Seeking Validation

Nearly everything we do on a daily basis is to seek the validation of others because there is a deeply rooted human need for love and acceptance.  Where this can become an issue is when we’re so insecure that seeking that validation comes in the form of purchasing things beyond our means to assert status and sacrificing our well being for acceptance.  If you think even about the little nuances of everything we do on a daily basis, this is true.  For example, take the person who diets on a regular basis but is afraid of the backlash they’ll receive in a social situation when they decline a drink or sugary birthday cake.  Out of a fear of social rejection, they self-loathingly imbibe to deal with a sense of dread the next morning or later that night in solitude.  They're torn with numerous puppet strings of insecurity now because they want to lose weight to look better in public but they don't want to feel ostracized by not eating because they want to project a complacent attitude that they eat what they want. 

At the end of the day, most people really don’t care what you eat, what you wear or how you act, so long as you're not personally harming them. (Read John Stuart Mills On Liberty) These people may come up as a topic of discussion or gossip amongst friends when said person is not present, but how that impacts our day to day well being is essentially moot, again so long as you’re not breaking serious social taboo and injuring the physical or emotional well being of others.  Most of us feel that a huge magnifying glass is aimed over our heads where people are analyzing and criticizing us, when in fact most people don’t care and are simply focused on their own insecurities and how they’re perceived by others.   

This has led to our culture of narcissism where we hope everything we post on social media is liked by others and enhances our perception. We’ve become addicted to little dopamine rushes of attention by text messages, pokes, likes, tweets that our brains have become wired differently where being alone scares us.  When you pull up to a red light these days, people simply can’t resist the temptation to check their phones for a new dopamine rush.  We all secretly admire that person who doesn’t seem to care what other people think, because we realize how liberating that must be when so much of our daily behavior is geared at crafting a particular image to be accepted by others.   

I’m not sure where this is leading other than my realization that doing things in solitude is cathartic (and necessary).  Although we have human needs for socializing due to our highly evolved social brains, there’s a sense of liberating euphoria during times of extreme solitude because there’s no judgment upon us.  My roadtrip last year made me realize a lot of this since I had to rely solely on myself and my decisions and my main worries were getting a flat tire, having enough water packed and what to do in case of an emergency, not whether people would notice I had a spaghetti stain on my collar from lunch and draw a conclusion that I was a sloppy eater. 

Booze and dependency

For the next 3 months I'm giving up booze completely because I hate the dependency I have on it.  Family is 100% supportive.  Friends I'm sure will range from supportive to scoffing, but this is purely to see whether my willpower can overcome my dependency on alcohol as a social and mental lubricant.  Over the last few years it's been very rare for me to take a night off from drinking, which is pathetic.  

Cheers to a dry quarter.

Hello 2014 (don't expect much)

For the sake of a New Year, here’s a post.

Since my last post I’ve landed back in Houston with no desire to travel.  Just like my previous exploits, I binged on travel enough to where I got sick of it and looked for the next outlet.  As the time passed idly, I still made time for reading (not a hobby I ever see myself overdoing) and slowly started searching for work. 

After a few months of tepid interviews and reading numerous postings about ‘seeking driven individuals with strong commercial acumen,’ I reached a neutral zone where I was in limbo with regards to working again and having all of this downtime.  Don’t get me wrong, the downtime is great.  I’m fitter, healthier and guilt-free regarding the amount of time I spend with my family and dog now.   That said, I’ve realized being away from something for an extended amount of time leads to romanticizing what you’ve experienced in the past. 

Even though I still have enough money to last me a few years, I began to romanticize work, a steady paycheck and business class flights.  I keenly forgot the mundaneness of meetings, small talk and office banter which led me to always disassociate work from personal life.   Now I’m taking the luxury of downing a few beers at 2 pm on a Wednesday (hello tipsy blogging) for granted and finding myself completely motivated to subject myself to routine and work for a paycheck and security. 

As job offers loom, I can’t help but self-reflect that once working again I’ll miss these idle times that come so few and far between, namely when you’re young and waste your youth.  At 32, with as much downtime as I have, however, it’s led me to a few conclusions about the decision I made last year, but I wouldn’t take it with a grain of salt because I can change my mind pretty quickly according to circumstances and boredom. 

Anyways, I digress.  This post was brought to you by cabin fever, alcohol and some mental stimulation after seeing my last post was over 5 months ago.  See you again later this year, when I’ve once again become a routine oriented capitalistic cog. 

The travel bug is asleep

After nearly 3 weeks backpacking again through Europe, I can say the travel bug is fast asleep.  Travel is becoming a listless series of tasks as I move from city to city, sitting on trains and making 24 hour friends.   It isn't just the travel but living away from home for the past 2.5 years that's worn the edges down a bit.  Some people can do it long term but right now I need to feel a bit grounded again and Houston is the most logical place for me to be close to everything that's important to me.  So I'm cancelling my Trans Siberian ticket and heading home in the next week or two.

The wanderlust I'm sure will peek it's head out again in the future, but for now all I want is some routine and a place to come home to.  Travel definitely teaches you skills and knowledge you wouldn't have the interest in acquiring from home necessarily, but the curiosity of reading will incite my desires to see a place again later.

America the Beautiful

On top of Half Dome in Yosemite

Nearly 6 weeks and 7,000 miles of driving on the roads of the American west, I’m grateful to have made it back in one piece with only small hiccups to deal with.  The west was absorbing enough that it was difficult to make any conscious time to blog or write anything down.  I was lukewarm to even write this post, but I should put some things to the screen because travel proved again that biases, even against your own country, can be crushed just by putting yourself out there. 

