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Today is a Saturday, and I’m recalling a beautiful turn of phrase I encountered last Monday morning that lightened the load of the workweek ever so slightly, that provided me a dash of spiritual nourishment, and a boost of fortitude. It was from Jboy Gonzales, SJ, reflecting on the Transfiguration of Jesus in that morning’s episode of the Jesuit program Kape’t Pandasal.

Fr. Gonzales was thinking of the disciples who were with Jesus, and what caused them to react that way in seeing Jesus in a glorious form, why they wanted to build tents and tarry on the mountain. They wanted to stay in the moment, Fr. Gonzales says. It was to preserve and keep the glory of what they were witnessing.

Of course, it turned out they could not do that, at least not right then. (It would take a while, and various profound sacrifices, but those disciples would eventually fulfill their desire to perpetually witness glory, beyond place and beyond time). What’s interesting is Fr. Gonzales’s takeaway from this failed attempt at prolonging a gratifying moment—he says that the experience of the Transfiguration was meant to give the disciples encouragement for what they will face later on when they come down from the mountain:

Jesus shows us that the peace we find on the mountain is meant to give us strength for the work we do in the valley.

The work we do in the valley: that’s quite the elegant image for the experience of the workweek. It’s a romantic, encouraging phrase, perfectly practical for a Monday-morning reflection on the Gospel.

It reminds me that even though some priests and other people of religious vocations spend much of their days and hours focused on matters that transcend this world, many of them do stay grounded, occupied with and understanding the concerns of the rest of society on a busy earth, including concerns as mundane as the burden of Monday mornings.

In “Corruption with Philippine characteristics” (a witty allusion to socialism with Chinese characteristics), Manuel Quezon III points out the recent poll finding that a majority of Filipinos don’t consider tax evasion to be a form of corruption (along with deliberate regulatory non-compliance). ¹

“WTF?!” was my initial reaction, self-righteously shocked at Filipinos’ casual immorality, and then thought about Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil. ² In that vein, perhaps the surveyed Filipinos were thinking less of the inherent immorality of tax evasion, and more about the infuriating prospect of paying taxes at a time when bureaucratic corruption is again under the spotlight. “Can I not pay taxes, if it will only go to these thieves’ bank accounts?” was a common sentiment at the time, among my friends even. Tax evasion, then, can be charitably seen as an act of everyday resistance. Of course, there are many who’d rather not, and indeed do not, pay taxes just because they don’t feel compelled to.

(The killjoy in me replied to my friends, telling them that evidence points to corruption eating up only a minority percentage of public funds, which means that most of every peso they pay to the government still goes to legitimate uses. I get eye-rolls in return.)

There is an alternative, less charitable, and sadder explanation to the survey finding: Hanlon’s razor—“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” Maybe the survey respondents just could not comprehend what the item in the survey meant (it was “Evading taxes or regulatory requirements”, or a Filipino translation thereof). What are regulatory requirements anyway? Isn’t tax evasion allowable? (Perhaps they’ve heard someone talk about legal tax avoidance.)

This would then point towards the sorry state of the Philippine educational system, and its failures not just in honing our intellects, but also in forming our characters.

¹ Pulse Asia Research’s September 2025 Nationwide Survey on Corruption. See Table 1, page 5 in the media release.

² Hannah Arendt’s notion is nuanced, misunderstood, and contested; see “What did Hannah Arendt really mean by the banality of evil?” by Thomas White.

“Ikulong na ’yan, mga kurakot!” (“Jail the corrupt now!”) has been the chant in the rallies protesting the massive corruption scandals of the recent months here in the Philippines. It’s catchy but also quite curiously inert, being as it is an obvious demand that should have not needed warm-bodies on the streets to express. Criminals should be jailed, whether the masses raise their voices in public spaces or not, and perhaps the fact that we have had to do so is indicative of the maturity of governance in the country.

Realizing this, some have started adding more specific and less obvious—but no less important—calls for action to the cacophony. One of the more important ones is the push to abolish political dynasties, dynasties being both a critical symptom and a persistent cause of our stagnant and regressive political culture.

