It’s not really hard to see why. There’s something admirable, almost enviable, about the capacity for a person to move towards their goals with tenacity and grit in the hope of realizing their wildest dreams. Most good things in life, especially in its later half, will come as a result of overcoming some kind of challenge. But at some level, this cultural expectation has become warped. The notion of “hard work” today seems to have left behind the actual concept of work as a means to an end, and rather become this weird romanticization of endless work as the end.

The Optimization Problem

It begins when we respect people who are putting in a lot in order to strive for something. It’s admirable to see someone want something and then drive themselves really hard for some time, “[xxx] needed to do [x thing] by [y time], and so they [studied]/[worked for] [4 hours]/[6 hours],/[11 hours]” and in this context the person being mentioned is doing it at peak, optimized efficiency and is racing to be first in their given context. The first to the moon, the first to commercialize a good idea, where even if they are working hard, their attention isn’t ever on the quantity of their work but rather whether or not they’re falling behind.

But the more that admiration gets repeated in the context of their quantity of work with quality as a given, this admiration begins to become respect for the process in itself, and then people see the process of exerting yourself as the desired result. Once this point has been reached, we stop really questioning people about whether they’re actually making more progress towards their objectives, simply because they seem to be spending more time.

We become more impressed by the idea that someone has done stuff for a certain amount of time, and focus is drawn away from what they actually did or whether there was a way to do all of what they did in substantially less time.

The message that becomes repeated to our kids and our peers is simply “work for longer” instead of “figure out how to work effectively.” Facing a roadblock, people are simply encouraged to “spend more time” on it and figure it out by sheer force of willpower instead of optimizing the processes involved.

And when people are just trying to spend more time doing things as opposed to doing this better, the whole idea of working a lot becomes self-defeating. The real reason you see these “admirable” people put in so many hours in one day is because of competition: they need to squeeze every hour from every day because they need to get stuff done faster than everybody else, as fast as possible or they face failure. This is why competitive arenas that prioritize being the first to finish, like business/entrepreneurship or military command during war have this culture at the highest level.

But no one is getting stuff done as fast as possible if they’re working painfully inefficiently. You’re just giving up more of your life and happiness compared to someone who does it faster than you. You’ve reached capacity and you become unable to do more. You’re still losing to people who are spending this much time but more effectively. Worse, you’re breaking even with people who are spending a lot less time on competing with you and developing more as a person, who will be better off in the long run. Once you hit this physical limit, the only step left is to optimize your workflow to earn more time: but nobody thinks about this because everyone just forgets to mention it.

And nobody thinks about it because they’re too busy working their pointless grind fantasy to have the time to think about how they could be doing it better.

What am I saying?

Am I suggesting that working hard is a bad thing? Not necessarily, because it’s a necessary evil to do most incredible things.

What is bad is unnecessarily working hard and long. There is no benefit to doing something the hard, slow, way except to learn that it’s wrong and that you should choose a better way. I don’t mean “hard, slow way” in the sense of a slower way that achieves your goals better by providing unique benefits through caution. I mean this in the sense of “I studied for the AP test by mindlessly reading my textbook front to pack seven times for ten hours a day and I remember absolutely nothing because my brain was turned off”, where slower is also, simultaneously, lesser for the same goal.

And then what really annoys me, is when people brag about the quantity of their unnecessarily convoluted work, when they haven’t actually done or finished anything. They think it’s impressive, but it’s more like pathetic. It’s one thing to work inefficiently and feel ashamed about it, and another to flaunt it like something to admire, because that’s what creates more people like this. It diminishes people who might have otherwise become both hard-working and efficient.

You might say that different people work differently. I mean, everybody probably has a different optimal mode or style of thinking and working; that’s natural. But the way you tackle a task isn’t like, an unchangeable constant. When you work, if it’s a kind of task you know you’re going to come back to over and over, you should be constantly thinking about how you could get this done just as well in less time and get back to living a life you want to live.

That’s uh, that’s the whole point of this article. I’m basically just complaining because in the words of PB&J co-writer tiantian, I’m a “sad complainy baby”. But I also think this is a valid sentiment to have about the world and the communities a person is in. That being said, if you feel personally offended by this, don’t take it too seriously. Unless you’re the kind of person I just described. Then maybe you should. But don’t take it personally.

I hope I wasn’t too annoying. This is probably rambly and probably disorganized because it’s a substack article. The point is the sentiment.

Signing out.

..Nope.

Interestingly, according to neurological research, dopamine is at its highest in anticipation of reward, not after you acquire the award itself. If some cue reliably predicts some future reward, dopamine spikes at that, not the actual award. That’s why we can feel amped up, optimistic about everything in life in the days leading up to a long-awaited event with promises of happiness and the realization of dreams, only to feel the familiar, creeping, existential fear of nothingness even hours after its end…only to perk back up at the next perceptual start of a new chapter of life, the trajectory towards, and anticipation of a new experience or award.

That seems, of course, to contradict many of our cultural narratives about what we need to be happy. We’re taught to model our behaviors after the student that gets into the top college, the successful, the wealthy, the strong, the doers, and the champions—because it’s only they who have attained the results of their desire: and the “idle dreamer” is ignored, sidelined, treated as a waste of time and space.** Confidence, ambition, resilience, discipline, restlessness and perfectionism are the best things that matter!

**The explanation for this—at least according to my gut—is that in a capitalist society whose culture is built on productivity and the accumulation of capital, it makes perfect sense that our cultural ideal of a successful human being is based upon output as a sole metric.

Of course, culture alone isn’t enough to overcome our biologically-wired tendency towards anticipation over actualization. Even if we’re taught to measure ourselves by the attainment of some award, the actual rewards we’re taught to seek are never final. They’re framed as stepping stones to the next one, so that we never feel truly satisfied with our outcomes—being outcomes—and simultaneously never recognize the engineering in the system, instead perceiving our discontent as merely due to not having attained the next big thing.

For example:

1. I need to make quarterfinals at this tournament to qualify to state.

2. I need to qualify to state so I can place well at state.

3. I need to place well at state and get other awards so I can have good extracurriculars to help me get into a good college.

4. I need to get into a good college so I can make connections and have a robust social position and a launching pad for getting into a good graduate school.

5. I need to get into a good graduate school so when I graduate, I can end up in a good entry-level job in a respectable field, that pays well.

6. I need a good entry-level job in a respectable field, that pays well so I can have a direction for career advancement.

7. I need to advance my career (*this is many steps combined to one) so I can have financial stability and material assets, and then I can meet a partner who is respectable.

8. I need financial stability and a respectable career so I can… (continue on indefinitely)

There isn’t really an end to this list—which was probably that which was recognized by Buddhists when they decided the path to enlightenment was the suspension of all desire, as the root of all suffering.

Every accomplishment in these lists are framed as a means to the next, and your unhappiness is merely explained by not having rounded out the list—you should’ve been a better capitalist!—which might just be impossible.

As much of a joke as it is culturally, or a tool for shock and awe, the almost poetic implication of the gradual release of the Epstein files is that even among the people who we’re taught to idolize and respect for their accomplishments—Presidents, billionaires, stars, and the “best of the best”—are performing the sickest acts of our time, confirming almost without doubt that their emotional lives are.. far from ideal..*

(*There seems to be an oddly strong correlation between success and pedophilia, and some explanations I’ve heard indicate it’s that because a relationship between a powerful adult and a child has the largest possible power asymmetry to exploit, the most extreme possible instance of exploitation that the insecure billionaire or actor wants to stroke their ego…which makes it especially desirable for them)

It highlights what we already know, which is that despite the extent to which we value success as a measure of human worth, the most successful among us aren’t really good people, or even satisfied people, or happy people.

But if not for success…then what do we live for? Because I write all this knowing full well that despite forswearing the emphasis upon the relentless pursuit of goals and the actualization of achievement, I’m just as complicit as anyone else (if not especially complicit) in all of that— am I a hypocrite? — and that I would be incredibly dejected in any kind of life without a constant drive to achievement, some venture that brings me social success, et cetera et cetera — all as seemingly valuable as the air and water which I breathe.

