spill it out on the ragged floor, a thousand different versions of yourself

this will go down as one of those posts where i say i'm going to not do something but inevitably go back on my word eventually. i realise that the internet is full of people just whining and moaning about how bad their lives are, which is rather destructive. now i'm entirely aware of how much i contribute to this collective bad vibe, so i'm going to try and minimise this from now on. it's going to be hard. half of my facebook status updates involve some kind of comment regarding how i feel my life/friends/things are horrible, which in most cases turn out to be wrong.

we all seem to wanna feed our neuroses, as if that gets us access to some kind of exclusive club where we can be amongst equally upset people whom we secretly hope will not make things better for us. and i suppose we don't really take stock of our lives enough. i'm not trying to make light of anyone's problems, nor am i denying the cathartic effect of just getting stuff off our chests, but i suppose in the end, it comes down to whether what we say are genuine cries for help, or simply a desperate longing for some kind of identity.

i'll be the first to say that i don't know who i am. especially here. i'm a second year econ major at the university of chicago. that defines broadly what my daily life involves. zoom out slightly and i'm a PSC scholar with a six year bond, a civil servant to be. that defines broadly who i am in terms of who i'm supposed to be. zoom out just a little more and i'm a 20 year old singaporean living in chicago, which is simply a means of identifying me. i suppose what i mean to say is, what people see of us outwardly means practically nothing.

yet, if i try to drill down into what i am, i think i'll soon find nothing much at all. most people would say that we are defined by what we do. so what am i to be defined by then? the classes i take? the company i keep? what i do for fun? my favorite food? the color of my sheets? it also doesn't seem to tell much about me. so essentially our lives are inherently blank. it's so hard to pin down who we are or what we mean, except perhaps in terms of how we relate to other people. so we tell people how sad we are, or how troubled we feel and hope for some degree of sympathy. that what we feel is not merely a reflection of the little vacuous lives we lead, but something which parallels the drift of human existence.

gah... this post has gone in a direction i didn't anticipate. i'll try to say what i meant to say some other day.