Sonder

“I am nothing, but I must be everything.” — Karl Marx

Hey Vsauce

In Michael “VSauce” Stevens’s video “The Science of Awkwardness,” the word “sonder” is introduced with the definition:

The profound feeling of realizing that everyone, including strangers passed in the street, has a life as complex as one’s own, which they are constantly living despite one’s personal lack of awareness of it.

As people, most tend to focus on ourselves rather than the people around us. This makes sense since we live our lives from our own perspective and we want what is best for ourselves.

The only way in which we can understand others is through the few moments of interaction we get. Even then, people change in many ways over time; so, someone you know today could and will be completely different in a few years.

So, perhaps it is futile to attempt to understand other people. However, there is beauty to this impossibility. Each and every person has something that no one else can have.

However, though everyone is different, that is also a shared property that gives us more in common.

By the way, I was watching that video in the Ricketts communal bathroom, and luckily no one else was there.

nothing, except everything

I saw a really good 13-minute short film on YouTube yesterday by Wesley Wang titled, “nothing, except everything.”

It’s a story that takes place over senior year that really make me grateful for youth and is just incredibly relatable and emotional. My favorite quote from the film is, “You will never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory.” It will definitely resonate for others in Gen Z.

Anyway, I can’t describe how good this film is in words, so you should just watch it:

Small note, in the Indiegogo campaign for funding the movie, Wang said that the main character was going to be Asian American, but in the final movie, he was white, which was kind of an interesting modification.

! DO NOT READ BELOW THIS LINE BEFORE WATCHING !

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By the way, 7 is the best number from 1 to 10. Also the best number.

Iff ¹

The true defining trait of our generation as a whole seems to be self-awareness combined with helplessness. There are many problems, but there simply isn’t much to be done from our position due to our inexperience and lack of authority. Of course, this will change eventually. However, as we age, will our ideals be maintained or discarded?

I have a feeling that many other generations of young people before us have been equally idealistic but have become disillusioned as they age. However, the level of awareness that the internet has brought through social media is unlike any generation before.

So, will our ideals define our growth or will our growth define our values?

5 Guy ²

WARNING: This section contains spoilers for Jujutsu Kaisen!

Here is a brief rundown of Jujutsu Kaisen’s plot relevant to this section of the post.

Geto and Gojo are two young sorcerers who have just graduated jujutsu/sorcery high school, and they have the responsibility of protecting civilians from curses/monsters.

Geto becomes disillusioned with the responsibility to protect civilians because he sees it as a thankless job, especially after he saw one of his underclassmen die after a mission. So, Geto joins the side of the curses with the intent to wipe out non-sorcerers to put an end to all curses (curses are born from negative human emotion, so if there are no humans there will be no curses).

After Geto wipes out a village, he is excommunicated and sentenced to death. Gojo, after becoming the strongest sorcerer, meets Geto again and this is their final conversation:

Geto asks Gojo, “Are you the strongest because you’re Gojo Satoru? Or does being Gojo Satoru make you the strongest?”

Skip a couple dozen chapters, Gojo gets bisected by Sukuna and a bunch of Gojo fans go crazy and call him a fraud. For these people, it certainly seems that for them, Gojo Satoru was defined only by his strength.

1989 (Tom’s Version) ³

The vault tracks on 1989 are actually all very good after a few listens. The first time I listened to some of them they sounded very boring. However, they all sound really good and it was hard to make a ranking.

1. Now That We Don’t Talk
2. Say Don’t Go
3. Suburban Legends
4. “Slut!”
5. Is It Over Now?

People were overhyping “Is It Over Now?” so much that it just falls short of all expectations. It isn’t bad but also not as great as the other four.

New Friend Part 5

My new friend C from Princeton is a humanities major ⁴. Shocking, I know.

We were actually classmates in 6th grade history, taught by Ms. J ⁵, who I used to write emails to. She lost her Boston University email so I haven’t been able to contact her for a while.

Anyway, I never talked to C in history, we just randomly started typing lyrics to “打上火花” by DAOKO and Kenshi Yonezu in the comment section of our friend P’s Instagram post with a video of fireworks.

In the words of J in the 2021 YouTube-livestreamed recital of L’s school choir, “Music really brings us all together.”

Fdcosθ pt. 2 ⁶

As it turns out, being a humanities major is actually a lot of work. There’s so much reading and writing to do, I would never be able to do that all day. Reading a few hundred pages in a few days just sounds like the worst thing ever.

Anyway, the next time you see a humanities major, make sure to show them your respect by reciting a line from a book. For instance, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”⁷

It was just like a movie ⁸

Time passes very fast in college. Part of it is having more work to do after finishing the current work, and part of it is that there are always fun things going on and new experiences.

When I met C, it was actually September even though it feels like two weeks ago. It’s just a never-ending chain of problem sets (though I do my best to do good enough).

Note: I had to copy-paste some code to get that Spotify song working.

Wagariyo! ⁹

There are occassional moments where the world slows down and I can feel every second go by. Today, my friends V, O, B were making tomato and egg noodles which were actually super good. The noodles were extremely tender, elastic, and moist; J and W would certainly agree.

Maybe I was just hungry from the ride back from Palomar, but I think there was a deeper sense of voracity from within for something familiar.

I haven’t eaten tomato and eggs in months, and I really wanted to eat rice for a while. I can finally understand why my parents always want to go to Chinese restaurants whenever we travel.

Once you’ve seen enough new stuff, you just want what you had before.

L8r

This post is getting a bit long, so the next post will be about my field trip to Palomar Observatory!

Footnotes

People said I should include footnotes for my references/puns, so I decided to include them this post.

1. Iff is the abbreviation of “If and only if.” A iff B means if B is true, A is true, and the reverse is also true. Referenced in the final sentence of the section. ↩

2. There is a fast food chain called Five Guys and Gojo Satoru in Japanese is 五条 悟, 五 is the number 5. ↩

3. Taylor Swift occassionally releases re-recorded versions of her old albums with some new content to make mad $$$ and puts “(Taylor’s Version)” at the end. ↩

4. As defined by Wikipedia, “Humanities are academic disciplines that study aspects of human society and culture, including the fundamental questions asked by humans… The humanities include the studies of foreign languages, history, philosophy, language arts (literature, writing, oratory, rhetoric, poetry, etc.), performing arts (theater, music, dance, etc.), and visual arts (painting, sculpture, photography, filmmaking, etc.).” ↩

5. Ms. J’s favorite book was or is Catcher In the Rye. ↩

6. Formula for work is Fdcosθ, there was a previous section with the same name in the previous post. ↩

7. Opening line of A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Darwin, I mean Charles Dickens. ↩

8. A lyric from “When We Were Young” by Adele. ↩

9. Line spoken by Souma in Food Wars when he serves his dish. ↩