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6 Daily Reminders

Jangan hanya mengandalkan perasaan. Perasaan kita itu nyata dan valid, tetapi perasaan tidak selalu mencerminkan kenyataan yang sebenarnya. Penting untuk tetap melihat situasi dengan pikiran yang jernih, bukan hanya mengikuti emosi.

Yang dibutuhkan bukan selalu kejelasan, tetapi kedamaian. Tidak semua hal bisa kita pahami atau dapatkan jawabannya. Belajarlah berdamai dengan hal-hal yang belum kita mengerti, agar hati tetap tenang.

Orang yang terluka sering kali melukai orang lain, tetapi orang yang sudah dipulihkan cenderung memulihkan orang lain. Karena itu, penting untuk menyembuhkan diri sendiri, supaya kita tidak tanpa sadar menyakiti orang lain.

Izinkan Tuhan menyembuhkan dan memulihkan. Ada hal-hal yang tidak bisa kita perbaiki sendiri. Berserah dan memberi ruang bagi Tuhan untuk bekerja dalam hidup kita dapat membantu proses pemulihan.

Kebahagiaan tidak hanya berasal dari luar diri. Hal terbaik yang kita bawa ke dalam hubungan bukanlah kelebihan atau kekuatan kita, tetapi bagian diri kita yang sudah disembuhkan dan lebih utuh.

Kasih tidak cukup hanya diucapkan, tetapi perlu diwujudkan. Menunjukkan kasih melalui tindakan nyata sering kali lebih berarti daripada kata-kata saja.

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How come we've never spoken about the importance of social contribution a leader should have? Consistent contribution to a community should be one of the most important qualifications, perhaps even a prerequisite for anyone seeking political roles. Not symbolic gestures or last-minute charity, but sustained, visible involvement that people can recognize as genuine commitment rather than strategy.

Consistency matters because it reflects empathy in practice. In psychology, prosocial and ethical leadership shows that people who are habitually engaged in other-oriented work tend to develop stronger moral accountability and restraint. Empathy, in this sense, is not a personality trait but a learned capacity and one that grows through long-term relationships with real people and real consequences.

What we often see instead is leadership built on status, wealth, or proximity to power. Trump entered politics from business with little record of sustained community service, and his presidency has been accompanied by repeated ethical and legal controversies reported by courts and independent media. The Epstein case, while not about electoral politics, further exposed how elite systems repeatedly failed to intervene despite long-standing warning signs suggesting how power without empathy enables moral blindness.

In Indonesia, these concerns are increasingly relevant amid ongoing issues of corruption, widening economic inequality, and a growing number of human rights violation cases that disproportionately affect marginalized communities. The rise of figures such as President Prabowo and VP Gibran intensifies the debate about how political power is acquired and exercised, particularly when leadership trajectories are not clearly rooted in sustained community contribution. These patterns raise important questions about accountability and whether those in power have developed the empathy and ethical grounding needed to govern in ways that genuinely prioritize public welfare over elite or personal interests.

Many of these issues could have been mitigated earlier if we collectively treated empathy, accountability, and sustained contribution as core leadership indicators and educate citizens to value them. Leadership should not begin at the campaign stage, it should be something people can trace back through years of service.

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27/01/2026

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about gender norms in deeply patriarchal societies like Indonesia, systems where power is still overwhelmingly centered around men. In many traditional structures, men occupy positions of political, economic, and social authority. Decisions that affect millions are made in rooms dominated by men, yet the consequences of those decisions such as economic instability, environmental damage, social inequality are rarely shouldered by them. Instead, success is measured narrowly: power gained, wealth accumulated, and influence expanded. The harm left in the wake of these decisions is treated as collateral, not responsibility.

From a psychological perspective, this creates a powerful reinforcement loop. When actions, no matter how damaging, are consistently followed by rewards (admiration, status, financial gain), there is little incentive for reflection or change. Behavioral psychology tells us that behavior followed by reinforcement is likely to be repeated. And in patriarchal systems, male entitlement is often continuously reinforced: by colleagues who share the same worldview, by communities that equate authority with competence, by families who benefit from the material rewards of “success,” and by younger men who are taught to aspire to the same path.

