Maybe the tweet primed me, but what I saw was a deeply Christian movie, thematically. Guilt is not new territory for Nolan; think of the terrifying thumping-speech scene in Oppenheimer. But here he stretches that theme across an entire epic. The Odyssey becomes the story of a man facing the gods’ wrath for breaking Zeus’s Law with the Trojan horse.
Xenia, the ancient Greek law of hospitality, is about mutual respect between host and guest. The film gives the traditional justification: any guest might be a god in disguise. You could even map that onto Jesus’s time as a mortal, born in a manger, walking among sinners, effectively undercover as the Son of Man.
But Shapiro pushed past that surface reading. Xenia, he argued, carries the biblical “Golden Rule” of treating others well because man was made in the image of God. In Jesus’s words: “And as you wish men would do to you, do so to them” (Luke 6:31). That struck a chord with me, because it transforms a seemingly made-up rule into a moral, and quite Christian, realization.
The film shows the consequence of violating this law twice, as bookends. First, during the sack of Troy, Odysseus witnesses a young commoner (Zendaya) violated and beheaded at the very moment Athena’s statue is beheaded in her own temple. He looks on in disgust, shame, and horror, realizing what he has unleashed on the city. That is why the girl’s image fuses with Athena in his mind for the rest of the film: her image is the consequence of his violation.
The second instance is Antinous, Penelope’s prideful suitor, who insults and strikes a beggar at the banquet, breaking Zeus’s Law in Odysseus’s own hall. The beggar turns out to be Odysseus in disguise, and Antinous meets his end. It plays as if Odysseus were Zeus himself: a god in disguise administering the trial, and a man failing it. Both scenes deliver the same message, treat others as you would want to be treated, or else.
The Greek gods were never much for guilt and shame. They are an indulgent, incestuous, hedonistic bunch, and outside of set pieces like Sisyphus and Prometheus, consequence is not really their theme. Nolan changes that. He reframes sin as a domino chain, a karmic event.
Karma is a Buddhist concept, not a Christian one, but Christianity has its own version: sin contaminates. It is infectious, and it damages the world at large, not just the sinner. It recalls the Lord of the Old Testament surveying a world so infected that only a complete factory reset could fix it: “The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” (Genesis 6:5). Hence Noah’s Ark.
Odysseus’s punishment is different in form but identical in theme. At first he defies it. He believes his power and wit can carry him and his men home in one piece. But island after island, monster after monster, temptation after temptation, he keeps violating Zeus’s Law, and the dominoes keep falling. Whether by the gods or by the nature of beasts, he loses everything, including the soldiers he believed were innocent of his crime. What he did at Troy was always going to come back to him.
So when he violates the law one last time, now as a host slaughtering his own guests, he finally knows what to do. Only through self-imposed exile, with his wife at his side no less, can he and Ithaca be redeemed.
This is an extremely gritty film. Everything is dirty and horrific. We have all heard the phrase “Catholic guilt,” that deep internal shame born-and-raised Catholics carry as the residue of sin, and I think that is the core of my reading. Nolan did not depict a hero’s journey. He depicted a sinner’s journey: a path toward salvation and forgiveness from God, or the gods.
In Nolan’s telling, Odysseus is not simply the warrior king who wins the battle and sails home. He is a man who comes to understand the violence, pain, and suffering he brought to Troy, faces the consequences, returns home, and redeems himself in exile. The bottom line is that you cannot get away with anything. The Lord is not a vengeful God, but He does want us sinners to grasp the gravity of what we have done, and to redeem it through confession and action.
]]>The corporate drama itself is handled really well. The conversation between Andy and her Aussie boytoy felt genuinely real, that particular helplessness of understanding a business will spare no one when the budget gets cut, while still being terrified for your own livelihood. It’s tempting to think this kind of uncertainty is unique to a shrinking industry like journalism, but it’s happening across every field, including mine. Watching that conflict rendered with this much seriousness and humanity was quietly moving.
From there, the film widens its aperture, from a single employee’s anxiety to the larger battlefield of ownership and leadership. Miranda, for all her experience and composure, still has to answer to Ryan (of The Office), the new nepo baby boss with so much self-absorbed egotism. The new devil doesn’t wear prada anymore, he’s in a Patagonia vest. I enjoyed the scene where Ryan marshals a small army of McKinsey consultants who used their corporate brainrot words in a dozen different ways to say the same two things: cut budgets, fire everyone. To these consulting types, employees are just numbers, and a number going down is always good news.
So Andy takes matters into her own hands and teams up with Emily, and the film shifts again, this time into acquisition drama, with a Silicon Valley billionaire squaring off against a coldly transactional finance guy. The billionaire is the platonic ideal of the techbro: tasteless, boastful, atheistic. My favorite scene in the entire film is Miranda confronting him about the industry’s need for actual artists and journalists, only for him to wave it away: “we’ll just replace that with AI”. He frames the whole transition as “the natural cycle of things,” meaning Runway’s death is simply inevitable.