Apart from travelling from Santa Fe to the Grand Canyon with some backpackers and having a friend in LA join me for the drive up the coast to San Francisco, the trip was done on my own with a lot of time to myself, which I still prefer for the flexibility and opportunity for meeting new strangers. The solitude at times got to me, but they were also the most memorable.  

What struck me most aside from the great scenery of the west were the people I came across.  In Salt Lake City I shared a meal with Shawn, a 40 year old man who spilled his guts about his rocky relationship with his son and ex-wives, his numerous arrests for drug use and his experiences as a homeless man in Utah after hitting rock bottom.  For a short moment, we celebrated the fact that he scored an apartment in SLC and was crawling his way back to what was a normal life.  He was hopeful, but I sensed hesitation on his part that he would make another preventable mistake and alienate more people from  his life. The people of America may be some of the most interesting in the world, for the range of opportunity, diversity and consequently, experiences people have.   Living abroad the past few years I created so many biases against Americans as small minded, religious people who refused to travel and consumed to find false security.  Some of this holds water, but I realized that was unfair and ignorant of me to come to such a conclusion.  America has more to see than a lifetime could contain, so I understand why people don’t have passports.

It dawned on me that the reason I traveled so much whilst living in Australia was to escape my life there.  I had a job I enjoyed paying me a 150k salary, beaches nearby, exotic vacations and everything on paper that seemed right, but I was missing my family and those friends I would be willing to stand in front of a train for.   

So here I am in Houston hours before my next flight to Holland to start another journey across the world to traverse 10 countries over the next few months, but the level of excitement is low because I don’t feel the need to escape my life here anymore.   My relationship with my family is solid and the handful of friends I love are here or very close by.   If anything, I have a sense of guilt that I’m leaving selfishly while my sister is on the last leg of recovering from cancer and my dad is in a hospital for his advanced Parkinson’s.  

Dare I say the travel bug is fast asleep inside of me now?  I’ll see when I land in Europe tomorrow. 

Food, Shelter, iPhone

We’ve become too accustomed to having our smart phones with us every minute of the day that the necessities these days appear to be food, shelter and an iPhone, iPad or other smart device.  It’s the generation of the me and I, fed by products which encourage self-portraits and other narcissistic pursuits which inflate our sense of self importance. We can’t disconnect and make real quality time for people or immovable objects like natural scenery.  Once we get an interruption, it disrupts our day to day interactions with human beings.  We’ve lost the ability to read maps or practice our penmanship by relying on Google maps and typing everything into a digital device rather than writing things down.  Kids these days who have known Facebook and iProducts since puberty are becoming socially retarded. What the fuck is happening to us all?! 

America the Hedonist

The past 3 weeks have passed idly in Houston, the first week being an odd adjustment with regards to jet lag and re-acclimatizing to the culture I was raised in.  Big cars, big meals, strip malls, meager public transport were all tell-tale signs I was back in America (specifically Texas).  It was a reverse culture shock of sorts after being abroad for 15 months where things seem to be done more efficiently.  Americans overdo things and are highly inefficient, while being very impatient, a terrible combination bolstering a NOW culture of instant gratification.  We can’t seem to cope with slow internet, normal calorie sized meals, traffic or queues at the DPS, but we tolerate huge portions, driving solo in V8 trucks and a lifestyle of buying unnecessary things.  A product which was revered just a few years ago as an innovation in communication (iPhone 3 for example) is now scorned by those same people as an inferior product which leads to inefficiency, time lags and a flaccid cool factor.  Get real people.     

America doesn’t foster an environment of learning and curiosity anymore, but rather buying, consuming and opposition to something (anything).  Our independence and our status as the most capitalistic, quasi democratic country make us feel entitled to complain about anything as long as its something.  We need to be satisfied in all facets of our lives and any source of disappointment should be spoken out against rather than simply rolling with the punches and realizing everything can’t be tailored to our specific needs.   We’re a country of 312 million people who are all in a hurry looking for our niche comfort zone and products.   Someone inept is to blame for anything that slows us down or fails to satisfy us. 

What we praise as American culture these days is nothing worthy of boastfulness.  Overconsumption of food, drink, media, religion, sports, technology, celebrity gossip?  I've been smacked in the face by this upon returning and it doesn't appear to be letting up.  We no longer give merit to literary achievements, scientific breakthroughs, or humanitarian efforts. Diversification by way of immigration is a bane and something we should be afraid of lest we lose our jobs and become insolvent to pay off our multiple televisions and cars.  

We try to make up for these shortcomings of inefficiency by recycling or driving an efficient vehicle, for example, because we know how wasteful we are relative to the rest of the world, but who are we fooling?

But fuck it, who am I to speak?  I'll be driving 10,000+ miles over the next 2 months driving around the US indulging in my self made independence as well...  but it doesn't necessarily feel right.  Hedonism at its best. 

Burmese Days

George Orwell is one of my favorite writers so I was pleased to find out he spent 5 years posted in Burma in the 1920's serving for the British police before his writing career and used it as the premise of his very first novel, Burmese Days.  The novel paints a very grim picture of the landscape in Burma in addition to the racial tension present between the British with the locals.  Orwell was first posted in Maymo (now known as Pyin Oo Lwin), which I just arrived to a few hours ago by an overnight bus from Bagan and a 4 am train through the mountains from Mandalay.  After dealing with 110 degree heat for the past week, I intend to stay here for 3 days to cool off and look around the town Orwell was posted in.  Orwell's subsequent novels, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty Four have been likened to the recent status of turmoil in Myanmar under the government totalitarian regime and some people here call him "the prophet" for his ability to tell the future. 

