🤪What’s Been Up Lately:
Hello guys, how have you been doing? Well? Well, I hope well.
Some things happened over the past week which threw me off guard but nonetheless, I made my way back to calmness and sanity. There is one quote that helps me keep going even in difficult times. It is a concept I came across a month ago - Amor Fati which is the love of one’s fate. Let me explain in a bit.
🤔Food for Thought: Amor Fati
Amor Fati was first discussed in the philosophical work of Stoic philosophers Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. However, Nietzsche would be the first to explicitly use and focus on the phrase, molding and integrating it as a unique, important value of his philosophy. He would most notably discuss the idea in his books The Gay Science, Ecce Homo, as well as throughout other works, notes, and letters. It is a declaration against the tendency to regret, to assume one could have retained more control over the outcomes of their reality, to have done differently, to have known any better, to have found that an existence sans particular negatives. And instead, to love and embrace all of life exactly how it is, with all the good and the bad, the success and the failure, the satisfaction and the pain. It’s the idea we ourselves may need at 4 a.m. finally to quieten a mind that has started gnawing into itself shortly after midnight. Every decision you’ve made is the best and only decision you could have made at the time with the information you had and the state of mind you were in. And every condition of life that either these decisions led to or that are fundamental to life in general, you have no control over and cannot change. Ultimately, to experience life at its worst and still say yes, I love it, is how one can accept their fate. Amor fati is to love a life that tries in almost every moment to make you hate it and to still stare back at it and say, yes, I love it. What’s scarier than an opponent who smiles while being beaten?
Four simple ways to practice it:
Purposefully expose yourself to the thing you dread
See change as an opportunity for something bigger
Be present regardless of the madness within you, around you
📹Video of the Week:
How Instant Ramen Became An Instant Success - Business Insider
🍜 After World War II, Japan relied on surplus wheat flour provided by the US during its occupation, which was used to make "stamina food" such as ramen and gyoza due to their high-calorie content. Despite a push to use wheat for bread instead of noodles, a 48-year-old businessman, Momofuku Ando, believed that noodles were an important part of Japan's cultural heritage and sought to create more accessible and easier-to-prepare ramen as a solution to the country's hunger problem.
🥢After a year of experimentation, he finally had his breakthrough: watching his wife cook tempura made him realize that frying the noodles was key. Frying extracted their moisture, so they could be stored for long periods of time and then rehydrated with hot water. This was how he invented the iconic brick of noodles we all know today.
🗼 In 1958, Ando released Chikin Ramen and changed his company's name to Nissin. Initially, it cost more than five times the price of fresh noodles, but the taste and convenience made it a huge hit. Chikin Ramen sold 13 million packages in its first year, and sales in Japan skyrocketed, growing by billions in just a decade.
🍲 However, Ando did not forget his original goal to help end hunger. In 1997, he helped start what is now called the World Instant Noodles Association. Ando once said, "Peace will come to the world when the people have enough to eat." It is evident that he lived his life with this mindset and strived to make a difference in the world through his inventions.
😲 It's incredible to think that instant noodles have become such a ubiquitous part of our lives, even making their way into space and serving as currency in American prisons. And it's all thanks to Momofuku Ando!
📜Article of the Week:
Default Male Bias by Sahil Vaidya
Here’s the crux of the issue: the world we live in is designed for men and not for all shades of humanity. In thinking about our systems, policies, cultural ideas, and technologies, we endlessly resort to the male-default bias and completely forget to consider females and their unique needs.
Deep roots: Our male-default bias is built into our very language. To refer to a general person, we often say ‘he’, and very rarely do people use ‘she’. Kids have consistently been shown to draw a man when asked to draw a scientist or an astronomer- even if the girls were doing the drawings!
Female bodies: Designers often overlook the fact that women have smaller hands and different body types. This is why phones, including the iPhone, are often too big for most women. Women also tend to feel colder in offices with centralized ACs due to their lower muscle mass and metabolic rate, which makes it harder for them to produce body heat. As a result, women are often seen wearing multiple layers while men walk around comfortably.
Violence: Insufficient efforts to reduce violence and sexual harassment are evident in the state of public toilets and transportation. Limited public toilets for women pose a risk of sexual violence as they have to walk long distances to relieve themselves in remote areas. Women without cars are vulnerable to molestation and assault when traveling by public transport.
Unpaid care work: Women's unpaid care work is often taken for granted and overlooked in economic calculations. However, this work is critical to the functioning of modern society. If women stopped doing their care work, the world would be in chaos. Even from an economic perspective, if these services were outsourced to companies, it would increase revenue and contribute to the GDP. It's time to recognize the value of women's care work and its trillion-dollar contribution to the economy.
Source: Link
🪬Quote of the Week:
Source: Pinterest
🔮Affirmation of the Week:
Source: Pinterest
📸Picture of the Week:
Source: Pinterest
🎨Art of the Week:
Artist: Sunny Wu
Source: Link
🎨Comic of the Week:
Artist: Sarah Andersen
Source: Link
That’s it for this week guys! Please keep anticipating my letters and meanwhile share them as much as possible. See you next week
Ciao~
Yet another great one!!✨❤️