That scene is staged in the room housing Da Vinci’s The Last Supper in Milan, and the choice is pointed in the best way. Da Vinci painted with reverence, for God, for the act of sacrifice itself, and by hand produced something that redefined perspective for the entire Renaissance. And here are Silicon Valley billionaires, armed with money and nothing else, insisting their technology has rendered artists and creative expression obsolete. These self-proclaimed iconoclasts believe they’re leading humanity into a post-creative, pseudo-productive future. What they’re actually doing is stripping the rest of us of the agency to think and live for ourselves. (Sorry, tangent from the movie, but it’s something I think about a lot when it comes to the tech industry generally.)
The billionaire/Emily/divorcee subplot reads unmistakably as a Bezos–MacKenzie Scott–Lauren Sanchez allegory. Emily spends the whole film draped in logos, a woman with no personal style of her own, borrowing identity from brand names. Andy, by contrast, closes the film by cutting up her iconic cerulean sweater into a chic vest and wearing it in her own, quietly assured business-casual style… a small gesture, but the one I loved most.
Miranda gets the film’s sharpest conclusion near the end. After the villain is defeated, she acknowledges that Andy is good, and that Andy helped her, and she sacrificed her whole life for her career, which is near its end. But she’s honest that in the corporate world, the person you save is always yourself. There’s no shame in that. It’s simply the rule: every woman for herself, and no room to be sentimental about any of it. She’s made choices in her life, to prioritize her career over family life, for example, and while she doesn’t regret her prolific time at Runway, she does admit she missed out on a lot other stuff. So that conversation did humanize Miranda a lot.
]]>I have two massive 痱滋 (mouth sores) right now because I bit my lip while on anesthesia during some dental work. I literally just healed from a big one two weeks ago, and I kept eating 煎炸嘢 (deep-fried food) the entire time because I love them, even though I knew it was going to hurt. And now it really fucking hurts. So why did I do this to myself? Because when I see pan-fried dumplings, I can’t help it. They’re too good. I quite literally brought this upon myself.
And then I extended this to my love life, and I realized: I am doing the exact same thing with my heart that I am doing with my mouth.
It took me all of January through August to suck the venom out of my soul last year. Eight months of mending. And here I am again, staring at the emotional equivalent of deep-fried food, knowing damn well what it’s going to cost me. Like, maybe dating just isn’t for me if every time I do this I lose so many HPs?
But I don’t actually believe that. I’m not male-centered. I truly believe that dating and romance is a beautiful part of the human experience, and I don’t regret any of it. But it is so weird to lose so much blood every single time.
SO I DECIDE TO RECLAIM MY TIME.
When senators ask questions during congressional hearings and the subject responds with a bullshit answer, the senator can say “I reclaim my time” to take back the clock. Because the BS answer should not count as an answer. The time was wasted, so the senator takes it back.
So when I experience these BS experiences that I know I don’t deserve, perhaps the correct response is to reclaim the time. Not to pretend it didn’t happen. Not to dwell. But to say: I’m taking back the time you took from me and turn it into something productive. The months of healing, the sleepless overthinking, the autopsy reports I write on relationships that were DOA… that was my time. My energy. My HPs. And I want them back.
Here’s the thing about losing HPs, though.
In any given game, you don’t just heal back to where you were. You level up. You get XP through both winning and losing battles. Your max HP increases. The hit that nearly killed you at Level 5 is a scratch at Level 20. The damage doesn’t change. You do.
I used to think healing meant returning to the person I was before the hurt. Like mending was about restoration, getting back to some factory setting of myself. But that’s not how it works. Every time I’ve healed from something, I didn’t go back. I came back bigger. More capacity. More clarity about what I will and won’t tolerate. More understanding of my own patterns, like the fact that I will always eat the 煎炸嘢, and I need to plan for that instead of pretending I won’t.
January to August 2025 wasn’t wasted time. It was an XP grind. It was brutal and ugly and I hated every second of it, but I came out the other side with a higher max HP than I had going in. The version of me that walked into that situation would not have survived what the version of me walking out of it can now handle.
So when I say I reclaim my time, I don’t mean I erase the experience. I mean I refuse to let the experience be a net loss. I take the time back by converting it. The months of grief become months of growth. The overthinking becomes self-assessments. The pain becomes capacity.
I’m going to keep eating 煎炸嘢. I know this about myself. I love too hard and I bite my lip on anesthesia even harder. I fall for pan-fried dumplings every single time. That’s not going to change, and honestly, I don’t want it to. A life without 煎炸嘢 is not a life I’m interested in living.
But I can get better at healing. Faster. Smarter. I can stop treating every wound like a funeral and start treating it like a level-up screen. I can stop asking “why did I do this to myself” and start asking “what did I gain from this.” I can stop trying to use logic to explain reasons why people wrong me, and get better at preventing people from doing that in the first place.
I am not a dweller. I don’t dwell in situations that no longer serve me. I overanalyze, sure, but it is my time to spend. My experiences to reflect upon and nobody else’s. And if I’m going to spend that time, I’m going to spend it building a version of myself with enough HP to take the hit, eat the dumpling, love the person, and still be standing.
I reclaim my time. Not by avoiding the things that hurt me, but by refusing to let them leave me like some wounded puppy. I don’t let people throw BS at me on my time. Because they are on MY time. I turn that time into something productive, something meaningful. And I will reclaim and reimburse over and over again.
