A Monologue on My Entire Life

A Monologue on My Entire Life

I realize my entire life has revolved around one thing. Taste over power. I always think of taste as higher than power. I go back to my football days. Back in high school — and primary school too — I was always part of the football gang. I would get punished for playing football in class, playing football everywhere I wasn’t supposed to. Our ball would get confiscated by teachers. But whenever I played it, God, was I passionate about it. I love to move the ball around. I love to move around. I love to dribble and kick the ball. And I did that all through schooling days before I just kind of stopped. Anyway, whenever I play, I like to curve the ball in elegantly — like Beckham, on the inside of the foot, like Roberto Carlos, on the outside of the foot. I’ve always really liked to try and master that, even though I was never spectacularly good. Once, when I was in primary school, I was invited to join a competitive school vs school match. I was subbed on, and subbed out, and never invited back.

But then I think about badminton. Unlike football, I’m actually much better with badminton. I’ve always been up there in terms of skill and technique. When I was maybe five years old, my dad and my brother — who’s nine years older than me — they used to play badminton at the front gate. We’re in Malaysia, so you know, there are gates in front of all the terrace houses, and I used to sit on the couch inside looking out the window, watching them play. Over time I got a bit older. I tried hitting the shuttlecock. Obviously I was dogshit. But then I played once, I played twice, and apparently — so my dad says, I don’t know if he’s lying or not — he said I was pretty good considering how new I was. Maybe I had some good ball sense, yada yada whatever. So he took me to training, and I never said no. What happened was I ended up learning and learning and training and training and over time I kind of slid into the aspiration of becoming the next Lee Chong Wei. Lee Chong Wei was the biggest thing in Malaysia at the time, the biggest sports figure, and I was like, hey, I’m gonna be the next one. I trained from eight to maybe fourteen — maybe three times a week — under Han Jian, who was like a former world number one from China. And the first six months, twelve months even, was just technique. I didn’t even really hit the ball. I was just swinging my arms back and forth to make sure I got the right technique. I guess it’s characteristic of learning under a Chinese trainer — you get it right, or you don’t. If you don’t, you get punished. If you do, you just keep doing it —

And then I got a small injury. Bottom left of my back, pulled a small muscle. It wasn’t actually bad, I don’t have it anymore. But I told my dad: I think I like football more. Maybe because of the influence of my friends, or the feeling that football was cooler, more youthful, more tasteful. So I stopped. I don’t know what my dad felt. I don’t know if he was sad, disappointed, or relieved. He did say once, much later, that he was kind of happy I didn’t end up becoming a badminton player — too much stress watching the tournaments, the blood pressure, you know. But even if I did keep going — and this is the thing — the fact that I like taste more than power, which also means wit and subversion more than stamina and sheer endurance, it meant I kept losing tournaments. Not always, but sometimes. Because when people were watching, when the gaze was on me and I had to perform, sometimes my own feeling would get the best of me and I just wouldn’t. My brother, my dad, whoever brought me to the tournament that day — they would always come back a little more sad or let down than I was. And that became a theme for the rest of my life. (Even years later, when I got fired after three months at an accounting internship in Melbourne — one of my dream workplaces, suddenly, one day in a random meeting — and my dad ended up crying more than I did. So yeah.)

Anyway. Just like in football, power has never been my strong suit in badminton, but I’ve never really leaned into it or even desired to. I think about Tan Boon Heong and his most powerful smash. Power kind of gets you there a lot of the time, but it’s the same thing with shooting a gun really powerfully, or being an archer shooting an arrow with everything you’ve got, right? Because you don’t need that much power to kill somebody. What you need is sheer accuracy. Pinpoint accuracy. You know exactly where it should land and you’re able to make it land there even when you’re hindered by obstacles. To be very tasteful, almost subversive about the situation. Nimble. A you-can’t-catch-me sort of thing. Taste is full of this sort of restraint. It’s just the same with football, I really like to playmake. I like to pass the ball and play with wit. And in badminton I’m always that person where I can move the shuttle around wherever I want to, and I hardly smash. If I don’t have to smash, I don’t smash. I get more enjoyment out of placing the ball where I want to. And it’s funny — I find it the most fun when someone really tries to smash hard and that’s their only strong suit. As if they keep shooting an arrow at max power and keep missing the mark. Especially when they put real pride in their power. I love seeing them go all frustrated about it. People who take pride in their power — there’s an egotistical equivalent there, right? If they don’t place it well, they make mistakes, the more they fail the more angry they get. And I’m like, look, honestly, you wanna win the game, you don’t even need much power. You just need to dance around and prance around and be like Ronaldinho, dance with the ball into the right place. (Maybe someone could say it’s how I dealt with my lack of power, like a coping mechanism. But I say it’s a damn effective one. It’s a damn fun one too.)

