Category: reflections

• Giving Up to Live

  Life is a series of untaken roads and unfulfilled potentials.

  Evan Tan

  January 19, 2021

  gay, personal life, rambling, reflections, travel

  evan tan, evan tan writer in manila, joshua rothman new yorker, personal life, solipsism problem, the uncanny allure of unlived lives, writer in manila

• The End of the F***ing Year

  To say that 2020 has been a maddening year would be the biggest understatement ever.

  Evan Tan

  December 22, 2020

  metaphysics, personal life, pop culture, rambling, reflections, travel, world events

  absence of free will, end of 2020, end of the fucking world, end of the year 2020, free will, john rawls, richard dawkins, what's happening at the end of the year

• Go Fake Yourself

  The more I think about pinning down who the “authentic self” is, the more I question that it even exists.

  Evan Tan

  December 6, 2020

  metaphysics, personal life, philosophy, rambling, reflections

  authenticity, be true to yourself, evan tan, evan tan writer in manila, how to be true to yourself, stay true stay you, to thine own self be true is bad advice, writer in manila

• Just Because It Is, Doesn’t Mean It Has to Be (Or Why Facts Aren’t Enough to Determine Futures)

  Facts are not ethical statements. So how can we make moral judgments from observation?

  Evan Tan

  October 25, 2020

  personal life, philosophy, reflections, vegan

  are animals conscious, ethics and veganism, evan tan writer in manila, is ought problem hume, morality, ought implies can immanuel kant, veganism, veganism appeal to nature, veganism morality

• “The Universe is Having a Wank”: Teleological Explorations, By Way of Birthdays

  There’s nothing that drives you further down into introspection like the waning high of your birthday that’s almost about to end (except probably a close brush with death, a bus speeding at 100 kilometers per hour barely colliding with the car you’re in at a highway—but that’s another story.)

  Evan Tan

  October 3, 2020

  metaphysics, personal life, philosophy, rambling, reflections, Uncategorized

  carl sagan, evan tan writer in manila, ian shapiro moral foundations of politics, john locke workmanship ideal, moral foundations of politics, teleology, writer in manila

• You are a rat

  “The earliest known mammals were the morganucodontids, tiny shrew-size creatures that lived in the shadows of the dinosaurs 210 million years ago. They were one of several different mammal lineages that emerged around that time. All living mammals today, including us, descend from the one line that survived.”

  Evan Tan

  July 25, 2020

  rambling, reflections, Uncategorized

• What If Everything Will Have Always Been Us

  As I went to bed and fell asleep, I started dreaming about dying, and I thought about how I slowly started to unravel, like fabric that had started to fray and were now becoming threads of different colors again.

  Evan Tan

  May 31, 2020

  metaphysics, personal life, philosophy, reflections

  evan tan writer in manila, panpsychism theory, world religions panpsychism, writer in manila

• Suffering is a Cookie: Chronicles During the COVID-19 Community Quarantine

  I suffer because I believe that I deserve that cookie. But I also know that eating that cookie comes with consequences.

  Evan Tan

  March 22, 2020

  personal life, philosophy, pop culture, rambling, reflections, vegan

  buddhism concepts, covid-19, covid-19 community quarantine philippines, covid-19 diary, evan tan writer in manila, first noble truth, writer in manila

• Solidarity or Shit: Chronicles During the COVID-19 Community Quarantine

  The COVID-19 pandemic has further exposed the entrenched inequalities in our society. Already we’re seeing how the less privileged are made to choose between dying from hunger or dying from the disease, while the rich continue to believe that these people are merely being stubborn–lacking the discipline that is demanded by this enhanced community quarantine…

  Evan Tan

  March 21, 2020

  film, gay, personal life, pop culture, reflections, vegan

  evan tan writer in manila, netflix the platform, the platform movie, veganism, writer in manila

• Love in the Time of the Novel Coronavirus

  All travel is fiction, you told yourself, as you walked around Ximending that cold morning. You’ve been too obsessed with getting the details right that you forgot that the experience is more important, the feelings you will take away from this whole trip.

  Evan Tan

  February 15, 2020

  personal life, rambling, reflections, travel

  ai weiwei odyssey, coronavirus, museum of contemporary art taiwan, pakavulay sarapung, taipei