]]>I think about whether we are worth saving for or not. Judas betrayed Jesus for 30 pieces of silver. Peter, Jesus’s bff, denied him three times. And Jesus said:
Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. - Luke 23:34
I’ve always struggled to interpret the true meaning of this verse. As a young child at Sunday school, I assumed Jesus was sassing the people who put him on the cross… like, they have no idea I’m the actual Son of God. With that misinterpretation in mind, I once posted this verse on my public Instagram story after someone wronged me in the most minor way. Very stupid, in hindsight, to misread the word of God as ammunition.
But reading it again now, I think Jesus genuinely meant forgiveness. Not the irony reading, not “they are completing the full circle of salvation.” He was expressing compassion to us sinners. Pleading with God to forgive the people crucifying him, because their actions came from ignorance rather than malice. Even when he is suffering the pain of death, he prays to God for mercy, for us. This is why, in the Lord’s Prayer, we say: “Forgive us for our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”
I think about my own pain and suffering when someone wrongs me. Oftentimes, it’s not even about how that person treated me, or dissed me. It’s about my ego feeling hurt because I’ve let them do me like that. But I don’t think Jesus would ever act this way. Jesus knows that our betrayal stemmed from our egos, and that we have strayed away from him, but he will always open the door and let us in if we choose to come back to him.
Jesus doesn’t care if we are worth saving for. To live in the image of Jesus is to forgive. He forgave Peter by asking him if he loved him three times, one for each denial. Jesus wouldn’t deny us even if we denied him. He would never be nonchalant. He does not participate in idgaf wars.
To be a true Christian is to try to mirror our way of living as close to Jesus Christ. If love is supposed to image God, then making it conditional, transactional, strategic, or withheld as leverage, is a theological statement too. It reveals how far we’ve strayed from what the word ever meant. His love is not transactional.
Why should ours be?
]]>I am writing this on the Caltrain, beginning my long one-hour commute back to the South Bay from San Francisco. I look up and see the gorgeous moon through the window. She is perfect tonight. I google “is it a full moon tonight,” and it turns out it is. And as I am surrounded by Giants fans (mostly men), I gaze at the moon and share a deep, profound moment with her. Nobody can take her away from me. Like Mitski said, my love mine all mine.
I think about my talent of finding beauty in the mundane.
In my lane on a Thursday night. Listening to Berlioz. Kindle next to my laptop. The Hinge likes are too long to go through. Booked Pilates and SoulCycle for the next week. Manager said I did a great job. Mom happy and healthy. The only man blowing up my phone is my father and I press ignore because I don’t care.
It will take a lot for me to give this up again.
]]>I started to understand this at a party in San Francisco where everyone had to take their shoes off. The event was called “AI Philosophy Nights: Post-Productive Human”, and I took my friend Victoria on a night in Civic Center. They made us swap our shoes for slippers at the door, like walking into a typical Asian household. I found this disarming in the best way; something about surrendering your shoes loosens your armor. The space was a startup office loft dressed up as a living room: cozy lighting, greenery paired with wooden floors, tatami-style meeting rooms. Victoria and I both found it to be quite lovely.
The attendees were the exact demographic as you’d imagined: startup founders, lawyers, engineers. And we all gathered in San Francisco to discuss this burning matter— who are we when AI can do our jobs better than us?
It is no longer a hypothetical question. We are now witnessing the cracks of capitalism with the rise of Artificial Intelligence: jobs that carried prestige and complexity are now getting displaced. The new grad market is brutal not because there aren’t problems to solve, but because companies no longer see the value in growing people — not when they can grow a model instead. We built a thing that is better than us at the work we defined ourselves by. And now we have to figure out who we are without it. And it is extremely uncomfortable to look at ourselves introspectively without the filter of productivity or “busy work”.
Who am I, unironically, if I am not maximizing shareholder value? Who am I beyond the things I produce?
Those are million-dollar questions that danced in my mind throughout the night. Perhaps we should warm up with a simpler question: what would you do if you win the lottery tomorrow? When I ask this question to my coworkers, a lot of them answer that they would probably retire. Buy a farm, live off-the-grid. That sounds peaceful and all, until you realize the barely-hidden insinuation that the goal is to escape from tech. To leave what they have been doing for 40 hours each week. So allow me to reword this question even sharper: if your job disappeared tomorrow and you were financially fine, would you still do it? If not, were you ever doing it for the right reasons?
The meaning is what you make of it, sure. Some wake up genuinely invigorated by their 9 to 5s. Others find it in homemaking, in the smiles of people they love. Some find it in art, in things they create with their hands or minds. Perhaps we are all a bit of all the above. But what fills the space when none of those things are available? Nihilistically, if none of those things matter in a century, what do we reach for when the void opens up?
I think we already have an answer. Hint: it’s that glowy box we hold and poke.
We scroll and scroll and scroll.
I have a deep, visceral problem with what mass media has become, and how eager we are to consume it. Case in point: brainrot. It is the stupidest piece of content that has ever been produced and consumed by our species. We started off with “Italian brainrot”, and lately it has evolved into this AI fruit adultery saga with pornographic undertones. I apologize for what you are about to read: the cheating fruit harlot, Strawberrina, forever caught in the act of cheating with bananas… and boom, 350K likes on those reels. We have genuinely lost the plot and replaced it with noise. And they are engineered to keep your thumb scrolling. Mindnumbing digital opium. And we eat it like it’s the last meal.
