Bryan Hung

My head pounded at the spinning lights of the night party. The lively music seemed to pierce through the surrounding air, where my head seemed to throb with every bass hit. Rambunctious cheering inundated the small corrugated iron shed that housed the party. Alongside this, in every direction yielded incessant drinking. I had enough. My social battery was at an all-time low – fatigue of the previous week had yielded a deficit in my social battery, and it felt it was now negative from the lively activities of the day. As everyone sat down in anticipation before starting a drinking game, a sudden impulse seemed to ripple through my wearied consciousness.

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All grown-ups were once children… but only few of them remember it.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

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The crushing of gravel by feet, the whispering of the trees. The caressing of the sun on your cheeks, the warm hug of semi-humid air. The ambient laughing of a kookaburra, the cheerful exhilaration of pleasant company. A 60-degree incline loomed ahead of me, in which each foot rhythmically planted into each crevice of the rocky wall, accompanied by regular panting. As I turned back, the scintillating landscape of Melbourne lay before my eyes. Despite physically being out of breath, it was emotionally breathtaking. A luscious carpet of greenery rolled into the horizon. Skyscrapers of the Central Business District seemed to grab at the sky, accompanied by the vastness of the adjacent Port Phillip bay. Captured in this view, lay the bustling livelihoods of 5 million people. The heartbeat of Melbourne portrayed in a snapshot of time.

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About 1 and a half months have passed since writing the last post – however, it was not unwarranted. I had caught the all too notorious COVID-19 in the mid of January, and I, unfortunately, have injured my hands during semester two of last year as I typed too much. During this time, I’ve never felt so powerless and weak in my life. A deep-seated malaise and exhaustion seemed to discolour reality. Isolation in my room for seven days felt like imprisonment, in which any youthful vigour that I had was replaced by the fatigue of the virus. Yet, the feeling of lethargy constantly dragged me to sleep, in which I would sometimes nap twice during the days of isolation. Hence, the days consist of napping, waking up feeling groggy, napping, watching a movie, then returning to sleep for the day.

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“It feels less fun the more serious you take it.”

Ali Abdaal

When I came across this phrase from Ali Abdaal I felt rather star-struck – because this is the life that I have been living.

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In the contemporaneous world that we live in today, we have insights into the lives of others like never before. Through the digital window that is social media, we know what our friend is having for lunch on the other side of the world as they experience their indulgent and luxurious holiday, accompanied by endless aesthetic photos that accompany this exhilarating existence. Amalgamating the experiences of all our friends, day by day, we are forced-fed this ‘feed’. Like cows lining up for slaughter, this culture encourages us to ‘one-up’ ourselves in speeding up our own hedonic treadmill of vanity. From this, we may feel disheartened, depressed, and even lonely. To fend off these feelings, we are obliged to join in on the bandwagon – adding another drop of the ocean of social media sharing that furthers the vicious cycle of comparison. Like the Instagram stories that only last a day and are gone tomorrow, these experiences are but fleeting – a chasing after the wind.

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Stephen R. Covey’s classic – “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” has been quite a revolutionary read for me. The book wasn’t necessarily revolutionary in terms of content, as many of the concepts in this book are quite self-evident and ingrained in human behaviour. What makes this book revolutionary, however, were how the ideas of this book were organised and packaged as a whole – with one such concept titled “the emotional bank account”.

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As I put down my pen after my final Fluid Mechanics exam last Friday, I was in a state of numbness and fatigue. The adrenaline required for an exam, and the coffee I had before, was still coursing throughout my body as I double and triple checked the exam submission. Amid this numbness, however, was the foreign and strange feeling that I am finally done. There were no more deadlines to push on to, no more barrages of assignments, projects, and exams. If I pass all my exams for this undergraduate degree, then that’s it.

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