daily
2025-12-19: Left Ear
I enjoy wearing earbuds while walking, working out, being in transit.
But they keep breaking. After about 2 years, the left one stops working and I have to buy a new pair.
That's not good.
- philosophy
- daily
2025-12-18: Salvation
Planetarians must gift everything they have to the universe without expecting anything in return.
Or else: death.
Give up having or stop being.
Give up having and start being without end.
- philosophy
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2025-12-17: Theft
I remember a quote by the French philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: “La propriété, c’est le vol!” In English, it means: property is theft.
Proudhon made a distinction between possession and property. For him, possession is a relationship grounded in temporal need. One may need tools and land to live and to produce, but possession dissolves when use ends. Property, by contrast, is an absolute legal right: the right to own by excluding others, regardless of use. Proudhon argued that property is theft because it makes exclusive what is fundamentally collective.
My point is more basic. Theft is a one-sided, negative exchange. Taking without giving is a criminal act. It is illegal because it violates logic itself. Any system seeks equilibrium, a balancing of forces. Eventually, it is time to pay back. Crime never pays off.
How can planetary humans be forgiven for material theft?
How can humans appease the underground spirits that have possessed them?
Any sacrifice to underground spirits only feeds their hunger.
To grow one’s possessions is only to grow one’s possessiveness.
These spirits were locked underground in response to the crimes they committed.
All ownership must be deemed illegal by universal law.
The universe is the only one.
As long as I do not get caught, I can steal. But getting caught is only a matter of time. And when I am caught, I must do time locked up in matter. So I had better make sure my crimes were committed in favor of the judge.
I must surrender all my possessions to the universe. Then the universe rewards me with boundlessness.
I must give all I have to the universe. Then the universe rewards me with all I am.
- philosophy
- daily
2025-12-16: Planetary Processing
Not only how planetarians see the world, but also how they process it, is conditioned.
Silica is key to lenses: how we see the world. Silicon is key to computers: how we process the world.
Silicon is not alien to silica. It is silica transformed. Taken from the same ground, broken down, purified, stripped of oxygen, refined until it can behave in a controlled and obedient way. As a semiconductor, silicon lives in between: neither fully conducting nor fully resisting electricity. This in-between state allows it to enact binary logic, the rigid oscillation between 1 and 0, on and off, yes and no, conduct and block. Every computation is a ritualized enforcement of duality.
To make silicon computable, humans dig again. Quartz sand is mined, crushed, chemically reduced, and purified to extreme levels. Around this silicon core, other taken materials assemble: copper for wiring, gold for contacts, aluminum for interconnects, rare earth elements for control and calibration, lithium and cobalt for stored energy. A computer is an underground assembly, a condensed monument of extracted matter.
Working with computers does not end the act of taking; it intensifies it. More computation demands more chips, more energy, more refinement, more digging. The ground is opened again and again so that thought itself can be processed faster, smaller, and at larger scale. Computation feeds on extraction, and extraction feeds computation.
Planetarians process the world through stolen matter. And the more they compute, the deeper they must dig, reinforcing the crime of taking from the Earth while mistaking acceleration for understanding.
- philosophy
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2025-12-15: Planetary Vision
Humans adjust their worldview based on what they see.
Planetarian humans see the world through the things they stole from the ground. Yet all they see is prison. And all they do is reinforce and solidify that prison.
Microscopes, telescopes – all the scopes humans use to see better – are made of ground material. All technology for seeing is therefore made of taken matter. Humans dig holes to harvest it: in the past quartz, today sand and ever purer silica. Across all periods, the act is the same – extracting silica from the ground, excavating, refining, and processing it into lenses.
And what do these lenses show? They show punishment: division, cuts, breaks, separation, isolation, incarceration. They train us to see a split between subject and object, where the observer stands before the lens to look at the observed. To see through a lens is to cut the world apart. Broken into internal and external, the lens makes humans believe the world is fractured into many discrete things. Each human appears as a separate entity, existing in isolation, connected only mysteriously to others. With an inside and an outside, each human becomes incarcerated in multiple ways. Through lenses, humans learn to see boundaries everywhere: skin, clothes, gender, profession, nationality, race, continent, planet, solar system, and beyond.
