Some years ago, I was talking to a girl.

Regular rizz activities, nothing too crazy.

While we were talking, the topic of freedom within relationships came up.

In response to something she said, on this point, I paraphrase-quoted bell hooks’ idea that, where true love is present, the need to dominate whithers away.

In response to this, she (half-playfully) mentioned that I had just passed another “misogyny test” by quoting hooks.

Apparently, she was keeping score, and I was doing well.

Now, this interaction happened long before the discourse on morality emerged in full force on TikTok and here on Substack— before we started explicitly exploring themes related to “goodness”, “performative goodness” and the strange, almost pathological desire for moral purity that sometimes comes up in these circles.

Studying moral philosophy is part of my job, so these issues are always on my mind, but lately I was thinking about this “misogyny test” conversation in light of this question of “performative goodness”, and I’d like to reflect for a little bit.

Our question here is,

What does it actually take to be a good person?

To begin, let’s talk about misogyny for a second.

I once watched a TikTok that said something along the lines of— where misogyny and men are concerned, the question is not if? But to what extent?

In other words, the question is not “if” your man— any man you know— manifests some elements of misogynist thinking, the question is “to what extent do they do so?”

This was an interesting thought.

Now, we could quibble about definitions here, regarding what is meant by misogyny, and that would be an interesting conversation for another day.

For our purposes here, let’s take this statement as true at face value.

If it is true, then we encounter an interesting and odd issue.

If all men are inextricably linked to misogyny, then what makes a man a good man?

A good man would simply have to be less misogynistic than the rest. To ask for a man free from misogyny would be impossible.

At least, this seems to be the conclusion to this train of thought.

Now, on some level, there is nothing controversial being said here.

If we were to swap out “misogyny” for “badness” and “men” for “all people”, then we’d get a pretty tame claim.

The idea here would then be that all people practice things that are not-very-good.

To be a human completely detached from badness would be impossible, so what we shoot for is to be humans who are, all things considered, less bad.

But, here we run into an issue— less bad than what? Or, to take our first example, less misogynistic than what?

If a person were to say, “yeah, I’m not perfect, but at least I’m not as bad as ** insert name of the most diabolical historical or contemporary figure you can think of right now here **, I think most of us would agree that the bar to cross should not simply be being better than the most diabolical person that comes to mind.

The fact that all humans have the capacity to do not-very-good things raises a question about where we might draw the line separating a “morally normal” person from a morally problematic one.

To make this point, imagine a person— let’s call him Kyle. Kyle occasionally falls short of being a good partner to his significant other.

Kyle occasionally forgets important things, but genuinely tries to make things better; things just fall through the cracks sometimes. Kyle makes mistakes, yes, and his mistakes hurt people sometimes, yes, but this really is just a case of a person who’s trying his best. Nothing pathological seems to be on the scene yet.

Now compare this person to another person— Jeff— who functions in exactly the same way, except for one thing— Jeff cheats on his partner once. Let’s call it a moment of weakness. He begs for forgiveness, explains what happened, and his partner, after some time, agrees to forgive.

Now, if TikTok is any indicator of the will of the masses on these issues, then it would seem as though this is the point where most people would officially turn on Jeff.

There is no redemption for cheating.

"A moment of weakness” does not fly in this case.

Once more, at least, if TikTok conversations on similar occurrences count for anything, then Jeff’s a bad person. End of story.

Yet, it gets more sus because we have to suppose one more case: the case of Geoff (Jeff’s evil twin).

See, Geoff is a serial cheater. He finds it enjoyable to get into relationships so he can cheat. Something about watching the tears in his partner’s eyes form if they find out just puts him over the moon.

Alright, so there’s clearly something wrong with Geoff here.

Might we even say he’s a bad person?

Perhaps, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves yet.

The issue here is, if we were to assume that Geoff is a “bad person”, then are we all absolved from the “bad person” label so long as we’re not like him?

If perfection is impossible, if there’s nothing higher than being like Kyle— being a person who’s just trying their best— then, so long as we’re not Geoff, we’re in the clear.

In reality, maybe most of us oscillate between Kyle and Jeff, and that’s really all we can hope for.

Perhaps this entire dialogue simply shows us what it might take to not be a bad person. Maybe that’s the easy part.

But what about goodness?

One interesting thing about goodness is that the aspect of “performative goodness” has made its way rather strongly into these internet conversations about morality.

A TikToker once said that she’d rather be played with by a good-for-nothing F-Boy than be played with by a “feminist leftist man”.

At least the F-Boy is simple in his evil, so the thought goes.

The leftist feminist man will sophistically gaslight and manipulate, and then, when it’s all over, suggest that in reality, you— the woman— were not healed enough from internalised misogyny to open yourself up to something real. Again, so the thought goes.

Now here we have another interesting issue, because we must then ask— what’s the difference between a performative good man and a good man?

We have a problem, of course, because we’re not sure that good men/people even exist.

So, that would mean that there are bad people, normal people and performative good people.

These three categories seem to be less controversial than “good people”.

So, does this mean we are cooked?

Well, yes, but not for any reasons related to this essay. We’re all cooked for many (many) other reasons.

Anyways, this, of course, all leads into the general conversations about performativeness that have been present in our discussions on this and other apps for a while now.

Without rehashing too many old debates on this topic, I’d like to introduce a consideration of authenticity into the mix.

So, here’s the thought—

A performative person is a person who does all the things a good person would do, but they do so for nefarious reasons. They weaponise goodness for their own ends.

So, if we were to find a person who does the exact same things as a performative good person, but they do so simply for the love of the things in themselves, would we have a case of a good (or, at least, a good-ish) person?

Perhaps a good person simply might be an authentic performative person.

Now, if you find it strange that we’d derive goodness from its perversion, and not the other way around, you’d be on to something.

In other words, if you’re wondering why we’d want to define goodness by looking at performativeness, you’d be asking the right questions.

I won’t answer this question here, though, it’d derail us too much. But it is an interesting question for another time.

For now, we’re concerned with something else— is this an accurate description of goodness?

Is a good person simply an authentic performative person?

This is a question I will leave for the comment section.

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I want to close with a recapitulation of the story I began with.

The first question we’re concerned with is: Is there any way to quote bell hooks without falling headfirst into the performative allegations?

This is an interesting thing for me, because I fear I have a habit of quoting things when I speak.

Partly for dramatic effect, but also just because I like to play around with ideas, and verbally quoting things is usually a good way to do that.

Plus, I enjoy sharing things I find interesting with peeople, if they are willing to listen.

On at least one occasion, though, this practice has been interpreted unfavourably.

A friend asked me for my opinion on something, and I began my response by saying, “Well, I think Kant would say…”

And she stopped me mid-sentence and said that she wasn’t asking what Kant would say, she wanted to know what I would say.

Now, this confused me for a second because, in my mind, I was about to tell her what I thought; I just wanted to show my work and build up to it.

I think, funny enough, this has consistently been labelled as one of my least-liked quirks, at least from some people.

Over the years, I’ve learned to tone it down when necessary, but, in my mind, my thought process remains the same—

As the Scriptures say, nothing is new under the sun.

I don’t think I’ve come across a thought in the course of talking to anyone that I had not encountered in some version or another elsewhere. Discovering such connections really is one of the joys of talking to people, I’d say.

So, in my mind, before I mention my thought on a thing, I find it wonderful to first mention where else I’ve encountered it, or, if my thought on a question comes directly from someone else, I like to mention that.

So, in the moment where I quoted bell hooks in our opening story, I did so because the conversation floated to this question of freedom, and I personally find the idea that domination fades away where love is present to be a wonderful thought.

It’s an idea that’s stuck with me ever since I read it, and so, I thought it’d be a nice moment to share.

I wonder if I would’ve done anything different if I had known that there was a misogyny test going on.

But, perhaps the question you are wondering at this point is— do I think I’m a good person?

Sometimes, upon learning that I do moral philosophy, this is a question people tend to ask me.

Funnily enough, though, philosophers never ask me this question. Partly because, in moral philosophy circles, we don’t really speak much about “goodness”. It’s a bit of a spooky term, and we’re often concerned with other things. But this is also a conversation for another day.

So, am I a good person?

You’ll be pleased to know that I often answer this question by quoting something else.

I quote none other than the big JC Himself, the star of the Bible.

Here’s the full conversation, for dramatic effect.

As Jesus started on his way, a man ran up to him and fell on his knees before him. “Good teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

“Why do you call me good?” Jesus answered. “No one is good—except God alone.

— The Gospel of Mark, Chapter 10, verses 17—18.

Makes you think, doesn’t it?

vibes est vida.

The Philosopher Pilar Lopez-Cantero, who works on the philosophy of love, recently published a paper titled Left on Read: Ghosting on Dating Apps.

Now, this is the first time (I think) that I’m directly engaging with a published philosophy paper here on Substack.

It’s especially fun because engaging with such papers is pretty much my day job.

Usually, when I write on here, I try to make things less formal and more stream-of-consciousness-y.

Yet, there’s at least one super interesting claim in Lopez-Cantero’s paper that I want to talk about here.

I will not, however, write this essay in the style or with the meticulousness of an academic essay, because that’d require me to spend many (many) words carefully reconstructing her argument in the best way I can before we can get to the point.

And, although I do love wasting everyone’s time with my tangents here, I think I’ll skip that part and be a bit more casual.

But I do recommend reading Lopez-Cantero’s paper to see all the contours of her argument.

So, the question is this:

Is ghosting (on dating apps) immoral?

Before we turn to this, let’s consider a scenario.

Suppose for a moment that you’re in a romantic relationship with someone, and you like them very much.

Let’s say you two have been together for a year.

You two talk and text every day.

It’s a vibe. It’s wholesome.

One day, however, they do not respond to a message you send.

One day turns into two days, then three, then four.

After a week and a half of silence, they text you, simply saying:

“Sorry, but let’s break up”.

You respond with several questions, but, alas, you’re blocked.

Suppose, alongside this thought, another scenario:

In this other scenario, everything else plays out the same, with one key difference— it is not a romantic relationship. It’s a friendship.

Now, intuitively, I think most of us would agree that in both these scenarios, the ghoster has done something wrong.

Maybe even something clearly wrong.

Might we even say that the ghoster has done something immoral?

Potentially, but before we get to that, we must ask: what exactly did the ghoster do wrong?

And, actually, before we get even to that, we have to make an obvious observation first.

The keen observer will have noticed that our question here, supposedly, is—

“Is ghosting (on dating apps) immoral?”

Yet these two scenarios have nothing to do with dating apps.

In both these scenarios, there are commitments, responsibilities, and duties at work that don’t really apply to most dating-app conversations.

Even if they are not always clearly defined, there are certainly some commitments that exist within a friendship or romantic relationship that do not exist when texting a stranger on an app.

(also, as an aside, I’m vehemently opposed to the idea that ‘nobody owes anyone anything’.

this statement, in my opinion, is not true.

and, not to be dramatic, but, to channel Kant’s ghost within me, such a thought would, quite literally, be the very end of humanity.

this is a conversation for another day, though)

The point here is that, when you’re in a relationship (romantic or otherwise) with another person, certain duties arise as a result.

Ending a year-long relationship with one text and a block seems to violate something.

(of course, a person could have ghosted in this way for a dire reason— fearing for their safety in the relationship, for example.

we will put a pin in this thought.

for now, we’re supposing that there was no actual or perceived danger here. the ghoster just ghosted)

So, what principle exactly did the ghoster violate?

Was the ghoster wrong because we all have a duty to have a conversation with people we break up with?

Was it because we all have a duty to have that conversation in person?

Was it because we all have a duty to provide reasons for our actions in situations like these?

Maybe all this is true.

Lopez-Cantero’s paper is interesting to me because it suggests a different reason why ghosting in these instances is problematic.

It’s a reason I never quite considered:

The idea here is that we all have a sense of self.

This sense of self is (partly) made up of the stories we tell about ourselves. These stories involve our past, our present and where we’d like our future to go.

The issue is that sometimes, things happen in the present that throw the future into flux, and this damages our sense of self, albeit temporarily.

So, say, you suddenly lose your job, and some of the plans you had for your future, and the idea of who you thought you’d be tomorrow (a person with a job making x amount of money) becomes uncertain.

The thought here is that when you’re in a relationship, the relationship becomes a part of this sense of self. When you imagine your future, you imagine it being a part of you.

A breakup (romantic or otherwise) would trouble this sense of self.

And, being ghosted in particular imparts a sense of limbo that makes things extra troubling.

To not know what you are (the uncertainty of being ghosted) is a different beast compared to knowing that you’re something different from what you were yesterday (the certain turmoil of being clearly broken up with).

Ghosting in the context of a relationship, then, is wrong because it imparts this limbo upon a person.

Lopez-Cantero frames this around vulnerability.

(again, read her paper to engage with the more technical and interesting parts of her arguments.

I’m taking some liberties here in simplifying certain things)

Having another person wrapped up in your sense of who you are in this way is a particular type of vulnerability worth considering.

Now, with this on the mind, we can ask—

What about dating apps?

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It seems obvious that the kind of vulnerability we have just explored is relevant for established relationships and does not really apply to casual texting on an app.

Yet, the story seems to be more complicated than it appears at face value.

Lopez-Cantero makes an interesting distinction here, where dating app users are concerned.

On the one hand, we have low-stakes people. These are people who exist on these apps for the vibes. Perhaps they desire something casual or otherwise not particularly serious.

They hop on these apps when they remember to do so, send a few texts, then forget about it for the most part.

On the other hand, we have high-stakes people. These people exist on these apps because they might have no other avenue for finding a partner. Perhaps their schedule makes going out in person cumbersome. In either case, they’re on these apps truly to find something real.

Ghosting on these apps would affect this second group more strongly than the first.

Why?

Because for these people, their sense of self is strongly tied to what happens on these apps. Good and bad encounters deeply affect them. They are vulnerable.

Lopez-Cantero does not make this point, but I think it is relevant to note that, for this second group, if ghosting is a common act, then it would be the case that they do not simply get ghosted sometimes; they might get ghosted more or less every day.

In other words, a low-stakes ghoster might not think much of the fact that they chatted someone up for a day or two before vanishing, but, if the ghosted person was a high-stakes user, this might very well be the third time this week that this exact thing has happened to them.

For the high-stakes person, then, their sense of self becomes affected by this.

Now, you might say that this is silly and no one should have their sense of self wrapped up in dating apps in this way.

You might be right, yet this is a different question.

Should people have their sense of self deeply wrapped up in dating apps?

No, probably not.

Do many people have their sense of self deeply wrapped up in dating apps?

Yes, many do.

So we must address things as they are while keeping our thoughts geared towards how they ought to be.

So, what are we to do with this information?

I’m not sure. It gets tricky.

But here are some reflections.

First, let’s talk about these vulnerable high-stakes people on dating apps.

One might read all that has been said so far and think—

“Well, it’s weird that people on these apps have their sense of self wrapped up in them in this way. If they are genuinely on here to find love and are constantly getting ghosted, that’s kind of a them problem”.

You might also think—

“I mean, if they’re getting ghosted this many times, they might just not be cut out for these apps. It’s a numbers game, after all. They just might not be desirable, and there’s really nothing we can do about that”.

You might also, along these same lines, think—

“What if the kinds of people that fall into this category of high-stakes users are of the incel-type? If they’re claiming to be ‘hurt’ by what’s happening here, the rest of us can’t really be expected to help. It’s not (in the case of male incels) the job of women to fix/care about society’s men in this way”.

These are all, to my mind, relevant and fairly good points.

The reason why I find this entire conversation, particularly Lopez-Cantero’s discussion, so interesting is that it draws our attention towards the “vulnerable” among us.

As a general rule, I think that it is ethically good to focus on those among us who are in vulnerable positions.

This is a good guiding principle in the political realm.

In the domain of interpersonal morality, however, it’s a bit tricky.

It’s tricky because the question then becomes—

What (if anything) do the low-stakes people on dating apps owe to the high-stakes, vulnerable ones?

Perhaps the answer is nothing.

Dating apps exist in the periphery of the lives of the low-stakes folks, so asking them to care about the high-stakes individuals would be supererogatory.

Yet, the truth is that there are vulnerable people on these apps.

People get hurt on these apps for many reasons.

If we were to come up with an uncontroversial list of the most vulnerable people on these apps, it’d include (backed by some statistics)—

People of darker skin tones, people who don’t conform to gender binaries and women, across the board, broadly speaking.

Could we (should we) add the emotionally vulnerable to this list?

That is, should we add the people, across all demographics, whose sense of self is deeply wrapped up in their interactions on these apps?

Now, some might say that the “threat” to emotionally vulnerable people absolutely pales in comparison to the real danger (in apps and in the real world) faced by the other groups listed above.

This is true.

