Last Thursday, I finally had the energy to meet a friend for dinner.
I say “finally” because the last few weeks have been one long blur of work, writing, rehearsals, emails, and the occasional existential sigh while staring at the ceiling fan.
You know the kind.
You lie down thinking you will rest for five minutes, and suddenly you are contemplating the entire trajectory of human civilisation.
Anyway, over dinner, my friend said something that caught me off guard.
She told me she had been reading the entries I’ve been posting on this blog.
Then she asked, very casually, in between bites of chicken rice:
“Why have your recent writings been so serious?”
Now, I hadn’t really thought about it.
To be honest, I haven't been taking the time to reflect on my writing lately. I’ve just been writing. Putting words down. Hitting publish. Moving on to the next thing.
But her comment stayed with me.
On the train ride home, I found myself scrolling through my own blog entries like a stranger who had just discovered them.
And she was right.
They were… serious.
Reflective.
Philosophical.
A bit like a lecturer who forgot he was supposed to be entertaining the class.
Which made me wonder: Am I becoming too serious?
Or maybe the better question is this.
Am I simply tired?
There is a particular kind of fatigue that creeps up quietly. Not the physical kind where you just need a nap, but the mental one where everything in the world starts to feel heavier than usual.
The news feels heavier.
The conversations feel heavier.
Even the act of thinking feels heavier.
And when that happens, your writing sometimes becomes a mirror of that weight.
So today, I decided to try something different.
Today, I want to talk about something lighter.
Or at least something that appears lighter on the surface.
Content.
Not the emotional kind. The digital kind.
The things we consume every day without thinking about it.
Videos.
Articles.
Memes.
Comment sections.
TikTok clips that last seven seconds but somehow convince you to stay for forty minutes.
The modern human diet is no longer just nasi lemak and kopi.
It is also information.
And like food, what you consume eventually becomes part of you.
If you spend your entire day reading angry news articles, you will start to feel like the world is collapsing every five minutes.
If you spend your entire day watching motivational videos, you will briefly believe you can wake up at 5 a.m., drink celery juice, run ten kilometres, build three companies, and achieve enlightenment before lunch.
Neither of these things are entirely accurate.
Reality is usually somewhere in between.
But what fascinates me is how content quietly shapes our perspective of the world.
Take the last week, for example.
Earlier this week, I was on the MRT during the morning rush hour. The carriage was packed, which is not surprising because Singapore has mastered the art of fitting twelve thousand people into a metal tube designed for maybe half that number.
Standing in front of me was a man who was deeply invested in a video on his phone.
Now, when I say deeply invested, I mean he was laughing.
Not a polite chuckle.
Not the socially acceptable “hehe.”
I mean the full, uncontrolled kind of laughter where your shoulders start shaking and you are desperately trying to contain it because you are surrounded by strangers.
Naturally, everyone around him became curious.
We all tried to glance at his screen without making it obvious that we were glancing at his screen.
Singaporeans are very good at this. It is a subtle national skill.
Eventually I managed to see what he was watching.
It was a video of a cat falling off a sofa.
That was it.
A cat.
Falling.
Off a sofa.
And yet this man looked like he had just discovered the meaning of life.
For a moment, I found it ridiculous.
Then I found it strangely comforting.
Because in that cramped MRT carriage, surrounded by tired commuters who were mentally preparing for another workday, this one man had managed to find genuine joy in something utterly meaningless.
And somehow that felt… hopeful.
Later that same day, I opened social media and immediately encountered three posts about global crises, two political arguments, and one person declaring that civilisation as we know it is about to collapse.
You see what I mean about content diets?
One moment you are watching a cat fall off a sofa.
The next moment you are questioning the future of humanity.
Another incident happened just a few days ago.
I was at a coffee shop waiting for my order when the uncle behind the counter shouted a number.
“Forty-two!”
Nobody moved.
He shouted again.
“Forty-two!”
Still nobody.
Then a man at the corner table slowly looked up from his phone and said very calmly:
“Uncle… I think forty-two already gave up.”
The entire coffee shop laughed.
Even the uncle laughed.
Number forty-two, whoever he was, had apparently abandoned his drink and disappeared from the story entirely.
But for that brief moment, the entire room shared a collective joke about a ghost customer who had lost faith in coffee.
It was a small thing.
A silly thing.
But it reminded me of something important.
Humour is often accidental.
It appears in the small cracks of everyday life.
The problem is that when we fill our minds with too much heavy content, we sometimes lose the ability to see those cracks.
Everything becomes serious.
Everything becomes a debate.
Everything becomes a problem that must be solved immediately.
But sometimes the healthiest response to life is simply to notice that someone ordered coffee and never came back for it.
Now, I should clarify something.
Finding humour in life does not mean ignoring the serious things.
The world is complicated.
There are real problems that deserve attention and thought.
But if your entire worldview becomes a constant stream of seriousness, something inside you starts to dry up.
Your ability to laugh.
Your ability to be amused.
Your ability to notice the absurdity of being human.
And being human is, quite frankly, very absurd.
We are the only species on this planet that can simultaneously worry about climate change, check Instagram, eat fried chicken, and argue about pineapple on pizza.
If that is not strange, I don’t know what is.
Which brings me back to my friend’s comment.
“Why have your recent writings been so serious?”
Maybe the answer is simple.
Maybe I have just been consuming too much seriousness.
Too many long articles.
Too many debates.
Too many think pieces written by people who sound like they haven’t laughed since 2003.
And eventually that tone leaks into your own writing.
But the truth is, humour is not the opposite of seriousness.
Sometimes humour is simply another way of surviving seriousness.
There is a thin line between cynicism and humour.
Cynicism says the world is ridiculous and therefore nothing matters.
Humour says the world is ridiculous and therefore we might as well laugh while we are here.
I prefer the second option.
Because if life occasionally feels like a very long and confusing theatre performance, then laughter is the moment when the audience realises that everyone else is also slightly confused about the script.
So perhaps moving forward, I will try to balance the things I consume.
A serious article.
Followed by a cat falling off a sofa.
A philosophical essay.
Followed by a video of someone trying to open a plastic container for three minutes.
A long discussion about the state of the world.
Followed by the memory of a coffee shop uncle calling out for customer number forty-two who may or may not exist anymore.
Because sometimes the funniest parts of life are not the jokes we intentionally tell.
They are the strange little moments that happen when nobody is trying to be funny at all.
And perhaps that is the real lesson here.
If you want to survive the weight of the world, you must occasionally adjust your content diet.
Consume a little seriousness.
But also consume a little absurdity.
Because somewhere out there, right now, a cat is probably falling off a sofa again.
And someone on the MRT is laughing like they have just discovered happiness.
And honestly?
That might be enough for today.
Written by: Adi Jamaludin
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