This is patriarchy operating at a macro level.

But when we zoom in, the same pattern appears in everyday, domestic spaces.

In many households, men grow up insulated from the consequences of their actions. Mothers clean up after them, literally and emotionally. Disrespect is tolerated, excuses are made, and failures are softened. A simple example, when a man is unemployed, his lack of productivity is often reframed. Mothers may help him find work, create opportunities to preserve the appearance of success, or quietly continue to serve him at home. Housework remains invisible to him, optional at best.

When a woman is unemployed, the response is often the opposite. She may be overlooked or criticized, yet expected to carry the weight of domestic labor. Cooking, cleaning, caregiving, these are not paused because she is struggling but they are intensified. And because many women do not want a life limited to unpaid labor, they push themselves harder to work, to be financially independent, and still to fulfill familial expectations at home.

This dynamic is not universal, and it’s important to say that clearly. Not all men benefit from or perpetuate entitlement. But in societies where male privilege is deeply embedded, these patterns are common enough to be structural rather than anecdotal.

What’s particularly striking is how this system reshapes women from the inside out.

Women are often socialized to suppress aspects of themselves that are framed as “delicate” or “soft”: nurturance, vulnerability, emotional sensitivity. Ironically, these traits are tied to real biological and psychological realities of women’s capacity to carry life, the time-bound nature of fertility, and the heightened relational labor many perform. Psychologically, certainty creates safety. Because women are aware explicitly or implicitly that time, opportunity, and social permission are limited, they learn to plan, to secure stability, to anticipate consequences.

Some men, however, are never forced into this reckoning. When their mistakes are absorbed by others, mothers, partners, or society at large, they learn complacency rather than accountability. Emotional labor is outsourced. Consequences are deferred and growth is optional.

Over time, this creates a quiet inversion where women become increasingly resilient, adaptive, and self-reliant, while many men remain stuck in entitlement, mistaking comfort for competence and power for worth.

Patriarchy doesn’t survive because men are inherently stronger or more capable. It survives because systems both public and private shield them from consequences and reward them regardless of impact. Change, then, doesn’t begin only in parliaments or boardrooms, but in homes. In what we tolerate, excuse, and reinforce. Until accountability replaces entitlement, and care is shared rather than assumed, inequality will continue to reproduce itself generation after generation quietly, efficiently, and at great cost to everyone involved.

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05/01/2026

After reading a few pages of Representations of the Intellectual, I’ve been thinking about how power works in Indonesia. Not just through corruption, but through exhaustion.

Regulations are no longer designed to protect people, but they are engineered to protect power. Human rights are quietly dismissed. Environmental destruction is legalized. Lives are lost through violent crackdowns on protests, and through disasters. Recently, just like how the floods tied to palm oil expansion in Sumatra are framed as “unavoidable,” even when they are clearly political choices.

Many intellectuals have spoken out. I’ve watched academics, and activists raise their voices carefully and responsibly. And I’ve watched the state respond, not with reason, but with dismissive, illogical, and often absurd arguments. Not because they make sense, but because they don’t need to. It seems to me that power doesn’t have to be convincing when it is overwhelming. You realize that no matter how sound your argument is, it won’t change the outcome. Decisions are made elsewhere, insulated from consequence. Words are simply symbolic and resistance begins to feel futile.

This is where silence becomes the choice, not from lack of arguments, but from learned helplessness. When every attempt to speak is ignored, attacked, or punished, silence starts to feel like self-preservation. It’s not that intellectuals stop caring; it’s that they stop believing their voice matters.

For many intellectuals, this leads to something deeper: an existential crisis. Speaking truth isn’t just a job, it’s an identity. When a country repeatedly rejects reason, ethics, and critique, it empties meaning. 

Edward Said wrote on his book that, being a critical, oppositional intellectual is difficult, isolating, and rarely popular but it can also be enriching. However, enrichment doesn’t cancel out grief or frustration. Or the loneliness of realizing that the country you speak for may not want to hear you at all.

So if intellectuals remain silent in the face of overwhelming, irresponsible power, are they still intellectuals or merely administrators of acceptable opinion?

