Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

The 30-year-old man in the black-and-white photo smiled at me, his happiness at perhaps his first time in Beijing for work still visible more than 60 years after the fact. Yet, moments later, I found myself ripping the beautifully preserved photo in half; the arbitrary split in the brittle paper ran through that very smile, a stark reminder of a sudden but entirely unceremonious goodbye. By the hundredth rip, I had become mechanical, pieces of old photos, alongside scraps of diary entries with neat handwriting and certifications of all kinds, so unemotionally falling into the black garbage bag below. 

The Western world has a paradoxical relationship with authoritarianism. Non-democracies the world over are roundly criticized for their inability to uphold human rights, protect minorities, and ignore citizens' desires for more freedoms and better livelihoods. Yet, in the corporate world, too many fawn over titans who run their corporations as personal fiefdoms, managing through a combination of a cult of personality and one-man decision-making. How come Elon Musk and Steve Jobs are almost glorified for having dictatorial powers when actual dictators are simply bad people?

Early December 2025, Malta rescued 61 illegal immigrants from a capsized boat in the Mediterranean, providing them with emergency medical support after taking them ashore. With the majority of the rescued coming from Bangladesh and various African countries, the visuals of their being treated (for free) by Maltese medics and ambulances only give local netizens, already angry about rampant foreign arrivals in the country, additional ammunition to call for a more stringent anti-immigrant stance by the government. 

"You shouldn't see parenting as self-sacrifice so that your kids don't see love as depletion." That line from The Fax Club hits a little too close to home. The book, which documents a year-long experiment in which 100 anonymous participants answered a weekly question that arrived at them by fax, showed just how deliberate contemplation, uninterrupted by the quick dopamine hits of social media, can create real philosophical gems through the most ordinary people. The best, like this one, came out of everyday observations about human relationships.

I still remember all the praises that veteran development professionals showered on Paul Kagame. It was 2015, and I was landing in Tanzania for my work at the One Acre Fund, an American microfinance NGO. The Rwandan president was the darling of Western donors, creating a country of political stability, clean streets, and a transparent welcome for foreign investors in a neighborhood often characterized by opaque shakedown, hidden costs of doing business, and unpredictable, sudden changes in policymaking that risk leaving people, assets, and money stranded.

AI has arrived at the audio age. Only years after robotic voices dominated the test-to-voice space, AI producers are investing substantial resources in humans willing to contribute their voice recordings to equip the latest generation of chatbot conversation partners. The result is an ever more natural set of sample voices that can recite textual responses, to the point that a blind listener would not be able to distinguish the machine-generated from the human original. Days are not far away when voice transcription, as a human job, becomes entirely obsolete.

"Could I...ask a completely unrelated question?" One of the attendees hesitantly spoke up in our online discussion session. As I saw him lower his head in the grainy video thumbnail, he quietly muttered, "How...does your life end up like that?" And before I could inquire what he exactly meant, he intoned, his voice a bit louder and even angrier, "I'm interested in living in different countries too....but it just doesn't seem like it plays out that way." I opened my mouth and closed it again before I could say a word. I had to think for a moment after realizing it was a much more sensitive question than I had expected.

When people envision a "revolution," they often conjure images of sudden bouts of violence and radical change. People coordinate large-scale gatherings where they clash with the police and military to voice their suffering and demand change. From the protests emerge charismatic leaders whose speeches move crowds and whose ideologies are projected into the public consciousness. When the authorities refuse to budge in the face of popular discontent, protests turn into mob violence, then organized armed opposition that overcomes the defenders of the regime. 

The Japanese often attribute the country's high-quality manufactured products to  Shokunin Damashii (職人魂) in action. A historical culture of craftsmen focusing on doing one thing and just one thing well in his or her life has led to a slew of artisanal success stories, from fabled swords from centuries ago to the aged sake rice wine taking over the world's palate. Despite modern manufacturing's reliance on automation and assembly lines, the country's electronics giants and carmakers continue to suggest that this culture of perfectionism over individual lifetimes is the secret ingredient to made in Japan's fine reputation.

When one asks for the wealthiest countries in the world, perhaps the most commonly used (albeit deceptive) measurement is GDP per capita. The logic is that if each resident, on average, is more economically productive, they would justify higher wages and thus more spending power to improve their livelihoods. A corollary is that the wealthy ought to also be the most peaceful. After all, crime and conflict are not good for business. No one would both investing, scaling up, and paying people to produce if they worry about their assets and very lives.