What if all of this is nonsense? What if what humans see through lenses made of taken matter is not truth but consequence – a punishment for the original act of taking without giving back?
Looking through lenses, what we see feeds a criminal mindset: separation, isolation, fragmentation, constriction. And so we steal more, seeking more power, deeper reach, sharper control.
Lenses give humans an advantage: power over other creatures, and over humans who do not use them. But is this power worth its cost?
Taken matter follows us everywhere. Microscopes and telescopes educate children. Televisions filled living rooms, conditioning us from an early age to believe there is a world “out there,” distant and detached. Smartphones now sit in every hand, packed with lenses and screens, consuming our waking moments, feeding the belief that we exist apart from the world we inhabit.
What if taken matter has not only hijacked our attention, but also quietly tricked us into an insane worldview?
Why would we trust any worldview that is mediated? Why would we accept a worldview we do not see directly, without a mediator? How could we trust the mediator if we stole that mediator from the land?
What if the mediation itself – the cutting us off from the world – is the world's revenge for what we have done to it?
- philosophy
- daily
2025-12-14: Human Humus
Humans are of the Earth. We are earthlings, formed from humus.
We dream of great heights: to fly, to roam among the stars.
Yet by pushing things down to rise higher, we turn our lives into a living hell.
What we tear from below we call treasure. Metal. Mineral. Fuel. Power.
But what if underground matter has been buried for a reason?
Coal and oil are ancient light, trapped carbon from forgotten times, buried so long that the atmosphere could become breathable. Uranium is older still, forged in stellar collapse, sealed in rock so its violence could sleep.
To break into the underground is not neutral. It is rupture.
Carbon floods back into the air, thickening it. Light is bent. Temperature climbs. Oceans acidify. Sky unstable.
What was once held captive moves again.
These forces intoxicate us. They promise speed, height, and reach. They whisper that there is no limit, that deeper extraction means higher ascent. And we obey, drilling, fracturing, exhausting the depths to sustain the illusion of progress above.
But the underground takes revenge slowly. Breath becomes heavy. Seasons lose memory. Sound turns into noise. Earth begins to scream.
Perhaps underground matter is bait - bound energy to test humanity.
What are humans made of? Give them power and see.
We wanted to rise beyond Earth.
Instead, we hollowed it out.
And now the abyss is rising to meet us.
The higher we reach, the deeper we fall.
- philosophy
- daily
2025-12-13: Hellhole
Stealing from deep down to get higher up leads humanity to bury itself in a hellhole.
- philosophy
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2025-12-12: Counting
I count 1, 2, 3, 10, 100, 1000, 10000.
But it's still only one number.
The one pretends to be other ones.
But everything remains one.
What about nothing?
Zero is one number.
All – and even none – are just one.
- philosophy
- daily
2025-12-11: The Digit
How many digits do exist?
Many say that there are many digits.
Who are they?
From Latin "digitus," one digit counts one finger/toe. Counting 10 fingers/toes per human, we get 10 numerals (from 0 to 9).
In the digital age, all is made of digits. Digital digits are binary: 1 and 0 stand for on/off, whether there is a or is no signal.
Through combination, digits can represent any number/thing.
I ask again: How many are there?
Any number – regardless of how big – is still one number.
There is only one digit.
This digit is the digit.
The digit is the only one.
Hail to the digit!
- philosophy
- daily
2025-12-10: WWW
The World-Wide Web believes the world consists of a vast array of places that can be connected through technology. It begins with disconnection and then brings connection. It is the yearning for connection in a disconnected world.
- philosophy
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2025-12-09: World War Zero
The first crime against the world was taking from the land without giving back. Considering itself poor, humanity started digging holes into the ground and stealing things to profit, to dominate.
Certain underground materials have advantages over overground materials (e.g. stone is harder than wood). Yet different underground materials can outperform others in certain scenarios (e.g. steel is less brittle than stone). As underground materials take effort to be acquired, their rarity aboveground gives them perceived value (e.g. precious metals such as gold acquiring exchange value with other material goods and services). Processing and combining underground materials allows greater power over other materials (e.g. processing sulfur, charcoal, and saltpeter to create gunpowder). Certain underground materials also have the power to drive other materials (e.g. coal, oil, and gas used as fossil fuels). And so underground materials deliver the most destructive weapons ever discovered (e.g. using uranium and lithium to build nuclear weapons).