I’m not too sure. But I do know that when power succeeds in making people believe that truth is useless, the damage goes far beyond policy. It reshapes how we understand ourselves and what we think is possible.

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Die, my love

Die my love is a film about what happens when motherhood is forced to exist inside emotional abandonment. Grace is not unraveling without cause, she is responding viscerally and truthfully, to a world that demands maternal devotion while refusing maternal care in return. Jackson stands not as a villain in the traditional sense, but as a the man who speaks the language of concern while refusing the labor of responsibility.

From the start, the couple is reckless in their love, especially Grace. She was alive, sexual, and creative. In one of the scenes, it captures her crawling through grass, watching over her baby, before masturbating while observing her husband care for the child.  The scene articulates a longing that goes unmet. Her desperate desire for him to share the act of nurturing, to fully inhabit fatherhood so she might momentarily step out of the all-consuming maternal role. 

The film lays a truth that men cannot fully comprehend what it costs a woman to become a mother. Not because they are incapable of empathy, but because society has never required them to lose themselves in the same way. Grace loses not only sleep and bodily autonomy, but creativity, erotic identity, and recognition. Once a writer, Grace is now reduced to a function. Her husband speaks endlessly of “getting better,” insisting that she must improve, must stabilize, must heal while ignoring the fact that her misery is structurally produced by his emotional absence. He talks. He diagnoses. He labels. But he does not act.

Despite her unwavering devotion to their child, he frames her as unstable, incapable, and dangerous. This is particularly cruel given the biological reality the film refuses to romanticize that mothers are biologically and neurologically wired to respond to their infants. Breastfeeding, attunement, bodily synchronization, these are not sentimental ideals but material facts. Grace’s attention shifts toward the child because it must. Jackson, however, experiences this as erasure. Instead of rising into fatherhood, he becomes jealous of his own child and ultimately seeks validation elsewhere, choosing infidelity over accountability.

Throughout the film, the black horse appears as a recurring symbol of escape and freedom. Across myth and literature, horses often represent uncontained power and autonomy. From Pegasus, born of violence yet capable of flight, to the wild horses of Artemis, goddess of untamed femininity. The horse arrives when Grace most need liberation. It does not rescue her permanently, but it reminds her that freedom once existed, and could exist again.

What the film captures with rare honesty is maternal fury, not as hysteria, but as a rational response to prolonged deprivation. Maternal fury emerges when love is exploited, when care becomes compulsory, and when sacrifice is demanded but never reciprocated. Grace is not violent because she is broken but she is furious because she has been erased. The film refuses the comforting myth of the endlessly patient, self-negating mother and instead shows rage as a form of truth-telling.

This fury develops in the unforgettable party scene where she strips naked and swims publicly. The act is not exhibitionism, it is collapse. A refusal to continue “performing” happiness and sanity. Her body, once constrained by expectations, becomes unmanageable. And yet, when her husband panics, she comes back from the pool to calm him. Even at her breaking point, she knows how to care for him. This is not instability, but her profound capacity for empathy.  

When the husband proposes marriage as an ultimate solution, the gesture is painfully revealing. Commitment, here, is symbolic rather than practical. It changes nothing. On her wedding day, she comes back alone to their hotel room, without him. Representing that marriage does not solve the emotional absence of her husband. 

His own mother compounds the harm. She infantilizes him, reassures him that he is blameless, that his wife is “crazy.” Instead of teaching his son accountability or emotional maturity, she reinforces male entitlement, validating his neglect and reframing the mother’s pain as pathology.

The film resonates deeply with the work of Simone de Beauvoir, particularly her insistence that womanhood, and especially motherhood, is socially constructed as destiny rather than choice. De Beauvoir warned that women are denied transcendence, denied the ability to create, to act freely when they are confined to repetitive, invisible labor. Grace embodies this loss. Her creativity diminishes not because motherhood is inherently destructive, but because it is unsupported, unshared, and unrecognized.

The film’s ending where Grace walks naked into a burning forest is a declaration. Fire has long symbolized purification, rage, and rebirth. Stripped of roles, stripped of expectations, she chooses herself. The world may burn, but she will not disappear. The final image insists: "I may walk through fire, but I belong to myself". This film truly reflects maternal fury that has long been silenced, and misunderstood.