From the week I've spent here, I feel like I've stepped into a time warp to observe men wearing traditional longyis / chewing betel nuts and women walking around smeared with thanaka, a golden tree root bark, all over their faces.  These practices have been ongoing for 2,000 years and Myanmar appears not to be affected by Westernized "fashion" trends due to its isolation from the outside world. 

Buddhism is still highly practiced (pagodas dot the landscape everywhere) and the interaction between men and women is still very conservative, where the simple act of shaking a woman's hand is off-putting.  The people are still dumbfounded in certain areas I've crossed to see foreigners like me and they've welcomed me with open arms and random Burmese children have asked to take photos with me.  They've a smiling and very spirited bunch of people. 

It's hard to believe the human rights record Burma is notorious for since its independence from Britain in 1948.  In 1962, a man named Ne Win overtook the country by a coup d'etat and the country has since been under totalitarian, military rule since.  He nationalized private industries and turned Burma into one of the most impoverished Asian countries. The military government has been known to stifle the Burmese, mainly minority groups, by hoarding resources such as rice, and inducing fear by spying on them, making them perform forced labour and imprisoning outspoken critics of those who speak out for democracy.  Aung San Suu Kyi, for example, was placed under house arrest for 15 years after becoming an icon for democracy during the 1988 uprising, and was finally released in 2011.  Since the infamous day of August 8, 1988, when students protested against the government and thousands of children / monks / students were slaughtered, the military government has effectively tried to re-write history and went so far as renaming the country to Myanmar, renaming the capital, re-locating the capital, renaming other cities and changing the flag.  The education system is poor, with only 4% of the GDP allocated to education while over 50% goes to funding the military, which has no known enemies other than its own political dissidents.  This has effectively implanted a fear in the Burmese to think for themselves and landed in a place of learned helplessness where they've accepted their fate and are helpless. 

What I don't observe here, however, is a strong nationalism amongst the people in favor of the military government like typical brain-washed countries where totalitarianism thrives (North Korea), which will be the downfall of the current regime.  The people seem to know they're in dire straights and quietly revere Aung San Suu Kyi as a symbol of hope in democracy, which is imminent by the way things have turned around the past 2 years.  Since the Burmese are unable to speak out without consequences such as imprisonment, the only real aid can come from foreign government intervention, which luckily has been successful and is highly warranted in Burma's case.  This is one of the exceptions where I think foreign intervention is necessary in favor of democracy to depose totalitarian rule.

Myanmar is unlike most of its counterparts in Southeast Asia.  They're resource rich (precious stones, oil, gas, fertile soil) and border India, Bangladesh, Thailand, Laos and China with a large sea coast, providing a perfect opportunity to be a key Asian hub.  Before World War II, Burma had the infrastructure and was earmarked to become one of the most prosperous Asian economies, but the infrastructure was destroyed by the British for fear of the Japanese utilizing it to their advantage and the country hasn't had the opportunity to recover and rebuild since.  As a result, they're one of the poorest countries in Asia with wages lower than Cambodia, which has nothing in comparison to resources.

It's easy as a tourist to come here for the exotic appeal factor and tread along the safe route and take away memories of smiling people, pagodas and deeply rooted traditions.  The government has their finger in everything, however.  The hotels I've stayed in which are clearly government owned have required all of my details and I've received numerous questions about my intentions in Myanmar, why I'm visiting, what my job is and what my address / email address are. 

The people here have blown me away by their friendliness, trust and forthcoming hospitality to welcome tourists like me.  They appear to have a genuine interest in what life is like abroad, but on the same token are content with what they have because they've suffered so much and have stopped having expectations. They adore Korea and what the country stands for - progress for an Asian country. I wish the best for the Burmese people so long as its not another episode of British rule.  My hunch is the country with make a positive turnaround over the next 20 years with the aid of countries like Australia, America, South Korea etc..

Understanding Vietnam

Visitors to Vietnam have given me mixed reviews of their experiences from pure hatred by famous travel bloggers such as Matt Kepnes to adoration.  (I lean towards the latter).  Despite all personal experiences, the generalization of North and South being very different holds some water from the short time I've spent here.  My thoughts are the ones who hate Vietnam do so because of their Westernized expectations from the locals.  They feel that by paying money to visit as a tourist, they are entitled to fair treatment by not getting ripped off and being treated nicely.  They compare Vietnam to Thailand, for example.

This is unfair.  Vietnam, firstly, is communist, albeit a conservative communism.  The people have also experienced a lot by way of domination by the Chinese, French and the United States. Visitors also have to remember Vietnam is predominantly Buddhist and believe in karma.  To be fair, the USA pillaged, raped and bombed the country for 10 years without very clear objectives other than victory as the Presidency shifted to LBJ and Nixon.  This may have led the Vietnamese to feel they have no obligation to cater to tourists due to previous unfair treatment.  Additionally, the communist mindset doesn't necessarily provide them with the perspective of a capitalism where tourism is an industry to be fed.  Rather, it is an opportunistic way to supplement their simple lifestyles.

