The perpetual feeling of homesickness, of feeling like we belong somewhere else, where the heart is fuller, the air clearer, the colors more vivid…
Can we be homesick for a place we’ve never known?
Author: Rebecca Toh
the future is written
Have you heard about GPT-3 yet? The language-generating AI? The AI that “writes”?
Here’s a screenplay it wrote, given this prompt –
Below is a screenplay for a film-noir hard boiled detective story by Raymond Chandler about the boy wizard Harry Potter:
“Scene: A small dingy office, early morning, furniture of the Salvation Army store variety. Sordid atmosphere. Harry Potter, in ratty tweed suit, unpressed shirt, and unshined shoes, sits behind the desk looking haggard, rumpled, and embittered. In one corner of the office a torn shade rattles at the wind gusts outside. Harry has one long index finger on the butt of a .38 and he broods over a photograph. The photograph shows a gorgeous blonde wearing an evening gown. She is holding a cocktail in one hand and looking pensively at a cigarette in the other. A tear adorns her cheek. Harry looks at her for a long moment, sighs, then puts his gun down and stands.”
— GPT-3
I’m kinda scared.
the elegant joy of black and white photography, part 2
real feeling
It’s not enough to do things, but I must do them with real feeling, with heart. Sometimes I catch myself coasting, nodding without real feeling, falling into things I don’t care for. But it’s all a waste of time.
Invest your entire being into the things you care about and you no longer need to wonder about the meaning of life. Meaning becomes the air you breathe — a basic, unquestionable element of life.
you want it darker, we kill the flame
the time experiment
For a day, an hour, or maybe just ten minutes, try this: Pretend time doesn’t exist, and live, for once, without the notions of “past” or “future”. Throw away your to-do lists, schedules, goals, worries, and live only in the deep now.
How does it feel?
Do you like how it makes you feel?
暗暗生出幼嫩的黑
Become a learning machine
Exactly what I want to dedicate my life to doing.
The best way to learn? Read. (Of course it’s not as simple as only reading — the article goes into more details — but the foundation is built on reading. A lot.)
“I just sit in my office and read all day.”
—Warren Buffet
Mother Teresa
“If I look at the mass I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.”
—Mother Teresa
Dark to light
The silence at 5.30am is hynotizing.
I love it.
I’ve been waking up early these days and using the time to read and write and think through some conundrums in my life, and to organise the parts that feel out of place, misaligned. It’s been working surprisingly well.
It’s not just the waking up early, but the reading and the writing. Especially the writing. I’ve been dumping all my thoughts on a page, asking myself questions and answering them, picking apart my own logic, organising and reorganising my thoughts.
It’s funny. When I edit my sentences and paragraphs, I realise I’m also editing my thoughts. For me, thinking is writing—they’re one. I’ve gone long periods without thinking through writing. How did I manage to make the decisions I made? I have no idea.
But here I am, thinking+writing again. And it works. I love it.
When the day awakens, it turns from dark to light outside. Writing brings me through the same process—the dark confusion turns into clarity as I write and rewrite. I’m forced to see the fallacies and muddiness of my thoughts, forced to confront my pretensions, my insecurities, my tendencies to do what is easiest or most commonly accepted.
It’s meditation in action.
Hard but rewarding.