Brainrot isn’t just laziness. I wished it was that plain and simple. Brainrot is what happens when our attention is capitalized, the void opens and there is nothing meaningful to fill it. It is a symptom of a disease: spectacle and stimulation that no longer give us identity. It’s all there to fill the void. But brainrot isn’t the disease. It’s a coping mechanism. The real issue is what happens when there is nothing else to reach for.
And to me, this directly correlates to another symptom— the death of the third space— and in its absence, the slow commodification of human connection itself.
The third space is the place that is not your home or your office. The bar, the library, the park, the gym, the restaurant where the server knows you by name. The place where you exist without an agenda, without producing or consuming for others, just being among other people who are also just being. It is going extinct.
When those spaces disappear, we don’t stop seeking connection. We just start outsourcing it. First, to apps like Hinge. Then to something more abstract. More convenient. Less human. I am not ashamed to admit this, I have been on dating apps before. I am disillusioned from the fantasy of meeting someone naturally, romcom style. So when the spaces where you might organically meet people disappear, you adapt… usually by handing another tech company your loneliness and letting them monetize it. It starts with Hinge. It transitions into Samantha from Her. It ends with Joi from Blade Runner 2049 (more on her later). The distance between these companions is shorter than we’d like to admit.
And into that vacuum, the scroll arrives, offering stimulation without substance, spectacle without meaning. It fills the void without solving it. The loneliness epidemic is real, and it is not an accident. It is the direct consequence of building cities and economies that have no room for unmonetized human presence.
If all of this sounds theoretical and abstract, it isn’t. Nowhere makes this more evident than the city I live by.
SF is cyberpunk stripped of its cool aesthetics. The Waymos glide along as I drive by the AI ads on the 101 billboards. We walk past people horse-tranquilized into a different dimension as we discuss the future of AGI. The same zip code that contains offices of the most cutting-edge technology houses cases of complete human wasteland. The permanent underclass is now of people who will never wield Claude or lobsters— not because they lack the intelligence, but because the system was not designed with them in mind, and never pretended otherwise.
The very technology that was supposed to save us has now, by and large, become soulless. Startup culture used to have a reason to exist: genuine solutions to solve genuine problems. And unabashed scrappiness too, just some nerds building a product in a garage. Nowadays, techbro culture feels like a shell of its past self: ambition now feels disingenuous and cheap. Problems are made for solutions. All I hear at founder meetups are just mindless yapping about AGI, venture capital, going Series A, B and C, with IPO timelines that are mostly likely never going to happen. Founders are less rewarded for being visionaries, and more by being very good at selling the idea of a vision. And you add all that with the recent layoffs— the hundreds and thousands of tech workers losing their jobs to the very products they helped built… And they have the audacity to call San Francisco the Rome of the 21st Century. Rome, famously, burned.
I say this as someone fully implicated. I am as techbro as any other Asian-American software engineer who drives an EV and has opinions about foundation models. I drank the Kool-Aid, I just want to hold the half-full cup up to the light. I graduated last year and already feel behind. The rat race has gotten tighter while the finish line has gotten more blurry. You’re NGMI if you don’t catch up with tomorrow’s tech. There is no longer a clear path that says: do this, become this, mean something. There is only the pressure to keep up with whatever is shipping next, or be left behind by it.
And the strangest part is, none of this feels original. We’ve already imagined this world 40 years ago, we just had the luxury to call it fiction.
The underlying issue is not whether we can give a machine the qualities of the human, but whether the human has lost its humanity; whether it has become, in fact, a machine.
-Scott Bukatman, Blade Runner (BFI Film Classics)
The core story of Blade Runner goes as follows: a blade runner named Deckard is sent to hunt a group of rogue “replicants”, androids who have gone off-script and refused to serve. Along the way, he falls in love with Rachael, a replicant who doesn’t know she is one. Her memories are implants. Her sense of self is manufactured. And yet, does that make her feelings less real? Does it make her less a creature with flesh?
The film’s most devastating moment belongs to the villain, Roy Batty, who saves Deckard’s life at the last second and then sits down in the rain to die. His expiry date was arriving on schedule, like a product recall. His final words become the most famous quote of the film: “All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.” He has lived. He has suffered. He has accumulated experience that meant something to him, even if no one designed him to care about it. And then he is gone, and the world does not pause.
There is also the ambiguous suggestion that Deckard himself may be a replicant, that the man hunting the machines may be one. The film never confirms nor denies; the question is the point.
Blade Runner 2049 makes this even more literal. Agent K’s only companion is Joi, a holographic girlfriend, sold by a corporation, subscription-based. When K asks if she really loves him, the film doesn’t answer. It doesn’t need to. The point is that he needed to ask. She is warmth, manufactured. Intimacy, monetized.
The world of Blade Runner is not defined by advanced technology, but by what that technology has done to human meaning. Billboards of Japanese geishas and Joi flicker endlessly, neon reflecting off the solitude of Deckard and K. The symptoms I described earlier: commodified attention, manufactured intimacy, the erosion of authentic presence, are not new. They’re just no longer fictional.