Randy David, in his recent Inquirer.net column entitled “Beyond the outrage”, repeats his key assessment of our politics as being stuck in a premodern phase, and enumerates the difficult projects still to be taken up, above and beyond the already formidable task of finally implementing the constitutional directive against dynasties:

It is not enough to ban political dynasties; we need genuine political parties and strict campaign finance rules. Eliminating pork requires curbing discretionary funds at every level of government. Patronage will persist as long as access to public services depends on connections rather than on a rules-based system. A professional civil service is impossible while presidents appoint the unqualified to critical posts. And we cannot hope for competent governance if the congressional confirmation process remains a venue for extracting favors and settling scores, instead of testing merit.

David understands the difficulty of these tasks: “None of these can be dismantled overnight. Some require constitutional revision; others demand bureaucratic restructuring. All require civic engagement and a citizenry that refuses to retreat into despair.” In other words, all these movements demand perseverance, endurance, and hope from the citizenry. A tall order, but if the past months have really been a massive test for the political sphere in our society, a true watershed moment in the life of the nation, then perhaps the motivation and energy could be found to realize this rare opportunity to effect profound change in our society, and advance its much-delayed progression into modernity.

“I save all my texts and photos. But do I really need them?,” asks the headline of an article in The Guardian by Adrian Horton, about the phenomenon of digital hoarding. She describes her personal crisis of losing a BlackBerry phone that “held my high school text messages that was crucial evidence of my life.” “Crucial” is a bit dramatic, but it appears that, at one point before, she truly believed those messages to be of vital importance.

She also writes:

I don’t have this compulsion to save in the physical realm, where I regularly purge outdated, irrelevant items with little thought. But I am sentimental, and identify with what experts call “digital hoarding”—accumulating excess digital material to the point of causing stress and anxiety.

The driving force is emotional, rather than practical. Digital hoarding is about fending off—compulsively—anticipated feelings of loss or even grief, unlike physical hoarding, which might be done as insurance against threats of a more practical kind, like bankruptcy or famine or a zombie apocalypse.

[Many people are] scared to lose remnants of themselves or the digital remains of a loved one… Some of this urge to preserve is curiosity… But the predominant feeling is anxiety.

She quotes Dr. Liz Sillence, “a psychology professor at Northumbria University and one of the few researchers who has examined personal digital data storage”:

The very thought of data can actually make you feel anxious because you know you’re not on top of it. It feels quite overwhelming.

This is a reiteration and elaboration of Jia Tolentino’s Second Problem of the Social Internet—that it “encourages us to overvalue our opinions.” Related to this is Oliver Burkeman’s notion that even truly important things have to be ignored by most of us most of the time, as a consequence of human finitude.

I felt the need to write about this again because I still often get that urge to write online about my stance on current affairs, primarily of the political variety, despite already professing profound agreement with Tolentino’s conclusion, that perhaps all that we can do is to “act on a model of actual selfhood, one that embraces… insignificance,” and “to be deeply skeptical of our own unbearable opinions.” Tolentino also emphasizes that inconsistency is part of humanity and selfhood, and my stubbornness about this matter is a reminder of that, and of human finitude.

The challenge, I think, is that I have internalized too deeply that notion, promoted by the design or at least by the emergent culture of the social internet, that my opinions are somehow unique or valuable and therefore must be shared (or shoved) into online social spaces. It is something I have to get out of my system, or get better at suppressing or sidestepping.

There are people who, by virtue of their place in society in terms of authority or duty, do have some degree of obligation to form and share their opinions on a specific range of current events. The problem is that, in the era of the social internet, this has supersized into an unhealthy imperative for everyone who possesses even only a moderately sized audience. (I am thinking of influencers and momentary celebrities.) Silence on issues becomes a flaw of character, a matter of injustice and a cause for cancellation or, at the least, disappointment.

It is simply absurd that I, who I think at one point many years ago had at least the tiniest of audiences in a most remote corner of the internet, and now has basically none outside of my circle of real-life friends and family, entertained this illusion of importance with regards to my thoughts and words.

