There’s a scene in Money No Enough where A does something stupid while waiting for another B, and A then says, “I got in trouble because of you!”
It hit me extra hard in that moment that people have different understandings of what “because” means
It’s making me question large parts of my childhood tbh. How much of what felt like cruel or selfish acts were really... people being incompetent re: causality?
It gets dicey, bc malice *can* be disguised as incompetence... sometimes the distinction is irrelevant (JJ’s razor)
It would probably be accurate to say that for most of my life I’ve taken people a little too seriously when they often don’t really mean what they say. 🤔
When I finally decided I was ready and able to make a serious, concerted effort to live up to the values that everyone around me seemed to pay lip service to, I discovered that lots of people are hypocrites, and that hypocrisy has a cost that you can choose to incur, then pay off
I’m not talking about “soft” hypocrisy where one doesn’t quite manage to live up to their values- I think that’s unavoidable. I’m talking about “hard” hypocrisy where one is deliberately creating and maintaining a duplicitous life, actively living a lie, strategically
what’s wild is that a person can do this maybe even semi-subconsciously, such that their claim “I didn’t realize what I was doing was bad and wrong” might even be somewhat defensible
things so often boils down to persuasion chops
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wow, money no enough 2 *sucks*; extremely unwatchable. basically seems to be a cash grab for Neo to stuff with product placements. no continuity from the first movie, no interesting story, conflict, premise, nothing. 45 mins of ugh so far
here is a scene with Jack Neo, Michael Palmer and David Ong all sitting at the same table
I’m piecing together bits for an essay I’m probably titling “the Jack Neo moral universe”.
On the surface it may not be interesting to non-Singaporeans, but I think might become my best and most important essay since An Analysis Of Power In Mean Girls
I need to rewatch INS 1&2 and MNE2, but here’s a sketch of a thesis based on MNE1 and ABTM1+2
Jack Neo does a pretty good job of depicting the struggles of regular people - but the frustrating thing is that the central conflict of the stories do not address the core issues
In Money No Enough, the story goes something like this: we live in a materialistic society, money talks, it’s a rich man’s world, etc. Our 3 protagonists are friends with different-ish financial backgrounds and they all end up facing serious financial problems
one of the radicalizing things about making things to sell in the marketplace – including, say, uploading test footage of your guitar playing to youtube – is discovering that the world is much more diverse than you think
I'd say there's such a thing as "marketplace intelligence" or "marketplace sensitivity" and it's something I value highly in people. it's also very learnable
lots of people can go through their entire lives with a very minimal amount of experience in this sphere
there's a chaos surfing element to it
on a long enough timescale, you will encounter...
people who think more highly of you than you think of yourself
people who think more poorly of you than you think of yourself
Woke up to 25,000 followers; hello new friends! Ask me anything 🤓
there are a few things that compete for this- “seek excellent peers”, “being kind makes you smarter”, “you can’t bully people into being loving” - it’s all connected. It’s really about *unlearning* neediness and coercion, which is all around us
did some stream-of-consciousness writing, I had dreamt that an old twitter friend was back on twitter (alas, they are not)
satisfied that I had done a bit of a braindump, I decided to open the bird app, and I discover that I have a dozens of replies and DMs from when I was asleep, which I am probably not going to be reply to, hence this: