Deconstruction

What exactly is the thing that’s been hindering me from living my life to the fullest? No matter what I pursue, there still seems to be a gap between me and the so-called reality, and the feeling of lack still persists even after the glorious moment of satisfaction. My life is nothing but an artifact that consists of symbols, linguistic traps, and ideologies, which unfortunately, consistently escape my awareness as though they are the fish in a broken net. Since the day I was born, my mind was thus shaped according to the context in which it arose, and from which it emerged as a personalized entity that thinks freedom is a necessity rather than something that needs to be earned. So, I become complacent, bravely charging towards my life in desperate need for validations, labels, symbols. Throughout my time, I have been learning to wisely label myself as that which I am not, and people have also been labeling myself as that which they think I am. Only by doing that, my life is imbued with meaning as I ceaselessly strive to become the labels which I have stamped on myself. The ‘me’ right now has lost touch with humanity, even alienated from itself in exchange for the opportunity to ceaselessly becoming, and it makes me wonder whether God rewards me for becoming someone I am not, or I will be damned to hell simply because I am who I am without evolving. I have made myself a product, rather than a human being. One of the perks of being a ‘humanly product’ is that I am never static; there will always be rooms for improvements for the sake of increasing my market potential. People around me seem to encourage that, they teach me how to be productive so I can run faster in the hamster wheel, they teach me how to think critically so that I never actually think, they teach me how to transcend so that I can temporarily relieve before venturing into a new way of becoming. All my life, I have been becoming, becoming, becoming. Life is meaningless if I do not become, to become what? I ask myself. I do not know the answer. I am a product is nonetheless true. I am a product that works more to consume, and in turn giving me a booster so that I can continue to produce. This is my life, I think. Accepting the ideology without retreating, I have heard people who claim themselves living life to the fullest, but essentially what they do is that they filter out which aspect of life they want to live on, which in turn reinforces their conception of life. I do not want to lie to myself this way, but I think, this is how my life will be, anyway. One way to avoid this nauseating letter is to tell myself that I am evolving, I am achieving, I am becoming, and I am a truly human being. So I can die merely existing, but not living. If I live as if I will die, I will definitely be a purposeless flower, blossoming without direction, without becoming this, and without becoming that. The world is suffocating precisely because it is flooded with meaning and purpose, only they are not ours.

As I engage with myself, with complete honesty and brutality, there is an aspect of me who is always rushing to be loved, a hard-to-admit phenomenon that is grounded not on unconditionality, but a fragmented expectation that my lack will one day be fulfilled. Then, I start to ask myself, is that true love? It is always not so easy to judge, sometimes it is and sometimes it is not. But what is commonly true is that we are always “first” broken, in the sense that loneliness, expectations, desires, ego always take hold of us and prevail, and from that state we hope the shadow will be taken away and our boredom will eventually be transformed into ecstasy. It is an intricate matter, I cannot say for sure, I might be entirely wrong, but the fact that our “broken self” which we feel so attached with, constantly craves for the “other half”, are we sure that we do it out of pureness? Or it is just another excuse that we will never be whole by our own efforts, and we need someone to do it for us. Why can’t we be whole first then only seek out for love? That kind of love must be so pure, so serene. We define love based on our faulty sense of self, is that love unconditional? Or it is insecurity and greed pretending something they are not? I am so curious. Always curious. It is so hard to admit, but I have to, I do not want a life so full of deceptions, I want a life full of depth even at the expense of a lonely death. “I love you” is a contradiction, how can an insecure “I” loves? “love you” must then be purer than “I love you” I assume.

I’m not going to lay down some grand logical arguments to prove this wrong, but it seems to me that it has always been guarded by falsities rather than truth. How so, the intention of adhering to a certain pattern is nonetheless a modification of the context, a certain word change that proves to be utterly naïve and illogical. What one is doing is merely replacing a word with another one and they think they are on a different path. However, the word is certainly not the thing, and what the path being taken is certainly just a reflection of the meaning of the word. People give so much significance to the word and they think from the word, not that which the word leads. In this case, it seems to me that the word has the power to alter reality, because reality is nowhere to be found when we are trapped in our preconceived ideas of what the word entails. People do not realize this fact and they go on believing that the word is not what they worship, but that which it represents. But people cannot be convinced of the represented if they do not first form the representation using the word, so it is a loop where people will never get to acknowledge the represented because that which is used to represent is being mindlessly and unconsciously exploited and mistaken for truth.