And then I thought — that’s also why I love Federer. Roger Federer. I know David Foster Wallace wrote a piece on him that was so nice. I’d tear up if someone writes that of me someday. That I played life itself, brushing the ball and dancing on the court. As if I’m — I don’t know — loving or fucking the ball. In fact, I’m actually starting to pick up tennis now, with my girlfriend, maybe because of Federer. And I know Nadal hits the ball hard, runs around, plays like a very strong and energetic monkey (I mean that affectionately). And Djokovic just seems more stoic, more upstanding about it. But something about Federer stands out as the most artful. He plays the way a painter approaches a nude woman — attentive, unhurried, like the point isn’t to finish but to keep finding the right place to put it. The erotics of Federer hitting the ball is kind of what’s going on there. The others feel more like sheer penetration, sheer endurance in penetration. Which doesn’t really impress me as much. There’s a lot of eros and eroticism going on here. Maybe I’m over-romanticising it. Maybe not, I don’t know. Maybe it’s just me. Subjectively. And based on everything I’ve said, I think you can extrapolate why I don’t really care about how others see me, as much as how I place the ball, right?

Same thing with work. I started in accounting. My dad pushed me toward it, and I didn’t say no (mirroring what happened with badminton). And look, I liked business. I’d read a couple of business books when I was young, my brother had bought me a few books, prompted me to start a couple of Facebook pages and Facebook shops that sold absolutely zero units of anything, and he also prompted me to learn graphic design (I ended up freelancing as a brand designer for a few years, and I did unexpectedly rake a few bucks in). So I studied accounting and finance, ended up in Melbourne, and fulfilled the minimum I needed for my working visa before I moved to a co-working space. Because I love startups. Startups, to me, are kind of the ultimate subversion — you build what people want, but don’t have, and can’t even think to ask for yet, right? That’s the perfect trifecta. You could slog it off as an accountant for ten, twenty, thirty years, or grind as an investment banker, but that isn’t it for me. That’s power over taste. I’m all about taste, and the trifecta of desire, lack, and unimaginability. So I moved to startups and technology, where taste gets you a hundred percent of the way there.

At some point in my early career, I ended up curating the Australian startup ecosystem when no one else did. Whenever you searched for the top accelerators in Australia you got a block of five recommendations but never a source of truth, a real library, a curation. So I did that. And my actual goal was to get a job at Startmate, the largest accelerator in Australia. I got it. I was elated. They sponsored my visa. I worked there two years, and then I realized I got disillusioned with being “industry-agnostic” — it was always B2B SaaS, and even what they called “deep tech” felt like the B2B SaaS of deep tech. Everything felt obvious, and there and then it ceased to be interesting. I wanted to be part of something more deliberately subversive. So I left to join Hansa, a family office with a very clear conviction around open societies (as in Karl Popper) and that was full-on subversion for a while. Then some things changed, and I left to join Headquarters, a crypto fintech startup in Singapore, where I led go-to-market operations and customer success. I also moved partly because my girlfriend was here, but also because the work felt like the right intersection of everything — the perfect ikigai overlap, if you want to be that kind of person about it. Much later, we got acquired by Gnosis. (Which is great, honestly, and very useful for pitching myself, but that’s not really what I care about.)

