How is your 2021 so far?
It's been a while, hasn't it? How are you?
A photo taken by my sister during her recent trip to Boracay Island last December. Closed due to its rampant pollution, Boracay reopened in December 2018 following a six-month environmental rehabilitation and redevelopment programme. I made a “Boracay Sound” special for Manila Community Radio featuring Balearic beats, house, and trance music that defined the island during the early 2000s.
It is hard to believe that we are nearly halfway through our first quarter of the year. During the end of last year, I was wary of publishing a “2020 Recap” in fear of putting something, anything, out there without much thought. Couple that with being knees deep into a 20,000-word writing project and the fatigue of being online, it didn’t feel appropriate for me to remind you of how disruptive, difficult, or “unprecedented” the past year has been.
So, I decided to wait a few months to check in on you. Recently, I was reminded of a magazine I frequented during my years working at the Kioskafé called Delayed Gratification. It is a quarterly publication providing in-depth commentary on events from the last three months and they pride themselves in being the “Last to Breaking News.”
Quite rightly so. Whether you are a reader, writer, or an owner of a publication, you are lucky if you weren’t compulsively bouncing between browser tabs, skimming through Twitter “hot takes” or tapping your notifications away every minute or two. Apparently, our media is designed to be consumed this way – a torrent of partial and contradictory information, pouring through the seams before we have the time or energy to make sense of it. Certainly, catching that seam after it breaks is something to be proud of, when you can take your leisurely stroll instead of drowning in a sea of informational fluff.
For me, 2020 largely involved making sense of informational fluff. I wrote this in my newsletter ‘How do I survive 2020?’, saying I didn’t have “the mental capacity to form a nuanced opinion on why I believe this and that thing. I just feel overwhelmed.” In fact, producing Cultural Learnings helped me really learn about the things I was interested in — to slowly develop an opinion, even if it was subject to constant revaluation or felt like “peeling an onion: the closer you are to the core, the more you want to cry.”
A photo of me and my view from during Christmas morning, 2020.
A few days ago, a friend from high school did a dry run of his new sake bar in Manila, the city where I live now. I overheard someone talking direly about stalling his compulsory military service in Korea. In a lacklustre attempt to strike a conversation, I mentioned how I “saw an article” about a guy that travelled to Canada without a plane, having just got out of the Korean military service.
“So, maybe you can have something like that to look forward to after the military?”
“I saw that article too!” a stranger in the room exclaimed.
Then it hit me. Did I read the article? Was the guy even Korean? Upon writing the newsletter you are reading now, I tried to backtrack that very article. It took a solid five minutes before I found it. Perhaps the piece was not search engine optimised enough but I started to seriously doubt whether I saw the article at all. It turns out the guy was Singaporean, not Korean. I must have dozed off on the fifth paragraph — the writing felt familiar — before opening another one of my many, many browser tabs.
We vastly overestimate what we know and what we know is reinforced by other people whose opinion are equally ill-informed — a circle jerk of misinformation, ego, and boredom.
I’d like to think I am getting better at slowing down and focusing my attention. I’d like to think I am creating good and quality journalism, especially for this newsletter. Eventually, I will be able to fit all my stunning ideas into a slick content calendar and write this lovely newsletter every month, week, or day. But for now, I’ll take my leisurely stroll, making sure not to trip on the fluff. That’s what I want for 2021 – a year that, so far, has been about figuring it out.
So, when you got a minute, let me know how the year is treating you.
The Great Quarantine of 2020: Soundtrack Edition
Manila Community Radio - Wednesday, 17 February 2021
09:00 - 10:00 GMT | 17:00 - 18:00 GMT+8
After six months on a pilot run and more than 1,000 hours of broadcasts, my radio family, Manila Community Radio, officially launched last Monday.
Tomorrow, I will be playing soundtracks and scores from films I watched for the first-time since 15 March 2020, the day Manila imposed quarantine measures. You can access the full list of films here, on Letterboxd.
If I’m not on Substack, I’m certainly on Manila Community Radio every Wednesday from 5 PM GMT+8 (Manila time) or 9 AM GMT (London time). Hope to catch you there. My previous mixes are available for playback too.
2021 Starter Pack
A piece from The New Yorker explores the “quest for slower, better news.”
This article from The Guardian was written entirely by a robot.
Three journalists come together to create “The Slow Media Manifesto.”
Last year, I decided not to come back to the UK. This piece by Zing Tsjeng of Vice does a good job at detailing the excruciating effort involved in applying for indefinite leave to remain.
Jia Tolentino on what makes an American.
This is a thought-provoking episode of Making Sense with Sam Harris where he gives his two cents for a new year. I’ve been using his Waking Up app for guided meditations and this tidbit is Harris’ response to users who tell him to “stay away from politics”:
If we find ourselves living in some hellscape out of the Road Wars movies, it would still be possible to meditate and feel compassion for one's self and others and to find equanimity. That is the capacity of the human mind that will not go away.
But we are right not to want to see things totally fall apart in our society. And if your practice of meditation is making you unable to take problems of civilisational importance seriously – well, you may be managing your own stress well, but you're no good to us. What we need now are people that understand their own minds and who also understand the world.
I've studied with some of the greatest meditation masters who are alive at the end of the 20th century. These were extraordinary teachers, but they didn't know a damn thing about most of what I talk about in this podcast. If they were alive today, they still wouldn't. It is a very good thing that people like that are not in charge of our cyberwar capabilities because we wouldn't have any.
We have to play this game on multiple levels. It's great that many of you are getting value out of Waking Up. But if you don't like me on this mode, when I'm actually doing my best to respond to a real emergency in our culture; if you don't understand that we need to mount a competent response to the challenges we face on a hundred fronts, you're not really getting what I'm teaching over there at Waking Up. You can't let meditation turn you into a New Age goofball who just burns incense and thinks the universe is one big mystery and that everything happens for a reason. Sometimes things happen for bad fucking reasons and a whole generation or generations lose the most basic capacity for order and for getting what they want in life and lose good things they didn't need to lose.
Cultural Learnings is an editorial platform curated by Sai Villafuerte. You can support it by subscribing to this newsletter, sharing it with your friends, emailing your thoughts, or answering this survey.
Cultural Learnings is on Manila Community Radio every Wednesday, 5-6 PM GMT+8.