Why do we suffer the way we do? What is the meaning of life? And why does life, at times, burden us so much with nonsense, to the point where the thought of giving it up sometimes seems to be the last and desperate resort? I have been pondering these questions for quite a long time, and many letters have been written to shed light on these matters. However, this is the second one I wish to share with you, especially my loved ones. We always question things outside of us, as if our “self” is the static entity around which all else revolves. By “outside”, I also mean our thoughts, memories, intentions, ambitions, and the like, Yet. we seldom ask to whom these things arise. We seem to assume that our “self” persists while everything else is in constant flux. And it rarely occurs to us to question whether our usually perceived “self” is nothing more than these things. We are afraid to dig deep into who we are, and we never seem to bother to ask the question. From my personal opinion, the reason for this is that the more we peel the onion, we might not be able to find who we are, because it is nothing. To me, achieving the state of nothingness is the God-given goal one can attain in this life because everyone is perpetually trying to become something. We persist in our pursuits, striving just to remain unconscious of who we really are. Striving offers us purpose, something to cling to, allowing us to identify and assert that we are someone with a distinct specialty, and people can differentiate us from others. No matter which spectrum we are in, be it self-destruction or self-help, the common thread is that we continually mold ourselves to a particular pattern, hoping to present a “better” version of ourselves to the world, presentation at this point, precedes peacefulness and truth, and it seems to haunt humanity throughout its history. Unfortunately, we often stop short at presenting ourselves morally and socially, and we find it the ultimate goal of life, we seldom delve deep, we are fixated on patterns, and what these patterns can offer. It no longer matters to me whether we are socially successful in this world. What matters now is the hope that humanity can progress without killing each other, without pushing other people into abyss just the sake of climbing that fucking illusional ladder. Can we progress without the need for identifications? As if we will perish without them. Can we progress without the fear of acknowledging that we are nothing and nothing? I am not suggesting isolation from the world. I am just questioning the motive behind all these endeavors. Can we be successful but remain non-competitive? Can we be rich without being mean? Can we be true without resorting to pretension? Can we strive without confining ourselves to the domain which we are striving for? Can we be religious without resorting to fanaticism, supremacism, and egotistical tactics? Instead of the blind progress we obsess over, let’s strive for global peace. In a world where we can love each other sincerely. How? By doing things without attachment, recognizing that these actions do not in any way define who we are but are simply things we do, consequently, despite changes and sabotages by others, we can always maintain inner peace, because it is no longer a public statement to who we are. When people ask about the meaning of life? I think the question is absolutely misleading. How can we have meaning, which is tremendously static, to something so versatile like life? I assume life has no meaning; it will have no meaning if we do not know who we are. Without understanding ourselves, what we identify with will always perish, and we will inevitably strive again to find something else until we die. In the end, people might condemn this as an utter bullshit, but, I guess, for them, inner peace and happiness are never the priorities.

It is often unusual that something hidden inside me wants to break out of its prison of impotence constituted by self-ignorance and the overall disappointment on humanity as a whole. I have slowly come to realize that we are all too self-absorbed; our human nature prompts us to shine, and yet we shine in the most self-aggrandizing way. Our way of aggrandizing ourselves is often disguised as self-realization, and what worries me the most is that wars and conflicts happen because of the blurred boundary between genuine self-realization and self-deception. The technological advancement has given us a platform to show who we are, and yet we choose to show to the world who we want to become. Everything is both curated and narrated to the extent that truth is lost, and egotism prevails. A question arises: whether we find solace only in the sea of deceptions and temporary gratifications, or whether we search for peace not to transcend the hustles and bustles of our daily mundane lives, but to escape from the fact that we are born empty and alone. On a gross level, we want to be respected, so we appear to be as successful as we could be. We delve into the realm of pretense and deceit in order to survive and impress. For those with a more refined and subtle ego, they delve into the intellectual/philosophical realm just to convince themselves that they are a different person, a person who pursues a more superior path than others. No matter which situation we find ourselves in, there is one thing in common, which is that we do things just to appear as someone we are not, and along the way, how many precious things have we lost simply because we have changed for the “better”? I guess, in the end, we are just craving creatures — individuals who don’t know what should be done to have a life worth dying for.

