So let me come to you / close as I wanna be

Close enough for me / to feel your heart beating fast

And stay there as I whisper / how I loved your peaceful eyes on me

Did you ever know / that I had mine on you?

—Eyes on Me, FF8

For few hours, I was waiting in anticipation. I pretended to look at the passing clouds, but I couldn’t help but think about her—the voices inside my head couldn’t stop talking. The anxiety felt tingly; there were butterflies in my belly.

“Oh, is that her?” Yep. Red hair tie, black t-shirt, red shorts—nothing fancy. She walked towards my direction and sat beside me. I said hello and continued watching the clouds.

“You here only for a while?” I broke the silence.

“Yeah, kinda. What about you?”

“The clouds are beautiful today,” I stupidly replied.

Her eyes were soft—like the eyes of a loving mother—but looking at it made me fearful. So, instead of peering into her eyes, I mostly glanced at her leaf-shaped earring. Many things I wanted to say to her—many longings, many bottled-up feelings—but my tongue was tightly locked. She stared at the ground most of the time. Perhaps she felt the same way. After a very, very long silence, she said, “Hey, I, uh… gotta go.” I looked at her, knowing that it was my last chance to do so. She was pretty, as always. “Sure,” I replied. As she walked away, she gave me her last goodbye with a smile and a wave. All I could do was smile back. Bitterly.

Audience is people whose heart you’ve won. It can’t be bought, it can’t be cajoled into existence. It must be earned. It might appear as a number, such as followers or subscribers, but a number ain’t audience—a Twitter account followed by a bunch of bots has followers, but it has no audience.

When you’ve won people’s heart, they like you, they trust you, they listen to you—they might even help you share your work. But if you treat their attentive ear with contempt, they’ll stop listening.

It’s about the heart.

People are often prideful for being busy. Why? Have you ever considered this idea of busy-ness? Why is it so glorified?

In linear domain, being busy makes sense because one hour of work will give you (more or less) one hour worth of result. Sewing shirt for 8 hours will get you 8 hours worth of shirt sewing effort, and the more effort you put in, the more shirt you sew. Sure, there is variance, but not much. A few examples of linear domain: bread baking, wood cutting, cooking.

Nonlinear domain, however, is a completely different beast—effort and time spent has little to do with result. In programming, a coder could code all year without creating anything of value, then another coder could create an app in few days that end up being adored by millions. In writing, a writer could write a hundred books without saying anything, then another writer could write a book that lasts hundreds of years. In music, a musician could practice for decades without graduating from mediocrity, then another musician could invent a brand-new music genre in their 20s. Podcasting, video making, product building, designing, drawing, and the things mentioned previously are few examples of nonlinear domain.

Linear and nonlinear domain have different rules, different winning conditions, different possible outcomes. Through technology, the world is getting increasingly nonlinear, and in this domain, there are things that matter much, much more than being busy.

When baking, my sister likes to say, “bready, bready, bready.” It’s contagious. When making this bready thingy, time is an absolutely critical component—after kneading, the bread must be allowed to sit before going to the oven. I still remember the first bread we baked: it went straight to the oven immediately after kneading, and it ended up super stiff and dry. (I still remember the bread’s texture, blegh!)

Like bread, a piece of writing must be given the amount of time and attention it requires. If it’s rushed or forced, it’ll feel half-baked.

(The pun is so good. I can’t stop smiling.)

One night, as I was writing, my laptop suddenly froze. Goddamit, I said to myself. So, I took a piece of paper and scribbled things down. For me, that turned out to be a significant accident.

The internet contains an infinite stream of newness—it killed boredom. When I hop on the internet, I’m dragged left and right by this and that—memes, tribal wars, news, cat videos, conspiracy theories, notifications, and all the cool, shiny objects.

Pen and paper provides a feature that internet-connected computers can’t: boredom. There’s no search bar to type on, there’s no notification that taps my shoulder. It’s just me—completely alone—doing my thing.