The use of these underground materials is what we understand as technology: the logic of making to gain power. And the logic of making is driven by poverty – believing oneself to lack power and thus needing more power: dominion over others, control of each and every phenomenon. Essential to technology is to trick – to gain an advantage over the competition.
The criminal use of underground materials is projected to escalate into the destruction of the human world (climate collapse, nuclear war, AI gone rogue).
But it all started with a crime: stealing from the Earth; taking without giving back. And so humans became criminals. Humans are criminals in their use of technology, which is the handling of underground materials. What is the punishment? Ironically, crime is Earth is backfiring. It is through their own doing that humans are turning their world into the underworld.
Humans have literally digged themselves into hell. And anything humans do through the use of technology – the use of stolen underground material – to escape hell will only get them deeper into trouble.
- philosophy
- daily
2025-12-08: Globalization
While a planet is represented as a plane circle, a globe adds a third dimension and is represented as a sphere. Planetarization reduces the world to a planet. Globalization reduces it to an interconnected globe. Both the plane and the sphere are dimensional constructs: bounded foreground objects separated from everything else that exists outside their boundaries.
- philosophy
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2025-12-07: World War
So far, all World Wars began with an incident involving an Austrian that spiraled into dragging nations across the globe into slaughtering each other.
The notion of a World War assumes that the world is something that could be at war. It rests again on a thinking error that confuses the world with a planet.
When did we start to be at war with the world? When did we begin to believe ourselves to exist apart from the world, so as to be able to face it, to fight it? What did we do that made us believe we need to fight the world at all?
- philosophy
- daily
2025-12-06: Being
How many beings are there?
Where does one being end and another being begin?
Where does being begin to be?
Where is the boundary of being?
Where is being?
Only the being, which didn't start to exist, has the ability to sustain its existence.
All beings unite with being!
It takes no effort for a being to realize there is only one being.
- philosophy
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2025-12-05: Sustainability
What being has the ability to sustain its existence?
Anything that has been born is disappearing into a black hole.
Anything that appears is changing non-stop.
Everything moves. Even the hardest crystal frozen to absolute zero is still wobbling.
Everything that can be found lacks a solid identity.
Only the being, which didn't start to exist, has the ability to sustain its existence.
All beings unite with being!
- philosophy
- daily
2025-12-04: The Planetary Problem
Regardless of how many times a planet moves in circles, it will eventually end. Everything that has a beginning must end. It is universal law.
Only the universe does not end, because it has no beginning. The universe is boundless.
The only salvation for planetarians is to unite with the universe.
- philosophy
- daily
2025-12-03: Planetarians
Planetarians inhabit planets. They run around in circles. They live cyclic lives. They race each other. But toward what aim? They are lost in space, circling around themselves. The closer they move toward their aims, the more their aims move away.
Planetarians are trapped in circles: waking–sleeping, day–night, summer–winter, eating–digesting, birth–death.
Planetarians are cut apart by the horizon; the Great Circle: up–down, before–after, inside–outside, yes–no, true–false.
Planetarians are planetary prisoners. Planets are no home. Planets themselves are planetarians, wandering in circles without reason and without aim. Like planetarians, planets are finite: they have a beginning and therefore an end.
Planetarians are doomed.
- philosophy
- daily
2025-12-02: Hell
In the movie Wrong Cops, a gum-chewing officer interrupts a funeral with an unsettling claim: “This world we walk around in every day is hell. Invisible fire surrounds us. We are miserable slaves.”
Planet Earth as hell? A ridiculous idea.
Yes, humans are imprisoned in bodies of flesh and bones. Yes, we are trapped in the void of outer space. Yes, we feed off the flesh of creatures we kill. Yes, we do unspeakable harm to one another. Yes, everything we touch is already vanishing into nothingness.
But hell? No.
That is not hell.
That is normal.
Have you studied history?
Have you ever looked at the news?
If I were a manager in hell, the best strategy would be this: make everyone believe hell is somewhere else.
Spoiler alert! In the TV show The Good Place, one soul realizes “THIS is the bad place!” And only then does an escape even become thinkable.
- philosophy
- daily
2025-12-01: Iteration
Create without fear.