Since God-Knows when, I have many things to say, and yet do not know where to begin. Though miserable to admit, we all live in a same story, the story has endowed us with strength to combat the excruciating uncertainty that constantly gnaws at the back of our mind, and in return we gave away our most precious garland, which is our “self”. Upon encountering this, many people would deem it to be fallacious, and it is something only people with nothing better to do would think about, they claim that they are living authentically and would go on to live their life to the fullest, so they claim. The journey is utterly lonely, I have to confess; by being honest to myself, and by looking at things as they are, I have realized that everything I have done so far or would have done in the future, is nothing but a pitiful tactic I used/use to escape from the disturbing noise that tries to push me into an abyss where I will forever be cursed by nothingness, I am nothing and a nobody, the abyss echoes through and from my being. And the things I have done, or will ever do are actually serving no purpose except for positing myself as something more than myself. And I have to admit, the trap of good and evil has bothered us for a long time, we are crippled by the story given by our society, we have been fed by the narrative of “you can do it” rather than “you should do it” in the past, and from the moment we buy into the narrative, we are forever trapped in the hedonic treadmill where the reality of being successful is something near and yet so far, because we do not know what it means for us to be truly successful, because we do not know life, life for us is nothing but a series of pursuits of some distant and delusional notion of success that we will never be satisfied. Success in this case, is parasitic and contagious, it loses its meaning, because we have condemned it to be. I have absolutely no concern over my defined success on either spiritual or societal level, I am worried that I am escaping from myself in the name of improving myself, to improve what? To improve based on what society and self-help gurus want me to be? To be forever progressive, efficient, adventurous, resourceful, spiritual, religious, so that I can be a better rat in their respective circle? Or should I face myself as it is, and proceed from there? People I know, and people that I will know in the future, including myself, have scarce chance of escaping the unconscious narrative that has been forcefully fed to us, we “work hard” to know who we are, not the other way around, we are pressured by the deluge of toxic positivity that demands us to be better and better so that we can serve better, so that we can contribute better to society that we hope would in turn reciprocate and give us less torments, we are also pressured by the incessant noises telling us that we should at least arrive at a better “self” when we die, so that we can die in peace. I think we all want to be chained in a golden shackle rather than an iron one, so that we do not have to think why we are chained in the first place, I think, overall, this is human’s common destiny.

We usually tend to make ourselves as a particular means to an end, rather an end in itself. How so? In retrospect, everything we have done in the name of improving ourselves has often resorted to a trick to make ourselves known to God, to others, and particularly to “ourselves”. In a personal context, we seemingly improve ourselves to make ourselves feel good, if not, our “self” is rendered useless. We often stop at the “feeling good” part, but, the good feelings which do not come from self-realisation are not whole, thus, we are always trapped in the hedonic treadmill. In a social context, we seemingly improve ourselves in order to make a public display that we are not useless, and is contributing to the social structure imposed on us since we are born. In a religious context, we do good deeds to avoid bad “karma”, and to have a good afterlife, and especially, to enjoy in a totally different dimension where celestial beings are our friends, instead of the nasty humanity that we see today. We can’t make ourselves known to God, God has already known us. We do not need to bother to be known to others, because they are also distracted to make themselves known to others. We can’t make ourselves feel good, unless we know who we are. All our conscious/subconscious efforts to be a better person is always rooted in some future expectations that might or might not be causally relevant to what we want to do. And people still wonder why the improvements made from learning all the toxic positivity and chicken soups (which is so prevalent now) have often been momentary. We should ask ourselves, what if, there’s nothing here to witness our “improvement”, no one whatsoever, including ourselves which is so influenced by society, do we still want to be someone that we aspire to be? Right now?