“C’mon, why am I not asleep yet?” you ask yourself. You can see your wife sleeping peacefully beside you; you’ve been staring at the ceiling for hours.

Now what.

You hate work, but you gotta work; your boss is a dick, but you gotta swallow it. “After all, I got mortgage to pay and mouths to feed,” you always say. Sometimes you wonder why your life is the way it is, but you quickly brush it aside; when you were young, you felt like a conqueror, but now, you’ve accepted your eternal slavery.

Since you were a small child, you were forced to follow rules—“do this, then do that; you should get this, then get that.” There wasn’t even a single person in your life that didn’t tell you what to do—your parents, your aunts, your uncles, your spiritual figures, your neighbors, your parents’ friends, and even your parents’ friends’ friends. “Well, since these adults are telling me what to do, they must know what they’re talking about, right?” you innocently said. You did the schools, you did the cubicles; you did the this, you did the that; you chased things you were told to chase, and avoided things you were told to avoid. You sacrificed your own personal happiness to satisfy all the rules that were shoved down your throat, and this life is what you get? There’s maybe a decade left for you to live—two, at most. Now what.

“Honey, can’t sleep again?” your wife whispers in your ear.

“Yeah.”

It’s 5.55 AM.

“Ugh… I guess I’ll take a jog,” you say to her.

Imagine not having to worry about money until the day you die. Fly anywhere, sleep anytime, eat anything; no alarm, no schedule, no boss to please, no colleagues to argue with; do whatever, whenever, without spending a nanosecond worrying about money.

Colloquially, this is known as Fuck You Money. Another way to call it is lifetime runway. Runway is the amount of time you can live—pay the bills, put food on the table, buy luxuries—without working. Now imagine having a lifetime amount of runway.

What could possibly be more important than having this?

Spiral stairs, undecorated / cement walls, unpainted

Vacant rooms, without windows / lonely balconies, no people

Green fields, many plants / white clouds, different shapes

Chirping birds, three of them / talking humans, there are none

As I write these, I’m inside an abandoned apartment. I’m overwhelmed by a feeling of awe, and no amount of words—or even pictures—can capture this feeling. The gentle breeze has been caressing my face since I arrived here. The sun is setting down: it’s hiding behind a thick cloud, and I can see few rays passing through. This cement ground I’m sitting on is quite warm. I was lying on it few minutes ago, and I could see the open sky with clouds gliding peacefully. There are four dried rain puddles, and their color is a mixture of green and brown—perhaps they were puddles of dirt and moss.

There’s no one here; I can hear birds chirping.

A physical sanctuary beyond compare.

A tank full of water, seventy-eight holes. One hole patched, six holes appears. This is how I feel.

I’m starting to wonder why I’m chasing success. I keep saying to myself that I want to be successful, and have money, and have this, and have that. But is that what I truly want? I feel like a pretender, on stage, dancing like a puppet. Maybe—just maybe—success is merely a way to patch my deep-seated insecurities. And, of course, one hole patched, six holes appear.

A tank full of water, seventy-eight holes…

(Replace the word “success” with “relationship” and “money” with “love,” and this writing will still be true.)

fungible: (especially of goods) being of such nature or kind as to be freely exchangeable or replaceable, in whole or in part, for another of like nature or kind. —dictionary.com

Imagine three sacks of rice imbued with the ability to speak. The first says, I am the best; the second says, No, I’m the best, because I smell better when cooked; the third says, No, no, no, I’m the best because my color is clearer. Who cares what these sacks of rice say? They’re fungible commodities—they taste (almost) the same, they look (almost) the same, they smell (almost) the same.

Humans are non-fungible, but made fungible by society. We all have unique talents; we all see things differently. But everything is stamped out by society’s propaganda. What’s the result? Fungible humans.

Look around. What do you find? There are many groups, and in each group, the members are saying, thinking, creating, and doing the same things. They dress the same way, they talk the same way; they like the same things, they hate the same things. Each group has sucked the uniqueness out of its members, and they became “sacks of rice.”

We weren’t meant to be fungible automatons.