Well, despite mentioning Buddhism, perhaps because I’m not emotionally prepared enough to confront its conclusions.. I don’t think Nirvana has any role to play in my life. Dopamine still requires the anticipation of reward to be released, after all—idleness seems like a languid realm of stagnation and depression and all the things that spur the greatest existential panic in my soul. But it does frame my vision of what it means to be successful: the end-goal of life:

The title of this article, The Door-Place:

A potentially undeveloped thesis, that the meaning of life is

To live in a constant state of anticipation, where everything is reward potential—a state of exaltation in which every minute is imbued with universal meaning, among or at the head of a wider project of historical import—to sit at the nexus of existence, surrounded less by physical stimuli but by the metaphysical doors which await you upon every path, not closed but expanding, constantly in a swirling vortex of strings and futures around your person, grounded in the clouds, far away from any base; the evangelical missionary living in an almost-heaven of converging worlds, no final end or struggle but to live perpetually in both;

Does that sound convoluted, intangible, confusing, and like I’m insane?
That sounds just about right.

I guess I’ll think about it more—since this article was a kind of sit-down rant.

You can’t forget it. Together with the steady pattering of raindrops against your window, it makes my rainy days feel like the scent of a tired refresh, liquid life for the undergrowth, harkening us toward greener pastures to come.

But it isn’t raining anymore,

Because with the same sharpness of “Petrichor” or just plain rain, with every sunlit inhale,

I know for certain that now I am breathing Spring.

Over is the long, long night of winter, blacked out mornings and sunset afternoons, over is the bitter cold, over is fighting our ways up hills glazed over with ice, a freeze so biting that to look ahead in any direction was to invite tears, not of sadness but dried up pupils, yearning for their own “pupilchor”:

Now is rebirth, mornings beautiful again, and

Not with the warm oranges and flooding yellows, like mangoes, of the Autumn season that overcame the sky with an ebbing drowsy,

But with pinks, lime greens, violets, cherry blossoms and sky blues, the colors and smells of renewal.

In less than thirty days, it will be the Spring equinox—and hibernation will go into itself, leaving only the Awake.

The irony of building a Palace of Stories is that to see the final majesty of the whole, you must step back far from the beautiful minutiae you inscribed into each brick that built it.

You can appreciate its vastness or its detail, but never both at once.

Plain iced matcha (unsweetened): This one is kinda impossible to deem cause either you actually like matcha or you’re trying to reach peak performativity, meaning you’re either the lowest (0/10) or the highest (10/10). Either way you probably tell people “I just like it this way” and feel really good when you say that cause it makes people think of you as more serious and mature. I guess bro.

Iced matcha with oat milk: 8/10. There’s no reason to be getting your latte with oat milk unless you are lactose intolerant (and if you are, that’s lowkey sad) — if you’re getting your matcha with oat milk because it “tastes better”, you don’t actually think that. You’re literally just performative and want to feel better about yourself because you’re making a departure from the status quo, or like.. the standard iced matcha. You probably order a matcha to study in a coffee shop and pretend like the background noise helps you focus. Also, the fact that you’re willing to pay an extra dollar for oat milk (at most shops at least) shows that you’re actually committing to the bit, so at this point you’re genuinely just doing too much.

Iced matcha with almond milk: 4/10. You’re not necessarily performative, you’re just quirky. You probably had almond milk one time 3 years ago and now you swear by it. You probably don’t want to get whole milk either because you want to be different or because you’re lactose intolerant and say that oat milk is “too heavy” or “too sweet”.

Strawberry matcha: 10/10. You probably take pictures of your matcha and post it to a Clairo song.

Lavender matcha: 10/10. You don’t actually think this tastes good. You say you get it because it’s “calming” but you’re just getting it cause it’s purple. Extremely performative. Horrendous.

Warm matcha: This is kinda the same deal as the unsweetened matcha — you’re either actually really genuine or you’ve reached peak performativity, so it’s pretty much impossible to rate. You probably wear a quarter zip while you order this and sip it while reading a book or working on your computer. It makes you feel smart… and elegant I guess. No one orders a warm matcha casually, so everyone knows you deliberately ordered it for a specific reason. To seem more approachable? Idk. You’re weird. Like, really weird. The only exception is if you’re an Asian mom or something and genuinely only like hot matcha. Shoutout to my mom.

Matcha lemonade: you’re not performative you’re just really fucking weird

Extra sweet matcha: 7/10. You don’t actually like matcha, but on the bright side, you embrace the fact that you don’t like it instead of ordering it unsweetened and choking it down for the sake of seeming cool. If you get this and tell people you got unsweetened matcha you’re 11/10 performative. Horrific.

Ceremonial-grade matcha: 1/10. You’re cool. You actually like matcha. BUT if you correct people about matcha or like to trash on any matcha that isn’t as green as neon algae, you’re annoying. Like, really annoying.

Weird flavor matcha (banana, blueberry, etc): 6/10. I feel like you’re neutral for the most part but err on the side of more performative. I have mixed feelings about this because I think that these matchas are really good, but at the same time you can’t really taste the matcha in them which means that a lot of performative people default to these. I’ll let you get away with it though since I’m pretty pro-customization.

One of the ironic truths about life is that nobody really knows what’s happening. Everybody thinks they do, and some people act like they do, but that’s exactly how you know that they have no clue. I think that among the causes, there are two pretty fun ones we can talk about:

1. Everybody’s always stuck thinking about what was and what will be and never about what is, so they tend to miss the really obvious truth sitting right in front of their noses—a lot more often than they’d think.

2. Most things people think that they know, are really just things that they heard from other people, so we’re all pretty susceptible to bullshit. It does seem pretty interesting that the people that most idealistically believe in the competence of whoever’s in charge is usually considered the least experienced in an environment, regardless of what it is. The seasoned ones are all disillusioned.

I guess for some people it might feel disconcerting that the people who are the best at things/running the world/in general are all pretty clueless (as if reading the news or being in school shouldn’t have already given you that feeling a long time ago), but at least for me it really does fill me with this incredible sense of agency—even when I have no clue what the hell is going on, in the worst case scenario nobody else does either, and in the best case scenario I seem to have a slightly closer clue than everyone else! So I’m never very far from where I need to be.

The world is pretty weird and if you look really closely the highest level isn’t really all that different from the lowest. When I was a kid, I always interpreted the “all of you can do anything” lectures to my elementary school classes as like, adults trying to pump us up with unrealistic optimism and encouraging kids to aim way above their ability — but I’ve come to think they’re probably right, and that the notion of being able to do anything is less of an optimistic narrative and more of a cynical one… because real idiots and random, unexceptional people can do really impressive things by being lucky, being confident, and trying hard enough.

After spending all of my life (minus a few months in China) living on the East Coast of America, with the span of a decade spent in my small town of ~30k people named Southington, Connecticut, I was moving again: this time, to the West Coast city of Bellevue, in Washington, that I had never even heard of until I was informed about moving just a month prior.

I had known that we were planning to move for a year by that point, but I’d never expected that it would actually happen, and especially not to a place so far away. In February, I had spent a series of weeks touring houses in the Greenwich and Westport areas of Connecticut, but I had felt even that was too far away from home. My dreams for high school still stayed firmly rooted in the town I had called home for so long, with blind hope that my (violent) protests would wear down my parents, that we could stay, that I could live the Summer with the people I’d known since pre-kindergarten— until that hope was shattered by the final decision in May 2024.

A year and a half after that day, I am firmly committed to the idea that moving was the best thing that had ever happened to me. Every one of the eighteen months that have followed the plane ride that brought me to the West Coast is directly a consequence of that moment—and I want to explore its impact, sequentially, from the weeks leading up to it, to how it’s shaped my high school experience and offered me unique perspectives other people have yet to learn.

T-7 Days: The Shell Falls Away

A week before I left, the thoughts I was having were simple:

Now that I was leaving Connecticut behind—of all the things I had done in the last ten years, how much would I be able to take with me up to Washington?