I might even go as far as saying that the hurt of emotionally vulnerable people on dating apps is objectively less of an issue than the problems faced by these other vulnerable groups.

Yet, the reason this becomes a moral question, for me, is—

While we fight (as we should) to remedy these real problems, what should we do with these lesser problems?

People are hurt by ghosting, and for that reason alone, I care about the issue and see it as worthy of our moral attention.

When I say, with Fannie Lou Hamer, that nobody’s free until everyone’s free, I mean even the least of these— even those with lesser problems.

But, you might say— Surely, anyone whose sense of self-worth is damaged by dating apps is hurt in a mostly self-inflicted way, no?

“What if the people who are unfree— in this case, the high-stakes people who have their sense of self wrapped up in dating apps— are caged in an optional prison of their own making?”, you might ask.

Should we still care about freeing them somehow?

Yes, even then, I think.

Perhaps, even, especially then.

How? I don’t know.

vibes est vida.

To those who aren’t familiar, here’s the tea:

K is a friend of mine, yet, like great friends often are, there’s a slight chance that K is imaginary— that he does not exist.

K might be a fake personality that I invented to tell my own personal stories. K might also be the combination of every story I’ve ever heard from my friends. K might be a mouthpiece for stories I have completely made up. K might legitimately be an individual I know. K might be a combination of all these things.

—From my essay the constant apocalypse of modern dating.

Now that we’re all acquainted with K,

A few years ago, I was by his side as he was going through a particularly strange experience.

He had met a girl who confused him endlessly.

She confused me, too.

Here’s what happened:

At first, they hit it off and seemed to enjoy each other’s company quite a bit.

But, after some time, she began to pull away, and K struggled to get a response to anything as he set out to plan future adventures for them.

Although she’d seem cold and uninterested at times, whenever she’d eventually pop back up, it seemed as though all was well.

K was more confused than he was unhappy, so I figured it wouldn’t make sense for me to tell him what was on my mind about the situation.

Yet, this pattern continued.

One day she’d be hot, and the next day— the next few weeks, actually— she’d be cold.

Eventually, K asked her about this, and a few interesting details emerged out of that conversation.

Here are the highlights—

1. She really liked him, but sometimes, the fact that she liked him, coupled with the thought that her liking him might lead to expectations, would make her really nervous, so she’d choose to close herself off.

2. She’s, in general, a bad texter and has been working on it. The anxiety that comes from feeling liked by someone also contributes to the inability to text back.

3. Deep down, what she’d actually like is to be more open and together with K. But, right above wherever deep down is, is the part of her which actually hopes she’ll frustrate K so much that he just stops reaching out. But, above that part of her is the part which really hates that this is how her brain works.

(I have taken some creative liberties in recounting this to you. Believe it or not, K, in addition to potentially not being real, is also an unreliable narrator)

So, upon hearing this recounting of the facts from K, I had a simple thought, which I shared with him.

“She just doesn’t like you”.

Now, I should say two things—

First, let’s keep in mind that this conversation happened a few years ago.

If I were to have this conversation with K today (especially in the aftermath of all the anxiously avoidant people I’ve now met), I might approach the situation differently.

The second thing is: I want to expand on my thought process in saying this to K, because, in some ways, it’ll form the main topic of this particular essay.

My thought process was thus—

I understand that life is hard.

Furthermore, I understand that some parts of life are harder for some people.

“Little things” come in different shapes and sizes based on the people who must deal with them, so it is not apt, generally speaking, to assume that we’re all bound by the same conventions in terms of how we ought to react to one another.

Despite all this, however,

I thought to myself,

“Sure, but, as the Scriptures say, love covers a multitude of sins.”

My thought here was simple— where there is love (or, at the very least, general fondness), surely it will make some of these difficulties easier.

I told K something along the lines of,

“I understand that there is much anxiety attached to responding to texts, but if she sees a text from you and the anxiety wins out over her fondness for you, then she really just doesn’t like you that much”.

Now, I really believed this at the time.

One of the reasons I believed this is that I did, and in many ways, still do, believe in people.

I tend to believe that people are, at any given moment, usually much more than we often think we are.

Because of this belief, alongside my notorious suspicion of “fixed identities”, I’m usually rather sceptical when someone tells me the story of their life and, in doing so, puts themself in a box.

Recall the old proverb— no situation is permanent.

I say all this because I simply did not want to believe that this girl’s story was permanent.

I wanted to believe that even if she’s currently overwhelmed by this situation, hopefully, some other situation will arise where there will be enough love to pull her out of it.

So I had two options before me when faced with K’s story—

Either this is simply how she is, and there’s nothing to be done. Or, this is how she is with K, and, if someone else arises, she will have the power to overcome her brain— power that her relationship with K did not provide.

I chose to believe in the second option because it meant that I chose hope.

K would eventually break things off with her.

But here, we depart from his story (although we will return with a surprise ending at the end of this essay).

Is there hope for avoidant attached people?

In the years since this adventure with K, I have crossed paths with several people who, almost word for word, echo the sentiments of the girl in our story.

Perhaps such peeople have always been around, and I just did not notice, or maybe, around a few years ago, the language of “attachment styles” became more widespread, so things were easier to categorise.

In either case, in meeting many such people over the years, I’ve noticed some trends that worry me.

My (genuine) worries are captured in the question above—

Is there hope?

The internal monologue I laid out earlier is one I have seen in friends, more-than-friends and strangers on the internet.

Everyone I know with a similar story says, without fail, that they’re working on it.

Yet, I have never met an individual who has shared with me that they once had such a monologue but have since worked past it and are in a lighter place in life as a result.

Likewise, there’s the occasional TikTok which blows up where a person recounts pretty much exactly the internal monologue I’ve laid out here, and far too many comments pose a simple question—

“Genuinely, how does one fix this?”

There seems to be no answer to this question.

The situation simply is what it is.

The internal monologue wins every time.

I think that this is why I remain suspicious regarding fixed identities.

The stories we tell to ourselves about ourselves matter.

One can declare that they are “anxiously attached” and that becomes part of their being.

This in itself is not an issue, but it easily can be.

It starts to become one, I think, when one adds “person who’s working on it” to their persona as well.

There is a difference, I argue, between working on something and being a “person who’s working on something”.

One of those is an active process, and the other is a stable personality.

This brings to mind that old joke where a person says they’d like to get a master’s degree, and they turn that into their whole being because the persona of “person planning on getting a master’s degree” has some utility in the world. It, for instance, gets people off your back when they ask what you’re doing after college.

Yet, when they actually start said degree, and the persona shifts, they realise that the persona of “person planning on getting a master’s degree” was much more desirable than “person actually working on a master’s degree”.

(I’m aware that I’m reading too much into a silly joke here, but there’s a reason this page is called long walks for short drinks of water)

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Anyway, I did not want to come to this realisation, but it became unavoidable after a series of strange encounters, including one with a close friend of mine.

I understood her general avoidant nature, even with friendships.

And, for the better part of a year, the thought was the same— she was working on things.

At some point, it seemed, to me at least, that the concept of “working on something” with no discernible change is a bit odd.

Now, I’m aware that this goes hand in hand with some conversations (and critiques) regarding therapy, what it does, what it’s for, and the extent to which the goal is to actually “cure” anyone of anything.

These are good theoretical questions, for some other day.

For our purposes, what we care about is that, theoretical concerns aside, our friendship became unsustainable.

At some point, it seemed like what was needed for the friendship to grow was impossible.

We remain friends, but it’s unlikely we can be as close as we once were or could have been.

Now, I should say, I was wrong in my initial advice to K.

It is not true that if she’s avoidant, it means she just doesn’t like you.

I did not understand the weight of one’s inner monologue on these issues.

There’s no doubt in my mind that my friend, whom I just talked about, really did try and really did value the friendship.

It just so happens that life’s a bit more complicated than that.

As the Scriptures say, in fact, as Christ Himself says, sometimes,

The Spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.

Epilogue: Let me wrap up K’s story real quick.

About a year after K parted ways with this girl, he learned, because they lightly kept in touch, that she was in the process of getting into a relationship with someone.

In her words, it was unexplainable, but it felt “easy” with this person.

Quite the tale.

Might even be a happy ending.

vibes est vida.

“Be realistic, demand the impossible!" -

Slogan from the 1968 Paris student and worker revolt.

There’s an old trope that people become more conservative as they age.

Something about entering the real world, paying taxes, and being in charge of one’s own finances makes a person shed whatever childlike dreams they once had of a perfect society.

At least, so the thought goes.

My life thus far has trended in the opposite direction.

I’ve been studying political philosophy since I was an undergrad, and during those years (when I was 16 until I was around 20), I was at my most pragmatic.

I cared very deeply about what was possible, what could work, what was realistic, what was, in some mysterious sense, “natural”.

As I’ve gotten older and continued on this path of caring deeply about moral and political philosophy, one clear truth has emerged—

Possibility be damned, nature be damned, “realistic things” be damned.

Do I no longer care about what is possible or impossible?

I do, it’s just that it’s not obvious at all, to me, what “impossible” even means to begin with.

Everything is impossible until it happens— until someone comes along and does it.

85 per cent (arbitrary number I just pulled out of thin air) of the world today and how it’s constituted is made up of things that our ancestors would’ve found incomprehensible.

Do you have a cousin in Australia? Would you like to speak to them in real time? Say less— pull out the supercomputer in your pocket and have at it.

In addition to your Australian cousin, do you also have a brother in Singapore and a sister in Angola? Irrelevant. You can speak to both at the same time, with no lag.

Would you like to read a book? Almost any book that’s ever been written? Not a problem at all.

Would you like to fly? For the price of a meal (unless you’re in the States— sorry Americans), you can fly accross a continent.

Do you see that little white circle up in the sky at night? That magical thing that moves the tides and mesmerised our ancestors? We— humans like us— went there. We showed up there and just walked around for a bit, mostly for the vibes.

The list goes on.

It is terribly unclear, at least to me, what it means to call anything “impossible”.

Benjamin Franklin famously quipped that the only certain things in life are death and taxes.

Let’s put a pin in taxes for now.

But we’re working on the death part. It’s not inconceivable to think that, at some point or another, future people will look back at the whole “dying” thing with tragic confusion.

Whether this is desirable or not is a different issue.

We are concerned here with the possibility.

I think that we see the boundaries between the possible and impossible at their weakest when we consider the fact that so many actions which historically have been placed solely in the hands of God or gods are now unambiguously in the hands of human beings.

Humans have dreamt of armageddon for many years now.

The idea was that, through some means or another, divine beings might destroy the world.

Fire and brimstone might rain down, giant monsters might battle and obliterate everything as we know it.

If there ever was a time in human history to abandon the thought of the impossible, it was, I would argue, during the race for nuclear weapons.

Reading accounts of scientists and military officials who tested nuclear warheads, one cannot help but notice the religious imagery they adopt in their reflections.

At the sight of a giant mushroom cloud of fire engulfing the sky, one can only remark that this is nothing short of the power of God.

Yet, this is not the work of God.

This is what humans have done.

We are a few button presses away from annihilation the likes of which the greatest sorcerers and emperors in eras past would not have even imagined.

We can destroy all life, as God did with a mighty flood.

And we can fundamentally curse the very land we strike with our power, as God did in the Garden of Eden.

What additional proof could we possibly need?

We can create hell on earth. We have come close to doing it multiple times.

Yet, heaven is out of reach?

A world without poverty is a fever dream?

A world where one’s livelihood is not tied to the work they do is unthinkable?

A world where all people are free is too mystical to comprehend?

I cannot accept this.

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What about nature?

Surely, the thought goes, some things are impossible not because humans are not resourceful, but because nature is a master that cannot be overcome.

Like “possibility”, it is not clear what “nature” means.

If by “nature” we mean: a set of immutable laws that bind all things and are set in stone which we as humans can know and understand, then I cannot accept this definition.

If nature is, instead, simply what a “thing” “does”, then I think we must conclude that human nature is as boundless as human resourcefulness.

The only limits to human nature are what humans can cook up and execute, and, as our previous discussion has shown, there are no impossibilities.

Everything we touch becomes our nature, because we have touched it.

Is it unnatural for humans to fly? Irrelevant.

Is it unnatural for us to breathe underwater? Irrelevant.

Is it unnatural for us to live past the age of 80? To survive smallpox? To move faster than the speed of sound? Irrelevant, irrelvant, irrelevant.

One of the most unintuitive things I’ve talked about with my students in the past is this question of nature.

I tell them to look at the room we’re in.

At the concrete, carpets, wooden tables and screens around us.

I then tell them to look outside our window, and gaze at the trees and the bright blue sky.

All of this, I tell them, is nature.

They often resist this thought.

But, the question then arises— Why is the building we are in not natural?

Humans built it, after all.

When a beaver wakes up one day and decides, for the vibes, to build a dam, we call that natural.

When a bird awakes one day, gathers some twigs, and builds herself a nest, we call that natural.

When a man wakes up one day and builds a rocket ship, why not call this natural, too?

There are some potential responses to these claims that hedge on the difference between enhancement and instinct, but I don’t find them particularly convincing.

The point stands: nature cannot— ought not— hold us back from dreaming.

“If a man does not work, he should not eat”, so the Scriptures say.

Some would argue that this is simply a law of nature.

I cannot accept this either.

Is there enough food in the world at the moment to feed all men, regardless of their desire to work?

Yes. End of story.

To be a utopian is to dare to dream.

To never settle for things as they are.

To understand that future people will constantly discover new ways to be free, and recognising that one’s role is not to end the story but to push us closer to the ideals we believe are worth fighting for.

But, one might ask, surely there are dark sides to being a utopian, no?

After all, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”.

Indeed, there dark thoughts to contend with on this issue.

I will not address them here.

What I want to stress is that utopia is not (just) a place but is a choice; a stance; a disposition.

Soon, we’ll all be gone.

Shortly thereafter, most of us will be forgotten.

In the time we have here, we have choices to make.

Do we choose to dream or choose to be awake within someone else’s dream?

Because this to me is where the stakes emerge.

To dream loudly is a privilege that seems to belong only to a select few.

Why should those who master the art of technology and reap the wealth that comes from this impose their dystopias on the rest of us?

Perhaps they can take our well-being and our standards of living, but they cannot— they must not— touch our ability to dream as loudly as we possibly can.

We need utopians now, more than ever.

vibes est vida.

…

I moved— again.

I’ve moved a bunch of times over the past few years.

I’ve had two large moves between countries and numerous little ones, either to different cities or different apartments, and through it all, I lament how much work it is to move one’s whole life so often.

But, for better or worse, this has been my life.

This most recent move, however, is different. It’s my third official big move across countries, and it had a lot of interesting sentimental elements to it.

I had to say goodbye to London— a truly special place to me.

The story of this move and the reasons behind it are conversations for another day, for today, I’d like to talk about a chat I had with my friend on my last full day in London.

He asked me, fairly simply, what I did during my last week in the city.

It’s a good question. It’s an interesting question.

One might think that, surely, being my last week, I filled it up with my favourite things, and maybe checked out all the things I had never gotten around to doing this whole time.

That would certainly make sense. But when, dear reader, have I ever made sense?

This question made me realise that I think that every day is my birthday.

Why? Well— behold. A tangent:

Many years ago, when I was a child, I remember getting super excited on the eve of one of my birthdays.

This one in particular was thrilling because my auntie said she would do something special for me, and I could hardly sleep because the anticipation was sparking many thoughts in my head.

The morning came, as it always does, and I was greeted with wonderful words from people around me.

I got some nice little surprises and felt extremely special that day.

[Although truth be told, I can’t quite remember what the surprise from my auntie was]

However, the day began to come to an end, as all days eventually do, and I found myself distraught.

This was my special day, and it was almost over. Tomorrow, everything would go back to normal, and I’d have to wait 365 (!) days for this feeling again. This seemed unacceptable.

In recent years, seemingly in an attempt to free myself from this feeling, I’ve developed a particular philosophy regarding my birthday.

To understand what this philosophy is, I should start by saying that each year, on my birthday, I try to carve out some time to walk in solitude and think about what life is and where it’s going, for me, and, to some extent, all sentient beings.

This is an incredibly important birthday ritual for me, but the thing is, it’s not unique to my birthday— I do this, more or less, every day.

My birthday philosophy involves treating every day as though it’s my birthday.

One element of this, importantly, is cake.

I’ve always loved cake.

“Cake is life”, I always say.

As a child, cake was, for the most part, a special-occasion-type experience.

Proximity to a full cake usually only meant that a birthday was imminent.

Yet, one day, in my London years, I stopped by a grocery store on the way home from work, and I beheld a decent-sized full red velvet cake.

I was celebrating nothing that day. Celebrating nothing that week. I can’t even recall what day of the week it was.

But I bought this little cake, went home, grabbed a fork, and fulfilled the greatest dream that child-me had.