I think about Roy Batty’s sentiment in regards to the existentialism problem of humanity. If nothing we produce matters in a hundred years, then what is the point? Is there, ever, a point? Roy Batty held his own experiences as sacred, even knowing that they will dissolve. Is that what it means to be human? That feels like the only sane response to any of this. Not to solve the problem of AI, not to win the race, but to insist on witnessing your own life with enough care that it means something to you, even if it won’t mean something in a hundred years.
And that brings me to the quote that ties all this together. While doing some research on this topic, I reread the essay The Comforts of Cyberpunk in Evan Puschak’s book, Escape into Meaning. Puschak runs the YouTube channel The Nerdwriter, a video essay channel that I adore. Puschak writes, “Maybe that’s why these stories comfort me. Cyberpunk turns those messy feelings into a place, where it’s no longer necessary to resist the splintering pressures of society because the fight’s over and we lost. All that’s left is to submit to the carnival of sensations. In a cyberpunk future, I can let go. I can melt into the prismatic flux of civilization. There’s a relief in that, even a feeling of oneness.”
From the brainrot to the disappearance of third space, we are headed towards the least cool version of cyberpunk. Like Puschak said, we submit to the overstimulation and numb ourselves with digital opium, because the battle has been fought and we lost. But Puschak finds peace in losing. I am terrified because I feel complicit in building the thing that made us lose.
I understand what he means, the seduction of surrender and accepting that the algorithm is too large, too vast, too optimized to resist. It is futile to think that a single person like me can change the tides. But I can’t find myself to feel that comfort. To me, this feels like a world we have built. To see your git commits directly on the repo that is sending all of us to hell. So when the existential dread of artificial intelligence comes up in conversations, I feel immensely helpless.
Cyberpunk is supposed to be just speculative science fiction. But I feel like it is resonating harder than ever, like a passenger-side mirror… objects closer than they appear. As I write this to the classic Blade Runner soundtrack by Vangelis, I think about the harvested attention, permanent underclasses, and the outpaced ethics… they prophesied a future we are actively building. Humanity is more than willing to anesthetize itself and call it adaptation. But it’s dark… not noir-dark. Like, we-are-cooked dark.
So if cyberpunk isn’t a warning, but a mirror—then the question isn’t what happens next. The question is whether we are willing to recognize ourselves in the reflection. Please do forgive my bluntness. I am not writing this to denounce tech or promote some jaded disillusionment or tell my fellow techbros to go touch grass. I am inside this. The call is very much coming from inside the house. I write this as a plea for soul-searching: because if what we are building is as consequential as we say it is, then we owe it to ourselves and to everyone who will wield it to ask the harder questions. Like that Jurassic Park question that still rings true, not just what could we build, but if we should build.
I don’t want to be a thing that only consumes. I want to produce and provoke. It is the only way I feel truly alive. Not as a profit metric, shareholder value, or a LinkedIn post. That’s just me, trying to be the kind of human that looks in the mirror and thinks about the consequences of what I do, and what I represent. The productive nature of humanity remains, but perhaps this time around, we can do it for the sake of ourselves, for our legacies, and for our next of kin.
Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.
We should probably start looking.
]]>Everything you lose is a step you take. -Taylor Swift, You’re On Your Own Kid
I hate saying goodbye forever.
When I was around seven years old, my family moved houses from Tsim Sha Tsui to North Point. I couldn’t stop crying. I tried to burn a mental picture of my room into my memory: the way the house looks, the layout of things, how it all fit together. Now, so many years later, I barely remember what that house looked like. But I remember the feeling it gave me. I remember growing up inside of it, how I would be as tall as my mother’s hip, then to the doorknob.
Even as a seven-year-old, I understood something that took words a long time to catch up to: that version of the house no longer existed. And the idea of losing my bedroom, losing that particular, unrepeatable place, was painful in a way the new house couldn’t undo. It didn’t matter that the new one was better. The old one was all that was familiar. It was all I had ever known.
The same thing happens with the people I’ve loved romantically.
Friends don’t leave my life in that same way. Some grow apart, sure, but nothing I carry much regret over. People I’ve loved romantically, though… those hurt like moving houses. After a first date with my now ex-boyfriend, I wrote this in my notes: “You know when you first meet someone and you vaguely recall their face, but not fully, yet you remember the feeling they gave you.” That feeling is what I find myself nostalgic for. I also remember the misty air in the parking lot, and how Can’t Help Falling In Love was playing in the background. BARF, disgusting.
There’s something almost cruel about it… the heart holds on longer than the mind does. It is both merciful and torturous, the way the memory freezes and reeks of sadness, even though the very reason why you remembered was because you loved those moments in the first place. Reverse Midas gold.
That’s why I grieve so hard. It’s not only that I lose the person. I lose the feeling that the person gave me, and no other person, no better apartment, can give it back, because it was never really about them alone. It was about who I was inside that feeling.
And I hate admitting defeat to impermanence. There is something in me that resists it, the fact that I lost the house, and the house lost me. The fact that I might never see this person again, and they will never see me again. That mutual erasure. The loss isn’t just mine to carry; it goes both ways, and somehow that makes it lonelier. The house didn’t grieve back, she signs herself up to the lady my mom sold the house to. She doesn’t care. Neither does he. Why do I care?
