juliana ong

“Are your opinions your own or are they borrowed, without thought or scrutiny, as you have been too lazy to form your own?”

There is a new buzzword in marketing, advertising, and generally anything business-related in China, “活人感” (lit. sense of the living). It is a mix of brand personality and a pushback against the “dead internet theory”.

People who value choices over happiness never argue about it. They are proud of it. People who value happiness over having a life full of interesting opportunities get indignant over being accused that they made that choice.

In an age that rewards optimisation, Eros acts as an insurgency. It’s what happens when you stop tracking your steps and start noticing where you are actually walking to.

In both myth and theory, Eros is the same force: the spark that brings aliveness out of inertia. To live erotically is to stay attuned to that rhythm, to let the energy that animates the world also animate you. But that kind of vitality resists management, which is precisely why the modern world fears it.

in the past, our social lives were primarily dictated by rules, duty, obligation, and commitment. And in the other parts of the world, it still is. That is how social living is organized. You don’t go to see your grandparents because you feel like it. You go because you have to, because it’s what you do. We have replaced commitments with feeling,... See more

I always make the distinction between love stories and life stories. There’s many more people you can love than people you can have a life with.

In Freudian language, ambivalence is the ability to hold contradictory feelings toward a person. A child loves their mother, but can also sometimes be extremely angry at her. A person holds love and hate, attraction and disgust, excitement and boredom, connection and disconnection with a person. The ability to be able to hold these contradictions... See more

But choice is not the same as freedom. Freedom is actually the ability to make a choice in the middle of restrictions.