This did, indeed, start a new practice.

Every so often, with no rhyme or reason attached to it, I’d occasionally buy cakes on my way home from work and experience what I could only describe as the levitating experience of eating a whole cake by yourself, for the plot.

To be fair, these were not large cakes, but, in spirit, the appeal was simply that it was a whole cake, just for me.

This, of course, added to all the other beautiful, sweet things (bubble tea, chocolate) that I like to surround myself with as often as I can reasonably manage.

The side effect of this, understandably, became that, whenever my birthday rolled around, getting a cake no longer felt special.

I, however, saw this as a good thing.

I wondered how far I could push this.

I wanted to imagine a world in which there would be no luxury tied to my birthday that I do not allow myself to enjoy on any other day.

One thing which I cannot account for, of course, is what others do on my birthday— no one sings to me or gets me presents on random days, so my birthday remains special in that way.

But, truth be told, in a different essay, I’d argue for giving friends random life-day gifts on random days and singing to them just for the heck of it. I don’t see why not.

But, for me,

The philosophy here involves demystifying my birthday so that when it comes around, it’s a nice day and it’s special. But so was the day before, and so will the next. All days become equally special.

But, is this strange? Why strip away the special sauce from one’s own birthday? What’s wrong with having a special day? Furthermore, you might think, it’s not like anyone out there is exactly denying themselves anything particularly special in order to exclusively do fun things on their birthday. So, what is the idea here?

Behold, more tangents.

“A thing isn’t beautiful because it lasts”— Vision, from Avengers: Age of Ultron.

[I don’t have any good answers to the questions above, by the way]

Anyways, so,

Back to my last week in London.

It was a very chill week. I simply did what I always do.

I went on my favourite walks, vibed around my favourite bookshops and got my bubble tea from my most trusted places— all things I would have done any other week.

It was a regular week for me, and I didn’t mind that being my last week, because it was a wonderful one.

There were a few new things I did, but as I look back at this last week, I only really remember the constant things. There’s no need to have a perfect last week, or last day, or birthday if every day is treated as equally special and sentimental.

To address the quote above from Vision, if it is true that a thing is not beautiful because it lasts, then, surely, you might think, the philosophy here should be about accepting the fleeting nature of beautiful days, not about avoiding it by trying to make every day special.

This is an interesting thought, and I will indirectly respond to it with a series of unrelated questions at the end of this essay (in other words, more tangents).

So, let’s talk about love for a moment.

If you were to ask Kierkegaard for some hot takes on love, he’d say that you ought to love everyone equally and unconditionally— this is the only true form of love.

You don’t need a reason to love someone.

Why would you want that? True love is loving someone even if (and especially when) they give you a million reasons not to.

So, if you love someone because you think they’re pretty, or they make you feel nice and warm inside, this is not true love. True love must be truly unconditional.

I don’t think it would go very well for anyone in a relationship if they told their partner that they have the exact same amount of love for them as they have for the random guy walking down the street. Yet, at least in some readings of Kierkegaard, this is what’s expected of us. This is true love.

Our question, then, becomes— if we love everyone, do we truly love anyone? More in line with our topic: if every day is your birthday, is any day special anymore? To paraphrase Syndrome from The Incredibles: if everyone is super, will anyone be?

These, to me, are deceptive questions.

Here’s a weird thought: I keep seeing notes here on Substack talking about how wonderful it is to build communities of people who just want to write cool things. This love for writing has made us all become “writers”.

Well, if we’re all writers, then are any of us writers?

Do we need “professional writers” to make sense of what it means to be an amateur one? Do we need special days to make sense of regular days? Do we need to love one person to understand why we don’t love others in the same way?

Strange, strange questions. But it doesn’t stop there.

Do we need bad days to make sense of good ones? Some might say that we need the bad to make sense of the good. But, I mean, do we?

Do I need to have my arm chainsawed off for me to appreciate the fact that my arm is intact at the moment? Surely the thought should be enough. Surely we would like to hope that we can feel and appreciate things without actually experiencing them. Empathy, maybe?

Well, let’s say you’ve had an awesome year.

For 364 days, nothing sucky happened. It was good thing after good thing after good thing. It was wonderful. In this case, do you owe yourself one bad day? Do you need to make day 365 a horrible one just to help you appreciate the year you’ve had?

Something seems wrong here.

So, if every day were your birthday, would it make your days less special?

Maybe, maybe not.

vibes est vida.

The interesting part is, I’m unsure what it was about turning 25 that made me think about death as strongly as I have over the past year.

Truth be told, thoughts about death— both as a concept in the abstract and as a state of non-being that I will one day (not) experience— have lurked in my mind pretty much all my life.

One of the interesting, perhaps unintended, consequences of growing up around religious imagery and topics is that one has to think about death a lot.

Usually, it’s framed as a positive thing.

Death is nothing to fear when you know where you’re going afterwards.

Perhaps the thought was that, if we phrase it this way enough times, we won’t notice that what we’re spending so much time thinking and talking about is the potential cessation of consciousness itself; the collapse into a nothingness so dark that darkness would illuminate it, should the two meet.

But these flowery thoughts aside, for some reason, these thoughts floated around my mind throughout my 25th birthday, almost a year ago now.

To be fair, I was listening to Mozart’s requiem, as I do every birthday, so that probably didn’t help. But still, the thoughts were striking.

It’s a little hard to describe exactly what the thoughts were actually about, though.

They weren’t quite centred around the fear of death.

No, I’m too delusional to properly fear death.

Or, perhaps I could say, I’m not brave enough to actually fear death.

Who knows.

But, these thoughts were more about the possibility of dying before I die. Of being alive but never really living. Of realising that my life was spent on things that never really mattered.

I had a running joke with my friends where I’d say something along the lines of “I’m turning 25, and what do I have to show for it?” And, in response, they tell me that, lowkey, I’ve done a lot of remarkable things in those short years.

And, I think that’s true. I’m eternally grateful for all the side quests I’ve fallen into, the people I’ve met, the places I’ve lived, and, perhaps most incredibly, the fact that, nowadays, I wake up each day absolutely in love with what I spend my time doing. It amazes me that I get to do this. [I pretty much read and think about things all day. That’s my job]

So, then, if what I say about myself is true, and I do in fact spend my days doing things I adore, then why did these thoughts of being alive but never really living come up on my 25th?

Perhaps, as the Greatest Showman taught us all, all the shine of a thousand spotlights, all the stars we steal from the night sky will never be enough.

Or maybe, as Hamilton showed us, some people really are never just satisfied.

Or, maybe still, I was having a Nietzschean moment.

Nietzsche wants you to imagine that one day, a magical creature comes to you and tells you that it is going to grant you the gift of eternal return.

What is this gift? Well, imagine you died right now, and every choice you’ve ever made has now been fixed in eternity [I’m taking some creative liberties with eternal return here].

You will come back to life after dying, and live your exact same life over and over again.

For eternity.

Your choices, your mistakes, your highs and lows— they’ll all recur, over and over again.

The question is, if you were offered this gift, would you think the magical creature was an angel or a demon? Would you consider eternal return a blessing or a curse?

If a blessing, then— wonderful, you might be leading a meaningful life for yourself.

If a curse, then— you might want to make some changes. Quit that job, get out of that relationship, move away, take that leap.

But, the issue here is— what if you don’t know if eternal return is a blessing or a curse for you?

What if you can’t tell if the magical creature before you is an angel or a demon?

What would that say about you?

I fear the call is coming from inside the house because, yes, this was the wall I hit with the eternal return.

I don’t know.

But, this was all about a year ago; my 26th is in a few days. What are my thoughts doing this year?

My internal monologue is conspicuously quiet this year.

Perhaps it’s because 25 seemed like a meaningful number.

I think, as I wrote in a previous essay here, I imagined 25 as “having two more goes at this until I start thinking about dying”. That is to say, if I turn 25 two more times, I’ll be 75, and at that point, I start working on borrowed time.

50 years is a long way away, but thinking of it as “two more goes of 25” struck me more forcefully than it probably had any business doing.

Also, because I couldn’t think of a clever way to include this fact in this essay, I’ll awkwardly say now that I write these words while suspended 34000 feet in the air on a flying death trap (I’m on a plane).

So, yes. My internal monologue has been eerily silent this year.

Maybe that’s for the best.

One consequence of all the death talk over the past year, though, is that I’ve doubled down on my belief in the power of existential authenticity.

Such authenticity, to the point of forsaking everything that seeks to bind you, can be a heavy cross to carry.

But, whether or not life is truly short, life is certainly too temporary for any one of us to spend time living lives we did not choose for ourselves.

When we are born, we are drowned in a sea of contingencies.

So many things are handed down to us.

The bodies we inhabit, the nations we’re born into, our skin colour, the era we grow up in, the cultural expectations.

All these things claim to have something to say about what we ought to be.

Although all these things can be blessings, they can equally be tragedies.

It’s a tragedy that we don’t initially get the freedom to choose, and, for some of us, we realise too late that, at the end of the day, all we can really do is choose.

Yet, choosing what to be can be terrifying. It’s easier and mroe comforting to outsource this power to other powers that be.

But if this past year has streangthened any particular conviction in me, it is an undying love for freedom.

To quote the founding motto of Liberia (as I often do): It is the love of freedom that brought us here.

Camus tells us that the absurd is a dangerous thing partly because, once you realise it— once you think it— you cannot unthink it.

Once you pause and ask why? Why am I at this job? Why am I with this person? Why am I in this country? Why am I pushing for this degree? Why am I here?— the dominoes start to fall. The contingencies unmask themselves. The randomness of it all emerges in full force.

Like Kierkegaard says, “I stick my finger into existence— it smells like nothing”.

It’s easier not to lift the finger in the first place.

But doing so, maybe, is a step to becoming free.

I don’t know, though.

These were scattered thoughts. They went nowhere.

This truly was a

vibes est vida

The higher up you go, the more about love you understand.

Of course, real ones know that Plato’s Symposium (my favorite dialogue) gives us a striking image of a ladder which takes us closer to “real” love with every step— but we are concerned here with a different ladder.

It is similar, yes. But different.

It’s less poetic.

I’m no Plato, but I can imagine a ladder.

So, this ladder of ours is a ladder of understanding.

With each step, you come closer to understanding what true romantic love might be.

So, let us start from the first step.

I: Desiring your perfect soulmate.

I begin by quoting a timeless sacred text:

We start with stars in our eyes
We start believing that we belong
But every sun doesn't rise
And no one tells you where you went wrong.

— Waving Through a Window, from the musical Dear Evan Hansen.

It might be accurate to say that many people are introduced to thinking about love within this framework of a “perfect person”.

Perhaps it is a generational thing.

What else might we expect from a generation raised on movies and TV shows that swim around this theme of “finding your person and living happily ever after”?

The implications are pretty clear— one believes that to love is to find one’s complete half; one’s perfect person: one’s perfect soulmate.

This soulmate is yours and yours alone.

They compliment you in every meaningful way.

A hug from them feels like a journey back home.

Talking to them feels like the most indecipherable parts of your heart are being read out loud in a language you’ve always known but have never been able to speak.

In order to feel love, therefore, to truly feel love, you must find this one person.

I emphasise this point further: there’s only one person who fits this description for us all.

We all get one soulmate.

This is the thought.

But then, one takes a step higher, and things change.

II: Perfection is what you make of it. It is created, not found.

One step above where we began is a realisation that perfection is a fairytale aspiration.

In reality, what awaits those who are open to it is even more magical— it is cultivated perfection.

In this train of thought, there is no perfect person, but, when two people put in the work, they can create something beautiful together.

I’m fond of saying that there are (at least) two kinds of magic: the kind we create and the kind that just is.

Both are magnificent in their own right.

It would, indeed, be magical to consider the possibility that there is a perfect person designed from the ground up out there waiting for you.

But, it would equally be magical to consider that no such person exists, but an imperfect person is out there who sees enough in you to want to put in the work. And, if you see enough in them, you two work together to build magic.

To be seen long enough for this second type of magic to happen truly is a mystical, special thing.

So, both are magical.

It is on this step of the ladder that we all, collectively, as a generation, decide that “if he/she wanted to, he/she would” is nothing more than a relic from the previous step.

It is needlessly idealised thinking.

In reality, if you want them to do x, you ought to communicate your needs to them.

There is no perfect person who will know you naturally.

To be known requires effort and communication.

Perfection, to reiterate, is built.

It is possible that most of the discourse on this topic currently rests here, on this step of the ladder.

So, what comes next?

III: Perfection Regained.

What if perfect soulmates— the ones from fairytales— do exist?

The ones who don’t actually need to be told what you need, it just so happens that their natural tendencies and desires match up perfectly with yours.

What if the childlike thoughts we began with are, in fact, true?

Everyone has a soulmate. One soulmate. Out there in the world somewhere, waiting.

What if one realises that it’s far too difficult to find these soulmates, so one rests on the second step because going any higher would make one confront the tragic reality that perhaps you are promised a soulmate, but you aren’t promised an encounter with them.

Perhaps accepting this as true would mean accepting that love demands too much from us.

It demands, as the existentialists would urge, a strong sense of individual authenticity.

Like Christ says, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple”.

What if love calls us to something similar?

What if the road to encountering such a soulmate involves forsaking all the forces which attempt to deny the existence of higher steps on the ladder?

What if it means ignoring pressure from friends, family, and the constant flow of new couples rising every day around you?

What if waiting for your perfect soulmate means being tragically alone even as the seasons constantly change while you seemingly remain the same?

What if it means that you actually have to learn to believe in that voice deep inside of you that never went away, that never left the first step of the ladder, that always told you that something felt wrong about “creating” perfection.

What if it meant that you dared to dream again?

In the words of CS Lewis, “Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again”.

Can anyone in their right mind bear the weight of the fairytale of a perfect soulmate?

Epilogue: Ladders?

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Perhaps love has nothing to do with ladders.

Maybe this is why this particular essay went nowhere meaningful.

Or, maybe love is a ladder but there is only one step.

It is you and I who change the longer we stay on it.

Perhaps oscillating between perfect soulmates and found cultivated soulmates is simply the price one pays for growing older, seeing more of the world, and hopping on to this forsaken ladder in the first place.

Is there a fourth step? Is it simply a rehash of the second? Or is there something more— something new, awaiting at the top of the ladder?

I don’t know.

vibes est vida.

Nietszche asks a simple, yet eternally heavy question, which is always worth considering—

Why truth? Why not untruth?

I’ll let Nietzsche speak for himself for a moment.

The will to truth that still educates us into taking so many risks, this famous truthfulness that all philosophers have so far talked about with veneration: what questions this will to truth has already laid before us! What strange, terrible, questionable questions!

That is already a long story– and yet it seems to have hardly begun? Is it any wonder if we finally become suspicious, lose patience, turn impatiently away? That we ourselves are also learning from this Sphinx to pose questions? Who is it really that questions us here?

What in us really wills the truth? In fact, we paused for a long time before the question of the cause of this will– until we finally came to a complete standstill in front of an even more fundamental question. We asked about the value of this will.

Granted, we will truth: why not untruth instead? And uncertainty? Even ignorance? The problem of the value of truth came before us,– or was it we who came before the problem? Which of us is Oedipus? Which one is the Sphinx? It seems we have a rendezvous of questions and question-marks.– And, believe it or not, it ultimately looks to us as if the problem has never been raised until now,– as if we were the first to ever see it, fix our gaze on it, risk it.

Because this involves risk and perhaps no risk has ever been greater.

This section, which begins Beyond Good and Evil, is aptly named On the Prejudice of Philosophers.

The stakes here are rather large and eternally fascinating.

Why should one care about the truth?

Why not a lie?

Why not value ignorance?

Ignorance is dangerous, one might say.

But is the truth not the most dangerous of them all?

“If the truth shall kill them, let them die”, is a phrase attributed to Kant (although I’m pretty sure he never actually said this).

Yet, it does get us thinking— can the truth harm? Does the truth harm?

Moreso than ignorance? Moreso than lies?

Now, before I continue, I have to write an obligatory disclaimer.

I think truth is good.

Many evils of the world spawn out of untruth.

Yet, will the truth, as the Scriptures say, always set us free?

Maybe not always, but at least truth, when it does imprison, does so in a more meaningful way than untruth.

In other words, it seems better to suffer for the truth than to do so for a lie.

But another question emerges for us out of this statement:

Is it better to enjoy one’s life based on a lie? What if the truth hurts? Would it be wrong to find joy in a lie instead?

On some level, these are the questions that animate this essay.

Question: Should you lie to yourself?

I think, maybe, you can lie to yourself so long as you know the truth.

In other words, lying to oneself becomes an act of substituting the truth for a better story.

Importantly, you cannot substitute the truth for a better story without first knowing the truth.

I’ll turn here to Nietzsche once more.