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Taxi Driver (1976): Loneliness, choice and the illusion of redemption

Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver is not merely a character study of Travis Bickle. It is a meditation on alienation, class, and the consequences of unexamined suffering. Travis begins as a man with seemingly nothing to offer the world, he is “just” a taxi driver. Yet ironically, his job renders him useful: he transports people to where they need to be, even as he himself has nowhere to go. This contradiction sets the tone for the film. Travis functions within society, but never truly belongs to it.

Travis symbolizes the working class individual stripped of purpose. He is economically unstable, uneducated, socially isolated, and lonely. His life unfolds in the busy streets, yet he exists in complete emotional isolation. The taxi becomes both his livelihood and his prison. An enclosed space where he observes the city’s mess while remaining powerless to escape his own.

This powerlessness becomes more apparent when Travis meets Betsy. Betsy is educated, articulate, and embedded in a world of political ambition and social mobility. Though Travis is drawn to her, their connection is illusory. They occupy entirely different worlds. Betsy represents an elite class, one that Travis both desires and resents. When she rejects him, the rejection is not merely romantic, it is existential. It confirms what Travis already suspects, that he is invisible, disposable, and excluded.

Throughout the film, Travis repeatedly refers to the people around him as “filthy.” This language reflects not just moral judgment, but exhaustion of life's conditions. The filth he sees outside mirrors the internal decay he feels within. His heartbreak over Betsy triggers a mental unraveling, transforming his loneliness into rage. He condemns her as “just like the others" who are cold, selfish, and elitist. Revealing how deeply his resentment toward social hierarchies runs.

Travis’s emotional collapse is compounded by economic instability and a lack of meaningful guidance. In a conversation with another taxi driver, he is told bluntly that he has no choice. That this is his life, and it always will be. The advice offered to him is shallow: get drunk, get laid, numb the pain. Travis rejects this, not because he is morally superior, but because he is already exhausted by his own existence. He is caught in a dilemma. He is aware that his life is empty, yet incapable of envisioning an alternative.

This moment is particularly striking when his friend remarks that he is “no Bertrand Russell.” Ironically, this comment highlights the film’s philosophical depth. In The Conquest of Happiness, Bertrand Russell argues that a good life requires reflection, curiosity, and outward-looking purpose. Travis and his fellow taxi drivers embody the opposite. They do not reflect, they endure. They function mechanically within society without introspection, or growth. Their suffering is not transformed into understanding, it simply festers.

Seeking escape, Travis channels his insecurities into physical training and firearms. Exercise and shooting become rituals of control in a life defined by helplessness. His impulses grow more overwhelming. When he cuts his hair into a mohawk, the transformation is symbolic: he is shedding the identity of the passive taxi driver and embracing something more violent, more decisive.

His obsession with Senator Palantine (an object of Betsy’s admiration) reflects Travis’s desire to assert significance. He adopts different facades, manipulating conversations and presenting himself strategically, as seen in his interaction with the Secret Service. When he kills a man during a robbery and faces no consequences because the store owner covers it up, Travis experiences a dangerous revelation. He can get away with something fatal. This moment solidifies his sense of power and moral invincibility.

Despite this, Travis lies to his parents in letters, claiming he is living an ideal life. This lie reveals a broken self, one desperate to be seen as successful, normal, and fulfilled, even as he spirals further into instability.

The turning point arrives when Travis meets a 12-year-old prostitute, Iris. He saves ten dollars with the intention of doing “something right,” and his focus shifts. When his attempt to assassinate Palantine fails, his violent impulse is redirected toward rescuing Iris. This raises a troubling question: does saving Iris serve as moral justification for his earlier desire to kill? Or is it another expression of the same unchecked impulse, reframed as "heroism"?

The climactic shootout at the brothel is brutal. Travis is shot multiple times, yet survives. In a haunting moment, he places his fingers to his head, mimicking a gun reflecting "kill me, i am not afraid anymore''. At that moment, Travis is willing to die, believing he has finally done something meaningful. He dies symbolically with the intention of saving someone else.

