Perspectives

Entering my twenty-first year on planet Earth with an honorary degree in being single isn’t so easy. Even the first month of it was already filled with news of engagements, new relationships among friends and a guy I had a teeny tiny crush on having a girlfriend. Jokes on me. It is, even more, overwhelming in social media like Instagram when I see all these lovey-dovey pictures and captions about couples’ undying love for each other. Some days, I win the battles with my overthinking mind and give no space for comparison with other people that ultimately leads to feelings of despair. Some days, I don’t and it feels like all hope I have for love is forever lost. Upward social comparison is what we usually do. It basically means that we compare ourselves with someone who is doing better than us in a certain something that leads us to feel bad about ourselves and have our self-esteem threatened. However, it is not like comparison is only specified to our love lives like the example...

Imagine you’re out for dinner. While you’re waiting for your dinner, a notification pops up on your phone screen. Fearing it might be something important from the office, you immediately check it. Somehow after a few minutes, you find yourself looking at cat videos reacting to their owners with cat face filters on. So you think to yourself ‘that was enough internet for today’. But, how did that happen? The idea most people have towards self-awareness is that they have pretty much mastered it and know exactly what they’re doing. Really? Do you? The human mind is on autopilot most of the time. However, the problem is we’re not aware that our mind is on autopilot. Taking in every information and carefully processing them requires so much of mental energy that can wear us off so easily and to be alive in a time like this where information is coming at you from every other direction, it’s not plausible to do so. Thus, when information that exists exceed your mental capacity, your mind...