Because to be honest, I had wasted so much time in Connecticut being afraid. I had felt Southington had a very hierarchal sense of social standing, and in everything I had done, I had carried the weight of that with me. As much as I didn’t want to admit it—my reputation was incredibly important to me, probably as a result of the perpetual environment of comparison I was raised in (Although not as intense as most people’s experiences, Chinese culture is incredibly deep-rooted). And so for a decade, I maintained it:

I made friends I found boring and stupid to try and get their “popularities” to rub off on me by association—I played sports I had no interest in to maintain some image of being athletic—I avoided membership in clubs in which I had interest, left chess club shortly after winning the school tournament because the other members were “nerds” that I didn’t want to be associated with, even as I spent hours on chess.com in my own time and traveled to Washington Square Park in NYC on my birthday to play in its park (even though that passion would burn out and I would eventually quit)—wrote endlessly in my free time but refused to enter in competitions or clubs related to it because wasn’t writing “weird”?—didn’t run for any class office because I had so many different versions of myself tailored for different people and couldn’t bear to somehow merge all of that into a unified presentation in an auditorium with all of them together. I spent months and years carefully balancing myself so absolutely no one could possibly dislike me, possibly not admire me—

And now that I was leaving, all of it was entirely fucking useless.

Whoops!

One week before I left, I resolved:
Wherever I went, I would focus on the things that I could take away from that place when I left, not the superficial that would seem important but immediately fall away the moment I moved away again.

T-0: The Process of Bouncing Back

One week later, I was on the plane. For all the grandiose notions that I had about the significance of this event, it wasn’t helped very much by the fact that we had Economy class seats. As I would learn later in my months in Bellevue but had no idea about from my perspective at the time, that was pretty emblematic of a frugality almost inherent to Chinese culture.

Of course, I wasn’t having a very great time. Driving past the scenes of my childhood on the way to the airport that morning, I’d felt that it was all too fast: that I needed more time to soak it all in: that it didn’t feel like I had left my home behind forever, although I consciously knew it to be true. But more importantly, I had no clue what I wanted to do with my life now. All the goals that I’d had before had fallen away with the absence of an environment around me to structure the vision I wanted to achieve:

I had lost my dreams I’d had in the past but now I was given a blank slate to dream larger dreams upon. And so, for three months, with contact to my old friends (a lot of whom, now that talking to them was no longer a necessity, were actually pretty boring) diminishing, I dreamt. With no environmental limits—school was starting in three months from here—you can dream pretty big.

President of the United States is just one of ten things on a bucket list you can put together. It’s pretty nice to think about what you would want to do in life if there is nobody telling you that you aren’t able to do something—even when you fall back into routine, it informs you of the potential purpose of your day-to-day.

Although my first few days on the West Coast were immensely depressing for me, I felt revitalized in under a month with bigger aspirations than ever before. Destiny was behind me—and I was unstoppable.

And so I resolved:
Wherever I went, I would become somebody who could transcend the limits of their environment.

T+3 Months: Risk is a Board Game

Fast forwarding months—Now, it was the first day of school. Having resolved the earlier two resolutions, I was now determined to go into Bellevue High School free from the tireless grasp for approval, to build something for myself. It does turn out, however, that the focus on yourself that is so concentrated in three months of solitude becomes much harder to maintain when you actually have to deal with people around you. Still, consciously willing myself past initial fear, I did a lot of things in my first few months in Bellevue that I became pretty proud of.

I ran for class office, and even though I didn’t win (being entirely new to the school district, whereas everyone who won had gone to middle schools in the Bellevue area), running with a theme of representing people who were new to the district made me quick friends and got me known. So school quickly transformed from a sea of unfamiliar faces that all knew each other but not me, to a place where I had some support—

and, without naming names, while asking for votes and espousing that theme, found other people who were also new to the district: and, consistent with the theme of risk, found myself in one of those freshman talking stages with one of them. Asked them to hoco—(though freshmen wayyy overestimate how important hoco actually is).

I joined speech & debate, an activity which I had considered in middle school since it aligned with my interest in the social sciences, but that I’d never had an actual organization to pursue it within: adding fire to the fuel of my self-myth of personal destiny, I started being recognized as good at what I did.

I kept taking risks, I kept moving up and up, and I found myself in what felt like a unstoppable wave of forward momentum: from “nobody” in September of this freshman year to someone people knew about, and recognized for actual achievements, by March when I qualified to NSDA Nationals in LD Debate and won a tournament going undefeated. No longer was I lost, a small fish in a huge pond, but I was now somebody within an infrastructure, a winner.

Where would I have been if I was too scared to talk to people or join up?

Being new gives you freedom that you don’t have if you spent middle school in the same city you go to high school in.

And so I resolved:
Wherever I went, I would take risks to move forward, because there is too much stagnation in reputation and not enough time to waste staying stagnant.

T+14 Months: The Fight Against Stability

An article I read a few months ago explains that we all perceive time as moving faster when we get older: not just because of math, where every new second accounts for a smaller percentage of our cumulative time lived, but also because of novelty:

When you’re a kid, everything is new to you, so your brain is constantly forming new pathways and integrating new understandings of things into its network. As you get older and repeat experiences: going to the same places, having the same kind of friends, over and over again, your brain doesn’t need to really try to make new memories of those places.

My first year after arriving at Bellevue, learning what it’s like in the Summer, Autumn, Winter, and Spring is one of the most vivid times in my life that I’ve ever had, because everything was new. But now, going into sophomore year, I found myself struggling against the restraints of repetition: less and less was new.

Grades were maintenance, debate performance was maintenance, memories were made but more and more were disregarded, life was speeding up and I felt suffocated in its speed:

So, to keep living, my final resolution is as follows:
Wherever I go, I will try new things, always until my life has encompassed everything. I will fight stability in place of novelty, to avoid a perceptually faster death.

The still death that consumed a decade of my time in Southington, whose cumulative insights I could have learned in three years or less.

When I say infinity, I don’t mean literally having an infinite amount of everything in the world: you could arguably say that—in an entertainment space where immortal, wealthy people contentedly consigning themselves to eternal oblivion are commonplace (I’m brought back to first grade, reading about Nicolas Flamel in the first Harry Potter book and wondering why in the world anyone would ever do that), and the instant-onset boredom that Minecraft Creative Mode always was when you didn’t have a goal—literal infinity would be a lot easier to give up.

The Origin of Infinity

When I say Infinity, I mean infinity of possibility. When you’re little, there’s a fundamental open-endedness to every question:

Who am I? I could be anything, but only time will tell—

What will I do? I could do anything, but only time will tell—

Where will I go? I could go anywhere, but only time will tell—

The only limits to your answers are those of your imagination. And as a kid with a very (over)active imagination, those questions, and their potential answers—expansive, beautiful, grandiose—held me captive for many, many afternoons and nights. I would, obviously, be everyone, do everything, go everywhere, live a life as full, as varied, as colorful, as rewarding as humanly possible; I would, obviously, go to Harvard, graduate from its law school, earn a Nobel prize in science, start a billion-dollar business, write a dozen books, and serve two terms as President of the United States before I turned forty-five, then go move to another country and lead it to modernity within a dozen years, before dedicating the remainder of my life to the largest charity foundation in history: what in the world could ever stop me?

The only problem is that those questions can only stay unresolved for so long. Every ambition has an almost-implicit expiration date attached to it, and as you move closer, you’re forced to confront those questions for real, and realize:

Today, I have to choose.

When you’ve been living in your own mental White House for years, what else can that be but intensely nauseating?

Once you reach a certain point, suddenly, the shit you do matters. Two dozen timelines crash into one with every finalized decision you make. Dreams for the future crumble into dust the moment a foundational pillar tilts off course. You’re no longer facing a kaleidoscope of every color of the rainbow in your view but rather World War One No Man’s Land, where your only options are move forward or get shot. Your lost dreams need to get put aside for fear of losing the few you still have left, hoping one day… maybe it’ll get better?

The Hidden Reward of Finity

The unsettling truth is that conceptions of the “final vision of what I’m going to do/be/have” need to be given up, because you cannot truly plan for years of variables unbeknownst to you yet, and your journey is not predetermined, but adaptive and luck-based.

Your life takes place not in the context of some final destination, but rather all the miles that led up to where you live. Absolutely nothing you do can be satisfactory if everything is judged by how close it gets you to becoming the next President of the United States: but you can face appropriate challenges and satisfaction when you can judge yourself compared to you one month before.

Half of the key to life comes in how we judge ourselves and our situations. Believing you will be everything is great for your happiness and not so great for your achievement before you move into a life with challenge and friction (the best sign you’re where you need to be!), but terrible for both afterwards.

It’s an intoxicating feeling to think you can do everything, and maybe you think that it’s responsible for your success, but it gets all too easily disproven the second you fail to do anything.

Instead, any guiding principle should be intrinsic, not extrinsic, because what is extrinsic is not reliable.

