I finished reading Susan Orlean’s memoir Joyride this week. The book was a breeze to get through (evidently because of Orlean’s engrossing prose and stories), but I kept finding myself taking long pauses to soak in all the insights she dispensed through her stories, like freebies at an amusement park. I have a tendency to…
I live in Canada. More specifically, I live in Quebec, which officially only recognizes French as their language, while the rest of the country counts both French and English as the official tongues. Quebec is perhaps the province that singlehandedly keeps French alive in the whole of Canada, and kudos to them for that. I…
One of my eternal ‘wants’ in life is to one day have my own library at home – wall-to-wall bookshelves filled with books, curated through a lifetime of reading. To me, “making it in life” comes partially in the form of having discretionary money to spend on one’s genuine hobbies, which in my case concern…
Not long ago I was wondering how much of the Internet is now taken over by AI. Apparently people now use LLM chat bots in place of search engines; we’ve come a long way from non-sensical word like “googling” entering the mainstream vocab to, oh I don’t know, having “gpt” as a verb soon, perhaps.…
Wouldn’t it be nice if there existed a tight-knit community of idealists, where idealism weren’t shut down immediately for a lack of pragmatism, and where people with a shared vision could actually pool their minds together to forge concrete paths towards it? Wouldn’t it be nice if these idealists, instead of being told their utopian…
During the month of December, I traveled around with just one small backpack and one handbag. This brush with minimalism left me with some thoughts and reflections. When I was an adolescent, I had a phase where I would idolize the minimalist lifestyle to the point of committing to a black-and-white “personal uniform” just to…
As the year closes and people are (once again) awaiting that blank slate to (re)start many of their personal aspirations, I just wanted to quickly share a tool I have been using for the past 2-3 years to track my own progress across various projects And despite the world moving through a myriad of new,…
I once read a piece of advice about writing the same way one talks. Essentially, the simplicity of spoken language not only feels more natural and genuine, but also appears to be more effective in reaching a broad audience. I understand the appeal of this advice, because I occasionally can only tolerate simple writing that…
I have taken some time off from being active online and engaging in digital correspondence with friends for a few weeks now. Somehow, it has felt both like a condensation and an expansion of time. During this period, I have stopped some activities I used to spend much more time doing (reading books, writing this…
I was a teenager who would eat up all the contents about minimalism and decluttering. Over ten years ago, when I was barely out of middle school, I made it a point to only possess a certain number of items, to eliminate the “inessentials” from my life, and to not buy things I didn’t need…
The age of social media seems to birth and nurture a phenomenon of constant social comparison. Measuring oneself against an external yardstick has never not been a staple of society. We, just like previous generations, are held hostage by an unbendable urge to live up to certain standards and earn validation from others. Unfortunately, with…
I recently read the Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath and her private reflections sparked some thoughts about the writing process. I’ve always sort of known that talented and established writers still “struggle” with the craft of writing. It’s an eternal challenge to feel fully immersed in and/or capable at whichever profession you are in, no…
Have you ever thought about how much time and energy humans exerted on the act of pretending? Perhaps if we seriously ask and study this question, we may arrive at a shocking answer that discreetly turns our existence into that of miserable fraudsters rather than decent, gratified human beings. My estimate is that most of…
The first time I listened to the song Don’t Let the Good Life Pass You By by Cass Elliot (Mama Cass!), I audibly cheered to the lyrics. This feel-good folksy tune sends a remarkably simple message: life can be wonderful and we shall cherish the little pleasures of it while we can. It sounds cheesy…