Nietzsche wrote a short text titled On the Use and Abuse of History for Life.

I won’t summarise the entire thing here, but I’d certainly recommend giving it a read. It’s fairly accessible, as far as Nietzsche things go.

Here’s an excerpt from the foreword:

To be sure, we need history. But we need it in a manner different from the way in which the spoilt idler in the garden of knowledge uses it, no matter how elegantly he may look down on our coarse and graceless needs and distresses.

That is, we need it for life and action, not for a comfortable turning away from life and action or merely for glossing over the egotistical life and the cowardly bad act.

We wish to use history only insofar as it serves living. But there is a degree of doing history and a valuing of it through which life atrophies and degenerates.

Importantly, there are different manifestations of “history” that Nietzsche talks about in this essay, and he has more beef with some over others.

For our purposes, though, we only need to focus on what is contained in this excerpt above.

Now, because this is Substack, and because this is a long walk for a short drink of water, I need to emphasise that, in what I’m about to say, I’m going to take Nietzsche out of context here (although I don’t think he’d hate what I’m about to say).

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Also, the historical context within which Nietzsche wrote this is important and quite interesting, but it’s a conversation for another day.

For us here, one idea emerges above the rest:

Learn how to lie to yourself properly. In other words, delulu is philosophically the selulu.

We need history, yes.

You need your history.

Your history shapes you.

It defines you.

It matters.

But, we need history not just because it happened. Not just because it is the past.

We need history for life and action.

We need it insofar as it serves us, the living.

So, does your history, your past, your story, weigh you down?

Then, change it. Find another story that lifts you up.

“But you cannot change the past”, you might say.

This is true.

Yet, history is not simply the past.

Put somewhat crudely, the past is everything that has happened.

History involves reconstructing the past.

There are many approaches that can be adopted when reconstructing the past.

Ancient historians are notorious for making things up when recording history.

This is not because they sought to be dishonest; it is simply because they had different preoccupations compared to modern-day academic historians.

Ancient historians, for instance, were typically more interested in “transmitting truths” than in “saying what happened”.

“Truths” in this former sense involve enduring societal virtues.

So, did Heracles (also known as Hercules) truly exist? Did he actually, as a matter of historical fact, battle a hydra?

This question is irrelevant, where enduring truths are concerned.

What matters is how great and tragic his life was— How pious he was to the gods, despite his constant suffering at their hands.

The idea is that some things (enduring truths, we could say) are more relevant to the living than simply “what happened”.

What would it mean to mythologise oneself, then?

It is a form of delulu.

Perhaps you’ve failed at many things.

Perhaps your history is laden with disappointments.

How relevant is this story to who you are? To who you want to be?

Learn to mythologise yourself.

Learn to lie properly.

Learn to be delulu.

Epilogue: Morality still matters.

Behold, a common meme/TikTok template:

In conversations like these, this sentiment always comes to mind.

Indeed, there are very strong moral and epistemological reasons why we need to tell historical truths— personally and societally.

This point cannot be overstated.

The advice in this essay, with this in mind, is very parochial.

It applies to very specific people under very specific circumstances.

Are you, dear reader, one such person? Do you exist under one such circumstance?

It isn’t my place to say.

vibes est vida.

I begin with some words from the final paragraphs of Frantz Fanon’s Peau noire, masques blancs [Black Skin, White Masks]:

I have no wish to be the victim of the Fraud of a black world. My life should not be devoted to drawing up the balance sheet of Negro values.

There is no white world, there is no white ethic, any more than there is a white intelligence. There are in every part of the world men who search.

I am not a prisoner of history.

I should not seek there for the meaning of my destiny. I should constantly remind myself that the real leap consists in introducing invention into existence. In the world through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself.

…

Am I going to ask the contemporary white man to answer for the slave-ships of the seventeenth century? Am I going to try by every possible means to cause Guilt to be born in minds? Moral anguish in the face of the massiveness of the Past?

I am a Negro, and tons of chains, storms of blows, rivers of expectoration flow down my shoulders. But I do not have the right to allow myself to bog down. I do not have the right to allow the slightest fragment to remain in my existence. I do not have the right to allow myself to be mired in what the past has determined. I am not the slave of the Slavery that dehumanized my ancestors.

…

Let us be clearly understood. I am convinced that it would be of the greatest interest to be able to have contact with a Negro literature or architecture of the third century before Christ. I should be very happy to know that a correspondence had flourished between some Negro philosopher and Plato.

But I can absolutely not see how this fact would change anything in the lives of the eight-year-old children who labor in the cane fields of Martinique or Guadeloupe.

No attempt must be made to encase man, for it is his destiny to be set free1.

Within these few paragraphs, which close off a very difficult book, Fanon presents us with many fascinating themes.

Here, we find (to highlight a few) thoughts on the philosophy of history alongside questions surrounding moral responsibility and freedom.

Unpacking all of this, in the context of the rest of the book and (importantly) Fanon’s other works, would truly be a meaningful endeavour.

But that is not our task for today.

I begin with Fanon’s words here to get us thinking about the topic we are contending with—

being black vs. being human.

You might have noticed, at the outset, that there is a problem with this phrase.

It is that problem which partly animates this essay.

Some other day, I’ll write about blackness as it relates to my lived experience.

The very concept is, and perhaps always will be, strange to me.

In Nigeria, where I spent most of my life, the concept carries little weight.

In the US, where I first arrived after leaving home, the term carries an unbelievable amount of weight.

In the UK, the land I was secondly diasporised into, the term carries a weight that manages to contrast sharply with the American experience, yet manifests so many commonalities that navigating both almost amounts to being bilingual.

This imagery of language is useful, I think.

Because through it all, I can say that blackness, for better or worse, is my second language.

I can’t say I grew up with it.

Yet, I’ve done my best to learn to speak it.

And I stumble, often.

However, all this is a story for another day.

I mention it here also as a preamble to what is to come.

To turn back to the topic at hand, one might rightfully ask—

What does it mean to say “being black vs. being human”?

To be black is to be human, after all.

Why frame it as an either/or?

This is precisely why I’m writing this essay.

Indeed, it is not an either/or— being black and being human are not in conflict with each other.

However, sometimes, we speak as if they are.

To illustrate this, I’m going to attempt to thread the needle of an extremely delicate conversation here.

I hope you’ll give this thought the grace it needs to land properly.

Every so often, a story finds its way to me of a black person in history doing something remarkable.

Generally speaking, the comments on such a story range from people lamenting that this person’s story has been erased to people finding pride in the story, affirming that black folks were, indeed, shapers of history.

In the most surface-level sense, I can say I have no issues with stories such as these.

But, truth be told, I always wonder— what are these stories for?

I mean, what are they really for?

On the one hand, they exist simply to share history.

And this is good, I have no qualms with this.

But, what does it mean to take pride in such a story?

Let’s say that I’ve just encountered the (true) story of Thomas Fuller,2 an enslaved man in the American South who had the mental prowess to be a living calculator.

His mental abilities would almost be the stuff of legend if we did not have documented evidence of what he could do.

Fuller’s story is remarkable for many reasons. But, I’m left wondering— why would I take pride in it?

My concern here is that taking pride in such a story would involve agreeing to presuppositions which I fundamentally reject.

Feeling pride in stories like this sometimes has the energy of saying,

“Look! You all think that people like me are unintelligent and have no history, well here’s one of many examples that proves you wrong!”

This thought disturbs me.

Fanon raises a similar concern.

Indeed, as someone who loves philosophy and likes Plato, it would be cool for me to discover a letter someday between Plato and a philosopher who existed in what is now known as Nigeria.

But what would this prove?

Would it prove that pre-Nigeria Nigerians actually did have the ability to think?

The ability to reason?

The ability to philosophise?

No, no, and no.

I need no proof of these.

I need no proof of these because pre-Nigeria Nigerians were human beings.

And these traits above are simply things that humans do.

Indeed, some parts of the world preserved their ancient escapades better than others for us today.

Consequently, due to several factors including chance, luck, ingenuity and innovation, some things are lost to history while others survive.

This, to me, proves nothing.

Or, at least, it proves nothing significant.

So, to take pride in certain stories seems like an attempt to make a point built on a foundation which I fundamentally reject.

The clearest example of this, in many conversations, is the Ancient Egyptians.

For many people, the skin colour of the Ancient Egyptians is extremely important for this very reason.

It is not simply relevant for historical accuracy; it is relevant to prove people wrong when they say that “black Africans” never accomplished anything historically.

This is, of course, an assertion from Hegel. And, as some TikTok comment sections, even today, on some posts, show us, this assertion still needs to be exorcised.

So the Ancient Egyptians become an important piece of this puzzle to prove the humanity of Africans.

If Egyptians were blonde with blue eyes, then Hegel was right. Egypt belongs to Europe and does not “count” as Africa.

The “real” Africa, where the black folks live, is pretty much a void where nothing happens.

So, to prove that Hegel was wrong, we must know what the Ancient Egyptians looked like.

Now, make no mistake. It is preposterous to think that Ancient Egyptians were blondes with blue eyes— they weren’t.

But, suppose they were.

Would this prove Hegel right?

Absolutely not.

The humanity of Africans is simply not a topic for debate.

Plus, more simply, if one wishes to hang out with ancient civilisations on the continent that were not Egyptian, there are options.

One only needs to spend time vibing with the metallurgy of the Yoruba kingdoms, or the Great Benin wall, to find enough interesting ancient artefacts to hang out with.

I feel the need to remind people constantly that there are more pyramids in Sudan than there are in Egypt.

So why should it matter if Ancient Egyptians had the same skin colour as me?

Once more, it’s possible that we rehearse these things simply to make sure that our history is accurate. And this is good, this is important.

There are many silences in the way we tell history that paint an unhelpful— and unjust— picture of the world.

Painting a truer picture is important.

And, if that is all these messages seek to do, then that is good.

But, once more, reactions to such stories tend to show me that there’s more going on.

To use these stories as “proof” in an argument where my very humanity is on the line is something I cannot do3.

These arguments might serve as a means to an end, but at this point, I’m making a moral claim which I will have to address some other day.

The point remains—

I am a human being, and I lay claim to all of humanity.

This assertion is a radical one for some, so I will spend the last bit of the essay fleshing it out.

I have met a handful of people over the years who are suspicious of the very concept of “humanity”.

They say that the very idea of “all people being human” has historically been a smokescreen concealing immense amounts of violence.

Enlightenment thinkers yapped constantly about the rights of man, yet murdered man at every turn (a phrase I borrow from Fanon’s Les Damnés de la Terre).

All of this, they say, tells us that the whole “humanity” business is a sham.

I have heard one person directly tell me that their blackness is so important to them that they would not want to give it up to claim some strange abstract concept called “humanity”.

With all these thoughts, we see blackness opposed to humanity.

One must choose between the two, and some people, viewing humanity as a sham, choose blackness.

Now, here’s the thing. There is truth here.

There are critiques of humanism which are well argued, historically justified, and worth engaging with4.

Yet, some other critiques fail to distinguish between the ideal and the hypocrisy of it all.

Am I less human because Thomas Jefferson was speaking out of both sides of his mouth when he penned the Declaration of Independence?

His hypocrisy is his cross to carry.

As the Scriptures say, let the dead bury their dead.

I can believe that it is self-evident that all people are created equal, regardless of how far away that ideal has been from reality historically.

Fundamentally, I cannot abandon humanism because I do not know what the alternative is.

Because Jefferson was a hypocrite, does that mean that all people are not, in fact, created equally?

Because humanity has been denied to people who look like me, does that mean that we are not, in fact, human?

Have the efforts of evildoers in the past tainted the human label so much that I must abandon it and seek out something else?

Sometimes, I stand alone in my answers to these questions. But I must answer— No, no, and no.

The human label— humanity itself— belongs to me as much as it belongs to anyone else.

This is, as I say, a radical claim.

It is radical because I lay hold to all of humanity.

Fela Kuti? He’s my brother.

Mozart? He’s my brother.

¿The Buena Vista Social Club? They’re my cousins.

Joe Hisaishi? He’s my uncle.

I claim it all, because I love it all, because humans, like me, put them into the world.

People often have very detailed conversations about who is allowed to “claim” certain things.

As a Nigerian, perhaps I can “claim” Fela, but can I claim Miles Davis?

Yet, I am not Yoruba, so technically, perhaps I cannot claim Fela.

Must I only claim achievements from people of my Nigerian ethnic group?

Why not make it simply those of my immediate family?

Truth be told, the only thing I believe I can claim is myself.

Nothing more, nothing less.

But this, as Fanon says, makes me my own foundation.

In claiming myself, I ask myself— what am I?

I’m a human being.

Humanity, therefore, is mine to claim.

Prologue: There will be a Part II.

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In Part II of this essay, I will address a few important things.

The first is this business of “claiming” things.

Am I suggesting that anyone can claim anything at any point from any culture?

Yes, I think I am claiming this. A radical claim, indeed.

But the alternatives do not sit right with me.

I will also need to address the morality of all I have said here.

There is a reason why we sometimes compartmentalise history in the way we do, along the lines of identity groups.

Sometimes we need to know who to blame, and who not to.

So, when I assert that I am human and therefore claim everything, do I truly mean that I claim everything that comes out of the human experience?

Do I claim white supremacy? Or might I want to leave that to a specific group historically?

These are good questions, yet I fear this essay is long enough as it is, so I must address them later.

Thank you for reading.

vibes est vida.

~this is an older essay, rewritten with some new additions~

This is Ted (Evelyn) Mosby.

Ted went on a date with a girl named Robin one night.

And, during that date (their first date, mind you), he said he loved her.

Now, let’s zoom out for a bit and think about some stuff.

In my opinion, Ted is one of the greatest sitcom/TV moral philosophers of the last 100 years.

Had it not been for the likes of Chidi Anagonye, Saul Goodman, and Gibby Gibson, Ted’s spot at the top would have been unquestioned.

In either case, Ted’s moral philosophy touches on themes relating to idealisation, utopianism, and the philosophy of emotions.

For today, I’d like to look at what Ted teaches us about being dreamers.

(To anyone who hasn’t seen How I Met Your Mother yet, bookmark this essay, go watch 9 Seasons, and then come back).

So, people often hate Ted for being creepy, selfish, hypocritical and just overall insensitive.

While there is truth to all this, I cannot wholeheartedly endorse these views for a simple reason:

It’s a sitcom.

And, no, I don’t mean that Ted isn’t real, so his actions can’t be loved or hated.

(after all, what is real? Fiction is the lie we use to tell ourselves the truth— says Camus).

But what I mean is that, in sitcoms, we, the viewers, are like omnipotent beings, privy to information that the characters we observe do not have.

So, we know their motivations; we know their hearts; we know who they are when no one is looking.

I realised this truth many moons ago when someone told me that they never liked Michael Scott from The Office.

Why? Well, Michael is inappropriate. He says icky things and makes people uncomfortable.

This is all true.

But, we see Michael. We see him when nobody else does, and we know that underneath all that he appears to be, he’s a lonely man who just wants friends. He cares for those around him, almost to a fault.

He is, in many ways, misunderstood.

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This does not immediately excuse the fact that he makes those around him uncomfortable; however, it should be kept in mind.

Michael, like Prince Zuko from Avatar: The Last Airbender, wants to be good but is very bad at it.

The same is true, to a lesser extent, of Ted.

Ted makes Robin uncomfortable by saying he loves her right after they meet. He does several things throughout the show that cross boundaries and come off as morally questionable. We should not forget this.

Yet, we also see Ted on his own. And we know that when he said he loved Robin on their first date, he really really thought he meant it.

He was not lying— at least, he did not think he was.

This is important because if Ted wasn’t lying, his crime here would not be one of volition but of cognition.

To put things very crudely, volitional acts refer to acts of the will.

If I act on my own volition, I act on purpose— I will something, and then I do it.

Acts of cognition, however, are not quite subject to our will, at least, not directly.

A person might hold beliefs they didn’t quite choose (say, loving someone you know is wrong for you), and that would be a cognitive thing, a bit more than it is a volitional one.

There’s more to say on this, but I’ll move on for now.

I only bring it up here because if I’m right, and Ted did think he was in love with Robin, then this crime he has committed (telling her he loves her on the first date) is a little complicated.

It’s complicated because Ted’s crime here was not being in love with her (which is not in his control), but it’s in telling her on the first date (he did have a choice about that).

I point this out because a lot of the Ted slander I’ve seen points out that he was wrong or weird for falling in love with someone he just met.

Yet, we cannot easily blame a person for their cognitive states— for things they cannot control.

We can blame them for what they do in reaction to these states, though. But even this is a complicated issue, for another day.

The point is, when Ted’s alone, he yearns for completion.

He’s broken. He has much love to give and wants to find someone to give it to. Sometimes, it leads him to seek out anyone in his search for the one.