Thus, the Kierkegaard quote in the subtitle: “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”

3:00-3:15 PM—Wake Up

I wake up and get out of bed at 3:00 PM. I know that’s late, but when you’re sleeping at 7:00 AM, that’s about the time it takes to get eight hours of sleep. I brush my teeth, get dressed, and check my notifications from the night before: I don’t reply to any of them yet, sans one. I check Substack stats for the day so far, read two articles in the news, then go grab my caffeine for the day.

3:16-3:45 PM—Reading

It was raining outside, the kind of day that the fifth grader version of me once described to my teacher as a “dog book day,” so I decided to read my copy of Educated by Tara Westover and finished chapters twenty to twenty-four: I still have a a lot of thoughts about the book but that could be its own Substack article if I wanted it to be—maybe I do.

Still, I think that the start of day is oftentimes the template through which your brain processes the rest of the day, and starting it with focus on something engaging, not overstimulating, not too intensive might be one of the best templates. Time to grab breakfast.

3:50-4:00 PM—Breakfast

Breakfast was simple—a ham & cheese sandwich between two bagels and handful of other things in between that I don’t know how to name (because they’re green, and well, my expertise isn’t usually in foods that are green… unless you want to talk about Haribo gummy bear flavors, because why the hell are the green gummy bears the strawberry ones????).

4:00 PM-4:20 PM—Why Do I Do This (LD Captain things?)

This Microsoft Teams Chat—Edward wanted to know whether a Kant Aff was viable on this debate topic, and I explained my elementary understanding of his theories to him, sent him some relevant material, then got yelled at by Bill for having a crappy sleep schedule, with him proceeding to also tell me that I “eat like shit”.

Sometimes I rethink my choice to run for LD captain. At least the kids are winning and it’s not nearly as draining as it felt during the start of the year. But my relationship with debate has always been very love-hate.

4:25 PM-5:00 PM—Homework

I did some homework, finishing the Precalc Pearson for Unit 8—Matrices. It makes me feel very underfulfilled. Well—I’ve finished all the math homework I have for winter break, paced just right. It’s dark outside now, that the reflection of car headlights and streetlights off of the ground wet from the rain is the main illumination I see in the streets, full of color. Hmm. I think it’s time to respond to the messages I got from the day so far. That’ll probably be the next fifteen minutes.

5:15 PM-5:40 PM—Workout

Since I had been using my brain for the last two hours, I decided to give it some time to recharge and headed down to the gym to a) get my day’s workout in and b) turn off my mind temporarily. I hit legs for the first time in forever, less out of disciplined choice, and more because every part of my entire upper body was about to crumble into dust like Thanos was snapping it out of existence, because of the last two days.

Then, because it was raining outside, I ran a mile on the treadmill—indoors. It was a good run, but I think treadmills are strange and not preferable to actually going outside and running—because the ground is moving beneath you instead of you moving over the ground, so when you step off of it you’re disorientated as hell. I would much rather have gone outside.

To be honest, every part of me is kind of soaked with sweat right now—so I’ll be back here soon, but first I’m going to take a ten-minute break, then shower.

5:50 PM-6:20 PM—2nd half of the day.

I took a shower, longer than I expected, and got my clothes, coat (and melatonin—because I need to sleep way earlier than usual today, given that school is tomorrow) and transportation for tomorrow’s trip to school ready. In that way, school is already altering the way that I get to structure my day. But I still have a second half of that day left to go, after which I can collapse. Keeping myself at 200 mg of caffeine for the day, in order to sleep earlier: now we head into the second half.

6:30 PM-7:30 PM—Debate Prep

I have a practice round at 8:15 P.M. and it’s meant to be a “lay” debate practice round, where I’m negating on the January/February debate topic: the problem is I don’t have lay neg prep right now. So I’m just gonna do that and check back into the Substack whenever I’m done.

And update: it’s 7:25, and I’ve finished an hour of prep and lay cases. I could always do more, but sometimes there’s a limit to how much you can do in one go while still maintaining performance for half an hour later. I think I’m ready for my round at eight P.M., and I’m feeling hungry now—mental exertion makes you hungry, I think—so I think it’d be a good idea to grab a quick dinner before going into the round.

7:30 PM-8:15 PM—Dinner

For Dinner, I’m having a three cheese pizza that I got from Trader Joe’s yesterday. To be fair, most of this dinner block is spent preheating the oven and then waiting for the pizza to slowly cook after putting it in the oven, which is pretty idle—and like a fraction of it is spent actually eating. Which is boring, and, as Vertitasium explains in that one YouTube video, an unpleasant feeling. But then he explains that being bored and sitting in silence with your thoughts is a necessary displeasure that ends up with people being more creative and more aligned with what they want to do in life.

So I’m going to stare at this oven’s temperature number slowly go up instead of scrolling reels. And I know I’m going to regret this very soon.

..So I gave up after about 20 seconds and instead ended up explaining the importance of being bored to my mom and had a conversation about that for about a dozen minutes. Kinda hypocritical, but like… not the worst. Then had longer conversations with my parents over dinner which I think is good family time.

8:20 PM-10:00 PM—Practice Round & Other Things

Debated the round, then talked about this UPS tournament

Debate’s been feeling pretty bleh recently—this topic is not the greatest for lay debate—I’ll write and organize more stuff in the week ahead.

I think the reason school—specifically the school day—feels also so bleh to me is that spending time on places isn’t a product of your initiative but rather forced; you go to 7 hours of classes because you have to, and that’s it. I think I need to recalibrate the way I think about school to be about what I get done during each class period.

10:20 PM-11:20 PM—Reading

I spent the last hour finishing the rest of Educated by Tara Westover after starting it three days ago.

Right now, I feel as if this is one of the “best” books I have ever read—in a year, I think it will probably still rank among the best ones. Whatever the case, it deserves its own article to itself—not somewhere in the middle of the record of a day.

Energy channeled properly is the foundation of every good thing that underlies our world—energy without proper release is that which blows up foundations and destroys people. Anyone born with an abundance of energy and spirit should be very cautious where it gets directed. Otherwise, they’re liable to find themselves on one of the two familiar ends of a smoking gun. Huh.

11:30 PM—Summary

I’m going to sleep soon, since I have school tomorrow, and I might have to down a few melatonins to get there. But even though today was half-length, I liked it: a little bit of most important things and a good 4th day of the new year.

Signing out now—

James sun

:p

But somewhere in my brain, it never stopped thinking about that question. Two days into the New Year, I think I have an answer—or a few answers. Because I think the colors are back, and I think it has to do with three main things:

1. A sense of personal narrative.

2. A feeling of forward momentum.

3. Something that kills excuses.

I’m out of a six-week long rut, and maybe these three things won’t cover every edge case out there, but I hope it helps somebody.

1. A Personal Narrative

I think we all do things better when we feel that they have meaning attached to them. When it comes to the things that you do for yourself, one of the best things you can do is simply understand the broader context of your life story and how the activities you’re doing right now ties into that bigger picture.

Near the end of December, I started to feel a sense of aimlessness with everything that I was doing. I had spent the last few months doing a lot of things, but with ever-increasing time since the last time I had thought about why, or made the choice to start any of those tasks, they started to feel disconnected, random, and purposeless. I started feeling more like a task robot than human, carrying out the myriad of duties I’d assigned myself, and without intrinsic motivation or satisfaction with or for my work, the only thing that started to matter was results: that made anything less than perfect a suffocating, snowballing existential catastrophe. For a few weeks, I was able to keep up "perfect”—but obviously, inevitably, it collapsed in on itself:

Probably the moment that happened is when I lost quarterfinals at a debate tournament in late December. Although I’d lost dozens of rounds through freshman year and felt fine, I spent a week after rotting in my bed replaying every moment of that round, asking myself, over and over: how in the world could I have let myself lose? I was “terrible”, I was “screwed”, I was “awful”—It wasn’t enough to me that I had gotten 1st place in my speech event at that tournament for the first time since I had started doing it, or that making it to quarterfinals in debate had gotten me my 3rd state bid, tying me for district leader and all-but-qualifying me for States in the Spring: the only thing I could think about was the simple fact that I had lost. For the next two weeks, all I could think about, while eating, working, on vacation, at 1 pm or 4 am, was the fact that I had lost.