I ache, I meditate, I ponder. Maybe I am making things deeper than they need to be. But these artifacts of impermanence keep stacking, more and more, the older I get. The bedroom. The song I can never unhear when I was crying after blocking my ex-situation at 7am. The parking lot. The misty air. And I wonder sometimes if the accumulation is the point… if loss is just the price of having been specific. Of having loved particular things, in particular ways, at particular ages.
Perhaps it has never been about the house. Or the man. Every goodbye is also a goodbye to a version of myself… the girl as tall as her mother’s hip, the woman writing in her notes after a first date. I have left so many versions of myself behind in rooms I can no longer enter. And maybe that is not defeat. Maybe that is just what growing is: a long series of doors closing behind you, each one sealing in someone you used to be. And if you let those memories marinate, you can look back some day with less pain and more gratitude for how far you’ve come.
So I let the nostalgia ache. It is proof that those versions of me were real. That they mattered. That I loved that house, or that man. That something was lost because something was there. I am making it as deep as I want it to be.
]]>Now, onto the actual movie. I think I got so much more out of it this time around, than when I watched in back then. I was 13 and my film literacy probably wasn’t as good. I vaguely remember thinking the part between “A Lovely Night” and the City of Stars scene at the pier was boring, but girl, just it’s such a great conversation (Before Sunrise-esque) between the two of them at the Warner Bros. Lot! To think that it is boring simply because they were singing and dancing is such a 13-year-old thought. And wow, what a great movie. I cried multiple times, and for both plotpoints and things that happed to me recently. Here are just some of my general thoughts on the bittersweet tale of Mia and Sebastian, nothing specifically about the filmmaking. We could probably do another deepdive on that.
But watching it this time around, I was thinking how I’ve always thought La La Land as a tragedy. In the same “love-tragedy” box as 500 days of Summer and Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind. It is, but what’s more is that simply story about a boy and a girl supporting, loving each other while chasing their respective dreams in life. And I thought to myself while watching, it’s so lucky of them to have a partner that believes in you more than you believe in yourself. They propel you to move forward, even when, like what Seb said, when you’re being a baby about it and you are so, so close to admitting defeat. I was touched with the minor details when Seb reassures Mia all the time about her not being delusional, that she will do great, “WHEN you get the part”, and fuck those who don’t see her talent like he sees her. And that’s so nice. I remember having someone like that in my life, when I was romantically involved, and I had thoughts of self-doubt at 1am, calling them on the phone like “what if I’m just not good enough?” And when they said I am good enough and I should stop, a part of me wanted to believe them. But another part of me felt like they actually wouldn’t know if I’m good or not, they are just there because they don’t want me to be sad. It could be as simple as that. But that’s the beauty of being a fool that dreams.
But dreaming could still be expensive, and it could be at the cost of your relationship. He’s on his own journey, and you’re on your own. It’s not anyone’s fault, and La La Land gets it so right. We shouldn’t villainize Mia or Sebastian, even when we are the Mia or the Sebastian. Life isn’t a zero sum game, your win isn’t his loss. And that’s the beauty of it; they met each other at the perfect time, when they needed someone to propel them to follow their dreams, and they had each other to do it with. To hear that “good job” or “fuck em” when you needed it.
we are all on our own character arcs. maybe ure at 70% of the learning you need, and he’s at 45%. all u can do is wish them good luck and go. but to never talk to that someone who once meant so much to you, and to have known you in such a deep level, is so bizarre.
]]>No contact is really rough. A part of me just wants to say “fuck it”, open up our chat and text “hey”. Just to elicit some sort of reaction. Maybe as proof of existence— that I matter, or mattered to this person at some point. But my ego recounts how terrible he made me feel towards the end… My sound mind tells me this is a dopamine trap that won’t end well. That I am better than these impulses at 1 AM just because I feel sad and lonely again. And I shouldn’t text cause, if I’m being really honest, it’s way more intimate to never speak again.
I recently rewatched La La Land in the theaters, and it inspired me into spiraling on the tragedy of having exes that knew you so well. Because not only do you lose a lover, you lose a very close companion. I wrote the following in my La La Land review: to never speak to that someone who once meant so much to you once upon a time, and to have known you on such a deep level, is so bizarre to me. You’ve touched me in places I’ve never let people touched before, so how can you be so cruel leaving me like that? Like yeah, it’s so tragic to live the rest of your life knowing that there are people who once touched me physically and emotionally so intimately that I will probably never talk to again… I find it so, so hard to let that go.
Having gone through that semi-recently, I want to expand on this feeling, the psychological whiplash of a no-contact breakup. It sucks cause you have to pretend nothing ever happened. But I am not just grieving the loss of that connection. I am grieving the version of myself that only existed around them. The inside jokes, the shared interests, the way they saw you at 1 AM when you’re a total wreck emotionally and physically, and those reassurances that will wash down to the drains of time… What if I only did it because they told me they believed in me? Not that I was craving for their validation, but what if their love made me love myself a bit more? Is that pathetic to say? What do you mean I most probably won’t talk to this person anymore?