There is a particular development in Philippine politics yesterday that triggered me to write this reflection. It is related to an issue that feels truly important to the life of the nation, but I have to remind myself that I hold negligible influence over this matter. I have to take comfort in the hope that the issues will still be resolved in due time in favor of justice. And I think it is a sign of progress for myself that, in the meantime, I have been able to limit the time I spent surfing the internet for reactions and opinions and analyses on this issue, and to refrain from adding on to this deluge of discourse.

Recently, I wrote about how I find the experience of browsing social media stressful, and, at the time, I expounded on Oliver Burkeman’s helpful insight—that the internet is a machine providing a limitless supply of things to worry about, in the face of which individual human finitude cannot help but be overwhelmed. That was particularly relevant to the specific contents I was seeing online then, but on the theme of online-induced anxiety, what I really always have on the back of my mind is Jia Tolentino’s essay The ‘I’ in the Internet, the first in her 2019 book Trick Mirror.

I first read it three years ago, and have since thought of it as the most definitive piece on the topic I’ve yet encountered. I’d forgotten some of the main points, so I decided to reread it. Below, I write down some notes and reproduce some of the most resonant highlights, mostly for my own benefit, to help affix the ideas in my mind. For you, dear imagined reader, of course I recommend reading the full text.

1. According to the philosopher and mystic Simone Weil, instead of freedom being simply the absence of necessity, it should be conceptualized as a unity of thought and action, or a right balance between the two. To be able to perform actions thoughtlessly is not true freedom. To be able to think, without being able to act upon the fruits of such thinking, is also a lack of freedom. Freedom, in other words, is theory with praxis, with both elements present and active. By this conception, a wealthy but unemployed person who spends all their time in pursuit of mindless leisure is less free than the middle-class worker who finds satisfaction in their work and has their talents purposefully employed in pursuit of a social good.
2. The novelist Jonathan Franzen studied in Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, where an inscription on one of the buildings says, “Use well thy freedom.” Such an inscription is also described to be present in the university attended by one of the characters in his 2010 novel, simply entitled Freedom; the simplicity of the title telegraphs the ambitions of the work to be a Great American Novel. And America is nothing without freedom, there is nothing that Americans value as much as their freedom, as the popular characterization goes. But the commandment implies that freedom is a means, not an end. The founding fathers and the revolutionary armies have won the nation its freedom; now the citizens are free—for what, to do what? Perhaps the true glory and nobility of freedom depends not on the mere state of freedom itself, but on what such state leads to and allows to take place.
3. One of the vows usually taken by those entering Catholic religious orders, in addition to poverty and chastity, is that of obedience. Obedience to their superiors, to the Church, to divine law. Indeed, the entirety of the Church’s teachings often feels like a list of restriction after restriction, an outdated set of obstacles to happiness. Certainly, this is what feels like to many children studying in Catholic schools, who are taught what cannot be and what should not be, but are often not made to understand why not. It is also what it feels like to adults, both the non-believers as well as the believers who have not yet studied the faith well enough. But just like how happiness is not necessarily the same thing as joy or pleasure (the ancient Greek philosophers teach that true happiness, eudaimonia, consists of human flourishing), what the Church would like the faithful to focus on is the positive conception of freedom, as the freedom to obey or act or believe. Those who take the vows of obedience do so freely, willingly, lovingly; in fact, they are given all the opportunities to refuse to continue with their vows if they are unable to, during their formation. It is said that the greatest trick the devil has ever played is to convince us that he does not exist; in a similar vein, God loves us so much that he gave us so much freedom, that we are free even to not believe in, obey, or love him. What a terrible waste of freedom that would be.

Given that, as mortals, we humans can only give so much time and other resources to legitimately important causes and advocacies, and that for our sanity it is consequently prudent to consciously limit and focus our caring, the question that follows is: what then should we care about?

