Legibilus

  In many contexts, the word “competition” brings up a negative connotation. When I hear this word, I am reminded of the time in high school where I had to pull multiple all-nighters memorizing the textbook verbatim just for one more point on the exam that would bring up my class rank. I naturally tend to associate stress, tiredness and lack of motivation with competition. But is competition such a terrible thing? If so, why is it everywhere around us? The basic principle behind competition is most likely that in a competitive setting, every individual participating in the competition will be further motivated to develop oneself in order to outperform the competitors. In a school context, students will be incentivized to study harder and in a workplace setting, employees will be motivated to work longer and focus better. In a larger scope, companies will be motivated to develop products of better qualities and countries will be motivated to implement policies that would further dev...

  There are some mornings where our eyes open so fast with excitement even without an alarm as we can’t wait another second for the day to start. And there are other days in which we just close our eyes, ignoring the alarm, and slightly frown wishing that time would just stop right there. In both, we react to some kind of a change that is about to happen. Sometimes we are ecstatic for the change to come, whereas other times we dread it. So change is an interesting thing and I would like to take this opportunity to examine the meaning of it in our lives.  First of all, change is what facilitates the flow of time. Echoing Jin’s previous post on time, time seems relative to everyone, to every situation. When we are traveling Europe for the first time, time seems to pass by so fast, but in a boring lecture that you physically cannot get yourself to focus, a minute feels like an hour. I believe that the difference lies in the existence of change in our situations. When we travel, t...

     While Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram were dominating the world of social media, seems like new face showed up: Clubhouse. This 11 months old application connects its users only with live voice chats; in other words, you literally can have a phone call with unlimited number of people who share similar interests with you. As the current pandemic limited people’s social interaction, Clubhouse nowadays is becoming a phenomenon.        The biggest difference between Clubhouse and traditional social media platforms is exclusivity. If someone who already is a member of Clubhouse does not use one of his two invitation ticket to invite you, you can never use it. Unlike the traditional social media applications that can be used by anyone just by installing the application and creating a profile, Clubhouse is thus making a new realm of invite-only social media.       This craze reminded me of two sociological concepts: hunger marketi...