 This is the latest essay I published in my project POWER of meanings // MEANINGS of power.
Writing about how power and powerlessness are intertwined, I can almost predict one specific critical response: But the language of powerful and powerless groups has helped us name real injustices and move toward equality. Are you trying to undo that? No. I think that language has been useful—sometimes essential. It offers a clear moral and political signal: some patterns of social life reliably disadvantage some people. If we can’t name those patterns, we can’t contest them. At the same time, I think the language of “powerful” and “powerless” has a built-in risk: it can harden into a story that flattens reality. And when it flattens reality, it can be used in two opposite—and equally unhelpful—ways. One is to treat a group as uniformly dominant and therefore uniformly suspect. The other is to seize on complexity as proof that inequality isn’t real, or that efforts toward equality are unnecessary or oppressive in themselves. This essay is my attempt to hold onto what the simplification helps us see, without letting it erase what it hides. Continue reading here. [This essay will be included via a link in Newsletter#21.]
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Here’s a new kind of post I’ll be mixing in between updates about new essays and projects: POEM (REVISITED). From time to time, I’ll be returning to poems I shared a few years ago, and posting them here again so they’re easier to find, read, and live with in a new moment. Butterfly One day, between the flowers and the sky, I met the most amazing butterfly. It sat in my hand, waiting to be caught, And all I knew was that it caught my heart. This butterfly became my precious friend, Our happiness, I felt, would never end. First, I carried my friend around. Her feet were still unsteady on the ground. I fed her and I slowly watched her grow. I taught her things that she did not yet know. My friend became as strong and tall as me. She could explore all things that she could be. My work was done, and now it was my turn To take the love she offered in return. She fed me patiently as I was growing small. She taught me things that I could not recall. My feet were now unsteady on the ground. She smiled to me and carried me around. It was so warm and cozy in her hand. Our happiness, I felt, would never end. One day, between the flowers and the sky, It was my turn to be a butterfly.  This is the latest essay I published in my project POWER of meanings // MEANINGS of power.
“Power” is one of the concepts we rely on most heavily to make sense of moral conflict. In everyday conversations, in political debates, and in activist language, power is usually understood as something people either have or lack. Some people are seen as powerful: they make decisions, influence outcomes, and shape the lives of others. Other people are seen as powerless: constrained, acted upon, deprived of meaningful choice. This way of thinking about power feels intuitive. It helps us explain injustice, assign responsibility, and draw moral boundaries. It also supports a familiar narrative structure: those with power cause harm, those without power suffer it. From this perspective, wrongdoing appears as the result of freely chosen actions by people who could have acted differently but did not. I want to argue that this understanding of power is incomplete. Power is not a simple possession, and it is not distributed in clean moral or social categories. Human beings do not fall neatly into groups of the powerful and the powerless. Instead, power and powerlessness are intertwined in every person, including those who appear to hold great authority and those who appear to have very little. This claim does not deny that power differences are real or that harm matters. It does not suggest that responsibility disappears once we acknowledge constraint. Rather, it points to a more accurate description of how human action actually works. People act from a mixture of capacity and limitation, agency and confusion, influence and constraint. Ignoring this mixture leads to moral oversimplification and distorted explanations of conflict. To understand power more clearly, we need to move away from binary thinking and toward a view of power as situational, partial, and always intertwined with powerlessness. Continue reading here. [This essay will be included via a link in Newsletter#21.]  I’ve just published a new essay on Medium: it’s a lightly reworked version of a piece I originally published on this blog in September 2024, revisited in light of how relevant these questions still feel.
If you live in the United States, as I do, you run into political and cultural polarization almost everywhere. But polarization is not unique to this country. If anything, one could argue that as the world becomes more interconnected, it is also becoming more divided, with rifts within and between countries deepening over time. Polarization is the opposite of connection, and connection has been a central theme in my scholarship and writing for nearly a decade. I keep returning to a basic question: What would it look like to emphasize connection—seriously, consistently—while people struggle with the problems of today’s world? Back in 2020, as I was finishing my book Media Is Us: Understanding Communication and Moving Beyond Blame, I found a song that seemed to encapsulate (albeit cryptically) many of my thoughts about polarization, connection, the human condition, empathy, and self-awareness. I am referring to “Under Pressure” by Queen and David Bowie. My goal here is not to argue that my interpretation is the correct one. We will probably never know exactly what Queen and Bowie meant, and perhaps it is not even essential to pin down what they consciously intended. Some would say that real masterpieces emerge when artists let something larger than the individual speak through them. My goal is simpler: to explain why, in an age of intensifying polarization, “Under Pressure” feels like an anthem for empathy. Continue reading here. [This essay is not going to be included in the newsletter.]  This is the latest essay I published in my project POWER of meanings // MEANINGS of power.
We are born into constraints so ordinary that they become invisible: a particular nervous system, a particular family story, a language, a culture, a body that wants and fears before “I” can even form a sentence. Add to this the constraint that we don’t fully understand ourselves—our motives, triggers, blind spots—and the fantasy of unlimited freedom becomes hard to defend. And yet the opposite fantasy—that we are merely programmed—fails too. It doesn’t match lived experience, and it invites fatalism. What seems truer is something narrower and stranger: a small, shifting space inside the constraints where choice can occur. Not a wide-open field. Wiggle room. The phrase matters because it forces a more honest scale. In many moments, agency is not a grand power to redesign one’s life at will. It is the ability to make a small adjustment inside a much larger pressure. It is a narrow opening in a crowded room. It is a few degrees of movement inside a system that doesn’t budge easily. When we call it “wiggle room,” we acknowledge two things at once: the constraints are real, and they are not the whole story... Keep reading here. [This essay will be included in the Newsletter#20 on January 13.]  This is the latest essay I published in my project Me, Looking for Meaning.