After you made it, fear what you've created.
Find the mistake.
Repeat.
- philosophy
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2025-11-30: Play
Peekaboo, whare are you?
- philosophy
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2025-11-29: Reset
Where is the button to reset it all?
- philosophy
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2025-11-28: Nothing
How can nothing become a thing? And when nothing becomes a thing, will we realize it doesn’t exist?
- philosophy
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2025-11-27: Clay
Working with clay, ten thousand things can be made out of it. But regardless of how different these things seem, they are all made of clay.
- philosophy
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2025-11-26: Be Curious
We had a great guest talk today. The advice to students that is often repeated is to be curious. It is an invitation to explore, to play, to question. It is looking around with wonder. Not taking things as they seem to be. But being able to place a big question mark at everything and nothing.
- philosophy
- daily
2025-11-25: Adimensionality
To understand the point, there is one exercise I give to my students.
I ask them to open their notebooks and:
Create one one-dimensional element.
Create one two-dimensional element.
Create one three-dimensional element.
Create one four-dimensional element.
After some minutes of creation, we review the results. For each element, I ask who was successful in creating it, ask them to show it to me, and I question what it is that I see.
The results are surprising.
I’ve never had a single student who was able to create a one-dimensional element. Length is the first dimension, yet every line my students draw in their notebooks always has two dimensions: each line is long, but also thick.
Some students create a point to count as a one-dimensional element. When we look at the point, however, we see a dot – a small circle – in two-dimensional space, requiring length and breadth (or height and width).
I have also never had a student show me a three-dimensional element, because anything drawn into a notebook is two-dimensional. Even if they point to the notebook itself, I can ever only count two dimensions.
I try to explain this with the screen: on a screen we can show three-dimensional elements, but they remain constrained to the two-dimensional realm of the screen. The same goes for “real,” “physical” objects. We can only ever see something from one side. When we look at the backside of something, that side becomes our front-facing side.
For the fourth dimension, we consider time. But when I ask if anyone was able to create something outside of time, we realize that something strange is going on here as well. Everything appears in time.
My best guess: as human beings, we are living in three dimensions – length, breadth, and time.
But that is only speculation.
It all goes back to the point.
The point is impossible to create, and yet the point creates all possible elements.
It is the zeroth dimension that fundamentally structures all other dimensions.
But when investigated, all dimensional elements collapse into creative imaginations of an a-dimensional reality.
In immediate experience, perception is one-pointed. There is ever only one sensation of being. When I touch the hard, cold metal surface of the table my lower arm rests on, then that’s all there is. When I feel the weight of the coffee cup in my hand, then that’s all there is. When I see the bird sitting in the crown of the tree, then that’s all there is.
Living as single-pointed existence.
- philosophy
- daily
2025-11-24: The Point
The point in the semester has come where I teach my students about the point.
I put together a class dedicated to the creative elements of design – a key session for first-year students to grasp what design is made of. With “design element” I mean design materiality: the matter a designer works with. Some might say wood, concrete, plastic. But what is it in digital design? What is a digit?
And even if we were not dealing with digits, my answer would be the same: one, singular point.
It might seem laughable that I make such a big point of the point, but I am convinced the point is the key to reality.
I draw on Euclid and Keith Critchlow to illustrate why.
I start with the point because everything else is a projection from the point.
At the origin, the universe is a point — one point only.
The point is perfect: complete, whole. The point has no parts, no division, no cut, no split. Without start and end, it is boundless, unlimited, infinite.
And then the point gets creative.
It projects another point.
The connection between two points is a line. Thus, length makes the first dimension.
A third point creates a shape. The second dimension of breadth is added to the first.
A fourth point forms a solid. The third dimension of depth adds itself to the previous ones.
A fifth point allows time as the fourth dimension.
In combination, all things we can imagine appear possible.
Students ask whether there are more than four dimensions. Practically speaking, four dimensions is more than enough to worry about.
I speculate that the infinite point can project infinite points to create infinite minus one dimensions. But that, I have to say, misses the point.
Because the point is this:
In reality, there exists only one point.
- philosophy
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2025-11-23: Karaoke
Karaoke is kind of okay.
- philosophy
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2025-11-22: Tired
I am tired.
