5 Things I Read This Week
Week 09/27 - 10/03
Published Oct 5 · 4 min readTable of Contents
- 1. bawal mangarap nang malayo kapag sakto lang ang pamasahe pabalik by ænri؛༊
- 2. The Rise And Fall of the First—and Only—Filipino Emperor by Allen Severino
- 3. I’m a psychoanalyst. Social media is damaging children’s inner lives in ways we don’t fully understand by Robin Kirman
- 4. How to pay back a dopamine debt by Juliette Ryan
- 5. If we fix the phone, we fix society
1. bawal mangarap nang malayo kapag sakto lang ang pamasahe pabalik by ænri؛༊
Perhaps the saddest part about all of this is not having to put our dreams on hold, but becoming so accustomed to letting them go that we eventually forget what they were.
It’s scary to watch a nation slowly snuff out its own light. In many ways this is how I feel about life today. I think I used to dream about becoming other things than Software Engineer, but most of those I no longer have the energy, time, or money to pursue. Trial and error is a luxury.
I read all kinds of articles from all kinds of people—opinions, suggestions, recommendations, and speculations—but rarely from Filipinos. I’m sure there are some out there, but off the top of my head I’ve only seen maybe one or two people consistently present on my feed ready to share their opinion.
I think this stifling corruption makes us believe our voices don’t matter, that it won’t help. We still rally on the streets, but the internet is a more permanent way to mobilize the people that is incredibly underutilized (for such a chronically online nation). (This is now a different topic altogether. I digress.)
Bottomline is, we need more Filipinos creating their own platforms on the internet, not disjointed and uncurated social media profiles, but actual avenues where they can share their opinions and make their voices heard.
The rising fame of Substack within the Filipino writing community could be the start of something big, if we use it intelligently.
2. The Rise And Fall of the First—and Only—Filipino Emperor by Allen Severino
Not a very well-known history about one of the early seeds of revolution against the Spanish rule in the Philippines. I myself did not know this.
3. I’m a psychoanalyst. Social media is damaging children’s inner lives in ways we don’t fully understand by Robin Kirman
For Winnicott, the capacity for genuine desire develops only where a child is free from an evaluative gaze and can follow impulses that arise from her own center. Social media destroys that freedom. What forms in its absence is what Winnicott called the “false self” – a performing self, shaped by the reactions of others.
Decades after social media was born, we are only now starting to really see the effects of social media on people who have only ever known social media.
I’m well into my 20s now and no longer feel that social media has me in its grip (although at one point in my teens social media did do a number on me and my self-esteem), but there are countless kids and teenagers who don’t know how to move in spaces whose goal is to consume them.
I am kind of glad that legislations are being made about restricting access to the internet, but I am not sure yet what I really want that to look like. There is more discussion and research to be made, but I do agree that children and teenagers need a safer space away from predatory algorithms.
Also, this is a very good time to start spending more time with friends, family, community, or just by yourself doing whatever piques your interest outside of social media and the screen.
Genuine desire requires a kind of self-forgetting: what Heidegger, Winnicott, and others have understood as the condition of authentic being – absorption in what one genuinely pursues.
4. How to pay back a dopamine debt by Juliette Ryan
A short explanation (minimal jargon) of what happens when you doomscroll and why you feel sluggish or uneasy afterwards. There’s an insightful list of things one can do to recover from a dopamine overload that I am pleasantly surprised to know—most of the things on the list are things I already do and plan to do.
I want to say more about this but I don’t know the words. If there is one thing I recommend to read out of this list, it’s this (and the comments on the article too).
And similar to another article on this list (#3), I encourage everyone to pursue their hobbies mindfully, resist the doomscrolling, and spend more time doing deep work (learning, researching) or bonding with your loved ones.
5. If we fix the phone, we fix society
A fully-analog world is not something I necessarily think to be an ideal world, but I do agree that many app notifications are actually useless and serve no purpose other than to distract us or sell us something we don’t actually need.
I believe there is value in creating alternative devices and solutions, and supporting those that create those alternatives. But then again the root of all evil are the greedy capitalists that we’ve let run our society. That is a much bigger and much more complicated problem to solve. So for now, analog and single-purpose devices and curated notifications it is.