As summer begins, there will be a pause in updates here for a little while. I’m going on a big summer trip, and when I return, it may take me some time to settle back into the rhythm of writing and posting again. My next update will most likely come in August.

In the meantime, I want to wish everyone a wonderful summer filled with rest, compassion, and connection.
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Thank you for reading and following my work.

This is the latest essay I published in my project POWER of meanings // MEANINGS of power. 

It is tempting to think of human conflict as a clash of beliefs, values, or identities. But beneath these visible differences, there may be something more fundamental at work: a shared condition that shapes how all of us perceive, desire, and act. Arthur Schopenhauer offers one way of understanding this condition—one that feels unexpectedly relevant in a time of deep polarization.

At the center of Schopenhauer’s philosophy is a striking claim: the ultimate reality of the world is not reason, progress, or harmony, but an irrational force he calls the will. This will is not a conscious intention but a blind, persistent striving that manifests in everything—from physical processes to human desires. In human life, it appears as a constant movement of wanting: we desire, we strive, we obtain, and almost immediately we are drawn into wanting again. Satisfaction does not end the cycle; it only briefly interrupts it. What follows is either boredom or the emergence of a new desire.

This structure of experience leads to a sobering conclusion: suffering is not an exception in human life but its underlying pattern. In this respect, Schopenhauer’s thinking resonates with traditions such as Buddhism, which similarly identify desire as a central source of dissatisfaction. The point is not simply that people suffer, but that suffering arises from conditions that are deeply embedded in the nature of human existence itself.

Seen in this light, human behavior becomes more difficult to interpret in simple moral terms. If our actions are shaped by forces that operate beneath conscious awareness—forces that push us to seek, compete, defend, and assert—then the line between intention and compulsion becomes less clear. This does not eliminate agency, but it situates it within constraints that are often invisible to us.

You can continue reading here.
[This essay will be included in Newsletter #23]

This is the latest essay I published in my project POWER of meanings // MEANINGS of power. 

A pattern, at its simplest, is repetition. On fabric, a pattern is a shape repeated across a surface. In music, patterns appear as repeating rhythms, motifs, and variations. In stories, we recognize patterns in plot and character—structures that feel familiar even when the details change. In visual art, repetition can be soothing and beautiful; entire traditions, such as geometric design in Islamic art, have explored repetition as an aesthetic language in its own right. Clearly, patterns can be deeply enjoyable for human beings.

Why is that?

Our ancestors noticed long ago that patterns surround us in nature: cycles of seasons, tides, lunar rhythms, bodily cycles, and the repeated processes by which life grows, decays, and renews itself. Even when reality feels unpredictable up close, we keep noticing forms of regularity—enough order to orient ourselves. In practice, much of what we call “knowing” rests on this: recognizing that something tends to repeat, and using that repetition to anticipate what may come next. Recognizing patterns creates predictability. Predictability means order. And human beings are deeply attached to order—at least to a certain kind of order, shaped by human needs and human limits.

Patterns are not only something we notice and enjoy; they are also something we think with. The human brain constantly looks for repeated features and relationships, because repetition is one way we reduce complexity to something manageable. We can only make partial guesses about how this developed, but it is plausible that human pattern-seeking and human survival reinforced one another over time: noticing regularities made action more effective, and more effective action made pattern-seeking worth repeating. In this sense, human cognition appears strongly oriented toward detecting regularities and using them to guide prediction and action in what can feel, from a human perspective, like an overwhelming universe filled with nuance, detail, and uncertainty. To navigate that universe, we label what we observe so that we can understand it, predict it, and communicate about it...

You can continue reading here.
[This essay will be included in Newsletter #23]

This is the latest essay I published in my project POWER of meanings // MEANINGS of power. 

I am curious about how other people live, and I enjoy visiting other people’s homes. But those visits can also make me think about my own house and how it looks. I notice this even more when someone comes into my space. In both situations, I can become self-conscious about what my home might seem to say about me.

My home is livable, functional, and safe. It works for my family. But it is not especially polished. Some things are worn. Some things need fixing. Some things are arranged more for use than for appearance.

This is not simply neglect. It reflects my priorities, my limits, and the fact that keeping a household going always involves choices. I care about hygiene. I care that things function. I care that the space supports daily life. But making everything look beautiful or fully put together is not where I choose to put most of my time, money, or energy.

Even so, I would be dishonest if I said I felt completely free about that. When I am in other people’s homes, or when they are in mine, I can start seeing my space through imagined outside eyes: what looks old, what looks shabby, what might seem like a sign that I am not managing life properly. Even when I know that the space is serving its purpose, that feeling can still appear.

Continue reading here.

[This essay will be included in Newsletter#22.]

Image credit: Butterfly and Pinkerton; screenshot from the film by Frédéric Mitterrand (1995)

This is the latest essay I published in my project POWER of meanings // MEANINGS of power. 

My work in recent years has been concerned with exploring a simple but demanding claim: power and powerlessness are always intertwined in any person and in any action. They do not coexist evenly, symmetrically, or justly, and they do not cancel each other out. I am using these terms not as fixed identities—powerful or powerless—but as a way to describe how agency and constraint coexist in lived situations. Power is always exercised under constraint, and powerlessness rarely (if ever) means the total disappearance of agency.

This claim matters because common ways of talking about power simplify human relationships and human beings themselves. People are often sorted into categories—e.g., villains or victims—as if these were stable, internally coherent states. Such framings can be morally clarifying, but they are often analytically blunt. They obscure the uneven, relational dynamics through which agency and constraint take shape in lived situations, often in ways that become visible only in retrospect. And when we rely on such blunt categories, we also oversimplify our responses to conflict and harm, making it harder to understand what sustains suffering and what might actually interrupt it.

​As I searched for a case that could make this paradox visible, I found it easier to begin with someone conventionally understood as powerful. That is why I chose Louis XIV. In writing about him, I examined how even a ruler associated with absolute monarchy lived within dense webs of dependence, fear, limitation, and loss of control. That analysis relied on biography, archival detail, and historical distance.
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In this essay, I take a different route. I turn to a work of fiction—Puccini’s Italian opera Madama Butterfly—not to reverse the argument or to offer a symmetrical counterpart, but to explore a different problem: how power can still appear within lives that are overwhelmingly defined by powerlessness. This approach is based on the assumption that fiction can sometimes illuminate inner logic and constrained agency in ways that the historical record cannot. This essay discusses major plot developments in Madama Butterfly (spoilers) and includes reference to suicide.

Continue reading here.

[This essay will be included in Newsletter#21.]

​Narratives of good and evil are everywhere. They run deep in human storytelling, from ancient myths and fairy tales to modern movies and news headlines. We seem drawn to stories that divide the world into heroes and villains. The appeal is obvious: such narratives make moral dilemmas, which abound in our lives, easier to process.

Yet this clarity comes at a cost. By simplifying people into categories of good and bad, these stories obscure the complexity of motives, causes, and relationships. When we see the world this way, it becomes harder to resolve conflicts—whether in society or in our personal lives—because we stop asking what drives people and start treating “badness” as a complete explanation. It also makes self-reflection harder: if we reserve moral ambiguity for “them,” we are less likely to notice our own mixed motives, rationalizations, and capacity to cause harm.

Media literacy educators have long examined how stereotypes, misinformation, and ideology shape our understanding of the world. But the deeper narrative structure—the good-versus-evil moral binary that underpins so much storytelling—often goes unquestioned. This essay offers one concrete way to address that gap by briefly analyzing a widely watched media text, K-Pop Demon Hunters (KPDH), with a simple lesson-plan sketch at the end. 

Keep reading here.