Building my epistemics. I am still assembling my worldview; it is an iterative, unfinished order best described by the maxim strong opinions, loosely held. That is: I strive to meet the world with discernment, but also with a readiness to revise. Practicing humility and truth-seeking, for me, means being precise about how I come to know what’s true and what’s worth caring about. This is a daily discipline of sharpening my judgment in foggy terrain by calibrating my confidence, catching blind spots, welcoming dissonant perspectives, and inviting critique not as a threat, but as a diagnostic. I believe the clarity of my thinking is downstream of the quality of my process, and that better thinking — more sensitive and more honest — can shape the arc of how I give back and pay forward. All these help me attune where my attention is most needed, and what actions might genuinely tilt the world towards a better direction.

Research and writing. I write several times a week, not just to satisfy academic requirements, but as creative and intellectual fidelity. Some pieces take the shape of blog posts I will never publish, grant proposals, or Instagram story riffs on whatever ideas won’t leave me alone. Others remain unfinished, as half-formed thoughts demanding deeper clarity from me. Under the mentorship of philosophy of technology professor and academic union president Dr. Imbong, I am writing an undergrad thesis that interrogates the situated practices of Filipino technologists as they operationalize and recontextualize transnational AI governance regimes within the Philippines, navigating infrastructural precarity, epistemic disjuncture, and disjointed policy temporalities through recursive acts of sense-making.

Lifting. Six days a week, two and a half hours each time. The repetition steadies me. There’s the inhale before the lift, the stretch into resistance, the quiet triumph of force meeting form. Progress doesn’t announce itself; it accumulates, discreetly, in the absence of struggle where it once was, in the way my body stops asking if it can carry the weight. What began as discipline has become something else: not routine, but ritual. When life feels formidable, the gym becomes one of the four places I return to — alongside art galleries, libraries, and the mountains — where the terms are simple: show up, move forward, be with what’s hard.

What’s Keeping Me Busy

Prefiguring governance for a world that does not yet exist. Much of my work has circled the question of governance as it exists now—its failures, its fractures, its entanglement in the very systems it’s meant to regulate or repair. But the harder question—the one that haunts more quietly—is what kinds of governance might be possible beyond the paradigms we’ve inherited. What would it take to design institutions that hold space for existential risk, ecological grief, and long-term resilience—without collapsing into inertia, short-termism, or the safety of abstraction? As a child, I found myself drawn to Singapore’s anticipatory governance, not as a blueprint, but as a provocation. What might it mean for a state to take the future seriously, not in slogans or strategic plans, but standard operations?

How Southeast Asia defines its own terms. Our exclusion from global governance negotiations isn’t just an oversight; it’s a structural vulnerability. When frameworks from the Global North fail to account for our realities, what gets erased is not just nuance, but need, like the ways AI is weaponized by cybercrime, the precarity of digital labor, the blind spots in safety protocols built without our languages, our cultures, or our constraints in mind. Too often, Southeast Asia is cast as a testing ground, rather than a site of innovation. Real sovereignty asks more of us: that we root governance in regional expertise, or that we center self-determined futures over imported prescriptions. To move from consumer to co-creator is not just a shift in posture, but in imagination. It begins with honoring our own dignity—our tangled infrastructures, our fractured pasts, the deliberative processes that protect what is most vulnerable. That is where future-making must start.

Alternative heuristics on AI risk governance and policy beyond instrumentalism. AI governance is so often framed through the language of safety, security, control—terms that presume the problem is containment. But what if we began elsewhere? What if we treated AI not only as a risk to manage, but as a moral frontier—one that asks us to contend with the ethical standing of non-human agents, the possible rights of future sentient beings, and the value of intelligence untethered from economic utility? Within Effective Altruism, alignment is often a technical challenge; within critical theory, a political and epistemic one. I find myself drawn to the space in between—the overlap, the tension, the misfires in translation. What might it mean to take seriously the points where these worldviews converge, and the places where they contradict?

Mountaineering. What’s clarifying about a climb are the conditions where I impose myself a slowness that tames my patience and allows me to confront my limits. Reaching the summit is never my point. Since my days in Scouting, I have been drawn instead to how fatigue melds into quiet exhilaration or the way the landscape rearranges itself below. And the descent is always the most humbling, because nothing is truly conquered, only momentarily witnessed.

Why I return to art. Prior to my undergraduate studies, my formal education was in the literary, performing, and visual arts when I created not as a means to an end, but for the joy of making (e.g. art history rabbit holes, exhibiting in galleries, staging plays, attending writing workshops, classical piano performances). At some point, however, creation became output, and output became something that needed to justify itself. I have spent so much time writing about structures, institutions, governance—things that demand precision and persuasion. But I also wonder: Where does my creativity sit in all of this? How do I reclaim it, not just as a skill, but as a way of imagining and being, as in the old days?

Photography as a way of holding time. I occasionally do this since I was 10 not to merely document, but to preserve moods that would otherwise slip through language and my writing. For decades, I have been curious about liminality, as in airports, empty corridors, the way neon spills onto wet pavement at 2 AM. My camera is a tool next to the pen to continue asking what does it mean for a moment to be held, even when it no longer belongs to me? Light falls in accidental compositions, symmetry emerges in places I did not intend, and in those brief instances, beauty asserts itself as a fleeting alignment of angles before everything changes again.

Music as an evolving map of my internal world. Soundtracks articulate emotions before I do: 5SOS or Twenty One Pilots when I crave nostalgia without sentimentality; Kodaline when the ache needs articulation; and Lorde when the world feels distant and a little too sharp. Musical theatre is emotional maximalism, mirroring the intensity I bring to the world—stories so full they spill into song. Over the past two years, I have immersed myself in performances across London’s West End and New York’s Broadway, while making a point to regularly support local productions at home. While I remain exploratory with my music, post-punk has become my recent fixation: its sharp edges and restless defiance capture an alienation and a refusal to succumb to said alienation.