With work, I’m never the guy who pushes for something with a hammer. I work with wit. Per corporate speak, what’s the 80-20? What’s the 20% of effort I can expend to get 80% of value — perceived value, because everything is about perceived value — and what can I do to maintain that level. What’s the 90-10? And what’s the smallest absolute unit of that 10? That’s a frame I find within a lot. The smallest absolute unit of value I want to deliver on, and how do I get there as fast as possible. Once I get that smallest absolute unit, what’s next, see what’s next. Kind of be very nimble — pass the ball, pass the ball, tiki-taka. Corporate elegance. I know people who are pure hustle. They want funding, five mil, hustle day and night, go to all the events, get in front of investors. Same thing in dating, they probably just approach the girl straight up. Maybe they get the money faster. Maybe they get the girl faster. I don’t know. I’m more the dancier and trickier one, that’s for sure. I’m Ronaldinho.

With dating — well, I’ve always been popular with the girls. It’s probably because I had a baby face growing up. And it didn’t help that I was the pastor’s kid who told sex jokes in church at fourteen and got funny reactions out of people. My community also meant I was always a bit older than I was. Most of the church’s youths were older than me, as is my brother who is nine years older than me, and so I got inducted into life nine years ahead of schedule — the music he was into, the games we played, the football club we supported. My dad says sometimes I didn’t have a proper childhood because of it. I don’t think so. I think my childhood was fun precisely because of my brother — we invented games together, played all the computer games together, and he practically inducted me into my psychological being without meaning to.

Anyway, when I was in primary school and high school, there were a lot of crushes that never went anywhere. Because I didn’t know how to bring them anywhere, I guess. Like a dumb teenager. Many could-have-beens. Not much has-beens. Although it wasn’t pitiful — there was good lovely moments, and tension, real tension, it just never got to that orgasmic feeling I find so endearing. I started dating seriously in my early twenties through to my mid-twenties. Did bachata. Asked acquaintances out. Which, in a way, embodied everything I’ve been saying here. I’ve never really been the guy who approaches girls on the street, straight up. (I’ve seen all the YouTube videos, I don’t like it, it strikes me as earnestly distasteful.) I put myself in situations, something comes up, I am full of wit, something comes to me and I pass it back in a very subversive way, and that works perfectly well, right? I have that hidden agenda — same thing with funding, same thing with dating. I have the hidden agenda, I wanna put you to bed and enjoy your being, body and mind. And I try to do it the smart way. Climbing the ladder, piece by piece. You see the diamond, you climb piece by piece. You see what’s next, you do that. If you fail, you adapt. I’ve gotten that feedback since I was a kid — hyper-adaptive. Maybe it’s part of being the youngest, the second kid. My brother is much more gung-ho. He wants to get what he wants, sheer energy, let’s work, let’s get it. But me — I’m “feelings-based”. That’s what my dad always says, and I agree. If I feel great, I play great, I do great. Maybe that’s where wit comes from. But it’s not always so reliable.

This is where I think about my philosophies, and it all starts falling into place. I was most enamored by Kierkegaard, right? Born a Christian — my dad a senior pastor who founded a church I practically grew up in, my mom also a pastor, and now my brother is a worship pastor too. A whole family of pastors. I grew up in that church, went to school, and eventually got kicked out of Malaysia to Melbourne to complete my higher education. And what happened was I started questioning my faith. Doubting my beliefs. My ground was debilitated. I started staring at my hands and questioning reality itself, and eventually went through a kind of existential crisis where I didn’t know who I was, and being didn’t know me, right?

I never really let go of my faith. I always prayed like the Psalmist. I always returned to the abyss and, through the abyss, found God, but through God, also found the abyss. I read a lot, watched a lot, saw a lot, and eventually fell onto Kierkegaard. I learned about him, I read about his journey, his life story. I forced myself to read Either/Or — practically a difficult book to read — and I spent a whole year going through it. I would say nothing has changed my life quite as much as Kierkegaard, or reoriented me, or helped me realize what my faith is. As Kierkegaard would say — and I can’t even quite remember the exact formulation, but it’s in the spirit of him — his books are not the Bible, he’s not the pastor, but he’s kind of a physician who tells people they’re sick and tells people where to look. A Christian Socrates. And then I also loved how his entire corpus, is as I would say — and as Kierkegaard scholars would probably agree — indebted to how he took his “leap of faith”, saw Abraham in himself, and cut off his engagement to Regine. From which all of his writing, all of his philosophy, all his brilliance came as the after-effect. The tragic after-effect. Or the tragic-comic after-effect. But also, ultimately, a figment of ultimate religious faith and fervor. He became the embodiment of existential passion. And that passion is what I so fell for, or rather — was struck by. (I’m now writing a 100,000-word manuscript inspired by this. One whole freaking manuscript! Do I wish that being an author didn’t come with all of its spectacular characteristics? Do I wish that philosophy didn’t feel intellectual? I wish so, yes, because then it would be more poetic — but maybe then I wouldn’t have done it.)