His yearning makes him fail, it makes him morally questionable, but it keeps him going.

What is the utopian philosophy of Ted (Evelyn) Mosby? Ted shows us what happens when you dream in a world which is obsessed with being cautiously awake. He shows us what happens when you carry your heart on your sleeve in a world where people lock their hearts away for very legitimate reasons. Ted forces us to ask: what would happen if you were you— Unapologetically, you? Earnestly, you? Embarrassingly, you?Problematically, you?

What does it mean to be you in a world where you-ness is seen as strange?

I’m writing this essay for a few reasons. One of which is a conversation I had with my friend K recently.

To anyone who doesn’t know who K is, K is a friend of mine who first appeared in this essay:

The fun little gimmick with K, of course, is that he’s either a real person totally separate from me. Or, he’s a pseudonym I adopt that’s just me in disguise. Or, he’s some combination of those two. Or it changes from essay to essay. Who knows? K is just K.

Anyways, K was texting this girl, and without giving too many details, she said something to him that was, even to my mind, kind of needlessly sassy.

That’s coming from me, who, almost without fail, is always sassy. But what she said just seemed uncalled for, you know?

So, K happened to be holding his phone when her message came in, so he responded immediately.

To which she responded by making fun of his “5-second response time”.

K responded by affirming her jab at him and said that he was very proud of his quick responses.

To which she, interestingly, said that she respects it, but she “doesn’t have time for that”, effectively ending their conversation.

Importantly, context matters. In a regular conversation, this is banter, but coming off the heels of her sassy/slightly rude comment to him, these were fiery words.

Now, K lives by a simple philosophy. I live by the same one.

He does not pretend to be things he is not.

If he is busy, he will not respond. Because he’s busy.

If he is not busy, he will not pretend to be just so he does not drive people away.

K thinks this is ridiculous, bordering on problematic.

K asked me:

When did it become necessary to pretend like you don’t care? To go out of your way to treat people like they’re a drop in the bucket in your “very exciting” life? To treat people in such a way where you make sure they know that they are simply one option out of many, and you aren’t eagerly wanting to talk to them? When did it become necessary to be… this?

Now, I love K to death. But I thought he was being a little dramatic here. Yet, I see where he’s coming from, and in some ways, I do agree with him.

I see where he’s coming from because I have heard it said that one ought not to respond too quickly, lest the object of their desire feel as though they have nothing better to do than talk to them.

I do find this strange. On days when I’m busy, you’ll get a reply when you get a reply, but if I’m vibing about, phone in hand, the thought of deliberately taking time just to pretend like I did not, in fact, have my phone in hand, is odd to me. K and I are on the same page here.

Where K loses me, however, is regarding the extent to which it is morally problematic to be a dreamer— to be Ted.

I think dreaming makes one almost inherently morally problematic. And this is something I keep in mind as a dreamer myself (K disagrees).

K thinks that if the world is wrong, then the world— not he— should move. He will plant his feet on the ground and be unapologetically him.

If his communication style appears too much to some, then he laments the world we live in, a world where one cannot simply be who they are— a person who loves love.

Now, I cannot get into the weeds of K’s personality here, although some of this context would be important. But I’ll say simply that K is often locked in a constant state of self-reflection, and his desire to be himself is not born out of a belief that he is always right, but it is tied to his desire not to deceive those around him. This is who he is. He’s a dreamer. The thought of becoming less so, to appear nonchalant and therefore more desirable to some, is an unwelcome one for him.

(K read through this description of himself, and he approves).

So, to recapitulate.

Don’t say I love you on the first date.

But, what if, the dreamer that you are, you do love them on the first date?

That should begin a cycle of self-reflection within yourself.

Know that (for me) being a dreamer is a morally problematic role to play.

You can, might, and probably will ick people off.

And, know that (for K) the world itself is in pain, and the more authentically you dream, the better it might all become.

In other words, there comes a time in a person’s life when they must plant their feet firmly into the ground and be who they are, and there comes a time when they must, for some greater good or the other, move and change.

How does one know when to do what? When to dream and when to wake up? That, dear friends, is the question.

And who is to blame for all this? Maybe we all are.

As Nietzsche says,

those who were seen dancing were thought to be crazy by those who could not hear the music.

vibes est vida.

Keeping an afro is difficult.

In the years since I’ve attempted to grow a nice, healthy one, I’ve found that the two main things I need are a good pillow and silk pillowcases. That’s, at the very least, the bare minimum.

When I was away for two weeks, I had my silk pillowcase, but not my pillow of choice.

Evidently, that was enough to damage the back of my hair a little bit and make it all janky (that’s a very official, technical term).

After getting back home, I embarked on a journey to rectify the wrongs of those two weeks.

It took about four months, but the back of my hair started shaping up quite nicely. I was pleased.

Now, the story gets tragic.

About a week ago, I returned to London.

A day or two ago, I noticed the back of my hair was already worsening.

Once more, I had my pillowcase without my desired pillow, and the pillow I’ve used this past week has been especially evil.

So, today I was burdened with this thought—

How can four months of careful effort be undermined in just a week?

In other words, and more in line with our topic for today,

Why is it easier to destroy than to create?

This question has been on my mind for most of my life.

When I was very young, we had a sticker on our bathroom door in my childhood home that read “it is easier to pull down than to build”.

Why did we have this sticker on a bathroom door? I couldn’t tell you.

But suffice it to say, this thought has been with me for a while.

I always found it interesting.

Now, I’m sure there’s an official answer to this. Perhaps a mathematical one dealing with laws of entropy or something or the other, and such answers are a vibe.

Perhaps it is true that the natural movement from order to chaos, which seems to characterise our universe, makes it such that destruction will always be easier than creation.

Yet, I wonder— why does this seem to be true for human actions as well?

Why might it take a lifetime to build a relationship, but take a single moment to end it?

Substitute “relationship” with “trust” in that sentence, and we have a similarly difficult question.

Why can a few boxes of TNT destroy, in a moment, what it takes a person months to create in Minecraft?

Or, to use a real-life example (that I’m still not over), why does it just take one little mistake to accidentally wipe one’s childhood iPad and destroy months and months of work spent building connected cities in Minecraft’s Pocket Edition?

One can spend a lifetime writing a book, print out a single copy, and it can all vanish in a moment with nothing but a lighter and a flame.

Is it all entropy? Is there nothing more to it?

Why is it easier to doomscroll than it is to read the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein?

Why does it seem more difficult to live one’s ideal life than it is to fall short of one’s own expectations for oneself?

When I was a child, my mother once said (perhaps half-jokingly) that as a general rule, if something tastes sweet in the mouth, it’s probably bad for the body.

This was meant to be taken literally, as I did have quite a sweet tooth as a child, which, if you know me, you’d know has absolutely never gone away.

Yet, this strange piece of advice seems to have some resonance here, doesn’t it?

Is there any tangible reason why it often seems harder to do good things and easier, oftentimes more enjoyable, to do not-so-good things?

And, perhaps more importantly, does any of this matter?

There have been long traditions of religious thought that glorify suffering and view it as intrinsically good.

The pleasures of the flesh, in some lines of thought, are not only evil because they lead one astray, but they are evil because they are pleasures.

To glorify suffering in certain ways, however, can lead us to morally problematic places. An essay for another day.

But, whether we glorify it or not, it seems difficult to ignore that it does seem to be the case that it is, in fact, easier to pull down and be pulled down than it is to build.

What are we to make of this? I don’t know.

At the moment, I look to the future and prepare for the next four months of trying to restore the back of my hair to its former glory.

Yet, does this mean that for the rest of my afro’s life, I must always walk on eggshells knowing that it can be damaged at a moment’s notice?

Perhaps.

Maybe this is something we all have to deal with.

I don’t know.

But I do know that this has been a long walk for a short drink of water.

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vibes est vida.

I’m a musician. But, importantly, for our purposes, I’m not a singer.

However, I’ve spent a lot of time around singers, and one interesting thing I’ve learned is that many singers have a very fascinating relationship with their voices.

A music Professor of mine once said that vocalists naturally tend to be very protective of their instruments, because their instrument is literally who they are.

To hate someone’s voice is to say something very personal and existential about them. So the thought goes.

In practice, this shows up whenever singers listen to recordings of their voices, and they express harsh critiques of what they hear. This is a common occurrence. If you’ve ever experienced it, it tends to show up as singers “hating how they sound in recordings”.

I had heard this sentiment from nearly every singer I had encountered until I met my best friend, who also happens to be one of the most talented musicians I’ve ever met— let’s call him J.

J was different.

One of the first times I was around J as he listened back to his vocal tracks, I was surprised because he didn’t cringe, he didn’t critique how he sounded, he did the opposite of all that— he closed his eyes and moved along to the groove of the music.

This man was vibing to the sound of his own voice.

In the years I’ve known J and seen this happen, an important life lesson has emerged from the experience.

You have to fall in love with the sound of your own music.

After all, if you don’t love your own music, how would you expect others to?

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One of the reasons I found J’s behaviour so interesting on this point is that it got me thinking about the place of humility in one’s life, especially for someone who creates any form of art.

(Also, in case it isn’t obvious, when I speak of music for the rest of this essay, I’m referring to anything that a person does/creates— writing, painting, stand-up comedy, etc).

But, yes, Humility.

Humility is fascinating to me because, although it certainly is a virtue, it is a pretty elusive one.

It can be hard to tell when someone is genuinely being humble vs. being too self-conscious to be perceived long enough to accept a compliment. This is a very interesting dynamic, but I cannot dwell on it here.

For our purposes, it is interesting to consider how pride, like humility, is equally elusive.

It is tricky to tell when a person is being cocky/prideful vs. confident/secure in what they do.

The line gets blurry pretty quickly, and the difference between one and the other is often a matter of vibes, or even, more interestingly, a matter of the perspective of the spectator.

Beauty is, indeed, in the eye of the beholder, and so is the determining factor which decides whether a person is bold or prideful.

This, however, is also another conversation, for another day.

But, back to J.

His actions made me think about these dynamics carefully.

This man was really sitting there, vibing to his own voice as he would any other song that he liked.

What kind of person, we might ask, loves the sound of their voice this much and in this way?

A narcissist? A ragingly over-confident person? A person who lacks self-awareness, a fundamentally prideful person?

I argue— none of the above. The answer is simpler, and much sweeter.

A man who is in love.

buy me boba (If you'd like to)

As I’m sure we all recall, this essay is titled— Fall in Love With the Sound of Your Own Music.

The keyword here is love.

True love.

Not infatuation, not blind idealisation, not prideful possessiveness— but love.

Love is another elusive concept because it has multiple entities that look like it, that act in its name, but in reality are worlds apart from it.

There are many things which emerge in contexts of love which, in other contexts, should be met with suspicion or even disdain.

Yet, to fall in love with one’s own music is, to me, to understand what one’s music is, and to know that love is needed for its growth and safety.

In other words, your music (much like you) needs love to grow and feel safe.

And, if that love doesn’t proudly come from you, first and foremost, where else would it come from?

I will close with two paradoxes, in the form of questions, for us all to sit with.

I.

Is Jazz music more for the player or for the listener?

I’ve come across this question in some form or another a few times over the course of my years as a musician, and it’s a tricky one to make sense of.

Who’s in charge when musicians come together to play?

Is it me, and my intuitions as a musician? Is it the song? Is it the crowd/audience? Is it the genre? Is it the lead vocalist? Is it— dare I say— actually the bass player? (No, it’s never the bass player.)

These questions pop up in different contexts, and different, acceptable answers might emerge based on the vibes at play.

One of the most interesting versions of this question is the one above regarding jazz.

Is jazz for the player or for the listener?

The great Wynton Marsalis once answered this question thus—

Music is always for the listener. But the first listener is the player.

So, dear reader, who is your music for?

If it is for the listener, but you are the first listener, then what should your relationship to it be?

Love, I think. Love.

II.

The Euthyphro Dilemma—

“Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?”

Plato tells us that Socrates asked this question to a fellow named Euthyphro, and it has perplexed many people (myself included) in many contexts ever since.

In fact, it has perplexed me so beautifully since I first encountered it that I will not say any more words on this.

Perhaps we can all simply sit with this paradox and think about how it fits into the topic at hand.

I will close (for real this time) with some words on love.

Earlier, I suggested that falling in love with your own music could make one appear prideful, or cocky, or something of the sort.

And, I mentioned that we need not fear accusations of cockiness because love is involved.

I’d like to say a few more things on this.

It is possible that true love, whatever it may be, at the very least probably requires both truth and freedom.

I would like to expand on why I narrow in on these two specifically, but I won’t. We must press on.

Loving your own music involves loving it for what it is. This is where truth comes in.

To love it for what it is, you must know it for what it is— warts and all.

You can know that your music is imperfect, flawed, inadequate in some ways. But you still love it, so you nurture it to grow.

Truth frees you from the grip of infatuation and idealisation, which will trap you in a world of defensiveness and delusion regarding your music.

One need not believe that they are the best singer in the world to love their music wholeheartedly.

Loving your music also means accepting its ability to change alongside you. That is where freedom comes in.

On one fateful day, during a very striking interaction, I was with J and another singer friend of ours, let’s call her M.

M was telling us how much she hates the way her voice sounds in recordings (the sentiment we explored at the beginning).

And J, in response to this, said to her, rather bluntly—

“If you hate what you sound like, then why not just sing differently?”

In other words, and for our purposes, if you do not love the sound of your own music, let it be free enough for you to let it become something you do love.

Is this another paradox? Perhaps.

But our thought for the day remains a simple one.

Fall in love with the sound of your own music.

vibes est vida.

Keep this thought in mind for a few moments while I go on a tangent that seems unrelated but will pay off soon.

Our tangent involves a question—

Is decentring men still centring men?

To consider this question, let us consider Nietzsche.

In The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche provides us with an essay on what he calls the Ascetic Ideal.

Now, like with most things Nietzsche-related, this essay (and, indeed, the entire Genealogy) is open to many interpretations. So, here, I provide one very simple one.

Nietzsche seems to be suggesting that a person who defines themself in opposition to something is, in reality, drawing their meaning and purpose from that thing.

So, take an ascetic person— a person who denounces society, renounces earthly possessions, and goes out into the woods in isolation.

Nietzsche seems to be saying that, although this person now lives in the woods apart from society, they still draw their meaning and purpose from society. They still define themselves by society.

Defining yourself in opposition to something is still defining yourself according to that thing. This is the idea.

Now, this is an interesting and strange idea.

We find a similar thought in the work of David Foster Wallace—

“Defining yourself in opposition to something is still being anaclitic on that thing, isn't it?”

— Infinite Jest.

So, interesting and strange, indeed, but is it true?

Consider, for a moment, the concept of being Anti-Racist.

The Anti-Racist stance is one which acknowledges that, when it comes to racism, simply being “not racist” or “not having an opinion” on these issues is insufficient.

In order to truly take these issues seriously, one must actively be Anti-Racist. This, importantly, is an active stance not a passive one.

So, returning to our Nietzsche thought, we could ask— does the Anti-Racist stance, in positioning itself in opposition to racism, ultimately end up centring racism?

In other words, does an Anti-Racist person end up finding meaning and purpose in life from racism?

Perhaps.

After all, if one constantly finds themself thinking about how their words and deeds, and those of the people around them, might be contributing to racist structures, then that would mean that racism is, indubitably, constantly on their mind. Racism is centred.

So, we can now revisit our first question about decentring men, with all this in mind.

Does a lady who seeks to decentre men ultimately end up defining herself in relation to men?

If she, in an attempt to escape the male gaze and the musings of patriarchy, constantly thinks about how her words and deeds move away from these systems, does this not mean that she is ultimately defining herself by these systems?

Does decentring men ultimately centre men?

Now, I will not provide a definitive end to this line of questioning here, because no clear answers seem to be readily accessible.

I will say though, that I am left wondering two main things.

1. Is Nietzsche correct?

2. If Nietzsche is correct, is this bad? Or is this simply just an observation?

Regarding (2), let us assume that Nietzsche is correct here, and it is true that defining yourself in opposition to something is, in reality, still defining yourself by that thing.

So, the ascetic is still defined by society, the Anti-Racist still centres racism and the man decentre-er still centres men.

If this is all true, is this a bad thing? What would be a problem?

After all, to take the racism example, would it be a bad thing if a person centres racism in their life?

Perhaps the only way to truly overcome something like racism is to centre it strongly so it can be conquered.

Yes, there is something a bit unsettling about a person who centres racism in their life, but if that is how it must be vanquished, then so be it— no?

After all, a person who names a thing has power over it (I don’t quite remember where this quote is from).

Now, in response to all this, one might say that this entire line of questioning is pointless.

One might say that the ascetic centres himself, not society; the anti-racist centres justice not racism; and the man-decentre-er centres herself, not men.