Instead, he is given a second chance. Iris is returned to her parents. Travis becomes a media hero.

The film ends with Betsy entering his taxi once more, and Travis offering her a free ride. This gesture symbolizes closure, that he is no longer heartbroken, no longer seeking validation from her. Yet the ending remains ambiguous. Is Travis truly at peace, or has society merely reframed his violence as acceptable because it served a ''good'' narrative?

Taxi Driver ultimately suggests that fate is not fixed. It is shaped by choices. But Scorsese complicates this idea by showing how limited choices can be when a person is trapped by loneliness, class, and unexamined suffering. Bertrand Russell believed that happiness emerges from purposeful engagement with the world. Travis, lacking the tools for reflection and connection, makes choices driven by pain rather than understanding.

The film’s ending leaves the audience thinking whether Travis will make better choices moving forward or remain consumed by the complexities of society that have shaped his past actions. Ultimately, the film centers on the power and consequences of, individual choice.

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05/12/2025

Any time I see people getting married, my mind instantly goes to how lucky they are to have found each other, to be loved and accepted, perhaps for a lifetime. There’s something undeniably beautiful about that.

And then, almost automatically, I start to wonder: "when will it be my turn?" When will I get to feel that kind of love, to experience that kind of moment? The longing grows sharper, and suddenly I find myself turning inward, questioning what I must have done wrong to not have experienced it yet.

But recently, I’ve realized that this was an egotistical way of thinking. Yes, I want that kind of love but what makes me believe I am entitled to it? What makes me think it’s a guarantee, or a privilege owed to me?

Sitting with that thought has opened something in me. It reminded me that life is so much bigger than a single moment or milestone. There is still so much for me to see, so much to learn, and so many parts of myself I’ve yet to grow into.

And maybe, just maybe that’s just as beautiful.

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I Wanna Know

A vision of you I ache to know what you dream when the night holds you.

Your silence lingers, I wanna know where it goes into peace or fire.

I wanna know the dreams you’ve kept deep inside, the truths yet untold.

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Enfield Poltergeist

Pattern Recognition and Trauma

One thing that stuck with me while watching The Enfield Poltergeist was the way they talked about behavioral patterns, how our brain works constantly to identify repeated sequences in the world around us. It’s not just curiosity, it’s a survival mechanism. If our ancestors noticed that certain clouds meant a storm was coming, they stayed safe. If a child notices that raised voices lead to slamming doors, they learn to protect themselves.

In the documentary, the investigators themselves began falling into patterns, listening for knocks at certain times, scanning for cold spots in the same rooms, expecting disturbances after particular cues. The haunting wasn’t just about unexplained phenomena but it was also about how humans, when immersed in uncertainty, start mapping patterns onto chaos. Sometimes those patterns are real, sometimes they’re coincidences, but to the nervous system, they’re all potential warnings.

This is where it connects to trauma. Our brains don’t just find patterns, they store them, and they latch onto them most tightly when the stakes are high. In the context of trauma, the brain becomes hypervigilant to anything that resembles the original threat. Even if the danger is long gone, the nervous system has learned that this sound means I need to be on guard, this time of day means something bad might happen. The Enfield family, for example, may have experienced a kind of ongoing psychological conditioning, every creak of the floorboard or flicker of the light reinforced their anticipation of “something happening,” whether supernatural or not.

The tricky part is sometimes, those patterns are accurate, they really do predict what comes next. Other times, they’re false alarms, ghosts of the past. But the brain isn’t wrong for keeping them, it’s trying to keep us alive.

In therapy, part of the work is to notice these patterns, trace where they came from, and gently retrain the brain to see when they no longer apply. It’s like telling your nervous system, “you learned this for a reason, but it’s safe to update the rule now.”

And maybe that’s why this part of The Enfield Poltergeist resonates for me. It’s not just a ghost story. It’s a mirror for how we all live with the echoes of old patterns, haunted not by spirits, but by the lingering imprints of what once kept us safe. Whether we call it a haunting or a trigger, the task is the same, to understand the pattern, and decide if it still belongs in the present.