It is something for us to answer as individuals, taking into consideration our individual circumstances. Many do not even have the bandwidth for society-at-large concerns because they are tied up and struggling to make ends meet, for their families or even just for themselves.

(Family before society: it is ordo amoris again, that theological concept of the proper ordering of love, which I touched upon before while writing about subsidiarity. A further side note: I have since found out that the recent discussions about it might even have been using the incorrect term, confusing it for ordo caritatis, about which apparently there are fewer writings and references available online. I did find an intriguing essay, The Ordo Caritatis and Giving to the Poor: Yet Another Example of How Political Ideology Distorts the Gospel, from an old and defunct blog, The Well At The World’s End. It provides an extensive analysis applying ordo caritatis to the age-old question of whether it is right to give alms to panhandlers.)

If one is so privileged in time or finances (or choose to devote themselves despite a scarcity of these) as to be able to contribute to big-picture, societal concerns, then there are two paths, one of which follows the logic of optimization. If we limit the choices of concerns to charitable donations, that is, if the question “What should we care about?” becomes “To which charity should I give money to?,” it seems like there can be easy answers, because organizations like GiveWell have carried out the hard work of researching which organizations out there will produce the most results for every dollar of your donations.

But if we are talking about a more general set of causes and concerns, the set that falls under C. West Churchman’s concept of wicked problems, then it is harder to arrive at ready-made answers. Wicked problems are those that are hard or impossible to define, to solve, and to evaluate because of their staggering complexity, rendering the usual techniques of optimization ineffective or even infeasible. These are the problems we think of first when we think about national issues, things like poverty alleviation and environmental conservation. These concerns are interrelated, and trying to solve one requires solving another, and the objectives are not even clear or cannot be agreed upon. (For example: is zero poverty possible, and if not, what level of poverty should be the acceptable target?) Basically, trying to solve these problems is tantamount to trying to fix a country, or the world; formulated this way, the intractability of the problems becomes evident.

We often have our usual suspects, our pet answers, when asked which ones of these notorious issues are of paramount importance. A common answer is government corruption, and it is telling that many do recognize that the problem of corruption is equivalent to the problem of evil: something not in our power to totally eliminate from this world, and which we can only struggle against continuously for as long as human civilization exists.

For me, and for a while now, there are two particular issues I have been very concerned with in the Philippines: education and infrastructure. The former because our top economists have been pointing out again and again that solving the education crisis is a prerequisite to achieving any of our long-term national goals: if we do not address the disheartening levels of ‘learning poverty’ in our youth today, we might be condemning entire generations to material, economic poverty; in other words, the educational crisis might be the biggest one among our national wicked problems. Even if all of those problems are interrelated, prioritizing education might be the optimal choice, it might reap the most rewards and have the most impact in moving forward all of the other areas. Infrastructure, on the other hand, is something top-of-mind for me out of personal experience, because of the difficulties I have suffered and continue to suffer when moving around even just across short distances in the city—an admittedly selfish perspective, though one that is also shared by millions of other citizens in this metropolis where I live.

Being the wicked problems that they are, solutions do not come easy for both these areas. Even in a theoretical, paradisiacal scenario where government is free of corruption, it is not just a matter of pouring in funds to build schools, hire teachers, and construct railways. In our schools, it turns out that even if the classrooms are well-provisioned and the teachers well-trained, many students still cannot learn effectively because of malnutrition and consequent deficiencies in brain development; the education problem extends into a food security and public health problem. In building much-needed railways across our cities and regions, even the availability of advanced foreign technical assistance and financing can do nothing to expedite the tedious right-of-way acquisitions, something that citizen-landowners actively resist for understandable reasons. The infrastructure problem extends into a land rights problem.

If all this difficulty sounds deflating, then there is always that other path, which is to let go of the relentless, brutal logic of optimization and solutionism. To refuse, to whatever extent possible, to participate in what the philosopher Jacques Ellul called ‘la technique’. This means leaving the comprehensive analysis and planning and policy-making to government, research organizations and civil society groups (unless, perhaps, if you choose to volunteer for these yourself!), and, in a kind of hopeful surrender, just choose a cause to toil for without much deliberation. It does not have to be the optimal choice; it does not even have to be a permanent choice anyway. Simply do what you can, for a while, given the limited resources that you have. For the rest that you cannot do, and will never get to do—as the Stoics have been telling us since antiquity: just accept them. Make peace with them, leave them to providence, and be content with what you have done yourself.

