Topic

Reflective Journey

A collection of 42 issues

Value Creation is Not Symmetric : Life, Relationships, and Organizations

Humans are inherently driven to seek value, create meaning, and leave a lasting impact. This urge to create value is deeply embedded in our psychology, touching on our need for survival, social connection, identity, purpose, and legacy. Value creation — the process of generating meaningful outcomes, benefits, or impact — is often

Two Days in Shanghai : A Memoir of Concrete Souls and Flickering Dreams

The city breathes, but the breath is mechanical. I step off the plane, and the pulse of Shanghai reverberates beneath my feet, a rhythm not unlike a heartbeat but colder, distant. I have come to this towering metropolis for reasons I can’t even recall anymore — work, perhaps, or simply

Why Realistic Pessimism is a Gift in a Delusional World of Optimism?

It’s strange to live in a world where optimism is marketed as the only viable option for a meaningful life. “Stay positive!” they say, wielding optimism as a panacea for all things bleak. But does relentless optimism make us any less exposed to life’s absurdities? If anything, optimism

Skyline of Solitude : The Forgotten Faces in the Rise of Modernity

In the city, tall structures crowd the skyline, vying for supremacy in height, gloss, and grandeur. These buildings represent our collective obsession with progress, each new floor a testament to ambition, each glass pane a symbol of perceived advancement. Yet as I look at these towering giants, an unsettling realization

Beyond the Clock : When Time and Self Become One

The clock ticks forward, dragging each moment into the next as though time is an endless scroll unrolled by the invisible hand of reality. Yet, if I pause and ask myself, “What is this thing I call time?” the answer slips through my grasp like water through a clenched fist.

The Strange Look of Grief and Recognition

Grief is strange, almost ineffable. I think of it as a mask that distorts, a palpable yet ephemeral presence — a look on a face that is at once alien and achingly familiar. I’ve seen it reflected back at me in mirrors, in the eyes of friends, in strangers on

The Hollowing

In the fading hours of twilight, where shadows stretch their thin fingers across landscapes that have long lost their meaning, he observes a world now entrenched in the dull hum of transaction. Once, there was depth. The waters of life felt bottomless, rich with the sediment of genuine connection, of

Reflections @46

As I stand on the precipice of 46 years, a multitude of thoughts cascade through the corridors of my mind. Amidst me orbiting 46-times around the Sun, my life, a complex equation, has often teetered on the edge of absurdity, where the vastness of existence juxtaposes with the minutiae of

The Nature of “Negative Capability”

Somewhere in the rolling fog of history, amid the ethereal musings of a poet, lies a concept that has managed to evade the hard grasps of certainty and logic : negative capability. John Keats — who, in his letter to his brothers, named this elusive state — did not anticipate the term would

Anti-Knowledge : A Journey Through the Paradoxes of Knowing

In a world that celebrates knowledge as the ultimate currency, I find myself drawn instead to its inverse : anti-knowledge, the space of what is not known, and perhaps, what cannot be known. Not an empty void, anti-knowledge is instead the paradoxical space where knowing folds back on itself, revealing the