Hanoi is lined with areas dedicated by zones to appliances, art, books, tires and the like,  For a niche product, it seems you have to go to a very specific area and choose among numerous shops selling the same products at the same price, going against the capitalistic mindset of fierce competition.  Rather, it leans towards socialism.  The Vietnamese seem quite content to set prices and leave everyone to benefit equally.  The nationalism is obvious, so foreigners are a means to gain a personal advantage, and frankly we should be okay with that given their roots in communism.  Accepting that has allow my experience in Vietnam to be much more bearable than if I had come here with a democratic hat, expecting equal treatment as the locals.

By misunderstanding this, a Westerner's experience can be a horrid one.  The US in the war failed to prevail despite having superior weaponry, money and military support because the Vietnamese were so strongly nationalistic and united to defy our understanding while we were protesting and forgetting why we even entered the war.

Communism by repression, oppression, aggression and censorship limits freedom and usually fails to remain sustainable (i.e. the Khmer Rogue in Cambodia, former Soviet Union, East Germany), although North Korea still stands.  This extremism isn't obvious here.  Communism is usually written off too quickly by the West because we think of the oppressive examples, but Vietnam appears to have achieved a healthy balance.

Sex Industry in Vietnam

The backpacker district of Pham Ngo Lao in Saigon is filled with women trying to coax men into their massage parlors, not dissimilar to Thailand.  My experience in Thailand, however, was that the women were still well-trained in massages and if the topic of sexual favors in exchange for money was never brought up, you walked out with some knots rolled out at a bargain price.

Seeing the obvious sex tourism here in Pham Ngo Lao, I asked a local to take me away from the backpacker district for a proper "no sexy"massage.  Walking in, I paid $15 (higher than Thailand), and naively proceeded upstairs.  The masseuse proceeded to lightly massage me when she grabbed my attention and demanded money to massage "my baby." I said no, to which she began to become anxious and upset that she wouldn't have a short session with a cash bonus to walk away from.  After expressing my disappointment and refusal to tip for a service I was declining, she began to beg and say she was hungry and received no salary from the parlor.  Whether the latter fact is true is questionable, but if it is, it shows the obvious demand for sex the tourism industry brings here.

The women have transactions which earns them $10-$20 quickly without a demand for a salary because stepping in is the entrance fee paid by a patron, so the parlor is satisfied.  This way she can get high turnover.  Unfortunately, I made her work for it and it was obvious how untrained she was in giving any semblance of a real massage.

My hubris led me again to a different massage parlor where I explicitly stated I wanted a foot massage.  Same story.  Only after turning her down did she actually try to give a real massage, although she tried numerous times to coax me again.

Can sex have economics?  Clearly so.  There must be a study out there that analyzes this stuff, but it's obvious how many tourists come here to have a meal, drink some cheap beer and get jerked off.

We're all being used

The minute I quit my job in Australia, I am deemed to be here illegally as an alien, and the government has every right to kick me out. The only reason I’m here legally is that the government deems the benefit they gain from my contribution to capitalistic ventures and tax dollars outweigh any utility cost they sacrifice by having me here. An avenue to stay here legally in spite of my employment status is to gain entitlement with time. If I’ve done enough and proved my willingness to submit to the system and provide a benefit to the country for long enough, they’re convinced I can be a sheep for life and therefore pose no threat to stay indefinitely. By maintaining the status quo for another few years, I would gain permanent residency and eventually citizenship, but until then, I’m in a holding period.


This logic filters through to media and companies – if you’re not providing them a beneficial use or ratings, you’re useless and expendable to them. If they perceive the benefit you provide them by way of $$ as favourable to them (not you), they will milk you and use you. Despite what you want to believe, there is very little by way of trust – which is why you sign contracts and any breach of a provision will lead to a merciless battle to preserve their sanctity, not yours. In that light, we’re all being used because we can be discarded if circumstances change whereby the benefit you provide is no longer worth the utility cost. By committing ourselves to too much to work, we delude ourselves into believing we’re doing something beneficial to the world, the company and anyone else who benefits down the pecking order. Stop measuring your self-worth by how capitalistic ‘success’ has been defined – how much you earn, what you drive, where you live, what you’ve created, how many ‘likes’ you get. In the end, we're all cogs being used and spit out by the system, sweetie.

On Creation and Idleness

Humans, by nature, are driven to create things. From the moment we’re cognizant and enthralled enough to realize our poop is self-created, we take pride in the things we make. Success is measured in our ability to create such things as art, books, money, buildings, video game scores, food, powerpoint presentations etc..  The product can be something shitty, but you made it and that's fulfilling.  This is why DIY home-made projects are more rewarding than paying someone else to do it – you can admire your own creation and take pride in it, regardless of whether or not it took you twice the time and effort. 


The glory of boasting about our creations and being praised for them lies at the heart of privileged societies, which are entitled with this luxury as we have numerous tools at our disposal to create at will, barring innate skill, money and fear as constraints. This is why the religious type are inclined to argue that no such diversity and complexity of life could evolve over billions of years and must be attributed to a higher being, but I digress.

The fact of the matter is through our propensity to create more for self-satisfaction, we end up consuming more, hoarding more and feeding our narcissism. We don’t feel ‘happy’ or fulfilled unless we’re actively pursuing capitalistic tendencies to beat the competition or come up with something new and innovatively creative. Subsequently,  some thinking people step back and wonder why we’re still not ‘happy’ and fulfilled because after all, that’s the one Holy Grail we’re all universally chasing after. Living an idle life is frowned upon and deemed a failure if we are physically and mentally able to do something the majority feels you are capable of doing. .

