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.]

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...
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Keep reading here.

[This essay will be included in the Newsletter#20, which will be sent out around mid January.]

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.

This is the latest essay I published in my project Me, Looking for Meaning.

When people hear phrases like “love your enemy,” the mind often jumps to an extreme case: the worst person imaginable, doing the worst things. From that starting point, the reaction is predictable: “I can’t possibly love someone like that.”

And from there, the entire idea gets dismissed. The concept is treated as unrealistic, naïve, or even morally wrong.

But this reaction rests on a misunderstanding. It assumes that the idea demands something dramatic: choosing the person you despise most and forcing yourself to feel warmth, compassion, or forgiveness. That is not what is at stake.

Keep reading here.

This is the latest essay I published in my project Me, Looking for Meaning.

It can be unsettling to question the familiar division between “good” and “bad” people. This essay explores why that binary feels so natural—and how it limits our understanding of ourselves and others. I examine how psychological habits shape our sense of right and wrong, and why moving beyond moral certainty can create space for humility, compassion, and connection.​

Here’s an excerpt:

Most of us move through life with a certainty that the world is divided into good and bad people. We may not say it out loud, but the assumption shapes how we interpret our own and others’ actions—in relationships, in everyday life, in politics, in history. We want to be good, of course, and we want to be surrounded by good people—those who are kind, trustworthy, and safe. When something goes wrong, whether in our personal lives or in society, we instinctively look for someone to blame: the bad friend, the bad parent, the bad politician—the bad actor in the story. It feels natural to imagine that if we could only keep those people away, the world would be fixed.

This way of thinking runs deep. It is woven into the stories that have guided human imagination for millennia. From myths and fairy tales to novels, movies, and news headlines, narratives very often feature heroes and villains, victims and perpetrators, saviors and destroyers. The appeal is obvious. A world divided into good and bad is easy to understand. It offers emotional clarity: someone is right, someone is wrong, and the conflict between them gives meaning to our experiences.

Yet even as this moral logic feels familiar, something about it obscures more than it reveals. Life rarely unfolds as neatly as our stories suggest. People who hurt us can also love deeply; those who do harm can still believe they are protecting what matters most. And while we are quick to spot the “bad people” in the world, we almost never see ourselves among them.

The idea that some people are simply bad may bring comfort, but it also limits our understanding. It prevents us from seeing how easily any of us could cause harm, given the right mix of fear, conviction, or circumstance. Still, it is difficult to question this assumption—because it is one of the oldest and most reassuring stories humanity has ever told about itself.

Keep reading here!

Image credit: Eugene Golovesov 
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This is the latest essay I published in my project Me, Looking for Meaning.

This essay explores one of the most deeply rooted ideas in modern life—the belief that we are free. In democratic societies, the notion of personal freedom feels almost self-evident: we make choices, pursue goals, and see ourselves as agents of our own lives. Yet, when we look more closely, freedom becomes far less straightforward. The essay examines the many forces that shape what we call “choice”—from social expectations and cultural norms to biology, language, and even the microorganisms within us.

Still, Are You Free? is not a pessimistic piece. It argues that constraint and freedom are not opposites but intertwined aspects of human experience. Even within the limits of our minds, bodies, and societies, there is room for movement, change, and wise action. By learning to hold this paradox—acknowledging both the conditions that shape us and the freedom we still exercise—we can approach ourselves and others with greater humility, patience, and compassion.

​You can read the essay here.