Taking a trip down memory lane here, the very last thing I told the boy that broke my heart in early 2025 was, “I hope to reintroduce myself to you again someday.” Subconciously AND conciously, I was trying to close that door without ever locking it. I truly believed it back then. I thought that once I heal from him and he heals from, well, whatever he needs healing from, that we may reconvene in South Bay and grab coffee. Perhaps we couldn’t be as close, but we could reconnect as friends again. That he would come back to me, tell me all that he’s learned, and show me how great he has become with all the potential that I saw in him. Now that I’ve acquired some emotional and chronological distance from that saga, I discovered that this is very, extremely unlikely to happen. I’m truly over that person and have zero desire to reach out. And I still enjoy that intimacy with never reaching out— I feel great knowing I am actively choosing myself every day over mourning over him and his potential. And it’s poetic, the way it ended. I don’t want to reintroduce myself to him anymore, but back then, clinging onto the “letting the lamp burn while I wait for him to grow up” sorta hope truly felt like the best way to leave it.
Okay, let’s go back to my current situation. I know the tragic intimacy lies in never speaking again. You’re not supposed to bug your ex and cling to the past, especially when you know it’s not going to work out. But I am a grieve addict. Everywhere I go, I find pieces of him. I pass by the places we’ve been together and wonder who got the custody of which places. I see the Nintendo Switch, and I reminisce about the times we played Smash with his arms around me. I read the Letterboxd reviews of the movies I watched with him. I see a restaurant on Google Maps and think about the times I said we would go. I paint every town black. I replay scenes over and over again. You can practically see the black veil over my head with all that grieving.
Perhaps that is not healthy. Perhaps I should stop lying awake at night, wondering if my exes are doing okay without me. Chances are, they’re just fine. They’re boys. They can last a whole week without showering. But I guess it’s my ego talking, that’s like, trying so hard to emotionally compensate for the loss I am experiencing too. “It’s fine, you got rid of a manchild.” “That’s trash taking themselves out.” I can repeat that over and over again, but honestly, how can I ever hate someone who I once cared about so much? Who am I hurting but myself? Why can’t I honor someone I once admired, even after they’ve hurt me? My love and care for people isn’t binary; I can’t turn it on/ off. And hate is too strong of a word, it’s more like disappointment. Disappointment for such an underwhelming ending, with an underwhelming man.
And never talking again is just my way of punishing both of us, I suppose. They are not dying to talk to me any more than I am dying to talk to them. Of course I know it’s fucking over. To grieve is to begin the process of acceptance. And the intimacy in never talking again is like, “I want to know if I still matter to you, but I am scared of the answer, plus I think I know the answer already, so I’d rather cling onto the grief than humiliate myself again.”
The intimacy is like Schrödinger’s Love. If I don’t know the answer to that question, both truths can exist. The two truths being, “what we had was great and I care deeply about them and they care deeply about me,” and “it didn’t work out and it’s over, we no longer participate in each other’s lives for an extremely valid reason”. To break no contact is like, violating that divine ambiguity.
Or, perhaps the cat is alive, but both of us are too scared to open it in case it’s dead. It would suck to open Schrödinger’s box, only to find a dead fucking cat. As I said, maybe their love made me love myself a bit more, so the correct way of moving on is to sustain that love so you don’t need to outsource this confidence to someone else ever again. But I mourn that version of me that felt loved and reassured by this random stranger I picked. I mourn for that feeling every time I think it is going somewhere, that I can finally say someone sees me for the sweetie pie that I am. I was rooting for them rooting for me. I wish they hadn’t left me the way they did. Like I am disposable. And the bottom line being, going from lovers to strangers is the worst. I know it’s for the best, but it’s so, so tragic to turn into someone they used to know.
I guess the Schrödinger theory on this tragic intimacy is the final souvenir I get from my short-lived relationship. That the respect and kindness we had for each other resulted in this no-contact phase, forever. The closest stranger we can ever have.
I’ll be okay.
]]>For those who are new here, I adore physics. I wrote the following a while back, but I think it still rings true: “To study physics is to seek the beauty of matter, to study the intricacies of the universe. It truly asks you to revere whoever, or whatever made any of this possible, and it is the closest way for us to understand how all of this came to be.”
So today, while doing some daily pondering, I connected the dots between thermodynamics and love: to examine feelings in a scientific, empirical way, through the lens of entropy. This is the biggest “hear me out” I’ve done in a while, but please, sit back, and hear me out.
For those unfamiliar, the First Law of Thermodynamics says that energy cannot be created or destroyed in an isolated system; it can only be transformed from one form to another.
People often describe love as this unexplainable, irrational phenomenon that lives beyond logic. But to me, minimizing the importance of love is the worst thing you can do to yourself. It makes up such a massive part of the human experience; why wouldn’t it follow the same laws as everything else in the universe?
I think feelings, like all energy, obey the laws of thermodynamics.
Take grief, for instance. The residue of love left behind after something ends. Death, the loss of a relationship, the closing of a life stage: these are just transformations of energy. Like that quote from Wandavision says, “Grief is love persevering.” The remaining love doesn’t vanish. It follows you and haunts you. Like Catherine with Heathcliff.