The reason for this was because I had forgotten why I do what I do, couldn’t measure what it meant to myself and so could only measure it in terms of results. Later in winter break, I spent some time remembering and reflecting the overall course of my life, and remembered why I did debate: why I did speech: why I care about the work that I do, and suddenly one loss at one tournament among dozens is tiny and irrelevant, as one part of a much larger life I hope will transcend that state circuit. Sometimes, all it takes is grounding yourself in your story and meaning.

2. A Feeling of Forward Momentum

I think the second important thing that we need to have in order to feel colorful is to feel like we are making progress instead of simply carrying out maintenance. It’s probably the reason why video games feel so addictive, why they’re used by people (including me for a short time in this rut) to cope, even though some of those games are basically just menial work repackaged with progress bars and dinging sounds.

Near the end of December, I had stopped doing anything new and was mostly focused on maintenance— which was so fundamentally different from September I found myself wondering what had changed. The change was from initiation to maintenance. Now, I was just maintaining: maintaining my grades, maintaining the debate winstreak, maintaining friendships and the only direction in which anything could really change was for the worse. It turns out, that kind of thinking is really bad for your brain and motivation. It’s all the anxiety and all the stress without any of the feeling of reward, hours and hours poured into your work only to see those percentage points slowly slip downwards, closer to that sub-90% mark, your projects wither and slow, and your tournament results get somehow worse.

I think we all need proactive goals towards which we can hope to move, instead of burdening projects where the only thing we can do with it is try and keep it as is. Because forward momentum is measured with more than just what you’re doing, but how you perceive it: the only time to know you’re moving forward is relative to something, something fixed, like a goal. Set them—meet them—and when you do, find yourself better than you were when you started, instead of the same.

That makes you feel like a person again.

3. Something that kills excuses.

This is the last thing, and I don’t think the reason it’s important is because it’s independently valuable, but because it helps you maintain the first two items on my list. I think we all need something to give us a feeling of time’s limitedness, something forces you to stick to your goals, some past event(s) that ties together everything you do grounded in the context of your story. I figured out what it was for me, but I’m not exactly sure why it induces that feeling:

Most literally, for me it’s the memories of people who have shaped you and your story, and since left, but who saw something in you while they were there and left believing you would one day become that something.

I’m not that sure I can write this much on this part because I’m not yet sure I understand why it has this effect on me. But hopefully whoever’s reading this can stumble upon that line and have it “click” for them—because it’s definitely not for me!

:p

signing out

James Sun

But gazing through the glass, I paused. The sky, which I’d said was one of the clearest ones I’d seen in weeks just hours before, was now obscured by a thick fog that had spilled into the streets, lit up into silver clouds by the odd streetlight every few dozen feet. In the backdrop, I saw the silhouettes of a row of trees, pitch black, positioned in front of another lit up fog. Looking through the haze, details on the ground vague enough to leave it up to imagination, a compilation of memories flooded into my head, brief images and fast forwards of scenes from my childhood:

1st grade—sitting on hay bales in a tractor, together with a congealed mess of my classmates, back when parents organized every event and nobody could choose to exclude anyone else when we all made do with the people we had; 4th grade, running from house to house trick-or-treating in a Costco-bought Mario costume with two friends, having heard about COVID in the news but still without a care in the world; 6th grade, a snowy night when me and my mom drove house to house, me running down the driveway and getting in and out as soon as I could. Orange, blue, and red electric lights filled those days.

Then things flooded back that weren’t as much related to what I was seeing: worlds of community you took for granted folded inwards into tight circles of friends, and now it was different: standing outside the Bushnell in New Haven with four or five people you kind of knew, every one of them several years older than you, part of a visiting group; the one-hour long Summer detours after school you took walking home to drop off someone who lived the opposite direction from your place, those ten minutes you spent sitting in a tree in the middle of a park, waiting for your friend to show up and find you had somehow managed to climb one:

Memories, three months ago or ten years, that felt part of a story, months that lived as moods, memories about everything under the sun in a life so vibrant you felt you were no longer living. Time filled with adventures had been replaced by hours lying in bed, days exploring the “warehouse behind that abandoned nursery” with your best friend since preschool replaced by texting friends who lived in the same city with you, who you saw maybe once a month. Colorful lights and greenery replaced by the drab white walls of the apartment you hadn’t dared to leave in days.

How was I supposed to make my way back into the storybook?

(1/2)

The Elusive Labubu Cult

I have found conclusive evidence of the very real Labubu cult as a result of my investigate journalism. Labubu collectors are in a organized, hierarchical, doctrine-having cult. And I found their bible.

This started online, where I found Labubu collectors showing off their 7000 dollar Labubu collections. But, as I scrolled, I noticed something weird: the language Labubu collectors use. For example, instead of saying “buying a Labubu”, collectors used the word “adopt”. When someone posted their first Labubu, collectors would flood the comments with “they’re on the path!”. They would share “testimonies” on their stories and videos of “Energy Transfers”. This wasn’t just online slang.

I had to get to the bottom of this.

How I Joined: The Telegram Channels

To infiltrate the community, I started joining as many Facebook and Tiktok groups I could. All of them were stating the same slang and codewords in their videos. I immedietely started looking for links. They posted quite strange things- gratitude videos praying/blessing their Labubus, testimonies of how their Labubu saved them from sin, etc.

Then I found the post. 7 months ago, a user named “@lbbjq8492” had archived a single link to a telegram channel. Could this be it? I clicked on the link, and it led me to a “Labubu Avids” telegram channel. They used the same language, but I still couldn’t find anything suspicious. I decided to dig deeper.

I gained trust by posting pictures of my friend’s Labubus and using their inner lingo, and found links to other underground telegram channels. The further I went, the worse the posts got. Pictures of Labubus tattooed on body parts. Gruesome beheading of lafufus. I won’t get deeper into it.

After searching for days, I finally found the motherload. “The Holy Labubu Basilica”, with only 140 members. There were famous influencers and even politicians, who I'm not allowed to name. This was where all of the language came from, where it has been seen in Tiktok. Oh. My. God.

Their Core Beliefs

From stalking the telegram channels, I’ve found out about some of their beliefs.

1. The Labubu is a spiritual entity

They genuinely believe Labubu has some kind of spiritual presence. Quote from “Guardian Mike”: “Labubu isn’t just plastic. It’s a vessel, and it holds energy. It reflects what you need to see in yourself.” Think of angels or spiritual beings. That’s what Labubus are. They can see you, feel you, and understand your thoughts without you telling them. The Labubu is primordial and cannot be understood by non-Basillica collectors.

They also worship Zimomos, the larger cousin of the Labubu. They have wings and tails. Basillica members believe that Zimomos created the world and Labubus are their family to truly bring prosperity to Earth. They connect with Labubus to reach the Zimomos.

2. Collecting Labubu leads to enlightenment

The more Labubu you have, the more “complete” you become. It’s a journey toward spiritual wholeness through accumulation. There’s also a hierarchy of Labubu collectors, which I will discuss later. If you have every Labubu, then you are considered eligible for completeness.

3. Kasing Lung (the creator) is a prophet

They believe he channeled Labubu from some higher plane. That he didn’t just design a character—he “received the vision.” He created the Basillica, and he brought the Labubu to the human world.

4. Lafufus are impure and sinful

Remember when I said they beheaded Lafufus? Right, they have an entire guide on how to spot the difference. All Basillica members are mandated to behead or dismember and Lafufus they get ahold of, and send a video to the telegram channel for proof.

The Labible

What would a cult be without religious scripture? I have the 90-page document containing the entirety of the Labible. It’s written in the style of a religious text. There are rituals, commandments, and hierarchies. I will share excerpts with you, and you need to remember: 140 people genuinely believe this.

The document begins with a creation myth:

“In the beginning, there was emptiness. A void in the shape of what should be. And into this void came Zimomo, neither cute nor ugly, neither good nor evil, but perfectly balanced. And Zimomo said: I am that which completes the incomplete. I am the god in the gaps of your soul.”

It continues:

“Zimomos created the Labubus, which then they chose to manifest in our world through the hands of Kasing Lung, the Prophet, who saw the vision and brought Labubu into physical form. But Labubu is not bound by form. Labubu is concept. Labubu is feeling. Labubu is truth. The Labubu is the holy connection to the Zimomo.”

In the next chapters, they list the 10 LaCommandments.