If you are alone, please be utterly alone. Don’t make it as a cover-up to hide that you hate being alone. More often than not, the fact that no one is here for us makes us think that we do not need other people to fulfill us, but that is not the case, people will still ignore us: and that will not change. For those people who feel alone, be proud of it, it is what you are, live and play with it. Do not act like you can be all alone when in fact you could not. This is self-deception, not something worth being proud of. If you are dirty, be dirty, don’t act like you are pure. If you are unhappy, be unhappy, don’t act like you are in joy. If you are confused, be confused, don’t act like you’ve got it all figured out. Sometimes it is not the negative aspects that make us suffer, we suffer because we want to become someone we are not, the escape only makes us more alienated than ever, from ourselves and the world.

We view social media as tools to reach and communicate with people, and through them, we hope that we can become more emotionally connected with others than before. However, a study has contradictorily shown that more time spent on social media was actually associated with more loneliness (Bonsaksen et al., 2023). According to Bekhet et al. (2008), loneliness refers to the subjective, upsetting sense of having a social connection to others that is missing or insufficient, indicating that ties with others are missing or inadequate. Moreover, this paradox persists as the public has widely included social media as a crucial part of their everyday lives (Boulianne, 2015; Chou et al., 2009). However, in this paper, I argue that it is not so much a paradox but rather a manifestation of how social media has changed how we interact with ourselves and others. To avoid over-generalizing social media as a whole, this paper takes Instagram as the prime subject for the argument. According to Lua (2023), Instagram has so far accumulated over 2 billion monthly active users; therefore, its influence on society as a whole cannot be underestimated because of its large spread of user population. The arguments will revolve around on dissecting the existing Instagram mechanism and how it affects users’ interaction with the world. In contrast, it will also touch a little on users’ psychological inclination caused by constant exposure to the use of social media. As we know it, Instagram consists of three major components: feeds, stories, and reels. These components have revolutionized the way we interact with the world, as well as communicate with others. All these involve a continuum that relies on users’ incessant scrolling. For example, the presentation of our feeds is the vertical scroll of static images and videos, and the presentation of reels is the vertical scroll of short videos designed to keep us entertained within our attention span. These mechanisms have tremendous effects on us and cannot be taken for granted. Firstly, I would like to establish a stark contrast between reality and the reality manufactured by the technological prowess of Instagram. In reality, everything we see has different degrees of interaction, be it with our friends, family, or even environment. Each encounter contributes to a distinct subjective experience because of the difference in the object of interaction and the environment in which we interact. For example, a dog that we interact with in our home is different from a stray dog we see on the street; the experience we have set both encounters apart as we are exposed to two different kinds of contexts; the first encounter may prompt us to feel loved due to the existing relationship between a pet and the owner, the latter may invoke a feeling of empathy as the dog is being abandoned and neglected. Whatever the examples may be, my point is that the world we live in right now is capable of contributing a genuine experience where we engage all our senses and mental faculties when dealing with a particular situation in the present. On the contrary, when the situation of both dogs is being translated to one of the feeds on Instagram, the genuine experience of the encounter diminishes as the feeds displayed on Instagram do not provide us with an understanding of the contexts; it is even more so when the feeds’ contents are of a distant past. Though depicted differently on the photographs (or reels), the lack of real-world interaction requires users to deliberately participate and resonate with the contents; it is possible only if it is all there is on the feeds of the user’s platform. However, the very nature of Instagram makes it very difficult to focus on one thing because we will soon be occupied by the following feeds (or reels) we will see. The consistency on the platform, where the richness of life is being reduced to standardized layouts and formats despite differences in contents, makes the interaction less genuine and realistic. Thus, it is logical to boldly assert that our real connection with the world lies in successful evocations of our subjective feelings, and it can only happen when we are exposed to the real world in which we are physically and emotionally involved. Yes, one may counter my argument by saying that our encounters with both the feeds and the real world depend on our visual capacity and they must be more or less the same in terms of the subjective connection between ourselves and what we encounter; however, the density of visual experience on social media is diluted by distance, time, and space, as well as the lack of context. On the contrary, visualization in the real world has all the necessities to appeal to us. What we encounter on Instagram is no longer a living fact but a representation beyond time and space. This phenomenon resembles what Debord (1967) discussed in his book, The Society of the Spectacle; in societies where modern production conditions prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into representation. Our constant exposure to representations on Instagram has changed how we interact with people; instead of engaging ourselves with their life, we observe them from afar with no understanding of the contexts whatsoever. When we do not feel with all of our senses and inner experiences and are numbed by the sameness on the social media platform, the lack of understanding and reciprocation rips us of genuine interaction that has been enabling us to connect with the world apart from ourselves. Instead, we feel more alienated than ever because everything is represented in the same manner that does not warrant our empathy for the situation. As Debord (1968) said, the current society, powered by technological advancement, eliminates geographical distance only to produce a new internal separation within us. That is why, as I argued, this is the reason why we are lonelier than ever. Not only