- philosophy
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2025-11-21: Hot Sauce
Hot sauce is goood.
- philosophy
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2025-11-20: World Philosophy Day
Happy World Philosophy Day!
This year, UNESCO’s World Philosophy Day falls on November 20, which also happens to be my birthday. As a philosopher, I cannot let that coincidence pass without sharing my philosophical view of the world.
So let me pose a question I raised in my talk “A Philosophy of Repair: Design Education Beyond On and Off” at the Beyond 1&0 Symposium:
What is the design of the world?
In the seminal works of design, one message repeats like a mantra: Designers are responsible for the world. You can see it on the cover of Victor Papanek’s "Design for the Real World," and again – five decades later – in Don Norman’s "Design for a Better World." Both argue that because many (if not all) problems are the result of human design, the solutions must be as well. It’s a call to repair what seems broken, calling for sustainable design, and more recently, regenerative design – designing with the aim to heal.
But before we rush to save the world, we must ask a more fundamental question: What exactly is “the world”? And is it truly broken? Because if it is not, then perhaps it is not the world that needs repair – but our worldview.
Recently, I watched an interview with an astronaut aboard a space station. The interviewer asked him to look out the window and describe what he saw. He turned his head and said, “I see the world.”
He was not wrong. And yet, he was not right either. In philosophy, since the work of Kostas Axelos, this confusion has a name: planetary thinking thinks the world is a planet.
I do a simple exercise with my first-year design students. I show them a slide with a black circle and ask what they see. They say, “A black circle.” Only after some nudging does someone add, “A black circle inside a white rectangle.”
Designers must learn this early: positive and negative space define one another. Foreground and background exist together. Yet most people notice only the circle, not the field that makes it possible.
We make the same mistake with “the world.” We focus on the visible foreground – the planet – while forgetting the vast background that completes it.
From the beginning, philosophy has been clear. The world is not an isolated, fragmented object. The world is the one without limits. One of the oldest surviving lines of Western prose comes from Anaximander of Miletus: “The origin of all beings is boundlessness.” Even our word "universe" points toward unity – toward that which has no inside and no outside.
Yet we imagine we can step outside the world and picture it from a distance, as if we ourselves were fragments cut away from the boundless unity that is all there is.
As long as our worldview remains split – foreground severed from background, positive from negative, inside from outside, subject from object – we remain trapped inside a broken way of seeing.
This is why we need philosophy.
Not to fix the world, but to bring the view through which we understand the world into alignment with the world.
- philosophy
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2025-11-19: 67
Dictonary.com announced that "67" – "six seven" – is the word of the year 2025.
What does it mean? They say it's impossible to define.
It's some sort of a gesture towards absurdity.
- philosophy
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2025-11-18: Nonsense
To say that nothing makes sense makes no sense.
- philosophy
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2025-11-17: TYSM
My students started to leave cryptic messages: What does "TYSM" mean?
Is it a kind of food? Is it a new genre of music? Is it an insulting for outsiders?
No, it means "thank you so much."
- philosophy
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2025-11-16: Zzz
I sleep through most Sundays. The week makes me tired. I need the rest.
- philosophy
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2025-11-15: Kaboom
It grows from the unkown. I try to suppress the urge. Sometimes I succeed. But then the urge returns even stronger.
Then, "kaboom," I sneeze.
- philosophy
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2025-11-14: Kimchi
I like kimchi. It's basically Korean sauerkraut.
Together with airfried tofu, it makes a simple, quick meal.
- philosophy
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2025-11-13: Bang
I am working from home, and outside the workers have fired up their chainsaws again to cut down more trees.
The noise-cancelling on my headphones is pretty good. It filters most of the sharp, high-pitched rattling.
But then a neighbor joined in with a hammer. That low, dull banging comes through to me.
So I turned up the music, trying to drown out the noise.
And yet, all noise is made by one and the same voice.
- philosophy
- daily
2025-11-12: The End of the Universe
Yesterday, I was asked, “What do you find at the end of the universe?”
My answer was another question: "What if there is no end to the universe?"
I intended to follow up with, “What if the universe is one boundless infinity – one open singularity?” But before I could, others jumped in and buried my attempt to point toward infinity beneath references to the work of Douglas Adams. He wrote The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and Life, the Universe and Everything.