I watched Disney’s Raya and the Last Dragon not long after it came out in 2021, and I remember being surprised by how directly it spoke to a problem that usually gets flattened in mainstream storytelling: polarization. The film’s premise is blunt and timely—Kumandra is a land broken into five rival groups, and the fracture is sustained as much by fear and suspicion as by anything material. The first time I saw it, I was genuinely moved by the climactic moment when Raya finally understands that repair and connection won’t happen unless someone risks being the first to step forward. The emotional logic was simple but powerful: if everyone waits for proof of safety before reaching out, the stalemate never ends. I liked that the film insisted, in a very Disney way, that repair begins with an inner movement—a loosening of the grip of certainty, a willingness to risk being wrong, and a refusal to reduce the other side to a permanent enemy. Even then, I felt a hesitation. The ending arrived with dragons, reunification, and a kind of visual fireworks: reconciliation as spectacle. That kind of closure can be beautiful, but it also implies that unity will look beautiful—obvious, luminous, unmistakable. In real life, when people overcome hatred or rebuild relationships, it often looks… ordinary. It can look awkward. It can look like small adjustments, uncomfortable conversations, and cautious experiments with closeness. But I still liked the movie overall. When I rewatched the film recently, what stood out was the film’s near-constant insistence on one particular remedy: trust. I realized that treating trust as the central solution for conflict made the message feel less convincing to me, even though I was still touched by the film’s intent to tackle polarization. Keep reading here. [This essay will be included in the Newsletter#20, which will be sent out around mid January.]  Image credit: Annie Spratt This is the latest essay I published in my project Me, Looking for Meaning.
Why do people see and understand the world so differently? We share the same planet, breathe the same air, sometimes even live in the same houses, and yet the realities we inhabit can feel worlds apart. What one person finds obvious, another finds incomprehensible. What feels true to one may seem absurd to another. These differences shape everything—from politics and art to the smallest misunderstandings between friends. I’ve come to think that each of us lives at the intersection of three coordinates. Together, they greatly impact how we perceive and interpret the world. The coordinates are human nature, individual characteristics, and experience. These three coordinates can scatter us across different worlds of meaning, yet awareness of them may also help us navigate toward one another. Keep reading here. [This essay will be included in the Newsletter#20, which will be sent out around mid January.]  This is the latest essay I published in my project Me, Looking for Meaning.
We often call ourselves “individuals.” It’s such a common word that we rarely stop to think about what it actually means. The term comes from the Latin individuus, meaning “indivisible” or “inseparable.” The idea is that each person is a whole—a unified being, distinct from others. But if we look more closely, the word carries a number of assumptions that don’t quite hold up. We may feel like unified selves, but how accurate is that feeling? In Buddhism, the idea of an indivisible self is treated as ultimately illusory. According to this tradition, what we call a person is actually made up of five components, or “aggregates”: physical form, sensation, perception, mental formations, and consciousness. These elements are constantly changing. There is no single, permanent “I” behind them—only the impression of continuity. This may sound strange at first, especially if we’re used to thinking of the self as something solid and enduring. But similar ideas appear in modern science as well... Keep reading here. [This essay will be included in the Newsletter#20, which will be sent out around mid January.]  Image credit: NASA This poem originally appeared at the end of my essay The Nonlinear Path of Unlearning, which I shared earlier this year. I’m reposting it here on its own because, embedded in that essay, it may have been easy to miss—and because it speaks to something that feels worth returning to.
The poem was composed by me in collaboration with ChatGPT. That matters to name explicitly: I do not usually write poetry this way, but in this case the poem emerged organically while I was crafting an essay about unlearning, as a continuation of thought rather than a separate creative act. The essay explained why I use the word unlearning so deliberately. Growth is often imagined as accumulation—more knowledge, more skills, more certainty—but much of real development happens through loosening, undoing, and releasing patterns that no longer serve us. Unlearning does not move in straight lines. It expands and contracts, circles back and moves forward at the same time, never returning us to exactly the same place. As I was thinking about it, this process began to feel less like a staircase and more like a rhythm—closer to natural cycles, to breathing, to the movements of stars and galaxies. This poem grew out of that image: learning and unlearning as motion, repetition with difference, and change that unfolds without a fixed destination. *** Unlearning moves like this: A rubber band pulled outward, quivering with possibility, straining against the habits of years. Then-- a snap, a recoil, a return to familiar ground. But each return is different. The band, stretched and released a thousand times, never rests in quite the same place. The cosmos, swelling with galaxies, never contracts to its original shape. The path is not a straight line, not a clean ascent from darkness to light. It is a rhythm-- stretch and yield, expand and fold, like breath, like tides, like the slow pulse of a star. And in this rhythm, power is not in holding the stretch forever, but in stretching again, and again, trusting that each recoil lands you in a wider sky.  Introducing a new essay in my project POWER of meanings // MEANINGS of power.
Summary: The concept of the “other” traditionally refers to marginalized groups who have been stereotyped and excluded. This essay introduces a new category: the “bad other,” the figure whose behavior is judged as dangerous or immoral and who is therefore denied empathy and complexity. Recognizing this category exposes a double standard in how othering is discussed and opens new possibilities for understanding conflict, judgment, and human behavior. Read the essay here. |