A few days ago, my neighborhood in Malta was hit by a series of power outages, blanketing the area in darkness just as everyone was about to head to bed. With the late-summer heat still unbearably strong, it was not exactly the easiest night to get through. Waking up in a sweat at 3am, I found myself unable to keep lying on the soaked-through bed in a windless room, so I headed up the balcony, just a catch whatever breeze it could offer. I expected that, devoid of the usual orange-ish streetlights, the top-down view of the streets, lined with stone buildings on both sides, would be ghastly, but far from it.

The microcosm of contemporary global politics played out on the official Facebook page of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. His meticulously documented trip across saw him first touring Japanese factories, calling on the two countries to cooperate on semiconductor development. Then he found himself in Tianjin, China, openly handshaking and calling Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin his friends and partners. All this despite the US publicly denouncing their summit as a congregation of anti-Americanism, while the Japanese government called on world leaders to avoid China ahead of its end-of-WWII celebrations.

For years, I struggled with fitting in at different organizations, whether it be school, workplace, or just groups of friends. It is not that I could not function within them. As needed, I could communicate with coworkers to get projects done, chit-chat with friends to share life updates, and adhere to rules that lead to concrete results, whether it be graduation or promotion. But more often than not, these actions felt less driven by intrinsic motivation to better belong through crafting more shared goals and tighter personal relationships, but just obligations to maintain memberships.

It was not yesterday that Korea became a cultural superpower. Yet, amidst the global rise of K-pop , K-drama, and even K-cosmetics, K-food remains relatively obscure. It is not surprising. After all, learning to cook a cuisine requires skilled chefs who are often unwilling to emigrate from their home countries, especially to those with lower salaries. Finding authentic ingredients or importing them from Korea affordably requires legal and regulatory support. And it is always a risk that the cuisine may not suit the local palate, especially given Korean food's reputation for being spicy.

The aftermath of the Japanese legislative elections this past week has only cemented an almost concerted narrative among international media outlets that the country is on the cusp of change, probably for the worse. The first time in post-WWII history that the ruling Liberal Democratic Party lost its majority in both houses of the legislature, and the very likely resignation of Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba in the coming weeks, are seen in the context of greater instability, despite the much-needed conclusion of trade-deal negotiations with the US. 

I do not normally comment on Japanese politics. It is not because I am not interested in politics or the country. But it is much more because, for much of the past decades, it has not been a source of change or inspiration. As the country struggled with deflation, economic stagnancy, and depopulation, politicians had little to say about solutions, preferring to muddle on with a combination of quantitative easing and pensioning off the growing cohort of old people, buying political capital in a land where the youth are largely characterized by political apathy .

When the Russo-Ukrainian War first broke out, the battlefield success of Ukrainian drones in blowing up Russian armored vehicles made me wonder whether columns of armored vehicles still have their place in modern warfare. Three years since then, the power of the drone has proven to be far more potent and game-changing in the blood-soaked fields of Donbas. Ukrainians have managed to smuggle them into Siberia, launching them against Russian strategic bombers located thousands of miles from the frontlines. And in exchange, Russians have pummeled Ukrainian cities, even without established air superiority.

Israel's latest attack on Iran was entirely unprovoked. Even as American and Iranian diplomats prepared for the next round of nuclear weapons negotiations in Oman, Israeli airstrikes lit up the night sky across the country, hitting not just suspected nuclear weapons facilities, but also government and residential compounds, in a bid to simultaneously damage military hardware but also take out its military, political, and scientific leadership in one fell swoop. The surprise attack was followed by Israeli government announcements that, confusingly, also called on the Iranian people to rise up and overthrow the regime.

A few days ago, a marathon held in Beijing marked the first time that specifically designed humanoid runner robots participated alongside actual human runners. Rather than a display of technological prowess, the publicity focused on just how much the humanoids lagged behind the humans, with the fastest robot finishing more than an hour after the human winner, and three-quarters of the robot entries dropped out of the race. The event became a testament to just how difficult it remains for robotics to fully mimic such basic human actions as running, despite advancements in AI and precision manufacturing.

If there is anything consistent about the inconsistent Trump administration so far, it has been a belief in self-importance. Amidst the endless threats and flip-flops of tariffs on other countries, the vague words around peace deals in Ukraine and Gaza, and the winding road of the domestic war against left-wing wokery, the administration has never stopped believing in one underlying principle: that the other countries fundamentally need the US more than the US will ever need them, and that in the face of the administration's agreessions, its enemies cannot credibly muster effective counterattacks.