09.20 | i guess i don't need to regress anymore

Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it comes to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.
   – Henry David Thoreau

✉️ letter #41

Recently, I've been reading an embarrassing amount of Manhwa - the name for Korean cartoons made specifically for scrolling through on your phone. There are just way too many free sites with translated stories on the web, and all of them are made for binging. I have found myself completely unable to resist mowing down hundreds of chapters at a time.

A very popular theme in manhwa storylines is the "regression"-style plot. Basically, you've lived one life but somehow didn't live it very well - usually you get killed off by people you trusted or whatever. But then, instead of dying, you "regress" to a point in time just before the trajectory of your life went wrong. You have the determination to get things right this time around, and enough knowledge of the future to make it happen.

It is amazing just how many Regression manhwa there are out there, though it's not like it's an uncommon storyline in other cultures as well. When I first entered my 30s, I spent many insomniac nights trying to identify the 'Sliding Doors' moments in my life and what would have turned out differently had I gone down another route, made another choice. When I went on a sabbatical in 2019, part of my goal was to get a feeling for what might have happened with some of those missed choices.

Most likely because it was my birthday again recently, and I'm in that "last year" of this decade of my life - which I intellectually know is just an arbitrary definition of time and doesn't actually mean much, but sorry I'm not evolved enough to just shrug it off so ugh - I had another one of those sleepless "what if I regressed" kind of nights.

This time though, it struck me that most of my "what ifs" were less wholesale deconstructions of anything and everything I've done, and more... optimizations? Like, here's how I would have navigated the health system better during university. Here's how I would have taken advantage of those visa trips to neighboring Asian countries better when I was "remote working" from China in my early 20s. Here's how I would have bought and kept bitcoin. I would have not held onto that relationship that long. I would have started dying my hair wacky colors earlier.

Basically, the choices I made would make it so that I was more or less playing the same game, just with a couple of extra bonuses.

It was heartening realizing how little of my life I would change from what it is right now. It must mean I'm in a healthier place than I was in my early 30s.

Either that or I've suffered an incredible decrease in imagination and now can no longer envision a multiverse of lives for myself.

Ha!

🌱 newsreel for a different world

• 35 years is enough time for a mortgage to come due, for children to grow up and have children of their own, and for the long-feared consequences of a warming world to become reality. For climate scientists, it doesn’t feel good to be proved right. [LA Times]
• Hell yes to the Iranian schoolgirls who are still protesting, even if the world's attention span has moved away from them. [The New Yorker]
• Researchers have sequenced RNA from an extinct animal species for the first time! Using the muscle and skin samples from a 132-year old taxidermied Tasmanian tiger, they can now figure out more about how these animals lived... including what ancient viruses might have infected them. [Nature]
• Apparently as kelp forests grow underwater, they suck up nitrogen and phosphorus pollution while absorbing carbon dioxide, which is great both for reducing ocean acidifcation and you know, the greenhouse gas issue. So... could incorporating more seaweed into our diets, thereby spurring growth in the seaweed farming industry, actually help the climate crisis? [Mother Jones]

🎵 song of my week

So, regrets. I've had a few. But then again, too few to mention.

A lot of artists have covered Frank Sinatra's classic hit "My Way" since it was released, but I still feel like the most inventive and underrated one is Nina Simone's propulsively fun clopitty clop version.

✨enjoying: one final piece of pop culture fun

I guess since I started this out talking about regression-style Manhwa, I might as well list my favorites. A lot of these manhwa follow almost the exact same tropes and storylines, and so after reading dozens and dozens, I think the ones that actually stick out to me are ones that have a fun twist... and really great art:

• The S-Classes that I raised | Set in modern South Korea, people begin "awakening" to superpowers - ranked from F(worst) to S(best) - just in time to protect themselves against the monsters pouring out of "dungeon portals" that have opened up all over the country. After accidentally causing his S-class brother's death in a dungeon, a F-class hunter turns back time to before he began trying to obtain his own "awakening," and it turns out he has a hidden talent after all: a knack for helping train S-classes. The "urban fantasy" structure of the story is pretty generic, but this manhwa manages to inject a lot of humor into it.
• The fantasie of a stepmother | A 16-year-old is suddenly married off to an old man who trains her to manage his estate and his four children, all of whom hate and bully her. Years later, when the eldest gets married, she retires from the estate and is almost immediately murdered. She returns back to the time of her husband's funeral, with a better understanding of the psychology of her stepkids (now that she's, you know, mentally 30-something instead of a teenager herself). I like that the story straight up states that marrying a 16-year-old was a very weird and awful thing to do, and the best moments in this German-inspired low-fantasy setting are when the stepmother is using her experiences less to maneuver to a better position in the kingdom, but rather to get to know the children she's become responsible for. And very interestingly, the latest chapters return to the first timeline and the aftermath of her murder.
• Mother's contract marriage | This one is great because it's super fluffy, gorgeously illustrated, and from a different perspective. Taking place in a western fantasy land, the story is told from the point of view of an 8-year-old who's mom is actually the regressor (not that the 8-year-old knows it). To the little girl, her beautiful but abusive alcoholic mom just wakes up and does a 180 one day, and changes their lives for the better.

Enjoy losing hours of your life!

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