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How should one spend a life? I've carried this question since high school, trying on different answers like costumes each year on career day. Titles, I figured, reveal little. What matters to me, Lei noticed last year, is remaining a 'sponge' to the people and practices worth learning from. Alea recently reminded me that this is discernment as deviation against sunk cost fallacies.
I think if we want downstream impact, says my good friend Lenz, we would need upstream positioning. And while I've gathered enough conviction to know where my own contributions might be taken most seriously, the paths below are still taking shape, explored alongside peers whose questions mirror mine, necessarily evolving, but presently feel most promising.
Pursuits In Progress
01How Might We Steward Capital for Meaningful Ends?
Capital is not merely a resource as it signals what is valued, who is believed, and which directions are worth investing in.
Grantmaking and ESG operate according to different frameworks, each with distinct constraints and levers. I'm interested in how these might be used carefully and responsibly to mobilize resources for underserved communities and promising solutions.
What this means for me now
I will be joining the Climate Change Accelerator at Jobs That Make Sense to map the sustainability sectors in SEA and secure a role before graduation. In parallel, I am determining which CFA credential to pursue.
02 What Actually Drives Growth, and Can We Measure It?
What causes some societies to become prosperous and civilizationally resilient, while others stagnate? Standard narratives feel incomplete, almost tautological. What I want to understand is the causal mechanisms beneath these correlations, and whether the Philippines faces binding constraints that are different from what worked for South Korea, Taiwan, or Singapore. How do we even know if interventions are working when economic development operates on longer timelines and involves countless confounding variables?
I argue you can't improve what you can't measure
We lack basic public data on so many dimensions of Philippine society, from granular local government spending to real-time economic indicators that could inform policy. This fundamentally limits our ability to understand what's broken and whether attempted fixes are working. I'm curious about best practices in governance elsewhere, and whether building better measurement systems and data infrastructure could be more leveraged than direct interventions, since you can't improve what you can't measure. But I'm uncertain whether this is a tractable problem for non-governmental actors or whether it requires state capacity we simply don't have yet.
Perhaps not all problems are worth solving?
At the short-term, some interventions might improve metrics slightly, but won't address binding constraints on growth. Others might be incredibly high-leverage but politically impossible or require expertise we don't have. I'm trying to develop better frameworks for problem prioritization . The meta-challenge is that this kind of strategic thinking requires both rigorous research and intimate knowledge of local political economy, and I'm still building both.
03 How Might We Design Institutions That Produce Scientific Breakthroughs?
Despite computers and the Internet, we haven't seen improvements at the scale of 1870-1970's electric grids, modern medicine, or agricultural revolution. It appears that we've come to believe progress "just happens" rather than recognizing it as a deliberate policy choice, the way the Greatest Generation, I read, understood when they poured 1.86% of GDP into R&D and created NASA, DARPA, and the NSF within a single generation.
Why progress stopped being a policy choice
I'm trying to understand what happened between the Endless Frontier era in the US and now, particularly how cultural revolts against technology in the 1960s-70s, combined with the Cold War's end, dismantled the very idea that science deserved prioritization. Recent revival in ARPA-H, Schmidt Futures, and Arc Institute suggests we may be rekindling that agency, and I'm curious whether new institutions found wisdom from history.
What actually accelerates discovery
I'm drawn to metascience's core question on how we might improve the scientific process itself. I've learned that beyond funding, we need further attunement which mechanisms genuinely accelerate breakthroughs versus which are bureaucratic red tape we've mistaken for progress.
04 Where Can I Add Value to Tech Governance from Asia?
While frontier AI safety within Western centers of innovation remains critical, I've been engaged with field-building in my region since 2022, where far less path dependency bring opportunities to improve institutional foresight on risks.
Where my thinking is
On talent development. Insisting people stay in the Philippines might invite stagnation. Progress accelerates when we both funnel the best talents toward opportunities overseas where they build real capacity, as we nurture the epistemic environment here so those who remain develop sharper heuristics to see latent concerns more clearly.