This is a huge reason why I advocate travel and to an extent idleness, where we’re not constantly compelled to create something – it allows us to see the discrepancy of our so-called privileged lives of endless choices contrasted with a life of, for example, a subsistence farmer whose only aim is to feed his family, limited in choice and leaving his or her vices to the weather. A life of routine prevents us from getting a full flavour of what our choices of work are doing with regards to resources and on others as far as income disparity. There is no free lunch. Everything we create or do, despite convincing ourselves it will inspire others or improve their lives, comes at the expense of others indirectly. That’s the capitalistic, self-fulfilling way. Look after yourself at the expense of someone else you can’t see. 

In the end, capitalism will always triumph and by getting ourselves stuck in its wheel, you either pay to play in order to maintain status and pride or risk falling out. In order to gain an understanding of why our productive lives, intended to be full of happiness, are not in fact as grand as we imagine, we need to understand that the mechanical acts of endless creation can be futile.

Take the time to be lazy, idle and to travel.

An Inspirational Vagabond

Yesterday on my way back from Kuala Lumpur to Perth Fortuna spun its wheel in my direction and I was lucky to meet a 27 year old Swiss girl name Virginie. Shy and unassming, yet bold. We made small talk and slowly she divulged to me that she had been travelling for the past 14 months around Australia and SE Asia on her own. For the next 4 hours of her flight, she knew her plans, but after picking up her bags, she had no idea where she was sleeping that night or how she’d get there.

Virginie had very little money so she confessed she had hitchhiked around Australia for 6 months and planned to do so again, camping along the way in a cheap tent without the luxury of being waterproof. She had camped in Thailand and Malaysia the past 4 months, without a cooking stove, subsisting on dry food and trusting in the charity of others. There was a bit of a language barrier, but I couldn’t help myself from asking her a barrage of questions on loneliness, fear, safety and what brought her to embark on this adventure. She had no cell phone, no laptop, no Facebook, no means of direct communication with her parents and very little by ways of possessions. In short, she is a modern day Christopher McCandless (although she wasn’t full of hubris like he seemed to be).

I commended her on her bravery and provided her a place to crash for the night, gave her a solid knife, some rope, a map of Australia and some other things to help her on her way. She defied the typical person we commend today, full of narcissism and a desire to prove themselves through accomplishments, unable to remove themselves from their phone and modern day comforts. Rather, she was keen on exploring the world on her own accord, establishing her independence and realizing her ability for self-sustenance after depending on someone through a 9 year relationship prior to her travels.  She had nothing to prove to others other than herself and it showed.  Virginie wasn't concerned about vanity and mundane worries, but about the basics (transport, food, shelter) to allow her to travel and explore more.  She was astounded by having a simple meat, potatoes and brocolli dish for dinner with us while we tend to worry about cooking temperature and seasoning.

We spent the night talking with my 2 roommates over dinner at home, sharing stories and opinions. She is, by far, one of the most interesting and brave people I’ve ever met. She encouraged me in my plans next year to drop everything and explore the world more, flap free style.

Bahh Bahh

Whether we like to admit it or not, we’re all sheep, bleating and following behind the next woolly ass in order to avoid judgement and risk being cast out amongst peers. We constantly seek approval. Socrates was an anomaly. He was an outspoken, unhygienic and allegedly ugly man who would walk the streets of ancient Greece barefooted asking people in the marketplace very profound questions. While he may have failed to conform to our notions of physical attractiveness and hygiene, his questions cut people like a razor. For this, some came to adore him for forcing them to think, others despised him for his unconformity and fear-inducing logic.


Imagine you’re shopping at a local Saturday morning market, latte in-hand, the other feeling for a perfectly ripe avocado to make guacamole you hope your friends will praise you for. (Enter approval seeking). Suddenly a decrepit, unshaven man walks up to you and asks you (very eloquently) to give your perceptions on the origins of morality. Chances are you’ll scoff and tell him to fuck off and find some shoes. Socrates stated that as sheep, we rarely step back to think about where we’re headed and challenged us to question our assumptions and eliminate those things that rationally made no sense (The Socratic Method) until we arrived at some truth. By insisting we know enough, rather than admitting our incapacity to understand everything, we already limit ourselves.

His student Plato carried his philosophy further by saying most of us live without an understanding the depth of our condition, content to take everything at face value, which is why ordinary citizens would shun the shoeless Socrates rather than answering his questions, because they had never considered them to begin with. By taking things at face value, these men advocated we are bathed in shadows, interpreting these as reality rather than the source of the object. To make a long story short, Socrates rubbed so many people the wrong way until those in power had enough and sentenced him to death, forcing him to drink poison. Luckily, 2,500 years later, his legacy and those of his pupils, Plato and Aristotle, remain strong, but our behaviour generally remains the same.

The thing is, as humans, we’re born into a conundrum. Of all animals, we have one tool at our disposal other animals don’t – REASON. It’s a tool all of us use, but not to its full extent, because beyond a certain point it doesn’t serve to improve our individual survival, which is ultimately what we care about. We like to eat, have sex and drown ourselves in the flavour of the week. This comfort inducing cycle creates such complacency that some of the most developed countries are depressed and have no idea why. Having money, a job, a house, good food, kids and the like is supposed to equate to happiness, right?

