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The Gift of Consciousness.

A really fun idea struck me this morning: consciousness is really valuable – pretty much everything we buy in the world is the result of another person’s intelligent consciousness taking form and shape as something we are willing to exchange the efforts of our conscious labor for, and even that is a small subset of what we have received from the intelligent thoughts, planning, and actions of others.

This might seem like a strange thing to be reflecting on in the aftermath of an incredible birthday celebration for which I am eternally grateful, on how people who came into my life in ways that I did not deserve chose to enrich my existence and who I am in ways that I never could have on my own – and it makes me reflect and remember that that part of my happiness exists because someone else and many others chose to give, and I am part of a cycle of receiving that bounty, whether it may be small or big.

Life is part of a balance of sociality – a topic I began reflecting upon when I read James Chai’s Substack post on How to decide who to pay for a meal – and I suppose there’s some nature of calculations that a person could do in order to try to pay things back, the simulation of which ultimately might be harder to attain than the solution to Navier-Stokes; people may choose to give in excess of what you deserve, you may reciprocate, it may not be enough, or you may not reciprocate either for reasons in your conscious control or not in your conscious control.

Correspondingly, it is also possible that you may give, and others may not reciprocate. Sure, it can feel bad when that doesn’t happen, but I suppose a possible way to change the situation so it feels like the entire world itself is a gift unto you whatever its actual nature.

Is it gaslighting? Perhaps it can be – but it is a nice precursor for another thing – to see that whatever life’s fortunes or misfortunes or how the world may treat us, it only takes a single instance of receiving what we do not deserve to find ourselves in a sense of loss that we cannot repay.

Pardon the philosopher in me for a moment, but I see that this is a condition that thinkers around the world have interpreted variously from the kaleidoscopically arranged aspects of secularity, moralism, and divine grace – and thus to recognize from these things and a world both personally and impersonally given, that we should choose if we can to be givers, hoping that the universe may enable us to give in all ways unto its betterment by the means that we determine and, if it were as the Platonists believed (even if the Platonists cannot be proven or disproven), there is an external ultimate nature of goodness towards which it may or must arc in fulfillment of final purpose and that as created beings we may be rewarded to the degree that we align, that we may thus in fullness align towards that arc.

If there is something I gained from this birthday and from the years and months that preceded it, I guess it’s a sense of finally, and strangely enough, being human. I truly feel like I belong somehow in a society where I may not have known all the ropes, but where I truly exist and where life is no longer what I used to think it was: a stuff of illusions, images, and things that were not real. No, the harder interpretation is more true than whatever I conjured up before.

If anything, what happened there just reminded me more than before that life is about the process of leveling up and becoming that much better each day as someone who engages with the world and brings an entire existence and presence to bear upon the universe, that I may better give unto the world around me that which I am, viewing all that I receive as an act of grace I do not deserve, and that I shall freely repay in the best way that I can; in all this, I may never fully know whom may benefit, in what way, why, or whether it was either enough or too much, or whether I am truly even one who may be regarded as one of the noblesse that I may feel a sense of oblige – but what is more important is that continued effort, towards which I will continue to strive.

The Perfect Sequence

An idea I have flirted with time and time again is the concept of the perfect sequence. It is the idea that, relative to a person’s life, there could be a perfect, predetermined set of actions they could take in the correct order (whatever that may be) to achieve the very best possible outcomes for that person.

In a way, I think that is Platonic (not as in friend zone – the philosopher!), but in another way, I also think it is delusional. There is, after all, only one life. What good is there in thinking about the ideal state of things when one could just go ahead and do them well? That’s actually why I’m thinking about this at the moment.

Yesterday, I posted a video pretty late at night after practicing a DJ set.

Now that I think about it, it would have probably been better if I had posted the video first, before practicing the DJ set.

Both were things I interpret internally as work, and in a way, both have possible payoffs.

The practice session paid off in extra skills, while the video paid off in views and people knowing a little bit of my thinking.

Had I done the video earlier, though, it would have dropped at a time when people were actually awake, and perhaps the algorithm would have picked it up.

That doesn’t seem to be the case because I dropped it quite late at night.

Either way, it is about the Fly FM AI DJ recruitment drive, which in turn was the fruit of my little expose of their fake live stream just the other day, which also became the top post on r/Malaysia for a while.

Time to flex!

That post in viewership terms reached almost 1% of the Malaysian population, if we assume that the entire viewership is either Malaysian x Malaysian diaspora rather than the possibly more interesting interpretation (that we could back with some data), that we have some Malaysians, mostly bots, disgruntled Singaporeans, kiasu parents who treat me as Malaysians may treat their durian, people who either love me or hate me or are indifferent but arrived by accident, and Americans and Chinese who may or may not be parts of secret agencies.

Anyway, back to earth – my failed video is what it is (or is it?), and there’s no use crying over spilled milk, though you may cry that Fly FM could have even thought that whatever they think they’re doing is a good idea.

This idea of a perfect sequence is still an appealing one, though, and it’s something I do think about time and time again.

Maybe that’s just proof that, as a person, I’m still somebody who can continue to get better and does continue to get better even if in some (many) ways I still suck.

That is a reassuring thought in this close of 2026, and as we open the doorway to the days and years ahead 😀

The Things We Do Not Do

One of the things I reflected about this morning was a little less about the things that we do, but rather the things that we don’t do.

Why? I guess cause in thinking about life, I’ve come to realize that tradeoffs are inevitable.

I guess it was true from the very beginning of my life, but I just wasn’t really thinking about that in a deep way.

Perhaps that was my own fault – no, it almost certainly was my own fault for being distracted by things and shiny objects and the temptation of “just one more” throughout my entire life – but I suppose the world is replete with temptations that pull a person if they suffer the woe of not having any structure.

The things we do are one thing – discipline is a hard thing to master, and an even harder thing to integrate into a person’s personality – but what we consciously choose to exclude is something I think we should think a lot more about.

That chapter of manhwa that you just read, the next one that you also read, the new series that you browsed and looked at after that – if we took these away from your life and substituted them with something else, what would happen? What would you gain, if not over a single day or perhaps a week, then over months into the years?

What would happen if you got rid of that doomscroll, the video watch, the planting down of your butt on a chair just to stare at a screen?

What would happen if you could consciously eliminate the things in your life that do not contribute – the things that ultimately only serve as dead space or dross on your conscious experience?

I think I am still learning about that in some ways.

There are, after all, times when I find myself overly emotional about things that people have said or not said – unhappy about things that are happening in my living environment and in the places that I call home; some of the ways in which I cope are not always the most productive ways of doing so, whether across short-term or longer-term time horizons, if there is one thing I have become much more sure of in recent days, it is that I have the capacity to improve, and that the limiting factor is not effort, but the ability to see.

To be able to cut off what does not matter, to strengthen what does, and to move forward without the limitations of a cluttered mind:

That is the fruit of knowing what we will not do, and I look forward to harvesting it.