• Thou shalt not sell thy Labubu for profit. (Reselling is considered heresy)

• Thou shalt display thy Labubu with honor. (They must be visible, not stored away)

• Thou shalt not judge another’s collection. (All Labubu are sacred, regardless of rarity)

• Thou shalt seek completion, not competition. (Collecting is spiritual, not materialistic)

• Thou shalt respect the Prophet’s vision. (Kasing Lung’s art must not be altered)

• Thou shalt behead the sinful. (Send videos or proof of Lafufu beheadings)

• Thou shalt speak the language of Labubu. (Use proper terminology: “guardian” not “owner,” “adopt” not “buy”)

• Thou shalt protect thy Labubu from harm. (Labubu must be cared for like living beings)

• Thou shalt commit to rituals and sacrifices. (Complete the ordained rituals in the Labible)

• Thou shalt never abandon a Labubu. (Once you adopt one, it’s forever)

Aside from scripture, they have rituals too. They’re very specific, and every member must complete them in order to rise up the hierarchy and become enlightened.

The Adoption Ritual

When you get a new Labubu, you’re supposed to:

1. Unbox it with the Labubu song playing

2. Hold it for 60 seconds while “transferring your energy” so you and your Labubu are “soul-linked”

3. Name it (yes, you have to name each one)

4. Introduce it to your other Labubu, and make sure it smells like your other Labubus (if you have them)

5. Post a photo with the caption “Welcome home, [name]”

This is the reason why all the Facebook and Tiktoks had so many videos of people opening their Labubus and posting photos like “Welcome home, Baby Jersey!”

The Daily Acknowledgment

Every morning, members are supposed to:

1. Look at their Labubu collection

2. Say out loud: “In the name of Zimomo, Kasing Lung, and Labubu, amen.”

3. Touch each Labubu

4. Through your Labubu soul-link, pray to the Zimomos

I found hundreds of posts of people doing this. People filming themselves doing the Daily Acknowledgment.

Lafufu Beheading

When guardians and members find a fake Labubu (Lafufu), they commence:

1. Set up their Labubu in a circle around the Lafufu

2. Behead the Lafufu (knife, guillotine, anything works)

3. Send a photo into the telegram groupchat

4. Pray to Zimomo to remove the sinful aura from your home

Zimomo Guardianship Ceremony

This directly ties into the Hierarchy. Guardianship is kind of like the Cardinals in the Catholic Church. After they collect sufficient Labubus and they are deemed worthy:

1. Stand in a pentagon of their Labubus (they should have enough Labubus to make this pentagon)

2. Hold their first Labubu, chant scripture

3. Livestream the ceremony to other guardians and members

4. Get blessed by the prophet

5. Become a Guardian

Now, they can directly communicate with Zimomo.

The Hierarchy of The Basilica

The cult has ranks.

Seeker/Member: Owns 1-5 Labubu. Beginner stage. Still learning The Way.

Collector: Owns 6-15 Labubu. Has committed to the path. Understands the teachings.

Ascended: Owns 16-30 Labubu. Has achieved deep understanding. Can guide others.

Enlightened: Owns 31-50 Labubu. Has reached spiritual completeness through Labubu. In consideration for Guardianship

Guardian: Owns 51+ Labubu. Has transcended material desire and achieved pure Labubu consciousness. They can communicate with the Zimomo.

In the Facebook groups, people list their rank in their bio. People defer to higher-ranked members. This is a very real social-hierarchy in a telegram channel, where everyone is named according to their rank. I am currently “Seeker”, but there are people like “Guardian Mike” and “Ascended Georgia”.

The Future: Where Is This Going?

The Holy Labubu Basilica is growing at an exponential rate. There’s members finding the telegram channel every day, being indoctrinated into their ideology, and collecting more and more Labubus.

For a moment, I understood the appeal. It was structured, there was a community, and there was the feeling that you’re on a journey toward something meaningful, even if that meaningful thing is just owning 50 vinyl goblins.

Please do not seek out the Holy Labubu Basilica. I’m sure they’ll just turn into another MLM. It is a scary time to be where our consumerism has become a real cult, with real impacts.

This investigation was conducted over 6 months, under independant private investigative journalism. The Telegram channels are real. The Labible is real. The Beheadings are real. The cult is real.

This article is satirical, do not go searching for the fake cult. I don’t think the Holy Labubu Basilica exists. Be wary if the real one does exist.

Follow the stuffing. Follow the truth.

Stage 1: Choose Your Bear (Inventory Management)

Your child gets to choose a bear or toy of their choice. How innocent! Let me describe what’s happening here in corporate terms: you’re selecting raw materials from available inventory.

1. Different materials have different costs

2. Premium options exist but cost more

3. Inventory is limited (the good bears are always “low stock”)

4. You must make a selection and commit to it

This is literally teaching six year olds how to do supply-chain decision making. The ways that the bears are displayed? Robbed of their flesh, piles of skin sitting in blue bins. It feels like a morgue for teddy bears. This is desensitization to human (and animal) rights. Your child is learning to see products as components, not complete items. Very warehouse.

Stage 2: The Stuffing Machine (Industrial Equipment Training)

Now, your child takes their stripped bear skin to the large industrial machine, and the employee teaches them how to use it. The machines are loud and scary, but they learn it’s a necessity to produce as much as possible. You’re getting a tutorial from a minimum wage highschooler on how to mass produce bears.

The machine even has a foot pedal. They operate it like they’re working a sewing machine in a garment factory.

Stage 3: The Heart Ceremony (Psychological Conditioning)

Before your bear gets stuffed, they make you do the heart ceremony. You kiss a little satin heart. You make a wish. You rub it on your head, your elbow, your knee (the employee instructs you through this). In corporate terms, this is culture building. This is when your manager tells you “we’re not just a company, we’re a family.”

Build-A-Bear has created a ritual that makes you emotionally attached to the product you’re creating. This is an emotional labor that is preparing these six year olds to be emotionally invested in the mass production sweatshop they work for to increase worker productivity.

It’s all an elaborate game of preparing these children to start working in the warehouses, to become the most productive worker.

Stage 4: The Computer Station (Data Entry)

After your bear is made, you sit at a computer and input data. Name, birthday, favorite activities.

Build-A-Bear now has:

• Your email address

• Your child’s name

• Your child’s birthday

• Your child’s interests

• Your purchasing data

• Your location (store you visited)

This is customer data collection on a massive scale. It’s interesting that Build-A-Bear collects data on children’s ages, interests, and family purchasing power. Could they be selling that data to large corporations so they know which workers to target in the future?

Stage 5: The Outfit Upsell (Artificial Need and Consumerism)

Your bear is done, but you glance around. Everyone else’s bear has pretty dresses and nice plastic shoes, and one of them even has a car.

This is teaching children that the base product is never enough. There’s always more to buy. There’s always an upgrade. There’s always premium features.

Sound familiar?

Build-A-Bear is teaching children about subscription models and premium tiers before they can do long division. This is how children learn what makes money.

Their Goal: The Warehouse Industrial Complex

Phase 1 (1997-2010): Build-A-Bear trains children in warehouse operations through “play”

Phase 2 (2010-2020): Those children become teenagers and get their first jobs at actual warehouses, feeling mysteriously comfortable with the process.

Phase 3 (2020-present): Those teenagers are now adults working in Amazon fulfillment centers, Target distribution centers, and Walmart warehouses.

Build-A-Bear is purposefully creating a generation of workers pre-trained for warehouse labor. They normalized assembly line work, making it fun.

Every child who made a bear at Build-A-Bear learned how factories work. They learned how warehouses operate. They learned how to follow instructions and meet specifications and participate in their own labor. The bear is a certificate of completion of Sweatshops 101.

Build-A-Bear is training children for warehouse work so they can eventually build their OWN logistics empire and challenge Amazon. They saw the future of retail, realized it was all warehouses, and decided to train an entire generation of workers loyal to Build-A-Bear, mass producing bears to sell across the world. Build-A-Bear is playing the long game, training workers for 25 years so that in 2030 they can launch Build-A-Bear Logistics and take over the shipping industry.

This is late stage capitalism, invading our daily lives without us knowing it.

This article is completely satirical and should not be taken seriously. We do not believe that Build-A-Bear is a warehouse-training program, but you sure can. It’s a free country. Maybe you’ll even find better evidence than I have.

