Go back to Identity
Class & Alienation
Written on August 12, 2025

I think that if you traveled a lot pre-Grab, as long as you were hanging out with the Christian Filipino middle-classers—with potlucks, group banter and prayers, carpooling, and Facebook chat travel planning and post-event tagged photos—you would have probably ended up feeling like a kind of a tourist, as is depicted by those television shows with all of their little attempts at summarizing the Filipino human condition, the corruption, poverty, density, family ties, and gentrifying upper class and all, without the traumatic collision between average and out-of-touch. Going to camps, sports fests, music fests, concerts, literary fests, and Bible Bowls; attending seminars and workshops; participating and volunteering in praise-and-worship teams, outreaches, community cleaning, and daily vacation Bible schools; and going to spiritual gatherings—trying to have a relationship with God in a regional way. All of it came face to face with the reality of the car-less individual, the one who can barely handle the pressure-heat of those bright orange privileged mall lights. You were staring all the time at nature, and even with jeepneys, buses, trains, pedicabs, and tricycles, you were inevitably staring out into the streets, even as you walked along the sidewalks, because there was this incapacity that had to be acknowledged—the distance between people even as one attempted so much to connect through spiritual communities where class might have both blurred and been reinforced depending on location alone, whether in a multi-purpose skycraper or in some subdivision that wasn't thoroughly occupied by the elites. A place like Metro Manila. The casual classism, social weaving callousness, religious hand-washing, mental struggles, and ineffable coping among the privileged. The humanity, unforgiving lives, and shared lessons of the underclass. The inability to resist neurotic creep. The rage that one incurred as a result. The urge to impose, the drive to demand the concentration of the energies of all into one. The inability to say no. 

Recently, I frequent Starbucks, going there at least twice a month, each visit in a new location throughout the region. I write, study, and read there, with my laptop, keyboard, USB-C monitor, headphones, mouse, phone, and physical and digital books. My rage is socially acceptable (sublimated).

Nevertheless, this is only one aspect of my identity. I had a great, "highly buffered" childhood (up to 14 years old, that is), and the details certainly will complicate final says and interpretations.