Author: Rebecca Toh

Solo dinner in Tokyo, January 2024

I don’t know if it’s just me but I always get a warm and fuzzy feeling in my gut whenever I stumble upon an interesting blog written by someone who is living their small unknown complex life God-knows-where. I feel connected by our common humanity. We’ll never meet, but I can picture them sitting on their sofa writing on their laptop or using the computer in their kitchen, writing when the kids are asleep, writing in the morning, writing when the first snowfall arrives, writing about their new job, about losing their job, about moving to a new city, about this film they just watched, about their husband who died a few years ago. A blog is a small and beautiful thing and I am grateful it exists.

The other day I was on social media and I felt another wave of resentment pour over me. It was almost tinted with rage. I don’t like how the very structure of social media fundamentally changes the way we write and share our feelings. People say we can decide how we want to use social media, but that doesn’t change the fact that Instagram, to use an example, is built to manipulate us and our dopamine levels. When we enter the world of social media, it’s like walking into a casino that is determined to get us addicted. We become altered simply by being in these places and become a twisted, more anxious, more egotistical version of ourselves. Not only that, everywhere we look, there is a branding or marketing message targeting our backs. It’s annoying. Buy this. Follow us. Like and share. We have a vulnerable story to share with you today because actually this is an ad. Or. Because being vulnerable is cool nowadays! At the very least it makes you trust us more.

You can have a good experience on social media if you are very intentional and mindful. There are accounts I really enjoy on social media and I have found a lot of inspiration there. But I still believe the corrosive effects of social media outweigh its good, because I know for a fact that social media apps CAN be re-designed to be less addictive and less manipulative, and they are not because of the ultra-capitalistic world we live in. I’m not sure who or what I’m angry at or if it’s even anger I feel. Maybe it’s sadness instead.

All that to say, it’s easier to breathe and write here. The energy here is so much cleaner.

I turned off my phone today at 5pm and it’s now 11.13pm. I haven’t turned it back on. This simple action cuts me off from the world. It feels so good somehow. I guess I’m just in this phase of my life where I am tired of almost everything that is happening in the “mainstream world”. And of course, more than a little angry at all the injustice and destruction and consumerism and myopia that so many people in this matrix we call the world are caught up in, including myself at the best of times.

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Discovered midnight.pub recently and it’s been very fun to fall into a world of disembodied thoughts by random strangers from all over the world.

ooh.directory is another gem and I’ve already found a few interesting blogs there.

Where do I start?

I’m reading a lot again. Cormac McCarthy, Donna Tartt, Milan Kundera, David Foster Wallace. I am so hungry for words. I want to read ten books at once but it’s impossible. But I’m impatient about getting blown away by a good book.

TV bulletin. I think The Bear is exceptionally well-written. It makes me want to talk to Christopher Storer, understand how he created it. But watching yet another interview of Cormac McCarthy or Donna Tartt, not easy to find at all BTW because they are both rather reclusive, I am reminded of the futility of trying to get to know a writer. My basic curiosity compels me to ask, who wrote this masterpiece? Please come out and explain yourself to me?? But knowing the details of their life or even how they created the work doesn’t add anything to my experience of their art. It adds no depth, no pathos, no transcendental understanding. Maybe every artist’s work must be complete on its own.

Anyway, Cormac McCarthy:

“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.”

― from “Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West”

And song of the day: Let Down by Radiohead. Heard on The Bear.

I’ll be there for awhile.

Please join me as I, on my 11th year as a photographer, attempt to make a photobook that’s also a book about photography. I’ll be documenting the whole process on a new Ghost newsletter, while taking the opportunity to try out Ghost and see if I like it. It’s actually been enjoyable so far, even though I haven’t learned how to customise many things over there yet.

So this post is really to say that I will be there most of the time, so if you would like to follow me and see what I’m mostly up to this year, you know what to do!

I’ll still be writing here, of course, because this is home.

1. When your ego dissolves, the pain might not go away, but the suffering does.
2. Empathy means: We don’t have to understand; we just have to believe.
3. I thought fiction was about understanding, now I realise it’s about believing.
4. You don’t have to ‘find your passion’, but if passion finds you then it is the most wonderful thing on earth.
5. To be a better photographer, be like an animal – be driven by something primal, raw, pure, or even unhinged.
6. Only in silence can we discern what is important and what is not.
7. When we liberate someone, sometimes we end up oppressing someone else.
8. Holding two opposite thoughts at the same time is essential to the development of our soul.
9. Your biggest flaw cannot be the thing that most defines you.
10. You can be judged, but you cannot really be defined.
11. True freedom is always one hair’s breadth away, so close as to be invisible to the eye. It’s annoying and exhilarating at the same time.
12. My favorite writing is made up of the simplest language.
13. I want to move through the world collecting, digesting and reforming ideas and feelings and stories and then presenting them back to you (and myself) in the form of a gift.
14. I am always happier right before my first bite of the McSpicy burger than after I finish it. The McSpicy burger is just such a delicious IDEA.
15. If you fail at loving, you are allowed to try again as many times as you want.
16. The more I move my body, the better my brain functions.
17. Lesson #546 from skateboarding: If you practice enough at the edge of your competence, you are not gonna fall much.
18. You don’t have to learn how to waste time. You knew how to do that as a kid. Be a kid again.
19. Does it really matter what I’m doing, as long as I’m enjoying myself?
20. Writing is easy if I don’t think too highly about myself.
21. The kids in my life add a substantial amount of love, laughter, wonder, and meaning to my life. My ambition is to successfully grow old so I can endure their antics for as long as I can.
22. The moment I fell in love with photography again was when I realised how little I knew.
23. I am slowly turning into an ENFP (?!!) because every day I want to spend more and more time with the people I love.

Bonus quote (my favorite of the year): “No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.” – Aesop

I have this feeling that I want to spend all my time reading and writing and falling into worlds not like my own. It’s 2:30 in the morning and I need to wake up early later to let the painters in. But all I can think about is how I want to finish this Haruki Murakami book and then read some Raymond Carver and maybe even some Orhan Pamuk.

I don’t want to become someone who is too sure about things. I want to be a friend of doubt, just like Anthony Bourdain was. He said, “Life is complicated. It’s filled with nuance. It’s unsatisfying… If I believe in anything, it is doubt. The root cause of all life’s problems is looking for a simple fucking answer.”

So no simple fucking answers. I’m fine with that.

2023 has been quite surprising. I have streamlined my commitments – cutting and letting go – to create more ‘open time’ in 2024 to do some personal projects I’ve been wanting to do. This is an exploratory and learning phase, and I’m feeling good and excited.

I ended the year having learned some major lessons about life and existence, which I will outline in this year’s ’23 thoughts and lessons from 2023′. I’ll update with the link once I’ve written it. If you’re interested you can read last year’s ’22 thoughts and lessons from 2022′ here.

I’m in the process of discarding my skin/mask and becoming the person I was always meant to be. I think it’s got something to do with growing older and going to Paris and talking to the astrologer who lives in London – who said I’d have a big change of identity in mid-2024… or just being fucking sick of not being the person I was always meant to be. But it’d be a mistake to say I’m changing. No. I’m just being revealed. I think ‘change’ is a thing of the world – the result of space interacting with time (I’m making this up). Change is physics. But to be revealed, that’s metaphysical. Again I’m making things up. But I’m feeling real good about this.