Every now and then I’d read someone testifying on Mastodon about how the social media platform has been great for them because it’s so much calmer, which they would often attribute to the default chronological presentation of the feed: in Mastodon, the feeds are actual timelines, not engagement-maximizing barrages of the most stimulating content on the network, as filtered by capitalist algorithms. (This may or may not be a fair description of other social media services, but this is how it’s often worded in Mastodon/Fediverse-speak.)

These testimonials run counter to my experience. While scrolling through my timeline, I’d still feel a ball of stress, unease, and tension growing inside me as I go from bite-sized post to bite-sized post, my mind flittering from topic to topic, rattled, exposed, and bombarded by a rollercoaster of evocative words and images. Marshall McLuhan, the pioneering media theorist, said that “the medium is the message”; more than two years of being on Mastodon has shown to me that defaulting to a chronological feed, implementing a well-intentioned shopping list of UI/UX differentiators, and emphasizing the lack of billionaire-owners are not enough to fundamentally alter the social medium, and its message of endless rage and infinite jest.

There are many theories and aspects as to why the experience of the internet is like this, but one that has been on my mind recently comes from Oliver Burkeman, whose book Four Thousand Weeks has an appendix titled Ten Tools for Embracing Your Finitude. Section 5, with the header Consolidate your caring, says:

Social media is a giant machine for getting you to spend your time caring about the wrong things, but for the same reason, it’s also a machine for getting you to care about too many things, even if they’re each indisputably worthwhile. We’re exposed, these days, to an unending stream of atrocities and injustice—each of which might have a legitimate claim on our time and our charitable donations, but which in aggregate are more than any one human could ever effectively address. (Worse, the logic of the attention economy obliges campaigners to present whatever crisis they’re addressing as uniquely urgent. No modern fundraising organization would dream of describing its cause as the fourth- or fifth-most important of the day.)

Once you grasp the mechanisms operating here, it becomes easier to consciously pick your battles in charity, activism, and politics: to decide that your spare time, for the next couple of years, will be spent lobbying for prison reform and helping at a local food pantry—not because fires in the Amazon or the fate of refugees don’t matter, but because you understand that to make a difference, you must focus your finite capacity for care.

This is the specific kind of stress I was feeling in my recent strolls into Mastodon world: the stress of having too much to care about. So many important events and causes and advocacies, how dare I not pay attention to each and every one of them! And the absurdity becomes apparent in this expression of that urge to care: the absurdity of trying to give more time than what we mortals have.

Embracing one’s human finitude is the core of what Burkeman is saying in his book (if it’s fair to boil down an entire book to its essence like that), and, applied to social media, this means approaching the platforms with caution and a mindfulness of one’s limited lifetime and attention, awfully insufficient for all the world’s concerns.

Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV, was indeed identified in the conclave chatter and by Vatican watchers as a papabile, but only as a minor one, his name far down the betting odds rankings. His election on Thursday therefore came as a surprise even to those like me who followed the proceedings with much anticipation, and I did not know what to feel immediately after the announcement from the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica.

But I warmed up to him quickly when, some minutes later, I switched to a different YouTube livestream of the event, rewinding it to the moment of announcement of his papal name, and heard a commentator suggest that it must be in relation to the last Pope Leo—the thirteenth one, who is credited with laying the foundations of Catholic social teaching. (A Vatican spokesperson would later confirm that Prevost’s choice is indeed, at least partly, to signify an affinity for Leo XIII’s papacy.) Catholic social teaching is an area of church thought that is of particular interest even to those nominal Catholics who like to say that they are not religious, but are deeply concerned with social and political affairs, perhaps because it relates easier to concrete and practical matters in our modern communities while retaining the gravitas of Catholic authority.