On policy windows. Building trust with public officials has taken us years, and I still weigh whether slow progress reflects necessary relationship-building or fundamental misalignment between how risks are framed and what decision-makers presently conceive as problems.
On regional dynamics. Asian countries outside Sino-US relations face questions whether to align with Western AI safety frameworks, develop indigenous approaches, or broker middle-ground positions. I'm exploring where the Philippines and similar nations can add unique value that neither major power can easily provide.
05 How Do Societies Learn to See New Forms of Moral Urgency?
Last September, the Philippines passed a law allocating 20B pesos each year to expand livestock production. My thesis examines how this policy, despite smallholder rhetoric, structurally favors foreign importers and conglomerates, while pushing out farmers who can't scale. The law prioritizes increasing output i.e. more chickens per square meter, faster growth cycles, and higher volumes, with no mention of standards. Animal welfare simply isn't legible to Congress.
Whether advocacy can work before 'affordability'
The common assumption is that (1) LMICs can't afford to care about non-human welfare when human poverty remains severe and that (2) moral circles expand only after you're wealthy. But I'm not sure that's how it actually works. Slavery was abolished in economies still dependent on slave labor. Women gained the vote before most had economic independence. I think moral progress precedes the material conditions that supposedly enable it, driven by minorities who refused to wait. The question is whether farm animal welfare can follow that pattern in an LMIC, or whether it genuinely requires wealth we don't yet have.
Can we care about the future if not the present?
I think this law is scaling up systems that will determine living conditions for billions of sentient beings over the next decade, so the suffering is immediate, the policy window is narrow, and the trajectory is being set right now. If that doesn't generate any political priority, what does that say about our capacity to prioritize genuinely abstract concerns? Not "animals versus people" but "can our institutions take seriously the interests of beings who have no voice in the process." That's the same capacity you need for caring about future generations, or governing emerging technologies responsibly, or any challenge requiring us to look beyond immediate, visible stakeholders. Maybe these are different problems requiring different strategies. Or maybe the ability to notice moral urgency where it's not yet socially visible is a skill we need to practice.
Projects In Play
01 Unjournal
Exposure as an assistant to professors early in undergrad immersed me in the workings of the academe, revealing its norms and limitations while allowing me to test my fit within it. In 2025, I began to reimagine what research can become beyond the well-behaved paper. I privilege rigor, but would like to transcend the sterility of traditional scholarship, having spent basic education in arts and design.
I have gone through rabbit holes experimenting with form, allowing the work itself to carry its arguments where stories, maps, audio, data, and speculative fragments exist alongside one another as epistemic tools beyond just ornament.
Complementing this, I want to start an independent press where ideas are stirred in conversation ala philosophy salons and carried outward into research and writing. What emerges here reflects on the archipelagos we inhabit and the technologies we reckon with.
Where I am with this
Support through Sigla Research Center's grants and Tandemic's data science accelerator has made this exploration possible this year.
02 A Life Board
Since 2024, I have been thinking about what it means to design a life with others, beyond the rhythms of check-ins and milestones, through sustained, intentional reflection.
I formalized a small circle of people in 2025 whom I could meet with regularly to talk through the big arcs across career shifts, creative risks, emotional weather, and long-term dreams.
These are not just my mentors, but also broader co-conspirators who amplify one anotherās ambitions, speak truthfully, and remain curious about the people we are becoming.
What I want this to hold
I want to curate this space with care, where accountability, imagination, and emotional safety are premium. A place to raise the ceiling of self-belief, to be seen clearly, and still encouraged to stretch.
03Gatherings
As I prepare for graduate studies and later pursue an early career in management consultancy and or tech, I keep circling back to a quiet desire to gather people in the in-between.
These are early-career peers who are still figuring out what they care most about, who they might become, and how their work might meet the world's unmet needs.
Since freshman year, I have been hosting informal and intentional spaces(a kind of third space) where we map out our edges and trace contours of T-shaped profiles oriented toward moral ambition and further flourishing.
Not to finalize trajectories, but to sit with them and think in good company about problems that are tractable but overlooked and how we might move toward them with more clarity.
If I were to anchor these conversations in a reading group here in Cebu, is that a space youād want to step into?