Don’t get me wrong—lack of sleep will mess up your brain. It’s scientifically verified. But truthfully, if you approach it right, a single night of bad sleep also affects your performance in a day a lot less than a lot of us imagine it does.

The problem is that when we expect to do badly because we haven’t had enough sleep, you start giving yourself excuses. That isn’t a problem with sleep deprivation—it’s a problem with your mentality. It happens from the very first slip-up of the morning: the jumbled thought, the forgotten folder, the misplaced keys. On a normal day you would’ve just laughed it off as a minor error, but now that we have a scapegoat to blame—you counted too little sheep, too late—everything that goes wrong is used as evidence that sleep deprivation has killed your ability to perform as a human. You use it to justify mistakes to other people when they happen, instead of owning up to them. The more you repeat it, the more you start to believe that today you’re a potato that doesn’t need to do anything but drag your tired body through hallways and collapse into a pile once you reach the afternoon. You use the excuses you justify to be nicer to yourself, tell yourself you can’t do an assignment today because it’d be better to do it with a sharper, more rested mind tomorrow, and push things off only to stay up to twelve A.M. all over again.

This is what turns your five-hour-sleep days into slop. Not the lack of sleep by itself, but the excuses that you give yourself to make up for it.

Luckily, the solution is pretty simple—or at least, understanding it is. With a little bit of conscious efforts, you can banish those thoughts from your mind, prevent yourself from thinking that way. Take accountability for everything you do, not from the perspective of a depersonalized you that is a victim of sleep pressure, but as a product of yourself. Think that you can do anything you could have done on a normal day—because as creatures having evolved to make smart decisions to survive nighttime predator attacks at 4 AM in the jungle, there isn’t really any reason you can’t. For people who habitually make excuses when they’re tired, this can be hard to implement—but with persistence (and enough fear of falling behind), you can make it happen.

Still sleep though.

It’s kinda important.

Written on 4 hours of sleep.

Most shoppers believe they choose between a basket and a cart based on “how much they plan to buy.” This is a lie. The truth is that grabbing a cart or a basket is a psychological confession. A statement about who you are as a human being.

Let’s look at the politics behind it.

1. THE CART PEOPLE

A cart person usually exhibits the following traits:

1) Commitment issues: They’re scared of only committing to just one item. They need six different types of cheeses or else they won’t survive.

2) Main-character syndrome: They push the cart and pretend like they’re in a dramatic indie film. Bonus points if they lean on it like it’s a security blanket.

Cart people also have a distinct social presence: they act like they’re the only people in their aisle. They’ll block an entire row just to compare the same exact item for 12 minutes. It’s even worse when it’s the friend group of teenagers who get a cart and make their friend sit in it so they can take a video and post it on Instagram because they think it makes them funny. You know what I’m talking about.

2. THE BASKET PEOPLE

Basket people always go into stores with the mindset that “they’re only getting one thing”. I have personal experience with my mom. This is not true. IT’S NEVER TRUE.

Basket people embody contradiction. They believe in minimalism but also end up buying multiple useless items as an effect of high-driven overconsumption.

Traits commonly found among basket people:

1) Optimism: They always think the basket will be “light.” They will regret this. Their arm will go numb in five minutes, and they will pretend everything is fine.

2) People who refuse to admit they need help: They see carts, and then they choose to ignore them. They’d rather their arm snap off than grab a cart.

3. THE THIRD CATEGORY

These are the people who pick up items without any carrying device at all. They just let their items tower in their hands, attempting to balance everything without it falling.

These people operate outside the boundaries of civilization. They have transcended grocery store norms. Their choices cannot be predicted.

THE FINAL VERDICT

What a person decides to use to carry their items at a store says a lot about their character. It’s not something you pick randomly — it alters the way you go about your shopping trip and who you actually are as a person.

BOTH SHOPPING BASKETS AND SHOPPING CARTS ARE EVIL!!! They are results of what high end capitalism does to people. They become a space where the consumer (the person using the item) constructs a lifestyle.

Thus the basket or cart is transformed from a tool of consumerism, feeding the broader system’s emphasis on “upgrading” everything, including simple everyday items like groceries. As the consumer moves through the aisles, the partially filled basket or cart creates a sense of incompleteness. You must add more. It fuels a cycle where overconsumption is normalized, let alone, expected.

So, the final answer is clear. The third choice is morally superior and is the only choice that allows for sensible, rational purchases when at the store. Everyone needs to open their eyes and see how evil the shopping basket and cart are. YOU PEOPLE ARE UNDER SPELLS!!!!!!!! I urge everyone to finally wake up and realize that we should abolish the shopping cart and the shopping basket for good.

I am an expert in online-dating-ology. I’ve seen gym mirror selfies, I’ve seen blurry group photos where I can’t tell which one they are, and I’ve seen bathroom mirror pics with the flash blocking their face. But nothing—NOTHING—is as prevalent or as scientifically categorizable as men holding fish. Why fish? What does the fish represent? Are more fish more attractive?

0 Fish - Concerningly Out of Touch

Rating: 4/10

This man has no fish in any of his photos. Not a single fish. This is somehow suspicious. What is he hiding? Is he afraid of fish? Has he never been invited to a lake? Does this man know what a fish is?

There are 3 possibilities:

1. A guy who lives in a landlocked city and has never had the opportunity

2. A guy who thinks the fish photos are cringe

3. A guy who tried fishing once, didn’t catch anything, and is still emotionally recovering from the traumatic experience

Unfortunately, this may be a majority. Remaining neutral is the best option. Who knows, maybe they have other talents unrelated to fishing.

1 Fish - Performative Fisher

Rating: 2/10

Oh, look at this guy. ONE fish. Just one. One singular, solitary fish across his entire dating profile. How incredibly convenient. How suspiciously minimal. This man went fishing ONCE, caught ONE fish, and decided that was his entire outdoor personality now.

This is performative fishing. This is “I went with my buddy that one time in 2019 and here’s the proof.” This man does not fish. This man went fishing. Past tense. Singular event.

This man is a TOURIST in fish culture. Has he ever been at the pier? At the dock, looking for walleye? No. Not a single time. This is a major red flag.

2 Fish - Perfectly Balanced

Rating: 10/10

This is why humans have two hands. To hold a pike in one hand and a bass in the other. This is a man who had to choose which fish photos to include because he has hundreds. Two fishes are perfectly balanced, saying “I fish a lot but not enough to make it my whole personality”.

This also shows that he’s good at fishing because he can have two fish at once. Spectactular.

3+ Fish - Wrap It Up, Buddy

Rating: 5/10

Okay we get that you like fish. Maybe you even LOVE fish. You probably would love fish more than me. Your tinder profile should not be the plastic aquariums at a seafood restraunt. At a certain point, I don’t need more evidence that you fish. You’ve made your point. You could’ve stopped at 2, but you kept going.

What is he going to do? Show you fish pictures the entire date? This is a man who makes fishing his whole personality. At least he’s not a performative fisher.

Special Category: Borrowed Fish - Blocked.

This deserves its own section because this is a criminal offense. He’s holding the fish like he’s never held a fish in his entire life. Like someone just handed him an aquatic animal and said “smile for the camera” and he panicked. This wasn’t even his fish. He didn’t catch it!

This is borrowed fish. This is STOLEN fish. This man is committing FISH FRAUD and you must report him for it. This is catfishing but with actual fish. This man has NO HONOR. NO INTEGRITY. This man would lie about anything, and he would lie to your face and send a photoshopped picture at the gym when in reality he’s at the club.

How to spot borrowed fish:

• He’s holding it at the wrong angle (DEAD GIVEAWAY)

• His expression says “I have made a huge mistake”

• The fish is disproportionately large for a beginner (he definitely didn’t catch this)

What The Fish Really Means: The Big Fish Scheme

After extensive research (swiping), I’ve developed a theory about why people post fish photos.

Big Fish, the fishing industry lobby, has infiltrated dating apps. This is a coordinated campaign to normalize fishing as an attractive hobby and increase fishing equipment sales. Wake up, people. How else can we explain men posting fish pictures other than the fact they’re being elaborately manipulated by Big Fish to post the photos? Dating apps mysteriously never ban or discourage fish content. Bass pro Shops are thriving right now.

