Fight Club

Just watched Fight Club again and I’m feeling more energized already! Can’t help but see the similarities between Fight Club and The Matrix. Both are about becoming disfranchised and ceding personal power to programmed aspirations. Like photocopies of our actual self, we grow further and further away from who we really are. For your own protection, Catmasutra introduces Angel for some comic relief while the Matrix provides the red pill; Fight Club inevitably presents Tyler Durden:

“Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.”

We can all identify with this somewhat… and sometimes it’s nice even just to wake up for a while, shake ourselves up (in fight club, they fight), at my workplace, we play foosball. And at one time or another, we feel like letting go of everything and just run with it – wherever that takes us. The more we have to lose, the less freedom we have.

“But first you have to give up. First, you have to know, with no fear, know that someday you are going to die. Until you know that, you are useless. It's only after we lost everything that we are free to do anything.”

Painting by Nara Yoshitomo

Of course, we have our very own blue pill, made in Singapore. The blue pill will leave us as we are, commuting to work everyday, caught in the rush-hour, reading the Straits times, and believing in the things we believe we know as a matter of habit. Boomtown $ingapore! As revealed by lifestyle in the Sunday Times, “It’s boomtime, boomtown Singapore as the island shed its stuffy image and revels in the sound policy decisions that were made.”

Boomtown Singapore Menu
(Work hard and you can be one of us!)

Risotto for $580
Face serums for $1200
New breasts and a flat stomach for $20000
Country club memnership for $170000
Lamborghini Gallardo for $928000
Horizon yacht $22.8m

Wahahah That was one of the most "empty" article I’ve ever read. Imagine what all those years of reading the national papers will do to you!!??

The red pill is that something
we should be searching for if not for the blue pill.

We are told that it can help us to find the truth. We don't know what that truth is, or even if it is necessary. It symbolizes risk, doubt and questioning. "Ignorance is bliss" and if you believe that you already know the truth as prescribed by the blue pill, what is there to question? “By accepting what we are told, life can be easier. There is the social pressure to 'fit in', which is immensely strong in most cultures. Questioning the status quo carries the danger of ostracism, possibly persecution. This aspect has a strong link with politics. People doing well under the current system are not inclined to look favorably on those who question the system. Also, the act of simply questioning does not infer a lack of validity on the questioned. Why not assume that your experience is innocent until proven guilty? Just accept everything?” – Matrix Philosophy

“After fight club, everything else in

your life gets the volume turned
down. You can deal with anything
The people who had power over you
have less and less."

Perhaps the truth lies in the ability to let that which does not matter truly slide...