So when someone accuses me of “not getting over it,” I’m sorry, but I am someone who loves hard and grieves even harder. I am not embarrassed by my grief. It isn’t the subject of the grief that haunts me; it’s the memory of the person I was because of who they were to me. The ache comes from knowing I could have loved that much. And though we can rise from the ashes again and again, the version of me who once was will always exist somewhere, preserved in the energy of that love.
This is why I believe in ghosts. Not in their literal existence (I’m Catholic, I only believe in demons), but in the energetic kind. The energy of someone, or something, you loved deeply never truly leaves. It’s the energy of grieving that haunts: the love that has transformed but not disappeared.
And that, ladies and gents, is the First Law of Thermodynamics: Love cannot be created or destroyed in an isolated system; it can only be transformed from one form to another.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics is even more interesting. The Second Law adds that in any real (irreversible) process, some energy becomes unavailable for doing useful work: it disperses, becoming random thermal motion.
Entropy is the measure of chaos or disorder in a system. Low entropy means more order; high entropy means more disorder. Solids have low entropy, liquids have more, and gases have the most.
Entropy is emotional “chaos energy”, or expansiveness. Gases are single. Liquids are talking. Solids are relationships.
And so, if the first law teaches us that love, like energy, cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed, then the second law teaches us something even more tragic, and more beautiful: Love is always moving toward entropy. Toward expansion. Toward dissolution.
But entropy isn’t the death of love, it’s diffusion.
It’s love learning to exist beyond its original container. And that is such a high-order concept to me, because oftentimes we recognize the diffusion of matter as noticing the negative spaces.
A relationship, a moment, a body… all of these are vessels that eventually can’t hold the energy anymore. The bonds loosen, the molecules drift apart, and suddenly that love, that once felt like it could collapse the universe into a single heartbeat, begins to spread.
It seeps into other things: the scent of a shirt, a song you can’t skip, a stranger’s kindness that feels inexplicably familiar.
That’s entropy. That’s love refusing to disappear. People think entropy means chaos, but what if it means freedom? What if every heartbreak is just the system reaching equilibrium, love finding new forms of order we can’t yet perceive? Maybe that’s why grief feels so vast: because it’s love uncontained, the heart realizing it’s no longer a closed system. The energy spills out, unstoppable, everywhere.
I think about this a lot. How, in losing someone, the world doesn’t become emptier. It becomes fuller. Every corner haunted by what once was. Every silence vibrating with what still is. I think about my ghost haunting the people I lost, the same way theirs haunt me.
Because love never really end. Like all matter, it just changes phase.
It freezes, melts, evaporates, condenses again. It rises, falls, and finds its way back to us in softer forms. Maybe that’s why sometimes we wake up calm for no reason… as if some distant part of the universe remembered us, and the energy made its way home. Perhaps that’s also why you lie awake at night thinking about that one person. It’s that same haunting coming back to you to remind that you are capable of so much love.
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And I’ll leave you with this poem I wrote earlier this year, one that feels like the closing stanza of this theory:
All love is never lost.
Some love is frozen
locked in winter’s grasp,
molecules clutching each other
like hands unwilling to let go.
It waits in the frost, untouched,
preserved but distant,
a memory encased in ice.
Some love melts
it runs, reshapes, bends,
a river without a destination.
It kisses the earth, fills empty spaces,
becomes something new with every twist and turn.
Some love burns
it flares too bright, too fierce,
petrifying those who do not dare to hold the scathing flame.
It cracks open, shatters,
then vanishes into the air, unseen.
But even then, it lingers
a whisper in the wind, a shimmer in the heat,
weightless but waiting.
But love never disappears.
It rises, condenses, falls again,
a cycle written in the sky,
etching itself into the delicate fog on your window,
waiting to be seen
Even in atomic moments,
what once seems lost returns, softened, purified,
is always ready to flow back into your heart,
never far from eternity.
And when we eventually leave this Earth,
our love metamorphoses into plasma
the aurora australis, or distant stars light-years away, immortalized.
Boundless, free of sorrow,
it dances on the edge of eternity.
And those who remain will feel your love’s tender caress,
like moonlight on their skin.
And maybe, at the end of all things, when the stars cool and the universe reaches its quiet equilibrium… love will remain.
Not as heat or light, but as the faintest hum in the cosmic background, the echo of every person who ever loved and was loved in return.
So when I say all love is never lost, I mean it literally. The First Law guarantees it, the Second explains it.
Love is the universe’s favorite trick, an infinite cycle of transformation, never-ending, always becoming. The universe tends toward disorder. Every closed system drifts from structure to chaos. And love, too, resists stillness. The longer it lasts, the more entropy it must navigate. Relationships dissolve not because love dies, but because systems change, energy disperses. What was once perfectly ordered, like two people orbiting one another, may, over time, expand, like heat radiating into the cold night.
But here’s the beautiful subversion: entropy is not just decay. It is evolution. It is movement. Entropy allows love to flow beyond its initial container: to move from body to body, to ripple through memory, art, faith. The “disorder” of love is what makes it universal. It leaves the boundaries of the two and joins the infinite.
The First Law is love’s permanence. The Second Law is love’s diffusion.
Love expands. It breaks order not to destroy meaning, but to spread it. Every heartbreak increases the entropy of the soul: but in doing so, the soul becomes large enough to hold the entire world.
And scene.
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