Does this solve the problem, or simply restate it? I do not know.

But, we must move on.

Keep all this in mind, though.

People of Colour.

So, to resume the thought we began with— I don’t like the phrase “people of colour”.

It took me some time to figure out exactly why, but I think, for me, the phrase emerges as a very strange one when it is used in the context of certain sentences.

Here’s what I mean.

One day, in a class of mine, a colleague uttered the sentence “yeah, if you look at people of colour vs. white people, it’s clear that…”.

This sentence made me realise a few things.

What does it mean to say, “people of colour vs. white people”?

This seems to me to suggest that there are two kinds of people in the world: people of colour and white people.

And, this is a strange claim to make.

Why would a person want to take me, a Nigerian, and put me in a category with a fellow from Japan, one from India, another from Mexico and one from Qatar, lumping us all into one box, seemingly not caring about the diversity present in our experiences?

Similarly, why would one want to group a family from rural Alabama, one from Northern Ireland and one in mountains of Scandanavia together and refer to them all as “white”, as though they all share fundamental things in common?

Now, in response to this, I have heard it said that there are things that “people of colour” have in common that are not present in “white” communities.

Such things, so I hear, include strong family/communal structures and wide varieties in foods.

This, truth be told, is a weird claim to make.

These things are no more unique to “POC” communities any more than they are absent from “white” ones.

I struggle, all things being equal, to think of reasons why anyone would want to group all “white” people in one corner and in another, group literally (literally) everybody else on the planet.

What things can be exclusively found in “POC” communities that are not genuinely part of shared human experiences?

But, apart from this, there is the Nietzsche issue, once more.

“POC”, then, becomes defined, quite literally, in opposition to “whiteness”.

As a term, it, therefore, draws its meaning and strength from “whiteness”.

Why might we desire to centre “whiteness” in this manner?

It is at this point in the conversation that I ask a genuine question—

Why might someone want to use the term People of Colour?

Perhaps there is some benefit in adopting it, but is it worth it?

Is it worth the ramifications of defining the entire world through a lens of “whiteness”?

It has been pointed out to me that POC is a useful term as it reclaims the pejorative term “coloured” and rehabilitates it for some positive purpose.

I wonder about this claim. But I cannot unpack it here.

I’m ultimately left with the question—

What might someone reasonably be talking about that would require them to refer to white people as a unique group, set apart from everybody else on the planet?

This, my friends, is a genuine question.

I’ve also been told that this is primarily an American phenomenon.

That is to say, in a nation like the US, where “whiteness” has a very strong historical and contemporary presence, it is useful to refer to some things relating to it with a sense of exclusivity, and, keeping this in mind, one could (carefully) homogenise the experiences of all people of colour.

This is convincing, I think.

Yet, where does it leave us?

Audre Lorde leaves us with the haunting reminder that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.

Truth be told, this sentiment from Lorde is one that I toss and turn over constantly, so I cannot unpack it here either.

It does remain worth thinking about.

Thank you for thinking with me.

vibes est vida.

I do not believe in making New Year’s resolutions.

My reasons are fairly simple— I know that in most cases, if a person has not lived up to their resolutions by, say, March of a New Year, they are fairly likely to write off the whole year as a failure and vow to start again next year.

I realised a long time ago that I’d rather not do this.

As an alternative, I prefer random life resolutions.

So, say I’m vibing about on a random Wednesday and I realise that an area of my life is not where I’d like it to be, or I realise that I’d like to take on a new side quest, or I realise that my thoughts and actions are not aligned in a way that I would like them to be on a particular issue.

Upon realising these things, I make it a point to make a random life resolution to turn things around on an uneventful Wednesday.

I don’t need to wait for any special dates or times of the year; I can always just get started when the thought arises.

To quote Martin Luther King Jr.: “The time is always right to do what’s right”.

Now, there is a higher level to this thought process, and it is this level that concerns us today.

Every so often, I imagine what my ideal self might be like.

A me who does— quite literally— everything I’ve ever said I would do/be all at once.

On some level, this me is impossible, as there are only so many hours in the day to do things, and I cannot conceivably do everything I would like to do (more on this later though).

This version of me drops all the personality traits that I find cumbersome in myself, he is clear-eyed and always locking in whenever he needs to, and he juggles everything he has to do perfectly.

Impossible to achieve? Perhaps.

Possible to pretend? Just maybe.

It all starts with a simple question—

What if you pretended to be your ideal self for a day?

This is not an exercise in changing one’s life; it is instead a simple move to see what one’s life could be like for a short period of time.

I think that one thing that many people potentially fail to see is that nobody else is ever privy to your innermost thoughts.

This might seem obvious. You might say that no one obviously thinks that anyone can hear their inner thoughts.

And this is true, yet I think we sometimes act as though we think people can hear our inner thoughts.

Why do I say this? Well, picture this scene:

Suppose you’re at a party, and you’re feeling a bit shy, as you usually do.

Let’s assume you’re alone, and you don’t know anyone there.

Let’s also assume you, traditionally, do not like parties like this, and you’re not much of a dancer.

In such a situation, you can do as you naturally want to do— stand in a corner and not dance.

Or, you could go in the middle of the dance floor and dance your heart out, even if it’s embarrassing.

Which option do you think is more likely to occur?

I’d say that for most in this situation, option 1 is more likely.

But, why?

Nobody here knows you. Nobody here thinks you’re quiet or shy, because they don’t know you.

For all they know, you could be the most carefree person in the world, who dances proudly even as they dance horribly.

Nobody knows you. Yet, to your chagrin, you act as though they expect something from you. You act as though they expect you to be consistent with who you think you are (a shy person who does not dance).

You act as though they know what you’re thinking, and they know that if you were to randomly start dancing, it would contradict who you think you are.

You act as though they know all these things, yet they simply do not.

Perhaps this example does not resonate with anyone. In that case, let us move on.

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The idea here is that in pretending to be your ideal self for a day, you first need to get a conscious understanding of who you think you are at the moment.

We all need to, at different points in life and for different reasons, come to terms with who we really are, before accurately imagining who we could be.

But, in coming to terms with who you are, it is equally important to realise that most people probably don’t know who you are at a fundamental level.

Your friends and family, who presumably might know you the best, likely have their own selves and inner turmoil to live with.

They might be invested in your inner self, but not to the extent that you likely are.

So, if you choose to pretend to be your ideal self for a day, and it would mean dramatically changing many things about you, then just know that a majority of the humans on this planet will not know that you’re in the middle of this random life resolution.

Those closest to you might notice, especially if it dramatically changes your day-to-day behaviours.

Yet, since you would be acting as your ideal self, presumably, those closest to you would be happy, or at least, not opposed to, whatever changes you make.

If, however, they are vehemently opposed to what your ideal self looks like, that is a scenario that would require some soul searching for everyone involved. But I cannot dwell on this point here.

At this point, you might wonder—

Well, my ideal self is impossible because I don’t have enough time to do all the things I’d like to do. I cannot simply pretend to have more time.

This is likely true. Yet, Seneca enters the chat at this moment.

Seneca wants you to consider the possibility that those who say that life is short are mistaken— life is actually quite long, we just often waste a lot of the time we actually have.

We must take Seneca with a grain of salt on this issue, but I encourage us all to fight off the urge to list off all the exceptions to this simple view and focus on the view itself.

The question becomes: Are there certain things that you do with your time that you don’t particularly believe add anything good to your life?

If yes, what if you pretended to be someone who did not do those things, say, for a day, and instead filled that time with something epic?

Hypothetically, would that be possible?

Now, at this other point, you might be wondering—

Why pretend? Why not just be your ideal self?

Truth be told, asking someone to change their whole life (if they feel as though they need to do so) is a tall order.

It is often not as simple as deciding to do so, and there can be a lot of fear involved.

But, there is something fascinating about the almost childlike act of playing pretend.

In this case, pretending to be who you believe (or perhaps, just strongly think) you could be might be an interesting exercise.

Does the ideal version of you have incredible amounts of confidence?

Well, for a month, put yourself out there. Meet and talk to new people.

Might you fail? Might it be awkward?

Yes, and, yes.

But, confidence is not a guarantee of success. Confident people know that.

So, as it turns out, part of the role-playing experience might involve learning about the ups and downs of your ideal self.

Role-playing in this way might help demystify this version of you in a way that might be beneficial.

In other words, the ideal you will never be real as long as it is ideal. The only way to demystify the ideal you to is to live as this version of yourself from time to time.

Perhaps you believe that confident people have many things handed to them, but in role-playing, you realise that, although you have certainly made some successes that were previously inaccessible to you, life is still not perfect. This is a nice lesson to have.

Confident people still fail, still get shot down, still get rejected. But, when they win, they win in ways that might be new and interesting for you to experience. Knowing new forms of losing that are only accessible to your ideal self is a fascinating experience.

I cannot ask you to change your life tomorrow. I don’t know what exactly that conversation might look like.

But to try for a day— that seems doable.

So, what does the ideal you look like?

Are they an avid reader? Are they super fashionable? Super confident? More extroverted? More introverted? More iconic? Braver?

Well, tomorrow, just pretend.

It’s like playing adult as a child. Somehow, we all actually got here, to adulthood.

The link between playing and being is fascinating, and certainly worth holding on to, even as we age.

vibes est vida.

Between the months of January and May this year, I spent a lot of time reading.

On an average week, I read one book (give or take 200 pages), a few academic papers (give or take 20 pages each) and some excerpts of fairly dense 19th century philosophy texts (so, say, 40 pages of Marx or Hegel or Kant).

In other words, many words were thrown at me each week. And, to spice things up, not only was I required to read these texts, but each week I was required to generate questions which showcased thorough engagement with some of the denser passages, and I was constantly required to be able to speak on the themes of these works and eventually write papers on things I was drawn to.

I suppose the question then becomes— how did I manage this?

Or, to paraphrase the words of our title for the day—

How does one read a book a week?

Now, my friends, some of you might have noticed that this essay has a peculiar subtitle—

“The art of knowing thyself”.

You might be wondering what this has to do with the topic at hand, and that would be a fair question.

You see, unfortunately, I cannot actually give any advice on how to read a book a week, simply because my life at the moment is a bit peculiar, and I cannot reasonably expect anyone else to do things as I do (more on this later).

So, this is an essay providing some advice which is meant to get us all thinking about who we are and how we can become people who read more in our own contexts.

Yet, this sentence above is a little abstract, so let me flesh it out. I’ll begin by describing my own context.

I’m a PhD student at the moment.

Being a PhD student can mean many things to many people, but for me, it means that I more or less have nothing else to do except read things. The act of reading more or less makes up 80 percent of my life.

Reading things is pretty much my job, and I have few other responsibilities.

Hence, it would be unreasonable, as I suggested, to give tips on how to read more to people who have jobs, families or any other commitments which make reading more akin to an activity one tries to fit into a busy schedule.

Reading, for me, is not something I need to fit into my schedule, it is my schedule.

So, what could I say to anyone who hopes to fit reading into a busy life?

Well, I have one tiny piece of advice. It’s advice that is passed down to us from our old friend Socrates:

“Know Thyself!”

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To make sense of why this is necessary, allow me to tell you a story:

There I was. A master’s student Living in London— a truly magical city.

Yet, I had a problem.

I struggled to find time to focus on my reading.

So, I did what I thought made the most sense.

I looked up fun/aesthetically pleasing cafes and made plans to go to them and do my work.

My thought process was simple—

I’d wake up, get ready/dress up, go to a cafe, get some tea (so that I’d have a financial investment in this endeavour) and sit down to read.

So, I would do exactly that. Time and time again.

And, like clockwork, I would fail.

I’d often end up finding myself being strangely tired at these cafes and would end up derping around on my laptop and skimming through the pages of my physical books.

I never understood why. I was doing everything right.

I was getting ready in the morning, which was meant to give me motivation, and I was at aesthetically pleasing cafes. What could be more empowering to do work than that?

One thing I did not notice is that I was consistently getting most of my work done in the most unceremonious of ways— Sitting at my desk in my room, in my pyjamas, un-showered.

This reality did not properly dawn on me until one semester where I self-assigned Hannah Arendt’s On Violence to read, because it was germane to some research I was doing.

My plan was to read it at a cafe, but one morning, I woke up, and while still lying in bed, after doing my usual morning rituals (no further questions), I picked up the book and just started reading.

Surprisingly, a few hours had gone by, and before I knew it, I had read the whole thing cover to cover.

I was flabbergasted.

The answer had been so obvious.

I had been attempting to read in settings that seemed conducive to productivity.

I was attempting to get amped to read in contexts that worked super well for others but did not vibe with me.

I made a change that day.

And, these days, my reading set-up is fairly unglamorous.

It isn’t pretty enough for a day-in-the-life video, or a story post.

It’s me, dressed plainly, on my desk, locking in.

It’s so simple. And at the time, it seemed too simple.

Yet, I had to learn to know myself. As we all must.

Now, I tell this story because over the years, I have been in common spaces with colleagues who have their work out, attempting to be productive, and many times, they exclaim that they “never get enough work done when they’re here”.

The solution is simple.

Know thyself.

If here does not work, go elsewhere.

Even if the common area is a vibe, and it seems as though many people are getting tons of work done, if this has not been true to you, then know thyself.

Know thyself and leave.

If you always take a book to the beach (as some people I know do) and you know you never end up reading it (as some people I know do), and if you actually want to read the book, then let the beach be the beach, and read unglamorously, elsewhere.

Productivity and aesthetics needn’t go together.

If you know that you do wonderful work in pretty cafes, or in group settings, then, wonderful. Know thyself and do what works.

But search your feelings. If you know that you’re constantly doing things you think should work, or doing things that look like they should work, but are not in fact working, then know thyself. And do something else.

This is what it means to know thyself.

It is simple advice. Perhaps too simple.

So simple, maybe, that it needn’t be said.

And yet, I needed to hear it, back in the day.

Perhaps someone else does too.

vibes est vida.

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I would like to begin by doing something I hardly ever do— evoking the words of Mark Zuckerberg.

I don’t have an exact quote for this, but I recall seeing an interview where Zuckerberg talks about his reactions to the Social Network movie starring Jesse Eisenberg.

Zuckerberg says that one of the inaccurate things about the movie was that Eisenberg’s Zuckerberg made Facebook in part to impress girls and gain popularity.

In reality, Zuckerberg says, it seems as though Hollywood struggles to wrap its head around the idea that some people just love building things, and don’t need any further external motivation than that.

I found this to be an interesting thought.

There’s certainly quite a bit of truth to it. Getting paid for things is a vibe, and being admired is a’ight (as the kids say), but, there certainly is something to be said about people who simply create things because.

One of the most sensational things I’ve seen on TikTok lately is the story of a man who’s been creating a miniature model of the New York City skyline in his home, seemingly just for the love of the game.

It’s an incredibly impressive feat and, although he’s gotten tons of praise and admiration, and although the model he built will likely end up on display somewhere for many more people to see, we could still ask the (potentially redundant) question— why did he build this?

This train of thought leads us neatly into our question for the day~

Why do artists need to create?

As you might have noticed, there is an unstated premise here, which we can frame as a question— Do artists need to create?

This is a tricky question, which could be the subject of a different essay.

So, for now, let us take it as a given that yes, artists need to create. And now we can ask— well, why?

I was thinking of this question recently because my short musical Prism was released last week (available to listen to wherever you listen to music, by the way).

And, the process of writing, workshopping and eventually recording Prism (available to listen to wherever you listen to music, by the way), was certainly one of the most time-consuming resource-intensive side quests I’ve been on in a while.

During the busiest points of my last semester in school, I found myself going straight from class into a practice room with my sheet music to work on vocal parts with some of the sensational singers who workshopped the music with me.

On one particularly tiring day, as I was organising my music, I wondered to myself— why am I doing this?

Additional thoughts included—

“Certainly, no one’s asking me to do this”.

“I hardly doubt it’s going to make any money”.

“I’m not even sure that anyone’s actually going to listen to it”.

I caught myself thinking these thoughts and, as I tend to do, I then proceeded to think some more about the fact that I was thinking these things.

This was all interesting because my views on the more public-facing parts of being a musician have changed over the years in interesting ways.

There was a time, way back when, when I was opposed to performing because I didn’t see the need for an audience to observe my music.

I eventually moved on from this view, and developed a fairly interesting (at least, I think it’s interesting) philosophy regarding the vulnerability and intimacy that comes with being perceived while performing. This would actually be a super cool thing to talk about (for another day).

But, shortly after I exited my “I’m-opposed-to-performing” phase, I entered my “hmm-now-I-want-to-release-music” phase.

When I first started releasing music, I knew from the get-go that I was never going to be mainstream pop-ish. That’s just not what I write.