I’m not advocating that we need to come out of every comfort zone and think philosophically about every topic because this could even lead us to realize the human condition can be an ugly spectacle. However, the lack of self-reflection and elimination of nonsensical thinking as Socrates fought so hard for could be a genuine reason we’re in such predicaments we have no idea how we’ve gotten ourselves into.

The Brothers Karamazov

I read this book without much research other than hearing the premise of the novel and continuing my binge on Russian literature.  The only fact I knew was that it involved 3 brothers, each different in their own rights, contemplating religious faith.  The philosophy of religious faith as contemplated from multiple perspectives was enough for me to read it; however, I must admit I thought the author would allow atheism to triumph as Ivan is painted as the character of philosophical insight.

The book was completely opposite to what I expected since religious faith was deemed the champion to shaping ones’ character, happiness, reputation and fate.   While Doestovsky was too idyllic in painting pictures of faith triumphing as skeptics saw their demise through death or suicide, I could heed a bit of what he was saying: That humanity needs to believe in the unbelievable and faith is not merit-based. Faith allows the means for people to live happily and peacefully without having to find answers to every gaping hole.    

Coupled with a lot of reading of Christopher Hitchens, the most outspoken person against faith, I feel a bit disheveled after letting The Brothers Karamazov digest.  The person I most identified with in the novel was Ivan, who goes insane after discovering a serious flaw in his philosophy that he is in fact partially responsible for his father’s murder.  His demeanor is one of detachment from humans, attempting to keep humanity at a distance due to his skepticism, which I also identify with at times. 

While Doestovsky’s novel spoke volumes to me and reminded me certain people of faith are some of the best people I know (similar to Alyosha), I can’t help but let my thinking fall into the fate of well, my own thinking.  Novels like these, while insightful, do little to sway me from my endeavor to discover what’s true.  If it leads to my personal insanity like Ivan, so be it.   If it puts me back on a track of faith due to the ignorant happiness it can bring despite defying logic, so be it.  

Brain Food

What we learn, study and mentally absorb is not unlike the food we eat. As adults, we generally know its limitations and that certain knowledge and foods are useless (i.e. birthday cake and celebrity gossip) and some are good and nourishing. We can consciously choose the food we eat as adults, but not necessarily as infants and children, which is dictated by our parents and school lunch menus. In the current food era of industrialized food, this has led to a prevalence of childhood obesity with the finger pointed at parents’ lack of responsibility in promoting healthy diets and exercise. By this stage, children could be so classically conditioned to consume highly satiable foods that obesity continues through adulthood and never reverses itself unless extreme measures are taken to defy what they’ve learned tastes good and satisfies hunger. The same applies for a dogmatic approach to education, which I believe is much more controllable than one’s diet, but rather than chastising the narrow minded path to religious education, we laud it as if it goes in hand with teaching morality and alleviating suffering, when in fact it is the culprit of ongoing bigotry and violent crime.

Regarding the necessity of food, what we ideally strive for is optimal health and weight. The vices of satiety and indulgence coupled with the abundant availability of food in developed nations leads to overconsumption and diseases we’ve only had to deal with in the past few hundred years, however. Regarding education, what we strive for is truth through evidence, reason and rationality, but the vice of ignorance amidst the abundance of knowledge and opinions usually leads us toward the path of settling with the information that’s popular, biased and readily available. That’s why nationalism is so strong and religion (and cuisine for that matter) is geographically isolated to particular countries. Humans are very adaptable creatures so you have to acknowledge the fact that what teachings you were born into and inherited over thousands of years may not be correct.

The issue with this mode of learning is it ingrains a very rigid form of dogmatic teaching that an ultimate authority who we dub as God is watching over you like Big Brother, watching your moves and preventing full reign of your thoughts, such as lust, which is worthy of thought-crime. (i.e. you can’t think freely without consequences) Some never step back out of this conundrum to see the sources of the dogmatic teachings. Where did religion originate, why is God revered as Yahweh in the Old Testament when polytheism dominated, how many people were killed to spread God’s word, why was religion created in countries 2,000 years ago when civilizations were suffering through famine and disease for 98,000 years? Why did God wait to intervene with Jesus after watching humans suffer for 98,000 years?

Holding onto such thoughts with a vice grip causes some of the greatest tools at our disposal, reason and free thought, to gelatinize as we follow creeds blindly like lost sheep. This is provides an unfair advantage to children, when their curiosities are in full swing, by implanting the idea to fear death early on and that the world is merely 2,000 years old. Whilst science is constantly unveiling new, sustainable evidence for evolution, a wall is erected, preventing young people from weighing scientific evidence against dogmatic religion and drawing their own conclusions.

We’re constantly mired in uncertainty and knowledge because we can’t foresee the future and know everything, which is ultimately the challenge of existence: selectively learning what we value and making informed choices for our survival, knowing we are all mortal and susceptible to death. What religion does is stifle the beauty of uncertainty by telling us the future is full of happiness and praise after death as consolation for having to blindly praise a God. Frankly, that sounds like a fairy tale to me. The wealth of emotions and uncertainty we experience is what makes our lives interesting and produces texts / art /movies which rock our core but just like that, upon death, God promises a split in emotions as if parting the Red Sea where followers are forever inhumanely jubilant like an artificial environment while others gnash teeth and suffer. The idea of absolute certainty for the everlasting future is not something that sounds appealing as it goes against everything we value. It goes against the principle of reason, rationality and searching for truth by telling us to believe something without a prerequisite of thinking.

