I look inwards much more these days, by the paradoxical consequence of just having more mental bandwidth available – a result itself of doing more stuff from just having the right systems in place, so somehow in this way the things that need to happen happen without my deepest or most conscious effort.

Right now, in reference to the stuff written above, I might go:

What are you doing? That sentence is way too long! Should we use shorter sentences? How about sentences with punch? Ooh, is that the right word?

But I do realize how much of the way I think, see, and articulate the world seems so apparently industrialized; tailored towards efficiency, constructed to facilitate a mimetic carrying-across, the delivery of the correct words in the correct way, that my consciousness in their low resolution dress may eclipse the firmer boundaries of a reader’s consciousness and transport my meaning to whomever should receive it.

Already, I’ve rewritten the paragraph above to challenge that basic paradigm and to overturn it a bit – to let the soul-patterns become that much more varied, no longer homogeneous – for words not necessarily to be “useful” or “not useful”, but somehow retain the quality of being comprehensible in the laboratory that is other people’s minds.

Our industrial language is clear, measured, and specific; it communicates intentions with highest fidelity, increases the probability that the chain of intention will lead to the desired consequences, and thus fulfills a need of capitalism in particular and enterprise at large – it exists for good reason in our age.

But there is a time and a place for it in the bestiary of our personas, both of communication and perception in a world that we could see in ever higher fidelity if only we would challenge ourselves just that bit more.

Returning to that first sentence for a minute…

None of this would have been possible internally for me without the gains of that productivity, that efficiency – the tangible thing that materially shifted things.

Perhaps this is the embodiment of what John Dewey said when he observed that we don’t think our way into a pattern of living – rather, we live our way into a pattern of thinking.

An idea I have flirted with time and time again is the concept of the perfect sequence. It is the idea that, relative to a person’s life, there could be a perfect, predetermined set of actions they could take in the correct order (whatever that may be) to achieve the very best possible outcomes for that person.

In a way, I think that is Platonic (not as in friend zone – the philosopher!), but in another way, I also think it is delusional. There is, after all, only one life. What good is there in thinking about the ideal state of things when one could just go ahead and do them well? That’s actually why I’m thinking about this at the moment.

Yesterday, I posted a video pretty late at night after practicing a DJ set.

Now that I think about it, it would have probably been better if I had posted the video first, before practicing the DJ set.

Both were things I interpret internally as work, and in a way, both have possible payoffs.

The practice session paid off in extra skills, while the video paid off in views and people knowing a little bit of my thinking.

Had I done the video earlier, though, it would have dropped at a time when people were actually awake, and perhaps the algorithm would have picked it up.

That doesn’t seem to be the case because I dropped it quite late at night.

Either way, it is about the Fly FM AI DJ recruitment drive, which in turn was the fruit of my little expose of their fake live stream just the other day, which also became the top post on r/Malaysia for a while.

Time to flex!

That post in viewership terms reached almost 1% of the Malaysian population, if we assume that the entire viewership is either Malaysian x Malaysian diaspora rather than the possibly more interesting interpretation (that we could back with some data), that we have some Malaysians, mostly bots, disgruntled Singaporeans, kiasu parents who treat me as Malaysians may treat their durian, people who either love me or hate me or are indifferent but arrived by accident, and Americans and Chinese who may or may not be parts of secret agencies.

Anyway, back to earth – my failed video is what it is (or is it?), and there’s no use crying over spilled milk, though you may cry that Fly FM could have even thought that whatever they think they’re doing is a good idea.

This idea of a perfect sequence is still an appealing one, though, and it’s something I do think about time and time again.

Maybe that’s just proof that, as a person, I’m still somebody who can continue to get better and does continue to get better even if in some (many) ways I still suck.

That is a reassuring thought in this close of 2026, and as we open the doorway to the days and years ahead 😀