#modernlife

This century made performance unavoidable.

everybody is curating themselves constantly now.

personalities.

opinions.

faces.

pain.

and I think it has created a strange loneliness —

being deeply visible while rarely feeling deeply known.

people are branding themselves before understanding themselves.

and maybe that is why so much modern poetry revolves around identity.

people are trying to locate authenticity

inside environments built around presentation.

I think many young writers are exhausted.

not because they lack creativity,

but because they are trying to remain human

We aren’t experiencing life anymore.

We’re just gathering evidence for a trial that will never happen.

The moment something beautiful happens

your first instinct is to reach for your phone.

Not to remember it.

To outsource it.

We stopped trusting our own minds to hold our lives

so we handed them over to servers.

But the second you look through the lens

the moment changes.

You are no longer inside it.

You are in the edit.

We have thousands of photos of sunsets we didn’t fully watch.

Meals we barely tasted.

Concerts we heard through tiny phone speakers while filming proof that we were there.

We document everything

because we are terrified of disappearing.

And in the process

we disappear from our own lives first.

One day, you’ll scroll through your memories and realize something horrifying:

you weren’t living a life.

Note: This piece uses imagery, emotion, and symbolic descent. It is not hypnosis. But if you’re tired or too open, your mind may wander deeper than expected. Return gently.

✦ ᛉ ᚨ ᚷ ᛟ ✦

What is the most powerful currency in the world? It is not gold. It is not time.

It is attention.

In an age where a sixty-second video feels endless, where a one-minute audio is a test of patience, where dopamine is instant and brain rot eats away at our depth…

when someone gives you their attention, they are giving you the one thing they can never get back. That, dear hypnotists, is a luxury.

How do we recognize it?

Sometimes it's as simple as sustained eye contact, soft, kind, almost anachronistic in this era of anonymity. For someone to hold your gaze without fleeing: that is a gift. For them to smile at you. For them to set their phone aside like someone laying a sword on the ground. For them to be present.

Then there is their body, that ancient language that doesn't know how to lie. If they nod even if their lips don't utter a yes. If they lean forward, if their breathing adjusts to yours, if their shoulders mirror your posture or your rhythm… that's rapport. The key to the entrance. The true threshold.

And the other thing, what separates the amateur from the artist: active listening. Someone who lets you finish the thought, who respects your silences without filling them, who offers you time like someone offering water in the desert, that someone is already predisposed. They have already opened an internal door.

And that—believe me—changes everything. Because that is the first step toward… trance.

They told us. . . “Study hard so you do not end up answering phones for a living.”

But here we are. College graduates. Former honor students. Working professionals. Speaking better English than our politicians just to say

“I am sorry for the inconvenience, sir.”

Call Center Is the Country’s Great Accidental Gathering Place

You will find everyone here.

The Psych major who can profile a customer’s trauma mid-call. The Nursing graduate who could not get a visa but memorized their QA metrics. The rich kid na naka tatlong course bago nag decide na pera muna, growth later. The loud bakla na may British accent on Mondays, Australian on Fridays. The breadwinner who types “I understand where you are coming from” while hiding past due bills.

Hindi ito dream job. Pero hindi rin ito basta basta.

It is the job that pays your rent, feeds your siblings, and slowly takes your soul one call at a time.

What They Do Not Tell You

The BPO is not just a job. It is a parallel universe where

3AM or 4AM is lunch break. Productivity is counted in mouse clicks and bathroom time. You learn to cry silently between calls, kapag baguhan ka pa. You get shouted at by someone 8000 miles away and still say thank you.

Pero Masaya Rin Kahit Papano

Yes, we joke about it.

We say call center trap yan. We laugh at each other’s fake accents. We tease each other for having a call center barkada na parang kulto sa pantry at smoking area.

But deep down, there is a strange kind of love in it.

You have not really lived until you have

Slept in the sleeping quarters beside a stranger na amoy Lucky Me. Chismisan sa floor habang may crisis tungkol sa metrics. Na promote tapos nag resign two weeks later dahil wala nang thrill. Inampon ng bakla sa wave mo kasi wala kang baon.

So What If This Was Not the Dream

We did not sell out. We just did what we had to.

Because in this country hustle is not ambition. It is survival.

And if you think we are less than just because we take calls at night and speak in accents that are not ours