Fear List

All of us have deep-seated fears, some of which we’re too much of a pansy to confront, others of which they will always linger after years of negatively reinforced blind observations & experiences. Fear was the culprit for my previous dark days of depression and I found it liberating to ask questions and face the tangible ones head-on. We can either hide behind our fears and surround ourselves in certainties and comforts or face them to make us more resilient and able to cope with practically anything that’s thrown at us.

That said, I’ve overcome a lot of fears, but still face a myriad of them and thinking about them is even scary. So admitting that I’m afraid of them and writing them out is a good step to more liberation. So onto my juicy fears:

1) Rejection. We’re all insecure to an extent so this will never temper away completely. Some deal with it by manipulating and using others with tools at their disposal to feel accepted. Beautiful women can get the attention of men. Or you take the safe route and follow fashion trends and earn a lot of money to show off possessions. The general public will accept you, praise your hard work and you’ll feel accepted and less of a reject. It’s the safe route to take toward overall acceptance. However, if you cast an eye and see the machine is fed by this fear mongering and have a semblance of intelligence, you’ll realize how you lie to yourself if you go down this path, gung-ho. I fear rejection by women, social groups, other races, communities etc.

2) Loneliness. I can no longer can tolerate nor settle for company for the sake of keeping me at ease like I did in previous toxic relationships. I feared solitude and facing my demons so much I had to dilute it with someone else's company. You end up dragging out relationships, creating more baggage and superficial friendships. That said, even though I can surround myself with family and friends, I fear long-term loneliness. As Chris Rock says, choose your poison, Married and bored, single and lonely!

3) Meeting the wrong person. A woman’s beauty and peoples’ uncanny abilities to deceive can reveal some nasty cards in the future. My hunch for people has improved, but it’s still a legitimate fear I have. A few bad apples I’ve met this past year have made it creep up.

4) The unconscious grip of power money has on me. My blog renounces the false security money brings, but I still feel the grip it has on me. It makes me greedy.

5) The subpar intelligence of the masses. The lack of self-reflection and uninformed choices people make leads us down the burrow of inevitably bad consequences. We’re fucking ourselves in the way of natural resources, health, finances... Says the guy who works for an oil company. But that’s beside the point. Human beings have lived and evolved for a tiny sliver of Earth’s existence and we’ll inevitably wipe out again with the next ice age or natural disaster... we’re just accelerating this outcome ourselves.

6) I fear smiling at someone and not having it reciprocated.

7) Superficiality and how much power it has to define “culture” and “arts”

8) My long term health.

9) Mind games with women. I’ve had my share of good and bad relationships over the past 15 years from a 4-year long-term relationship to 1 night stands to months of casual relationships where the obvious intent was to use one another to amazing people where the circumstances just didn’t allow it to materialize. At 30 now, I no longer crave sex and intimacy like I used to. A lot of men think with their dicks and will sacrifice their integrity to get a piece of ass and attention, crushing the woman’s self-esteem in the process by using her. (This goes both ways). The whole game of treading carefully to play a balancing act of not appearing too desperate while showing interest is deceptive bullshit. As the one being used, we give up our integrity by lavishing someone with what they want with minimal in return. It’s a game to satisfy our insecurities by playing with another’s emotions. Sure it keeps things exciting in the beginning because our primal instinct to chase things, but why can’t we just be honest and straight forward?

10) Ironically in conjunction with #2 above, long-term commitment.

11) Becoming cynical with age.

12) 2013. My intention to leave my job here next year and travel without health insurance and financial security. It’s all a bit daunting. Unless circumstances change to put me on a path of domestication, it’s still slotted as my top plan. It’ll help me shed fears further.

I No Longer Fear (as much):

1) Aging: I’ve already lost the bulk of my hair but have surpassed 30 in better shape than I was at 20. Shaving it off has been liberating and I give priority to my fitness. Sure some people of the opposite sex won’t give you the time of day because of baldness, your height, weight, race, moles and whatnot. Fuck them and move on because most people of value don’t give two shits. If you can make a girl laugh, you’re already halfway there. Whenever I see people spilling money toward ‘anti-aging’ products, it saddens me.

2) Judgement: Like they say, opinions are like assholes: everyone has one. If you let them shape your edicts without genuinely seeking out personal values yourself, you’re living someone else’s life. Nearly everything we do and say is done in some form to win others' approval..   when you can minimize approval seeking, it's liberating.

3) Idiots: There will be idiots everywhere who hold conventional wisdom, superstitions, pseudoscience, and conspiracies as dogma. Through their ignorance, they feel entitled to try making you feel small.  Unfortunately they are the majority, hold a lot of power and are making irreversibly bad decisions. That’s still scary.

4) Horror / spirits: This also used to petrify me. There’s some irony that some of the most religious people I know are most afraid of this category.

Do you have the balls to write down your fears and face them?

Dark Refuge

I've just realized how serious my blog is with hardly a morsel of humor inserted. On a normal basis I like talking about irony, farts, bad smells and general bullshit, but this blog has been a refuge for my dark thoughts. So a black welcome .. enjoy!

Nothing Left to Prove.

I just returned from a 15 day trip to Cambodia and Laos, which both surprised me in their own rights.
Cambodia’s dark history of genocide in the late 70’s shocked me, when approximately a quarter of their population was wiped out by the Khmer Rouge, driven by fear from Pol Pot’s regime. Any intellectual people such as doctors, teachers, and nurses were all uprooted from their families, tortured and killed, along with their kin. Up to 2 million people were wiped out this way from 1975 to 1979, when the Vietnamese invaded and Pol Pot’s regime fell over. There’s a generation gap clearly evident by the large amount of young people all over Cambodia.