And so I came onto Kierkegaard in this way. Kierkegaard is kind of the ultimate subversive anti-philosophy philosopher. He writes so romantically. Now I don’t like people who are just controversial for the sake of being controversial — I don’t think I’m a jester. I take my wit seriously. I take my jest seriously, so to speak. Kierkegaard does too. Irony is of the essence, but fraught with seriousness. Not irony for the sake of irony like a comedian or a jester, right? I love Kierkegaard. I love Nietzsche to a lesser degree — I read him a couple of times during that same period of crisis, but he always feels a bit teenage to me. Same thing with Camus or Sartre. Almost like a badminton player trying to hit balls where it’s just a bit subversive — always trying to get there but never quite. The great philosopher of power isn’t tasteful enough. Kierkegaard hits that element much more; he himself moves around as much as he moves the ball around. He’s more romantic, more witty, more subversive. But far less efficient, that’s for sure.

Same thing with my relationship to God. My dad’s a pastor — hard-hitting father figure. My mom is very soft. Perhaps I’m embodying more of my mom there. But also, same thing with theology, with philosophy — people come at it with hard-hitting logic. The same thing as smashing hard, right? Mathematics — I’ve never loved it. In my O levels, it was my only C. Everything else was B’s or A’s, but mathematics, just a C. It always arrives to me as a hard-hitting force of rationality that cannot be argued against. Maybe I haven’t discovered the dance in it, perhaps I should read more Gödel. But I love poetry. I loved bachata when I did it. I love dancing with women, because I feel like that’s in a way embodying everything I’ve said. And sex, making love, the whole dance up to the point of an orgasm — that’s kind of like what I try to experience in almost everything I do. So this is almost, at this point, an entire philosophy of my inner being. An erotics of me, maybe. And ethics is downstream of that. Whereas for other people, ethics is a big thing — to me, ethics is also that hard-hitting logic thing. Ethics is never quite the hard rule. It’s all part of the same relation. Part of what I’m trying to become by suspending my being in my wittiness, or something like that.

All the same, even if I grew up in a church, and I still go to church, I find my relationship to God different from other Christians — so different it might as well be called something else altogether. And yet I believe in that. That’s almost where I find myself back in the faith, just like everybody else, in a way. Like if I’m Ronaldinho playing football — a different kind of football than everybody else — but then in that kind of football I feel like I’m playing a deeper, crazier kind of football than everyone else, and everyone’s still playing the same kind of football. I don’t know. Maybe that’s a bit overwrought. But it’s something like that. But still, I go to church — and similarly, Kierkegaard likes his eternal enemy. Hegel, and I too like Hegel. So when people say, you like Kierkegaard, you don’t like Hegel — I’m like, look, actually, I really like Hegel. And perhaps you can say the same thing: I love my dad, you know? I think he’s onto something. He just doesn’t quite see as far as I do. Maybe he does see further, but what is for sure, I am absolutely indebted to him — and this is where my witty, subversive part is coming into play, because I refuse to let you put me in a box. I’m not a rebel, nor am I a sheep. I’m like a third thing, or a fourth thing, or a fifth thing, right? If you generate a third thing, I’m probably a fourth thing. You might say I am an ‘aesthete-existentialist’. Honestly, I think that’s what I am, but yet — that only works because the label flips upon itself. Kierkegaard is like, “don’t put me in a box”, thus, Kierkegaard can be put in the box as ‘the one in the out-box’. Sure. Whatever. And so I keep slipping, and there is the threat of what I like to call ‘infinite regress’. I need to anchor myself onto something, but I keep slipping, wherever I see myself, there I am not. And that’s where the Kierkegaardian swerve comes in where Nietzsche keeps hitting the post. And I just say, that where I am not is, honestly, just God. But then what is God, right? Who? Where? Why? How? That’s the second question. And this is where you get into all the rambles and theological issues and linguistic issues per Wittgenstein. I think God is just kind of like your true self — who it is, everything that it is you aspire to be, but you’re not. Approaching God from an apophatic, existentialist sort of angle. Except God is not me. I’m not God. God is that thing within. God is that thing without. God is the absolute within and the absolute without, so to speak. And it is that which I always aspire to, and that ultimately generates all my movements. Maybe “God is dead”, but he sure seems alive even in death.