So, I embraced the reality that most people probably won’t exactly blast my acapella choral arrangement of The Lord Is Good to Me (From Disney’s Melody Time) while they’re out on a run or going for a drive.

I knew that some people would probably find some joy in the music I release, but it’ll never be a large number. And I had no qualms with that.

Yet, Prism (available to listen to wherever you listen to music, by the way) was different.

I found myself really— really wanting people to hear it.

Not only that, but, because I wrote it with musical theatre things in mind, it’s the kind of album that’d be wonderful (I think) to deeply listen to and hear how all the themes connect across the songs.

So, if the question plaguing me was— why am I doing this? The answer, for the first time perhaps, was— So people will listen! So, people will like it!

And yet, despite the truth of this statement for me, I realised that something more fundamental was going on.

And that is, simply, I just needed to release this—

I needed to release it so that it could exist.

Sometimes, when you love something, all you desire is for it to be okay. For it to exist, simply.

Sometimes, yes, one desires to possess something that they love. One desires to hold it tight and never let go.

But other times, one just wants it to be.

One lets it go not with any hopes that it returns; maybe, not even with a desire that it returns, but with a hope that it runs free.

And with this, I learned how all these thoughts fit together.

Prism (available to listen to wherever you listen to music, by the way) will never be free, will never truly exist, will never be, until it is perceived by other people. Until it is experienced outside my head and outside my heart.

Yes, the German idealists (we can throw Fichte and Hegel into this camp) would certainly agree that one can only be when one is observed by another. But this is a story for another day.

The point is, Prism (available to listen to wherever you listen to music, by the way) must be experienced in order for it to truly be.

While writing and recording the album, there were a few instances where the incredible vocalists I worked with picked up on things that I actually had not intended. In those moments, I imagined Prism (available to listen to wherever you listen to music, by the way) free. I imagined Prism (available to listen to wherever you listen to music, by the way) happy. I imagined Prism (available to listen to wherever you listen to music, by the way) as more than what I had in mind for it. And that was beautiful.

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Epilogue: Some wisdom from bell hooks

(I’m 6’9 by the way)1

Behold, some wisdom from bell hooks, which is relevant in many contexts, including ours at the moment:

“The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others”.

The first step of learning to love is giving up the desire for domination.

One consistent thing which I have believed ever since I started releasing my own music is the idea that once a piece of music of mine is out there, my thoughts on what it means becomes one opinion in the sea of many— not more valid than anyone else’s.

I don’t really believe that the fact that I wrote something gives me any special insights into what it means, once it’s been released into the world.

I, like anyone else who experiences the art I create, simply have an opinion.

Prism (available to listen to wherever you listen to music, by the way), which purposefully has a lot of unanswered questions in the story, is the embodiment of this belief.

I really do hope you’ll consider listening to it.

Did I mention that it’s available to listen to wherever you listen to music, by the way?

vibes est vida.

I used to have a friend (let’s call her T) who, whenever she got drunk (or at least, whenever I was around while she was drunk), she’d inevitably always blurt out the phrase: “I’m sooo drunk!”

Now, here’s the thing. As some of you know, I don’t drink alcohol, and I’ve never been drunk.

(I also can’t drive, so my abstinence in this area can’t even provide the social function of having me be a designated driver, but that’s besides the point.)

Anyways, one of the most entertaining elements of this lifestyle on my part is being around my friends when they get drunk.

It’s a strange experience, when it’s not charming and occasionally funny.

Now, I don’t know if that gag about how different kinds of alcohol get a person drunk in vastly different ways from How I Met Your Mother is accurate, but I’ve certainly seen a few varieties of drunkenness.

And, naturally, I sometimes attempt to theorise what might really be going on with someone when they emerge as a particular kind of drunk.

With that in mind, what I’m about to say will sound conspiracy theory-y. So, bear with me.

Whenever T would declare that she was so drunk, I’d always be a little sceptical. It was suspicious.

Surely, I would think, if she were so drunk, we’d all see it, and she wouldn’t need to announce it, no?

But at the same time, if she no longer had her wits about her, then it’s not inconceivable that she was just blurting out that sentence without really knowing what she was saying.

Yet, I happen to know many things about T.

Her desire to belong.

Her desire to be wanted.

Her desire to be popular which typically ended up pushing many people away.

This is how she was while sober, and so I wondered about her drunken refrain— was it all a ruse?

What if she was never really that drunk, but instead was sober enough to know that if she asserted her drunkenness, then in the future, everyone would remember those evenings as “the night that T got super drunk”.

This way, T would be immortalised in the stories we’d tell.

Entire evenings, entire events would be marked by her.

We’d tell stories about a particular evening, and in trying to remind everyone what evening it was, we’d have to say, “Remember? We were at that place and T got super drunk!”

Now, this is all speculation on my part.

Complete, utter speculation.

But, truth be told, it is not inconceivable.

In the kindest way possible, as someone who, at one time, really did care for T, I wouldn’t put it past her to do this.

Once again, her desire to be desired was one of her defining traits, unfortunately, at the time.

I think back on this sometimes, and it makes me wonder—

What does it mean to live an interesting life?

This is a fascinating question which, apparently, seems to be fairly relevant these days.

If you’re like me, you’ve seen the odd TikTok and Substack essay here and there, which gives advice on how to make it on these apps.

Some of these posts rather bluntly suggest that a crucial step in all this is actually being interesting.

You can post twice a day if you’d like, you can be consistent if you’d like, but if you yourself are not “interesting”, then it will be a waste of time.

Now, prima facie, this advice might not be entirely accurate.

After all, some of the most followed people on TikTok aren’t particularly interesting.

We know this because their fame tends to be built around very short lip-sync videos, but on the rare occasions when they find themselves in front of a podcast mic, we all collectively sigh.

But I suppose, for someone just starting out on one of these apps, being interesting is probably good advice for “making it”.

Yet, we are faced with the obvious question— what does it mean to be interesting?

Well, you, dear reader, are you interesting?

This might be a difficult question, so let’s try another:

Are your friends interesting?

Are they really? Or are they just your friends?

As the Scriptures say, love covers a multitude of sins. That is to say, where there is love, there is the overlooking of shortcomings.

In other words, could it be that you just love your friends so much that you might not be able to tell that they’re potentially fairly uninteresting?

Is this harsh? Perhaps.

But nonetheless, this is an interesting question (although, whether or not it is worth asking is tbd at the moment.)

It is interesting because the human mind truly is a marvellous and tricky thing.

In my days, I have seen a few romantic relationships which seem to exist purely due to inertia— sometimes you just get used to being with someone, so you don’t even quite know if you still like them. They’re familiar; they’re safe, so it feels like feelings are still strong, when in reality, the well has run dry.

In every such instance I’ve observed, a breakup has happened eventually, and the debrief always confirms that inertia did, indeed, fuel the relationship, not love.

This, however, is a conversation for another time. I only bring it up here to showcase that sometimes, your feelings towards a person might be clouded by the comfort or familiarity they bring you.

Of course, this, in itself, is not a bad thing at all (although it certainly could become one, depending on the circumstances.)

But the existence of this phenomenon means that yes, it is possible for a person to love their friends deeply, and also not find them very interesting.

And, in a tragic turn of fate, the same might be true of oneself as well.

You might love yourself, and I hope you do, but do you find yourself interesting?

Now, this essay is supposedly about what it means to live an interesting life.

As you might have noticed at this point, we have not made any progress whatsoever in figuring out what that means.

I instead made us all go through this tangent about friendship and self-reflection, but I did so for a reason.

The moment I asked if your friends were interesting, what came to mind?

Did you think about how your friends make you feel?

Or, random facts you know about them?

Or, how much fun you have together?

Or, something else?

This has all been leading up to the very obvious question—

What does it mean to be interesting?

You know, for some reason, I do not think that this question, “what does it mean to be interesting?” is the same as our main question, “what does it mean to live an interesting life?”.

People on the internet, as we have seen, encourage us all to become interesting, but what does it mean?

Well-rounded, perhaps? Well-spoken? Well-travelled? Well-read? Well-dressed?

Do these things make a person interesting?

And, do interesting people automatically have interesting lives?

Can a person live an interesting life and be uninteresting? Can a person be extremely interesting and yet live what some, including you, might consider to be a very boring life?

To that matter, what is the opposite of interesting? Is it boring, as I implied two lines ago? Or is it something else?

I fear that these questions might be slipping through my fingers.

So, alright.

Let us switch gears for a moment.

Authenticity.

Perhaps to be interesting is to be authentic.

Here, I quote two prominent moral philosophers who have had a great impact (for better or worse) on the world today— Friedrich Nietzsche and Captain Raymond Holt.

Become who you are!

— Friedrich Nietzsche.

Every time someone steps up and says who they truly are, the world becomes a better, more interesting place.

— Captain Raymond Holt.

Is the key, then, to living an interesting life, to being interesting, simply being authentic? Simply being who you are?

If this is true, then it would mean that everyone is interesting by nature, but some people just have not come into their own yet and expressed this truth.

I think I agree with this.

Yet, we all sometimes colloquially suggest that there are some people who “we should not have made famous”.

That is to say, some people who received clout then showed us all who they were, and the internet collectively sighed.

Should you be who you are if who you are is a terrible person? Or, dare I say, an uninteresting person?

We make memes about this sometimes.

Imagine the worst person you know at therapy right now being told that they need to be more confident in who they are. People cower at the thought of such a thing.

So, is being interesting simply choosing authenticity?

At this point, I think of that great poem, Pink Pony Club by Chappell Roan.

Consider the dreamer in that story, who desires to escape from Tennessee and vibe with the vibes over in California, against her mother’s wishes.

Does the dreamer become interesting only if she takes the leap and leaves Tennessee behind? Or does the very act of dreaming make a person interesting, regardless of what they do with their dreams?

If the latter is true, we then have to ask— do we all dream?

Are we all dreamers?

Should we be?

To paraphrase Brian from Family Guy—

They say shoot for the stars, but if everyone did that, there would be nobody left here on earth.

Epilogue— why did I write this?

My friends, I had a thought in mind when I began this essay.

In this original thought, we were never going to answer the titular question, but we were going to move towards it.

Yet, after writing a few lines, I decided to see what would happen if I went against my better judgment and pursued every new thought that sprang up, leap-frogging from one question to the other.

As I anticipated, the end result was many questions, strange thoughts and implications which are bleak from one angle and quite hopeful from another.

In other words, my friends, this truly, truly, earns the title of being called a

vibes est vida.

Growing up, I went to a private primary school in Abuja, Nigeria, my home.

This was an interesting experience, for many reasons, all of which would probably warrant different essays at some point in the future.

But one of the strangest parts of this was that my family was not particularly wealthy at the time.

I was able to go to this private (and, in its own way, kind of bougie) primary school because my parents believed in the power of a good education, and if there was anything worth spending money on, it would be that.

The downside for me, as a child, was that I was constantly around kids who had more than me—More toys, more games, more fancy foods, more stories of trips abroad, more stories about Disney Channel shows (we didn’t have the Disney Channel growing up— that cost extra).

But, through it all, my father always reminded us that at the end of the day, wealthy or not, everyone at that school paid the same fees and earned a spot there.

Even if we all took different paths, and lived different lives outside of class, the reality was that within those walls, we were all equals.

Now, much has changed since my simple days wearing my school uniform and staring up at the ceiling fans during breaks because I liked being antisocial.

My world has expanded, and I’ve seen many things and met many fascinating people.

More relevant to this essay— I’ve found myself in many places where, judging from my background (and perhaps my ancestry), one could say that I had no business existing in.

Places where, one could say, I didn’t belong.

Places which were not made for me.

Yet, truth be told, this way of thinking never felt natural to me, and I never really understood it.

Impostor Syndrome.

My introduction to impostor syndrome was similar to my introduction to stage fright.

Many moons ago, also in primary school, I was cast in a play (I have no idea how this happened).

I remember feeling very nonchalant about it, after all, it was just a matter of memorising some words and then saying them in front of people. “What’s the big deal?”, I reasoned.

During a rehearsal one day, however, a friend of mine (my co-star) expressed that she was nervous, because she had stage fright.

I was bewildered by this. I had never heard this term before.

I was about to ask what it meant, but from context clues and good-old etymology, I was able to piece things together pretty quickly (big brain moves).

A fear of being on stage?

A fear of speaking in public?

The existence of these things had never occurred to me before.

I was fascinated by this and wanted to see what would happen when I eventually went up on that stage and said my lines in front of parents and much older students.

Now, I fear I have to move on from this story for today. But, spoiler alert, I ended up vibing so hard with public speaking that I took up competitive public speaking for two years during my undergrad (and became a nationally-ranked public speaker). But this is lore for another day.

The point of this tangent is to say that, upon hearing about impostor syndrome for the first time, I was equally befuddled.

A colleague of mine once expressed disdain at the fact that we were at an institution (a university) that “was not built for us”.

This, or some variation of it, has been at the heart of conversations surrounding impostor syndrome, which I’ve come across over the years.

And, personally, I still sometimes struggle to understand what this all means.

I currently attend an Ivy League institution, after finishing my last degree at a pretty prestigious (at least in certain circles) UK university.

Additionally, for a variety of reasons, I’ve walked the streets of Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard and a bunch of other old, awe-inducing places, and I’m typically too busy reading plaques and checking out cool buildings to consider the thought that these places “might not have been made for me”.

There is a slight tint of nihilism here, which will ground our thoughts as we continue.

Because I often think, indeed, Oxford was not built for me. But is this a moral issue, or merely a descriptive one?

At this moment, I’m typing on a laptop. This laptop was not built for me.

This, however, is not a moral failing on anyone’s part.

The inventor of the computer did not have me in mind, nor did the inventor of macOS or the Safari Browser. Neither did the creator of Substack or TikTok, or really anything, for that matter.

If I care not about these things, why would I worry about buildings, institutions or even nations?

Now, you might say (and rightfully so) that this analogy falls flat upon closer scrutiny.

You might say that I’m being absurd here, because obviously none of these things had me in mind; that would be impossible.

Instead, the issue here is that some of these institutions went out of their way at their inception to exclude people who look like me from their walls, their conversations, their entire worlds.

This is the historic reality which I am faced with when I exist in these places. They were not made to include people like me.

I understand this. Yet, perhaps it is the nihilist within me speaking, but I still do not see the relevance.

Many things in the world today exist with tampered histories weighing them down.

It is a serious and complicated question to wonder what is to be done about this.

I tend to struggle to see why I should care on a personal level (more about larger societal currents in a moment) that an institution was not built for me.

Of course, if a particular institution is currently, in this day and age, being needlessly exclusionary, then that is a different conversation.

But being haunted by ghosts of the past as I walk through so-called-hallowed halls does not sound particularly interesting to me.

If the long-dead founders of a particular university really have a problem with me living, learning and existing within the grounds of their sacred space, they’re more than welcome to come and remove me. But I fear they cannot, for they are dead.

I think that the problem of using history in this way is that we centre problems which (literally) have no solution.

Even if a particular institution were to dedicate 80 percent of its endowment to enrolling previously excluded students tuition-free, it would not change the fact that the university started as an exclusionary place.

This move might help, might be welcome, might be a step in a wonderful direction, but the past cannot be changed— the past can never be changed— so why centre it in such a powerful way?

Now, there is an obvious answer to this— because the past matters!

Institutions which have historically been exclusionary still exhibit the same traits, so, in looking to the past, we can more clearly see what they are doing in the present.

I agree with this. Yet, what does this mean on an individual level?

Does it mean that we must forever be haunted by the ghosts of dead people who did not like us?

One of the lesser-known parts of being a good nihilist, in my view, is that one develops a fairly interesting relationship with history.

History remains an important part of one’s life, but one gets to decide what history means for the present. One can choose to ignore history if they so please, one might even choose to rewrite it to serve their current purposes.

I understand that this can be a jarring thing to consider. Willingly re-writing one’s own history sounds sacrilegious. And it can be. On another day, we can discuss why/how one might want to do this.

For now, here is a simple thought to entertain.

Consider Bojack Horseman.

Bojack constantly does terrible things and excuses them by referencing his truly traumatic childhood.

His history matters. His childhood was terrible.

Yet, what role does this play in his present/future?

What role ought it play?

Are we slaves to our history? Always at the mercy of where we came from, or can we, at times, simply choose otherwise?

I can— and do — keep history in mind and use it to uncover the failings in the modern day of certain institutions, but while I do that, why would I let the past weigh me down on a personal level?

Why centre the old dead people who didn’t like me, as opposed to centring the more recently-dead people who fought for me to exist in these places?

I might not have been part of the original plan, but if I find myself somewhere, I’m going to make it my beach (this is wordplay, because I don’t curse).

There are many reasons impostor syndrome is strange to me.

My somewhat warped sense of identity (where my identity markers matter very little to me on a personal level) likely plays a huge role.

