You’re gonna fail to have a great career, unless…

Unless you listen to this farcical, self-deprecating talk, and think deeper.

Life, illusion, and sanity

 

Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces. – Sigmund Freud

Dropping out: is it a wise choice?

Go to a college, work hard and play hard for three or four years, earn a degree, and get to work. Yes, that’s undeniably a normal facet in our lives, a spell-binding ‘must-do’ habitude that has long rooted in most of the societies in the last century. Either we ourselves or our parents – to a further extent, our distant relatives, uncles, aunties, grandparents, cousins, and whatsoever familial names you can make – have never ceased pursuing these goals, with all the audacity that we can afford to make great accomplishments suited for the curriculum vitae we are going to submit to these future employers.

It turns out the world is becoming increasingly uneasy for university graduates to secure a permanent job.

In a life process either before or after graduation – something that is intensely fast-paced, cut-throat, and savagely competitive, we are all demanded to secure great scores – or mention the least, good-enough remarks – to fill our resumes. We come and go by lectures after lectures. We have to learn to be independent. We have to adjust everything anew to our long-in-our-comfort-zone minds. We have to make new friends, leaving our families, or probably, childhood pals behind. And we realize maturing up is not something we have always imagined in our childhood.

There are some people who have this strong feeling about dropping out of universities or colleges: they are out of the blue startled to realize they are unhappy with the courses they are taking; that those ‘inner voices’, unceasingly coercing them to discover their ‘true passions’, or to ‘shed a new light in their real lanterns’; or that the ‘new friends’ are not thoroughly the ideal friends they are supposed to be. Then they face two similarly uneasy choices: either you proceed the studies you abhor so much no matter how well-qualified the lecturers are, or you face humiliation from your family, the discreet disappointment in the faces of your parents. That you choose not to live in accordance to what the societies demand, that everybody surrounding you thinks you are insane.

Or there are other segments of the societies who choose to cope with the entire hindrances facing them, attempting to re-adjust their mindsets, how they assume society and the reality themselves, and find themselves fully transformed, out of their Euclidean comfort zones, but with the consequences, possibly, of ‘losing their inner identities’, of getting lost in this vastless world.

Either you choose to drop-out or to carry on, remember one thing: it is, in the end, no more than Pascal’s wager. Either you win all, or you get nothing. There are myriad graduates, who, even with the curriculum vitae overwhelmed with achievements and awards, may still end up getting unemployed. There are even more myriad drop-outs who can, in their worst luck, end up homeless and need to hinge on government’s social security schemes to stay alive.

But there are also university graduates who eventually succeed in their careers and have happy families afterwards. Or drop-outs – if, and only if, you have immensely well-crafted talents like Bill Gates or Lawrence Ellison or Sergey Brin or Larry Page – who end up becoming billionaires. The truth is: either you choose to proceed to colleges or not to, it has little to do with our careers. In the end, everybody, as Stanley Kubrick once said, needs to shed light for oneself.

Two essays here present the pros and cons of dropping out from universities/colleges. Click the links to read more.

The man and his trashy freezer (animation)

It’s short but scintillating, homely yet touching, and it does have one important message: there is someone out there who is always ready to accept whoever we are.

Still more: a compliation of weird Japanese ads

And don’t forget there’s ‘Lainbow Mountain’ too.

This movie is only for ‘forever alone guys’

 

Joaquin Phoenix returns to sanity after all the idiosyncrasy he made in ‘I’m Still Here’ by falling in love with a computer operating system voiced by Scarlett Johannson, whose sexy voice probably transcends that of Siri. That’s awesome.

At least, this is not the typical romantic-comedy flick you will die for watching.

The magical world of Haruki Murakami

 

 

There is more to the reality he wants to convey through his mind-bending narratives, but some literary critics are still unsure what he actually wants to convey about.

Read the full article on The Daily Beast.

Excerpt:

With Murakami, there are certain motifs that appear again and again, and for which he’s sometimes mocked—cats, wells, baseball, and jazz, to name a few. Thematically, Murakami’s work explores the complexities of relationships, sex, self-discovery, the influence of Western culture in Japan, violence, and the reverberations of World War II. “You get a sense of the oddness and the eeriness of a modern culture, I think, which was born from a great act of violence,” said John Freeman, the editor of the literary magazine Granta. “His work is full of monsters and earthquakes.” Freeman said there are two things that make it hard for Murakami to win big literary awards and gain unmitigated praise. The first is that his stories have an improvisational feel to them, even if they weren’t actually improvised. The second is that “there’s a silliness and comedy to his work, and people who have comic impulses I think are always underrated in the short term.”

Inside China’s otherworldly political system

 

How overthinking kills

Cartoon: by Charles Barsotti

We are dying from overthinking. We are slowly killing ourselves by thinking about everything. Think. Think. Think. You can never trust the human mind anyway. It’s a death trap. – Anthony Hopkins

Only in Indonesia: waves of trash

 

 

No, this is not part of ‘Wonderful Indonesia’ you always see advertised in foreign media. But, you can’t deny the reality as well.

And this is what the photographer, Zak Noyle, told after taking the picture, as seen above: It was crazy. I kept seeing noodle packets floating next to me. It was very disgusting to be in there; I kept thinking I would see a dead body of some sort for sure.

Noted: bulk of our nation hasn’t succeeded in maintaining the pristine, otherworldly beauty of our country. And see, it’s all happened.

Read the full article on Huffington Post.