cvcarloscv
September 27, 2025 at 3:07:48 AM
hello!!! i read your last blog entry and i found it very beautiful. i wanted to recommend you a book called "how to do nothing: resisting the attention economy", which tackles a lot of themes and one of them is the meaning of the self. your journal entry reminded me a lot of how they describe the self in the book, here's an excerpt you might like!!!
"I find something comfortingly anti-essentialist in the way ecology works. As someone who is both Asian and white, I am an anomaly or a nonentity from an essentialist point of view. It’s not possible for me to be “native” to anywhere in any obvious sense. But things like the atmospheric river, or even the sight of Western tanagers (a favorite bird) migrating through Oakland in the spring, gives me an image of how to be from two places at once. I remember that the sampaguita, while it’s the national flower of the Philippines, actually originated in the Himalayas before being imported in the seventeenth century. I remember that not only is my mother an immigrant, but that there is something immigrant about the air I breathe, the water I drink, the carbon in my bones, and the thoughts in my mind.
An ecological understanding allows us to identify “things”—rain, cloud, river—at the same time that it reminds us that these identities are fluid. Even mountains erode, and the ground below us moves in giant plates. It reminds us that—while it’s useful to have a word for that thing called a cloud—when we really get down to it, all we can really point to is a series of flows and relationships that sometimes intersect and hold together long enough to be a “cloud.”
By now, this might sound familiar. Indeed, it’s a similar framework to the one I described regarding the self, a slippery thing at the intersection of phenomena inside and outside of the imagined “bag of skin.” Resisting definition like headwaters resist pinpointing, we emerge from moment to moment, just as our relationships do, our communities do, our politics do. Reality is blobby. It refuses to be systematized. Things like the American obsession with individualism, customized filter bubbles, and personal branding—anything that insists on atomized, competing individuals striving in parallel, never touching—does the same violence to human society as a dam does to a watershed."
Replied on: September 27, 2025 at 4:55:16 AM
Thank you for the kind words and also for the book recommendation. I will check it out 
