentum we've built up. whatever happens, life always moves forward. but every now and the...