Never More than A Ten-Percent

Yesterday, someone texted me, jokingly (I hoped), that he could make my life a living hell if he wished. Mm. Apart from sounding a little too kinky, he sounded like he had too much time in his hand. I don't. Most of us don't. But I won't lie: the kink started to get under my skin. (Otherwise, I wouldn't dedicate a blog entry for this rather unfortunate event.) So, here goes.

First of all, let me lay out the attributes of life I anchor myself to. In other words, let me define myself based on what I think says a lot about me, and that is my curiosity. Over the course of my life, I've taken up many commitments (in lieu of the word 'hobby' because some of these are too taxing to be leisurely hobbies) because of curiosity: video games, programming, gardening, gym, cycling, woodworking (or maybe crafting), music, reading, and other things. I take pleasure on how the rule applies (and to some extent, how it has been made). Give me some time, and my curiosity will demand something else: Based on the established procedure of rule-making, can the rules be manipulated? To what extent? Who will be affected? Following this, I apply mods to my games, change my fertilizing schedule (or the soil mix), inflect chords, etc.

I'm pretty proud of my curiosity.

And it drives my knowledge-seeking instinct. In my undergraduate final year, right after finishing my thesis and before the graduation ceremony, I downloaded an advanced clinical dermatology textbook, of which I had not the slightest idea. I forgot the title, the authors, the publisher, and everything else. But why dermatology? I entered skincare several months before. After reading pages of a skincare subreddit, I decided it was time to move on to the next level. (Arrogance. Happened to the best of us.) Hoping to be any wiser about cutaneous mysteries. Instead, I encountered postcolonialism. (Should my memory not fail me, dermatologists have been aware of the fact that many skincare products are based on experiments meant for white people. Non-white people are systematically forced to follow a regimen that is not necessarily suitable.)

So, maybe you already have a gist of a life I'm living. I'm curious. And my curiosity offers me many a field I've yet to spoil. My mornings are filled with questions of "what first" and "what next", and my nights with worries of unrealized curiosities.

But what does it all have to do with the threat of giving me hell? Definition, my friend, is where people can give you hell. How do you define yourself? And this is where the philosophers come in.

Self-definition is a problem as old as language. Des Cartes with the thinking self. Wittgenstein and/or his linguist friends with the speaking (or language) self. The question about "who we are" (defined as how we know who we are in a given context relative to everyone else) is so fundamental that everything else, including "what we should do" and "how we should live our lives", is contingent to the first question. In my mind, I have at least three schools of thought I relate to: Marxism, hedonism, and Stoicism. Let's focus on hedonism first.

I am perhaps a hedonist (or, to avoid Marx's wrath of reifying oneself with a structure, I relate to the hedonist ideas). I chase fun all day. I avoid hurt. But I understand that having fun must happen in adjacent to being hurt (wow, Hegelian dialectics much?). Most nights, I go to sleep happy after following where my curiosity has taken me, knowing that there are more things I haven't explored. Happy but sad. Fun but hurt. (And what fun is it to know that death may and will stop you, eventually, from going to all the places your curiosity points for you?) But then again, Durkheim reminds me, "Humans know good when they see bad." I have fun because I'm hurt. All in all, it doesn't seem to contradict hedonism: have fun. And by being hurt, I have fun. Masochism.

Stoicism. Yeah. The college hype everyone seemed to subscribe to. And now every man-child seems to idolize the idea. Anyways.