I came across with this phrase online, it is something like this… “I must work hard, because the things I want are expensive” I have come to realize that no matter what we do, be it striving for social status/fame, or even working hard to obtain the so-called first barrel of gold, our end goal is nonetheless the same, which is to be always happy, happy in the sense that we will be completely free of sorrows and conflicts that are mostly caused by the deficiency of what we desire (so we think). Most of us choose to gain the leverage of being ultimately happy by the same means, we strive for the tangibles according to what society has laid down for us, we modify ourselves to earn as much as possible, but at the same time, in the process of working hard towards achieving what we think can provide us with the bliss that we have always wanted; in reality, the outcome is often disappointing and is always incapable of giving us the long-lasting happiness that we long in the first place. So, the sentence above comes into place to justify our endless striving and it seems to imply the appropriateness of us wanting to spend in expensive things. First of all, I am not advocating the lying-flat culture where one is doing absolutely nothing nor am I advocating the obsession with gaining psychological security through compulsive working, what I want to do here is to question the attitude towards what we normally call “striving for a successful and wealthy life”. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to live a successful and wealthy life, but it is problematic when our desires are getting enlarged immeasurably, and that is why even we are living an above-average life, where all basic necessities are well taken of, we still feel the need to work harder and harder to achieve a higher level of success; and that so-called level of success is merely a state encompassed by expensive/extraneous things that we think we want. Ironically, we feel it is totally not okay to not work harder to achieve the never-will-get-achieved-state that we long, why is it that it will not be achieved? Because the moment when we are progressing towards the “goal”, our desires are also being simultaneously piled up by social influences, when we did get to that state, our piled-up desires prompt us to do more and more. But on the other hand, we feel it is totally okay to have our desires gone wild like horses on the grassland (what the fuck?). When people who have everything to stay alive and healthy and have an additional freedom to do what they please are lamenting about being poor, it is never because they are actually “poor”, they are indeed poor, poor not in terms of financial situation, but in terms of the emptiness of their heart that will only get satisfied by having more desires. The so-called successful figures often look down on people who are easily satisfied, they call them cowards for not getting out of their comfort zones, but it seems to me that people who are trapped in the loop of endlessly achieving and striving till the last day of their life are indeed the pitier ones. Because their life is all there is, without a sense of complete fulfillment. It all boils down to our negligence of the importance of our inner richness, and we end up buying happiness with money, and that’s it! That’s all we can do. I wonder how is it enough when the emptiness inside our heart is an endless devouring pit? How is our money gonna be enough when we spend to travel not just for the sake of expanding horizon, but to escape our boredom that will still stick with us even after our trips?! How is our money gonna be enough when we spend on beautifying our face and body, because we have nothing to offer on the inside?! How is our money gonna be enough when we spend not according to our own charisma, but social commercialization? And we think that’s what we want?! How is our money gonna be enough when we spend on eating fabulous foods that will eventually harm our body? And we do not even think of exercising our body?! How is our money gonna be enough when we spend on things that we think are normal, but extravagant to other?! How is our money gonna be enough when we numb ourselves with alcohol and nicotine, but not with silencing the mind with meditation?! How is our money gonna be enough when we spend on houses that will allocate more than a thousand people, but in fact there is only us who will live?! How is our money gonna be enough when we spend on one cloth that can feed a hundred poors? Our body is even disfigured (due to excessive indulgence) to have worn that cloth?! Yes, we can all do these things, but please, it must come from a serene and tranquil heart that is filled with compassion and acute self-knowledge and awareness, if not, we are only some fancy walking-deads who think they have conquered life. When in fact, life is laughing at us for being so entangled with things that can’t be brought over when we die.