Dear my T2 friends,
How is your week?
Sometimes I couldn’t help but feel amazed by how fast a week’s gone by. Last year I read “4000 weeks” by Oliver Burkeman (probably my most favourite non-fiction book of 2023). But, rather than all the meaningful messages and ideas inside, it’s the title that struck me the most. 4000 - this finite not-too-big number is all we have in this little life, and we (or at least I) have gone through a good proportion of it without any memory.
Hence, in this little series, I hope to capture some of my most memorable experiences/thinking/stuff I’ve learned during the week. By sharing it here, hopefully sometimes you might find some of them relatable, or things that we should talk more - about writing, or about this journey we happen to be in together.
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This week, in preparation for an event about “The burnout Society” by Byung-Chul Han, I’ve listened to quite a few podcast episode about this topic and the author. I really think people should pay more attention to Han – an enigmatic South Korean-born German philosopher, one of the few who are still able to think independently and originally in this chaotic fast-paced world of information overload.
“The burnout society” really awakens me to the fact that I’ve been unconsciously caught up in what Han calls ‘an achivement society’, where personal development is everything, where the desire to constantly moving forward is so strong that there’s no room/time for deep contemplation of anything at all. In his work, Han shows how this never-ending the-sky-is-the-limit mechanism of personal development can actually be harmful,
not only for individuals in terms of burnout and depression, always feel that they’re losers because they can’t be more productive and efficient,
but also for society, as there’s no consideration of others anymore.
I’ll definitely dig deeper into Han’s arguments and ideas and write more about it in the near future.
This week I’ve also nearly finished reading “Inner Engineering” by Sadhguru. This book is truly eye-opening for me, the way it discusses about yoga and how to live a spiritual life according to it.
I really love the way the author divides the book into 3 parts - of the body, mind, and the energy; and how only by preparing properly our body and our mind (which is a process of much discipline and knowledge and actual experience) that we can go further in our spiritual journey.
To be honest, the final part of the energy is quite difficult to grasp, as it reflects things that one can’t really perceive with 5 senses (and hence unfalsifiable in Karl Popper’s theory).
However, there’s something about his writing and his sharing that make me believe it’s true, and hopefully one day I’ll be able to experience it enough to clarify my belief.
Anyway, I would highly recommend this one to anyone who wants to discover more about yoga and spirituality.
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That’s it for this week. Hope you enjoy reading, and would appreciate any relatable thought/idea you can share with me. Thanks!
Andy Luong