There are several principles underlying Catholic social teaching, but the one that has been of particular resonance to me recently is subsidiarity, which I am leaving to Wikipedia to define: “a principle of social organization that holds that social and political issues should be dealt with at the most immediate or local level that is consistent with their resolution.”

The idea is elegant. Household issues should be primarily the responsibility of the family. Municipal issues are mainly the responsibility of the local government. National issues are the domain of the state. It is only when the immediate level of organization turns out to be incapable of handling the situation should the parties resort to the assistance and authority of higher levels. Families who cannot resolve their issues on their own can seek the arbitration of the barangay or local courts. Grave issues in towns and cities might require the intervention and greater resources and authority of the national government. National governments themselves that have fallen into dysfunction have the community of nations and international law to turn to—in theory, at least, as with all of these other cases.

Subsidiarity, in my view, reminds us that the first venue of action is always the local. This is of particular relevance today, because the atmosphere of constant crisis that pervades politics these days is breeding a feeling of helplessness and desperation, and it is becoming evident that one antidote is to refocus on local communities and spheres of action.

The economist Cielito Habito writes in his column, ‘Change from the ground up’ (Philippine Daily Inquirer, 2025-02-25):

I prefer to set my sights and keep my energies focused on the immediate community around me where I live, whenever time off from my various official tasks permits. Along with countless scholars and development workers worldwide, I’ve held on to the conviction that we can bring about meaningful change from the ground up, especially if we keep on electing leaders who will not initiate positive change from the top down—and sadly, that’s what we do, election after election.

Focusing on the local does not mean abandoning and forgetting larger issues. It just means recognizing that all actions are local, and any larger effects are always indirect. Habito proposes a specific local program and imagines its ultimate effect on the nation:

So again, what can you do? I’d suggest you start talking to your neighbors, including and especially the less fortunate ones, and revive and strengthen the spirit of bayanihan that has largely been lost among us. If organizing a group is a challenge, find a poor family you can help lift out of poverty. I would reason that if one in 10 Filipino families is poor—as our poverty statistics now tell us—nine are not and can possibly help lift that one family out of poverty. Be one in the nine who would—not just by “giving a fish” but more by “teaching how to fish”—say, by helping with the children’s education. Think about it: if for every nine non-poor Filipino families, even only one would care and share enough to do that, we could well wipe out the scourge of poverty, and get ourselves out of the vicious cycle of self-destruction we seem trapped in.

It is relevant to note a similar concept in Catholic theology, the ordo amoris, or the proper “order of love,” which became a topic of controversy a few months ago after the U.S. Vice President JD Vance used it to justify America’s policy of much-reduced foreign aid under Donald Trump’s second presidency, saying that the principle means that it is only right to consider the interests of those closest to us before attending to the rest of the world. The controversy even led to a rebuking from the late Pope Francis in the form of a letter to U.S. bishops, although, being the good and Christian man that he is, the Pope still gave Vance a warm welcome at the Vatican the day before he died.

I think this discourse around ordo amoris was controversial not only because of the deep polarization of contemporary politics, and the general shift to outrage that it encourages, but also because it points to the practical difficulties of figuring out the specific implications of such abstract principles. To be fair to Vance, I do not think he meant to portray the rest of the world as Others not deserving of love, or of American resources; he merely said they should be last in line for consideration, which, at first blush, certainly sounds uncharitable. While much diminished, U.S. foreign aid programs continue under Trump’s presidency; as to whether these significant cuts are prudent and just is the true controversy.

Vance probably does not intend to support a policy of total exclusion or exception, and this is the key point that applies to both ordo amoris and subsidiarity: the higher levels of social organization matter, the world at large will always be of concern to all of us even as small individuals (or as individual nations); it is just that, as limited humans moving in a physical world, our actions and affections will always only have our immediate surroundings as their initial environment. When the troubles of the world feel overwhelming, it is not improper to focus for the meantime on our little neighborhoods, where we are more likely to feel that our words and deeds can do something for the better.