— this is also a wonderful lore drop for some other day —

But, I think that the faulty nihilistic analogy from earlier still has some merit.

Nothing, in the grand scheme of things, was made for anyone. Not in a fundamental sense, anyway.

Sure, we can say that an institution, at its founding, was made to accept very specific kinds of people.

But all of those specific people are as long gone as the ancient beards who made these rules.

The people who exist today who bear a passing resemblance to the original “acceptable” people only have that— a passing resemblance.

These places were not made for them either.

They were made for no one; nothing is made for anyone, not in the grand cosmic sense of things.

This might be an un-intuitive thought.

“What about systemic issues?”, you might ask. “What about”, once more, “taking history seriously?”, you might also ask.

Wonderful questions.

In response, I’ll say that there are some stances that one takes on a personal level, and others that probably should be taken on a larger, political scale. Yet, the personal is the political. Indeed, this is a difficult issue to untangle. And we must untangle it some other day.

The point is, as I walk out the door and into the world, and as I find myself in places, doing random side quests, history is on my mind, as are the systems at play. I hold them tight. And then I fold them up into a nice little pocket square and keep them in my breast pocket for safekeeping. I take a deep breath, then walk out there and make all places I vibe around my beach. No one deserves to be here, so we all get to make things ours.

vibes est vida.

If you’re like me, then your feed on Substack lately has been filled with conversations around plagiarism.

More specifically, the plagiarism of Maalvika~ ~, who stole an essay pretty much verbatim in some places from Katie ~ ~, another author here.

~~ Now, to Maalvika and Katie [I hope you don’t mind if I address you casually with your first names], if either of you ever read this essay, I hope you take it with the spirit in which it was written. I also hope that throughout this essay, said spirit will be clearly on display ~~

Based on how this story found its way to you, you might have encountered one or all of the following ideas:

1. Maalvika, a top bestseller on Substack, is a serial plagiarist who makes money off stealing from others.

2. Maalvika, who recently wrote a piece on Compression Culture that blew up here, actually plagiarised the entire thing.

3. Maalvika is not, in fact, a real human being, and is some combination of a team of bots created by Substack to siphon money away from real writers.

So, here’s the thing.

I do not know Maalvika personally.

She shows up on my TikTok fyp often, and I follow her there, but I do not know her, nor have I ever spoken to her.

Here’s another thing: I deeply dislike plagiarism.

I’m a PhD student, and my current degree is my fourth one, so I’ve been academia-ing for long enough to know how serious this is.

And, on Substack, where people pour their souls into their words, it’s especially despicable to do this.

I understand the seriousness of all this. I know how disrespectful and sometimes morally reprehensible it can be to pass someone else’s ideas off as your own.

I say all this because, with this in mind, I want to defend Maalvika in this essay.

Now, this is partly a social experiment on my part. I don’t know if it’s possible to have delicate conversations like these on the internet, but I’m deeply willing to try.

I want to defend Maalvika for one simple reason—

As of right now— as of 5:15 pm on the 31st of July, 2025, she is being accused of far too many things that we simply do not know to be true.

I have read too many things that seem to suggest that we are not all privy to the same information. And that is not true. We are all watching this unfold in real time.

As of right now, here’s what we know for sure:

About a year ago, Maalvika plagiarised from Katie. She did— this is true.

Maalvika’s ‘apology’ at the time wasn’t quite an apology, and certainly left much to be desired, but the plagiarised essay in question was taken down.

Now, Katie does say in her essay that upon glancing through Maalvika’s posts, she found “entire paragraphs lifted from other writers, including Noah Smith”.

Maalvika, in her response to all this, says her plagiarism was a one-time thing that she regrets doing, but all her other work is hers.

I cannot stress this enough, as of right now, this is all we know to be true.

The amount and the quality of the hate thrown upon Maalvika, given that this is all we know, is disturbing.

People are saying things that (*) as of right now (*) just are not true.

They say that most of her work here is plagiarised— we don’t know that to be true.

They say that her famous essay on Compression Culture was all stolen from someone else— we don’t know that to be true.

They say she isn’t an actual human being— we definitely know that not to be true.

As I write this sentence, it is 5:20 pm, on July 31st, 2025.

As of right now, none of these things are known to be true.

I keep noting the time and date as a constant refrain here because it’s possible that as soon as I publish this, everything will change and we will get new information that proves this entire essay wrong.

It is possible that the day you read these words (maybe tomorrow, maybe a week from now), new information will come out, definitely proving that Maalvika plagiarised everything she’s ever written on Substack.

If that is the case, then I will be wrong. And I have no qualms with that.

All we can do, all we can ever hope to do, is try to do our best in each moment with the information that we have.

In this moment, at 5:24 pm on July 31st, 2025, all we know is that a person here plagiarised an essay (perhaps more). She was wrong to do that, and she deserves criticism.

Criticism, but not hate.

I really cannot stress how uncomfortable it has been to read the things being said about this person.

A lot of people seem to be taking this opportunity to throw expletives and slurs at someone just for the heck of it.

Putting those aside, this is a strange case study into how rumours spread.

Here’s a scene I’ve seen multiple times at this point:

A person restacks Maalvika’s Compression Culture essay.

Another person comments, saying that Maalvika is a serial plagiarist and that the entire essay was stolen.

The initial person apologises for ever liking the essay.

There are also droves of people emerging, suggesting that their “intuition” told them that something was off with the Compression Culture essay, and now they know why— it was stolen and/or AI-generated.

I would like to reiterate that as of 5:28 pm on the 31st of July, 2025, none of this is confirmed to be true.

Of course, everyone seems to assume Maalvika is lying.

I do wish Katie had provided one other example from what she’s noticed in Maalvika’s work, because that would have been helpful in the chaos.

So that, at the very least, criticism can be directed at the right places.

So people could pinpoint the issues surrounding Maalvika’s failures here, instead of bulldozing everything about her.

I keep seeing comments that explicitly say that “multiple authors have accused her of plagiarism”. And, genuinely, genuinely, I have only seen Katie’s essay. I only know of one.

People keep asking who Maalvika plagiarised the Compression Culture essay from, so they can give praise to the original author. But the replies usually stop there.

Maalvika says that that particular essay is written in her own words. No one has emerged to say that it was stolen from them. What are we to make of this?

Now, I’d like to respond to some possible objections to everything I’ve written so far.

1. You might say, “If Maalvika did it once, who’s to say she hasn’t done it a thousand times and lied about it”?

Fair point. Yet, in the absence of any evidence, what are we to do?

She could very well be lying. She could be (as I’ve seen some people on Substack say) a “high-functioning sociopath”, but why would I think this to be true? Because she did something admittedly really dumb?

I fear that if we lower the bar of labelling people as high-functioning sociopaths to that level, we are courting disaster for ourselves.

And, by the way, that sociopath comment was truly disturbing to see.

This is a small part of the hate-wave that I really do not think is warranted based on everything we know as of right now, 5:37 pm on the 31st of July, 2025.

And this is why I say that it would be helpful in this moment to pinpoint her failures instead of bulldozing her entire being.

I don’t quite know how referring to her as “a high-functioning sociopath” and “functionally illiterate” will help us out here.

2. Another objection: you might ask, “Why am I siding with Maalvika instead of Katie, who was clearly the one who was wronged here?”.

To that, I say that I do side with Katie. She was objectively the one who was wronged here. Maalvika plagiarised her work.

That said, I’d push back on the premise of that claim.

This essay only defends Maalvika as a secondary point.

Its main point here is to show the problems of smelling blood in the water, pouncing, and in the process, introducing unverified claims and truly problematic comments into the atmosphere.

Maalvika has been insulted on her intelligence, her accomplishments, her writing style, her looks (there have been many things said about her looks, none of which are germane, in my view, to this conversation).

It seems worth asking a simple question here— what if she’s telling the truth?

What if all this is a story of someone who did something bad, and fairly dumb once, and tried (albeit insufficiently) to address it at the time?

What if that’s all this is?

Is the hate worth it?

I noticed there was a campaign to get her banned from LinkedIn, which I think has now worked.

But, I mean, why?

If she’s a bot, then sure. But she’s not. So how does getting her banned from LinkedIn help anything?

I see suggestions that she should be reported to her school, with implications that her standing in her department should be affected by this.

And, truth be told, that really is a bit strange.

3. Another objection: You might say, “Well clearly she’s guilty, because she’s deleting comments and blocking people”.

So, here’s the thing. I share my thoughts on TikTok, and most of the time, my listeners and I simply roll happily with vibes.

Sometimes, though, I talk about Africa. And those conversations occasionally ruffle some feathers.

I do get the odd racist (or, at the very least, deeply problematic) comment here and there, and when a video does well, you get lots and lots of people throwing many words at you.

I tend to watch it all happen and silently observe, because that is what works well for me, but I cannot blame anyone for how they choose to handle the swarm of comments that one gets when their words blow up on the internet.

It can be a lot. I mean, a lot. Even when it’s positive.

4. I suppose the final, related, objection might be, “Okay, but what if it is true? What if she has stolen from multiple people and has been making money off doing it”?

Well, if that is the case, this essay still stands on its own.

The fact of the matter is that as of right now— as of right now — we simply don’t know.

It just seems reasonable, and slightly considerate, to err on the side of caution (compassion?).

Showering this much hate on someone over a mistake does not seem worth it (even if we don’t buy that it was a mistake, I think we all know from experience that mistakes come in different shapes and sizes).

Maybe she’s exactly as guilty as everyone says, but this is about a bit more than just her.

This impulse to latch on to rumours and jump upon a hate-train, while saying some really (really) unsettling things about a human being, needs to be approached with caution.

“But”, you might say, “Why have you avoided the last objection? What if she’s really guilty, though?”

To that I’d say, sure. She’d deserve to lose all she’s gained here if she’s as guilty as some say.

She has already lost a lot of trust and will have to deal with that.

But if she’s as guilty as some say, would she then deserve the hate?

Well, on this point, I must personally defer to my temperament and moral attachments.

I have experienced (intellectually and otherwise) enough instances of hate to know that I don’t want to put it into the world. But this is a personal choice on my part.

If she turns out to be as guilty as everyone says, then of course, do whatever feels right for you in response.

But, as of right now, as of 6:17 pm on the 31st of July in 2025, this is the story of a person who plagiarised. It was wrong, and it was stupid.

As we keep the wrongness and the stupidity in mind, let us also keep the person in mind.

Long ago, before I began music-ing and philosophy-ing, my first love was art.

I loved to draw and could do it for hours at a time. I have very fond memories of those experiences. I did, however, have one odd quirk relating to my art.

Sometimes, after spending hours drawing something, I’d briefly stare at my finished artwork before tearing it up and throwing it away.

My sister once asked me why I did this, and I mentioned that destroying my art motivated me to create more.

This was a cute sentiment, and looking back at it, it was kind of dumb. However, that aside, I think of something interesting whenever I remember this little quirk—

There’s beauty in letting moments die.

Today, I was at Tottenham Court Road in London and walked into the popular immersive art exhibition open to the public. The exhibition is an open space with screens on the walls and ceilings that create a wonderful visual experience, as the images are sharp and super captivating.

Today’s images included cherry blossom trees, and it was an absolute vibe to see the gorgeous pink leaves floating around the walls and ceiling in bright, beautiful colours. As I stared at this, I was drawn to the number of people recording this experience on their phones.

Not too long ago, I was at a gallery and had the pleasure of seeing Van Gogh’s Starry Night in person, along with some of Monet’s water lily paintings.

Similarly, the number of people who walked up the Starry Night just to take a photo of it, or to take a photo in front of it, was certainly a lot more than I would’ve expected.

It was even more so with Monet’s water lilies, which sometimes span the length of a wall. I suppose that makes them the perfect background for a nice photo?

I find all this extremely interesting.

I had a similar thought during my first 4th of July firework show while living in the US. I was curious about all the people recording the fireworks on their phones.

To my mind, fireworks seem infinitely less captivating on a small screen, and I felt the same way about these cherry blossoms.

I typically think that if I wanted to see a video of fireworks or cool cherry blossoms on my phone, YouTube certainly has lovely 4K videos to look at, so why would I not want to make the most of these moments by experiencing them in real time, with my eyes?

Similarly, photos of paintings by Van Gogh and Monet are widespread across the internet. If one wants to see a photo of Starry Night, why not just Google it?

Why stand before the actual brush strokes of a painting you admire and still see it mostly through a screen?

Perhaps there is a conversation here about there being many ways to enjoy and experience art.

Perhaps it is all relative. There is no wrong way to appreciate art.

You could be like me, who naturally feels the desire to stand still and stare awkwardly at paintings I like for many (many) minutes.

Or, you could simply walk up to a painting you like, take a photo, and be on your way.

Now, I could provide an apologia [a formal defence] for my view here, and suggest why I think it might be better than this particular alternative, but that will be a conversation for another day.

Our simple thought for today is—

Let moments die; kill them if you have to.

Imagine a time when moments had such great power over us, so much so that those who could preserve and recreate them were respected as great artists.

After all, what is art if not the immortalisation of the mortal, glimpses of the infinite in the temporary?

What I mean is, imagine a time when moments passed us by, and we could do nothing but let this happen.

A time when, if you saw something mesmerising, you could only stare at it in awe, and when it passed, it passed.

This was undoubtedly a time of great tragedy—Imagine, for example, never being able to see your loved ones in photographs or videos after they pass away.

However, maybe, in addition to the tragedy, there was also a deep beauty here.

Perhaps not having such photographs meant we could only see our loved ones when we closed our eyes and looked inwards— when we stared deep into our own souls and found pieces of those we loved there.

Maybe there was beauty in that we only had imperfect pieces and memories, as opposed to the perfect representations that technology allows us to capture these days.

Now, don’t get me wrong, there is also great beauty in being able to capture some of the most important moments in our lives, and it’s undoubtedly meaningful to be able to immortalise the smiles of those we love forever. But that would be an essay for another day.

Back to my point about artists.

Before we could all do things like take photos and stream music whenever we wanted to, it’s interesting to me how people who could do this were (mostly) exclusively artists.

We’d go to artists to have our imaginations sparked, relive some of our greatest memories, and transport ourselves to different worlds.

Their paintings would show us worlds we never could have imagined; their songs would transport us to different times and realities, and their words would help us look within ourselves.

Modern artists still do this, of course, but I can’t help but wonder how different it was back when it was impossible to take some of these things into our own hands.

Nowadays, we’re all artists in the sense that we all have the power to capture moments for ourselves and each other.

With this power comes some responsibility— The responsibility to let some moments die.

Perhaps this is nothing more than the common sentiment of ‘living in the moment’— the idea that we should be present and experience things without feeling the need to pick up our phones and immortalise what’s happening.

I’m less interested in living in the moment and more fascinated by the connotations surrounding dying in the moment.

Or, more specifically, letting the moments die— killing them if we have to (yes, this is a Star Wars reference).

Moments once held great power over us. If we missed them, there was no solace, no salvation.

Nowadays, I think it’s possible that our triumph over the moment can lead to what I can only describe as an imbalance of vibes— a thing that happens when the vibes are off.

In the days when moments had all the power, it was tragic in many ways, as I mentioned earlier. But perhaps our triumph over the moment has birthed new tragedies. Perhaps we’re now tasked with finding balance.

Killing the moment refers to the act of actively letting moments pass. Letting them be lost forever.

The act of experiencing something incredible while being conscious that, if you do not pull out your phone, this thing will be gone forever, yet still choosing to let this be so.

Perhaps immortality is an illusion, and our power to preserve things makes us unable to look inward and understand what we really are— finite beings occasionally blessed with fleeting moments of the eternal.

And maybe, maybe, these fleeting moments would be more meaningful if we actually let them flee.

Epilogue.

One day, many years ago, I had the pleasure (the absolute pleasure) of going to a Tommy Emmanuel concert.

Tommy Emmanuel is one of the most virtuosic guitar players alive today. Hands down.

He also happens to be one of my favourite musicians ever.

His song Angelina, which he adorably wrote for his daughter, is one of the most beautiful pieces of solo guitar music I have ever heard.

But anyway, the moment Tommy Emmanuel walked onto that stage, I felt the urge to take out my phone.

I had a strange inner conversation with myself.

“Take out my phone to do what?” I wondered.

Record the concert?

But why? There are countless videos of his live performances (I know, I’ve watched most of them).

Why would I want one to look at on my phone?

Would it be special for some reason because it was mine?

Would I lose a part of the experience if I recorded absolutely nothing?

I did ultimately take my phone out.

I took one blurry photo of him walking on stage.

When I think back to that day, I remember very little.

I don’t remember what my seat was like, what I wore, what the auditorium looked like, what the lighting was doing, or what his guitars looked like. I don’t even remember most of the songs he played.

All I know for sure is that when he played Angelina, I almost wept.

vibes est vida.