Big Fish realized that if they could make fishing seem attractive to women, men would buy more fishing gear to seem dateable. They’ve weaponized heterosexual attraction to sell rods, reels, tackle boxes, boats, fishing licenses, and those vests with all the pockets. Just follow the money. Big Fish pays Tinder and related apps to further push pictures of men with fish so it’s circular- dating apps promote fish pictures, others go buy more fish supplies, and Big Fish uses the money to encourage men and dating companies to post fish photos.

We are ALL pawns in Big Fish’s dating app strategy.

This article is entirely meant for sarcastic and humorous purposes and do not align with the author’s views of said topic.

11:49 AM — Refracting

Autumn rains reflect in dim daylight waters the golden light outlines of wandering angels

Upside down, a triplet glides towards me, halos for heads, judges and executioners of God

Presences so ethereal they cannot be seen nor grasped, fluorescent, flickering illusions

I am paralyzed, shattered glass and blood the color of roses are a river by my head

The world has never been so in focus, so impermeable, so distant far away, everything still

Glued to the floor, unable to move. Am I dead?

My seat is too warm, the room is humid and there are too many layers of cloth on my skin

Yellow men scurry about in a clearing beneath mine, I reach for them but they turn away

Crowds of people part like the seas for Jesus in my approach, who am I in this place?

I wander through gardens filled with flowers and gaze in a lily pad pond, see my reflection

The water ripples, I can barely make out shapes, and the world turns to black

The air is comfortable now, the distinct whir of an air conditioner fills the background

Light trickles in through a door half open, I stand up to see and cotton sheets fall beside me

Naked, I see the city from a penthouse, dozens of buildings sprawled out beneath me, blind

This penthouse is empty, I am alone with my shadows and five million people below

I charge at the window and as I fall through the glass the world disappears once more

Splat.

November 18th – Day 24

3:09 PM – Love Me

Pink bulb tulips crushed under the boots of careless travelers, bloody guts on the floor

People hate what comes before, we the trapped in a prison made up of thoughts and words

Chains of letters that wrap around our heads and squeeze our hearts, sick to our stomachs

Memories walk the halls near your hippocampi, an endless maze of almosts and what ifs

We ended up in the right place, but that’s what everyone thinks, not knowing the latter

Crunchy snow beneath damp shoes walking through the New York Winter Wonderland

Branches bending under the weight of frozen waters, my sanity bending the same way

People talk, they love to talk, words to fill the void in their hearts left by other’s words

What if we stopped talking and stared into each others’ souls? How would that feel?

Maybe wars would stop, sins atoned for, the world would be a different place

November 20th — Day 26

4:20 PM — Freed to the City

Freed to the city, land of the iron beasts that scream through rubber and exhaust, let go to

The land of the night, livelihoods clung to by a thread, freezing, willing to do anything to

Join those whose eminence is routine, prowling the high floors of glass-window buildings,

Lit by dancing electric fires in the dark, beacons of ambition for the youth and symbols of

Oppression for those that live outside, staring up at lives they will never, ever know…

Wandering the city, land of parks in plain sight, golden-silver lights strung through trees,

Festive winter wonderland, your limbs and digits are cold with a fireplace in your heart, it’s

Gliding ornaments rocking back and forth, red spheres of the most fragile glass whose

Ruin will be licked up by unknowing dogs, stepped in by innocent children, blood flows in

Households decorated for celebration, perfect front lawns and devils for residents in the

Model of D.C., torturing vipers like Joseph P. Kennedy, family’s fucked up as shit

Every firework of spirit hides awareness of the piercing truth, impossible to capture except

By recognition of all those that lie barely stirring, charcoal bodies in a gutter, cry.

Disciple of the Archangel Azrael, from which corner do you hail? Son, I hail east…

Disciple of the Archangel Azrael, from whose hand anointed you? Touched by God..

Disciple of the Archangel Azrael, whose prophecy do you read? I read from Jesus’ script…

Mister Sir Disciple, why have you come? I come to break this city down.

Aurorae pink fades to lavender and pale violet blues in the midst of water droplets in the sky,

Scenes of overwhelming beauty paid attention to little by those in their final moments in life.

6:00 AM : Wake up

I climb out of bed and accidentally trip on a feminist book. That must’ve fallen off of my bed when I was reading it last night. Whoops! I do my daily stretches (6’5 by the way), and do my skin care. I take off my matcha infused sheet mask and use my matcha infused toner with my matcha based eye cream.

I can’t believe women have to do this every day to feel acceptable enough to go outside. This is why I stand in solidarity with women’s rights and do skincare to make it a norm, not just something “girlie”.

6:30 AM : First Matcha

I grab my 50-dollar cermonial grade matcha from Kyoto made especially for koicha. I use a premium avant garde bamboo whisk to froth my matcha, then pour it on my freshly pressed oat milk from last night. I take the first sip of matcha and feel so energized. I can do anything now- stand up for women’s rights and fight to close the gender wage gap.

I post it on my instagram story.

7:15 AM : Fit Check

What shall I wear today? Oh, I know! Collared shirt with a green tie and a thrifted beabadoobee hoodie paired with jorts and a labubu on the carabiner, of course. I put on my socks and loafers, put in my wired earbuds (clairo is always playing), and put my favorite feminist literature by Jane Austen into my eco-friendly grassroots non-profit thrifted tote bag. I prepare to head out the door but forget my tote bag labubu. The labubu on my jeans is named Octavia after womens rights protester Octavia Butler, and the labubu on my tote bag is named Lana after Lana Del Rey.

9:00 AM : Transit, Coffee Shop

Today’s selection:

1. “The Bell Jar”

2. “My Year of Rest and Relaxation”

3. “A Little Life” (I carry this for weight training)

A girl makes eye contact with your stack of feminist literature. Yes! Score! Then she walks away. So, I order a matcha latte, oat milk, extra foam. The barista knows my order. Time to document my progress. I take a photo of my matcha next to my open book. The angle must be perfect. The shot: the book title, the matcha looks aesthetically pleasing, and there’s a hint of my labubu collection in the frame.

Follow up story: A boomerang of me putting a bookmark in my book. Song: Pier 4 by Clairo, obviously.

12:00 AM : Lunch Break

Phew, it is exhausting being performative! I can’t help it. It’s just the way I am. I get a salmon avocado bagel and another matcha.

2:00 PM : Vinyl Store Pilgramage

I head to the local record store. I don’t own a record player but I own 14 vinyls. They’re stacked aesthetically on my shelf at home. I have vintage Frank Sinatra to Laufey.

Today I’m browsing for Phoebe Bridgers. I already have Punisher but I need the exclusive pressing with the different color. A girl is also looking at Phoebe Bridgers vinyls.

“Punisher or Stranger in the Alps?” I ask, as if this is a philosophical question on par with Camus.

“Punisher,” she says.

“Amazing,” I reply. I just said “amazing” out loud in a vinyl store. But I maintain eye contact. I ask for her number. She declines.

Why aren’t the labubus working???

4:00 PM : Art Museum

I walk through a museum, taking photos of myself looking contemplative in front of paintings. I don’t know anything about the paintings but I know they look good on Instagram.

I post a carousel:

1. Me in front of abstract art (thoughtful expression)

2. A close-up of a painting

3. My matcha latte (different one, I got another)

4. My carabiners catching the museum lighting

5. The Labubu clipped to my bag in front of a sculpture

Caption: “sometimes you just need to be in a space that holds history ”

I pretend to understand what abstract art is. I look smart. The sun is hitting my brown eyes in a way it makes it look gold. This will be great for the ladies.

6:00 PM : Thrifting

I make my weekly journey to three different thrift stores looking for the perfect tote bag. Not too clean (suspicious), not too destroyed (unusable). I need that sweet spot of ‘this has history.’ I have some options:

1. A cat tote

2. A 2003 small library convention tote

3. A tote with Joe Rogan’s face on it

Obviously, I chose number 2. If I ever posted a Joe Rogan tote, they would come after me. I am mindful. I am appealing. I post the library tote on instragram.

9:00 PM : Home

A notes app screenshot (typed specifically to screenshot):

“been thinking about how masculinity can hold space for softness. how reading women authors isn’t about performing but about listening. anyway, goodnight, and read Sylvia Plath. ”

47 people view it in the first minute.

I smile. I’m 6’7”. I’m drowning in carabiners and Labubus. My tote bag contains more feminist literature than I’ll ever read. This is my day as a performative male.