We live in a time where human connection is unlimited and humanity feels rationed. You can reach anyone instantly. You can speak to strangers across continents without leaving your chair. You can watch lives unfold in real time, tragedies, celebrations, confessions, meltdowns, all neatly packaged for your feed. And yet something essential is missing. Not access. Not information. Humanity. Connection
Author: teodulfo.espero
There was a time when having an account on Twitter meant something. Not followers. Not impressions. Not engagement rates cooked up by dashboards designed to impress advertisers and exhaust users. It meant you were there. Present. Plugged into a place where the world talked to itself in real time. News broke before press conferences. Ideas collided without permission. Expertise surfaced
Spring semester in graduate school always starts with a lie. The calendar promises renewal. The weather hints at longer days. The emails sound cheerful, supportive, almost gentle. You open your laptop on day one thinking this time will be different. You are rested. You are organized. You are ready. Then you open the syllabi. Four of them. Geostatistics and Spatial
I walked into McDonald’s expecting the same old deal. Greasy comfort. Predictable regret. Fries that taste like childhood and bad decisions. What I did not expect was to open the bag and think, what bullshit is this, dafuq with this. The fries came first. No red container. No proud cardboard spine holding them upright like they mattered. Just a paper
This week I just started reading The Dictator’s Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith, and I am only up to Chapter 2, Coming to Power. That is already enough to make me question my book choices. Some people unwind with novels. Others read productivity manuals. I apparently relax by reading a cold, clinical explanation of why bad
I grew up being told that utang na loob was virtue. That it was the glue that held us together. That without it, we would become cold, Western, selfish. That gratitude was our superpower. What they never said was the price. You feel it early. The tone shifts the moment you do well. Not celebration. Accounting. Who helped you. Who
We are not ready for what’s coming, and we still think we’re fine… … and yet we do not realize how much we are f*cked. Not mildly inconvenienced. Not challenged. Effed in the quiet, structural way that only becomes obvious when it is already irreversible. In the Philippines, flooding has been downgraded from crisis to background noise. It is something
Keep your eyes open and keep your mind open.Fear wants obedience. Virtue wants silence.Thinking wants neither. I used to think I was choosing a side. I read what I was supposed to read. I repeated what sounded informed. I learned the tone, the cadence, the approved outrage. I told myself this was thinking. It was not. It was compliance with
I am currently taking GIS Programming with Python as part of non-degree coursework from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and the course does not waste time pretending to be something it is not. It is a programming course. It is a GIS course. It is unapologetically technical. Python is introduced only insofar as it serves geospatial work. There is no
Learning should not be cruel. But it should never be padded. I withdrew. Not with anger. Not with a manifesto. Just with the quiet certainty that staying would be dishonest. I enrolled in the local tech courses because I needed structure. Real structure. The kind that forces discipline when motivation runs dry. I am paying out of pocket. I am