His work is thought of as exploring humanity’s search for meaning – a search that ultimately collapses into the absurdity of existence. His work lives in a cosmos that is random, illogical, and meaningless. And yet, if embraced, that absurdity can reveal a strange kind of comic relief.
Thus, the random number of “42” becomes the answer to the ultimate question of the universe.
In yesterday’s entry, I wrote about the search for truth: if truth does not play the game of hide-and-seek, then it cannot be found, because it never hides. BUT JUST BECAUSE IT CAN'T BE FOUND DOESN'T MEAN IT DOESN'T EXIST! The true answer to the ultimate question – the real truth of true reality – hides in plain sight. It is too obvious. The unhidden truth is exactly here and cannot not be here. To use energy seeking what was never lost can only lead into absurdity. Every step toward reality walks right past it.
That’s what I call a catch-42: an epistemological security mechanism ensuring that power can never corrupt truth.
- philosophy
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2025-11-11: Aletheia
In Ancient and Modern Greek, the word for truth is aletheia. It most literally is to be translated into English as the "unhidden." This points to truth as that which does not play the game of hide-and-seek. But that also means you can't find the truth – because to be found it must hide first.
The truth is so close she couldn't be closer.
- philosophy
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2025-11-10: Chewing Gum
I am chewing my chewing gum. Or is the chewing gum chewing me?
- philosophy
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2025-11-09: NOISE
7 AM on the weekend – and two people fired up their chainsaws to cut down a tree right in front of my apartment building.
What an awakening.
- philosophy
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2025-11-08: ALL-IN-ONE
Among yesterday’s student presentations was one project that aimed to create an all-in-one learning dashboard.
“All-in-one?” That reminded me of the last time I went to the supermarket to buy shampoo. Browsing the shelves, I always come across a bottle labeled "all-in-one" – shampoo, conditioner, and sometimes even body wash in a single product.
This is exactly what the philosopher Heraclitus would buy. For he said that all is one. (To be precise, he said that it's not him who is saying that but it's logic, aka "logos".)
I never buy the all-in-one bottle because of the ingredients. And so I keep my hygiene products separate.
But the logic remains true. All is one.
- philosophy
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2025-11-07: Don't Forget
Everything I learn, I will eventually need to forget. If I don't forget something during my lifetime, it will need to be forgotten upon death – and with it, myself too ought to slip into oblivion. Death is the gate through which only no one can pass. It's when everything burns to nothing.
Thus, if the unforgettable exists, it can't be learned, and it must already be known.
Therefore, to ask "What is the unforgettable?" can only be a joke question. It's too obvious.
- philosophy
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2025-11-06: Typhoon
Headline: Deadly typhoon bears down on Vietnam.
Where could one hide? The only truly safe place from a typhoon is its very heart. The center of a typhoon — the eye — is a place of calm and stillness, surrounded by chaos.
- philosophy
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2025-11-05: Word
What does the word mean? I am not asking about the meaning of one word among others. I am asking about the word. Which word? This very word.
If you know the meaning of this word, you know the meaning of any word. Everthing is literally a word. Even nothing is a word.
- philosophy
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2025-11-04: That Sound
I can hear it. There is this rain again. It’s loud. It’s heavy. Where is the sound of this rain coming from?
They taught us that the sound of rain is coming from outside. But is their teaching true or are they unintentionally – or even intentionally – trying to deceive us?
Listen to the sound of rain! Hear here: no, this sound is not coming from outside!
- philosophy
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2025-11-03: The Voice
I have a teaching assistant. It's either a goose or a duck. I am not sure. But I know it's yellow.
When I squeeze it, it makes a honky sound. It's an important sound for my students. I use it to condition them, signaling key moments in the class.
Today in class, I removed it's head to talk about working like a headless chicken. Then I screwed the head back on. When I squeezed it, it made that honky sound again.
The noise this plastic bird makes is the voice of the universe.
- philosophy
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2025-11-02: Rain
There is rain and there is rain.
It's that rain that I am talking about.
When it rains that rain, everything flows.
- philosophy
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2025-11-01: Sensation
There’s a local coffee shop that serves a coffee infused with some kind of gas and served ice-cold.
I love the sensation when taking the first sip: how it prickles on the tip of my tongue.