Laos surprised me by its conservative Communist rule and its extreme poverty. Apparently it’s a crime for Lao women to mix with foreigners / Western men. Taking roads through the rural countryside, I felt naive to realize how poor of a country Laos is. I was robbed twice in the course of my travels through Laos, but in hindsight, it was my own lack of foresight that led to these incidents. It also made for a huge chunk of change to a local Laotian’s average salary of a few dollars a day (or less).

These two revelations struck me. While I myself was a tourist snapping pictures, falling into tourist traps and the like, I felt a bit of displacement looking at particular tourists. Those tourists with too much money who travel for the sake of getting another stamp in the passport, adding another to a growing laundry list of visited countries just to say they’ve been there. They scorn the locals, only mix with Westerners on their trip and make a mockery of the culture by poking fun at the language and getting shitfaced amongst luxury accommodations and pubs catered for them. What they fail to realize is how subservient and grateful locals are to tourists, who provide so much in the form of income, tips etc. They go out of their way to learn English and French, vastly different languages to Khmer and Lao, so why do we feel entitled to mock their poor English writing in menus and signposts? English speakers are notorious for knowing only their mother tongue. If we tried to pick up their language they’d have a field day of laughing at us. Anyways, I digress.

The reason for the post is there’s 2 certainties my brain has settled on. 1) We will all die 2) A huge part of the world population subsists on $1/day. Call me an idealist, but number 2 still scares me. The first certainty of death does only mildly now, but only from the perspective that time runs out far too quickly for us to rest on our laurels and make excuses to stay with the status quo and forego things we really want to pursue. My first goal when I started work 6 years ago was to attain a 6 figure salary before I reached 30. I’m 30 now and making a comfortable living, but it feels flat and empty, a means to an ever increasing goal for more money to supplement what kind of lifestyle? Pretention, stuff, material excess, mortgages, cars? No thanks. If that’s the holy grail of success, I have nothing left to prove, nor do I want to prove it anymore.

11 months are left on my contract. The freedom to explore what I want to do next is wide open. Whether I pursue development economics / policy / humanitarian aid is still something that has scratched my conscience for years. Regardless, I’m grateful to have saved a good chunk of change to buy this freedom to take time off next year. Travel, family / friend time, semi-retirement and exploring a new purpose are on the agenda for 2013. 11 months will fly here in Australia, but I can’t wait to take things in stride and off-the-cuff next year.

Tolstoy, Daniel Haddad and Christianity

Late in 2010 I wrote a post about my friend Daniel Haddad, who I befriended in college. We were both transfers into Rice, econ majors and had affinities for Volkswagens. After realizing those similarities, the rest was history. He was one of those guys so smart, he challenged you to be his equivalent and attempt to keep up with him. After we graduated, we lost a bit of touch but remained in contact through informal means of communication.

I discovered he was diagnosed with a severe form of bone sarcoma cancer, which quickly progressed and took his life last April. Religiously following his blog (excuse the irony), I realized how firmly he stood by his faith in God and his religious convictions, never losing hope that all pain he suffered was in the hands of God. As much as I was supportive of him and his battle, I couldn’t sympathize with this side of his blog posts, however, due to my lack of belief in the Judeo-Christian God. That never took away from Daniel’s integrity and character and if anything, it strengthened it.

After having just finished Anna Karenina, a book I consider one of the best I’ve ever read, I couldn’t help but think of Daniel. Tolstoy touches on the topic of religion frequently. He mocks religion as a refuge for characters such as Anna’s husband, betrayed by infidelity, to find comfort in God through his suffering and devise excuses to go back on his word after moments of magnanimity. This theme is tossed around through the meat of the book as Levin, apparently Tolstoy’s alter-ego, expresses his fervent atheism and impious insecurities prior to marrying Kitty, a woman of faith.

The theme of religion was like a hacky sack Tolstoy plays with throughout the book, not giving the reader a real indication of his feelings on religion and bringing it up time to time as an accessory. That is until the very end when Levin goes on his philosophical rants regarding his stance on God, religion and his fit into the cosmos. Levin is one of the only characters in the book I actually liked. The novel really is about learning from the character deficiencies. After reading numerous philosophical texts and unable to come to a conclusion, Levin contemplates suicide as a solution of release from a meagre existence. Levin then realizes that to avoid thinking and living simply with good ideals while satisfying one’s own desires is what makes for happy living. This conviction doesn’t last long, however. After a conversation with a peasant, Levin has an epiphany that living for oneself is futile and converts to Christianity, although he does not reveal his newfound faith to his wife. The book ends there. If his newfound faith is any indication of the other characters’ failures to find happiness through causes larger than themselves, Levin will ultimately not find happiness in his newfound faith and it may be the reason why he doesn’t share it with his wife. We’ll never know, however, but from all the wisdom Tolstoy imparts regarding human behaviour, this is the arena where he leaves us hanging. That’s what makes me appreciate the book even more. Tolstoy doesn’t provide any answers to those things he sees some value in but seems unsure of himself.

The reason it struck me so deeply is that while I, like the former Levin, am an unbeliever and in a phase of reading philosophical texts to understand the reasons for religiosity, I still see the good in religion and the purpose it gives people like Daniel.