Look, this is all just rambling again, right? Philosophy, anti-philosophy, theology, heresy, blasphemy, irony. Where do I land? Kind of in the moment, in time. And this is where my chief archetype is a jazz pianist. You feel all of these things, all the polarities, you play them. And, okay, I haven’t spoken about music. Which is funny because music is maybe where all of this started. When I grew up in the church — my brother had learned the organ when he was five, before I was even born — Chopin, Rachmaninoff, yada yada whatever. And eventually the church lacked musicians. I was the youngest pastor’s kid. My brother played practically all the instruments by then. So I was kind of conscripted into the band. I was taught drums. Learnt piano for a bit. But drums stuck and became my main instrument. I played drums in church for something like ten years, maybe more. Later on, I also taught a couple of students in church, made a bit of money from that. But the main thing was I loved the drums. I loved the drums. I listened to a lot of drummers. Larnell Lewis. Nate Smith. I played a lot, and felt a lot. I liked playing in the pocket, playing in-time, but in a manner that was subversively out-of-time. If the song was four-counts, I would try to play in seven, and I wish I could play polyrhythms, wittily, but I haven’t done enough paradiddles to get there. Just like I wish I could play like Roger Federer.

All the same, after a couple of years playing in church, I fell in love with gospel music — because worship music, contemporary Christian music, became a bit boring. You listen to Hillsong, you listen to Planetshakers, all the builds are the same, all the fills are the same, and even when they’re marginally different they occupy the same moment, the same vibe, the same tension. I got tired of it the same way I got tired of B2B SaaS. Gospel felt more alive, like true subversion. Like everything else I’ve described here, it felt more like Ronaldinho in a worship band. The recently-departed pianist Quennel Gaskin was one of my favorites. If Nietzsche listened to Quennel Gaskin instead of Wagner, he might have said “God has resurrected”. And that was around the same time I was really getting into jazz, which is also around the same time I got tired of contemporary Christian music, and yeah, that’s where I landed. Out of everything I’ve said, you probably know — without me having to explain — why my favorite music is jazz. Bill Evans. Keith Jarrett. Errol Garner. I love them. I don’t just love them theoretically. When I listen to them, I feel so much in my head, my heart, and it just somehow encompasses my existence. And I love Jacob Collier — he’s somehow the embodiment of play to me, but Bill Evans feels more Kierkegaardian. He’s more melancholic. Jacob Collier is Kierkegaard in the major key. Someone who has discovered God and just understands the minor key but rambles and rambles all about the goodness of God. I don’t know what the philosophical or poetic equivalent is, but I think you catch my drift.

And even now, quite often, when I dream and I’m at my freest, I’m either flying in the air or playing an impossible solo that I can’t actually play in real life — but that I hear all the time. I can never reproduce it, because every single time I hear it and play it in my dreams, it’s always different. But somehow it is always the best damn solo in the entire universe. And Keith Jarrett — sometimes I don’t even like listening to him, but I love the experience of listening to him. Someone caught in the act of being serious, witty, subversive. I love the experience of being in time, occupying time, having sex with time. And I think jazz is kind of the embodiment of having sex with time. And yeah — every new explanation I can generate from here is just self-diminishing now. It’s too obvious and it doesn’t really mean anything. Am I not still performing that same act — having sex with time — even as I spew all this like an orgasm of words, and get off on my transgression? But now, meaning is at stake here. And if meaning is at stake, what should I just do? I should just stop talking.