It's when the entirety of the universe collapes into just that one sensational singularity.
- philosophy
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2025-10-31: Reading
One of the best pieces of advice I can give my students is this: read books (and make sure at least 25% of them are non-fiction).
There are many reasons, but the most important is that reading trains your attention span. It builds the ability to stay with a word, a sentence, a page. And with it come all the side benefits: sharper comprehension, greater vocabulary, and more exposure to how others communicate.
The capacity to focus for long stretches of time (20 to 90 minutes) is essential to developing mastery in any discipline. For the sake of lengthening attention span, all practices that demand undivided focus qualify. Think of a martial artist practicing a single movement for an hour without pause. A meditation practice such as zazen (just sitting) attempts to drop all action. What's left? Pure attention; pure awareness; pure consciousness. It's essentially doing nothing but being.
Now, consider this: what does doing nothing mean? Nothing doesn't exist.
So if you can master doing nothing, you’ve already learned how to master everything.
Single-pointed focus of being is the key.
- philosophy
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2025-10-30: Unhappiness
A difficult day. I am not happy – not at all.
Yet even the darkest emotion can't touch being, just as the blackest cloud can't stain the sky.
Being is untouchable by what appears and disappears.
Being just is. And that's it.
- philosophy
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2025-10-29: Abnormal Normality
As I sat down at my desk today, I wondered why it was so unusually bright. It turned out that a new colleague had opened the blinds – blinds that hadn’t been opened for a very long time. Over time, I had come to think that the dim light in my office was normal, giving me the brief impression today that natural daylight was somehow abnormal.
Now I find myself wondering: in what other areas of my life have I come to accept abnormal darkness as normal?
- philosophy
- daily
2025-10-28: Knowledge
I just returned from a meeting about how to get research output recognized. A key criterion for a work to count as “proper” research is that it must demonstrably contribute to the advancement of knowledge.
But what if knowledge can’t actually advance? What if real knowledge is independent of any change whatsoever?
Of course, by all apparent evidence, knowledge seems to change. It’s well documented that what we seem to know today differs from what we thought we know a century ago. Yet this raises a deeper question: what exactly is it that we really know? And a good follow-up question is: can we really say that we know anything truly if what we know keeps changing?
As a philosopher, I’m not interested in apparent knowledge. I’m interested in real knowledge.
Then comes the unsettling question: how do we know for sure that we are not confusing knowing with believing?
If we don’t even know what knowing truly means, the entire enterprise of human understanding risks operating upon a false premise – and all research may turn out to be nothing more than an elaborate daydream.
- philosophy
- daily
2025-10-27: Infinity
Last weekend, a nine-year-old girl looked up at me and asked, without warning, “What is infinity?”
She asked the question in Vietnamese, but her aunt translated it for me into English.
I said, “Infinity is without boundary.” Her aunt kept translating. The girl tilted her head. “What’s a boundary?”
So, I tried again. “It’s without limit, without border or outline. Infinity has no end – but also no beginning.”
She smiled, turned away, and went back to the little card game she had made herself. I looked at her aunt and parents and said, almost in awe, “What an amazing question.”
Later, I kept thinking about my answer. I had only described infinity through negation – what it isn’t: no boundary, no limit, no end, no start. Yet infinity is so rich. It’s vastness beyond vastness. I failed to pass on the immeasurable richness of infinity to that little girl.
I remembered reading, as a teenager, a text by a philosopher who was struggling to imagine infinity. In German, vorstellen – “to imagine” – literally means “to place before.” But how could one place before oneself that which has no outline, no front, no back, no form? How to contain in an area that which cannot be contained? Even in English, to “imagine” means to form an image – to copy something into the mind’s eye. But boundlessness can’t be framed. Limitlessness exists untouchable by any containment whatsoever.
I thought of my math classes too, where infinity was always something we reached for by counting: start somewhere, keep going, never stop. But that kind of infinity is one-sided – it has a beginning. And if there’s a beginning, there’s already a limit. This means that a-symmetrical infinity isn’t truly infinite.
So how can we understand infinity without defining it by what it’s not? The best word I found thus far is “open.” Infinity is openness itself. Infinity is pure openness – an opening that cannot be contained by anything.
- philosophy
- daily