2024: Character Development
This image is my favourite from the entire series and one of my favourites ever, primarily because it’s so evocative. I used it early in October to answer a friend's question: “How are things going with you?”. In retrospect, it was a fairly simple question. There was no need to respond with a panel from a manga series my friend was not exposed to. Unsurprisingly, she did not understand what I was trying to convey (what should I have expected from someone who only reads yaoi?). To be honest, neither did I.
I’m not going to explain why it was this panel that I judged to be the most accurate answer to that question. I could’ve just said “Fine” and let it be over with. What I’ll do instead is describe the context of this image.
It’s from the Vs. Mahito arc in Jujutsu Kaisen, a devastating exploration of Yuji Itadori’s ideals and the harsh realities of the cursed world. Yuji encounters Junpei Yoshino, a grieving and disillusioned high schooler manipulated by the cursed spirit Mahito. Despite their differences, Yuji bonds with Junpei, hoping to guide him toward a better path and away from vengeance.
However, Mahito’s influence pushes Junpei toward darkness, culminating in Mahito transfiguring Junpei before Yuji’s eyes. Yuji is left powerless, begging Sukuna to save his new friend. Sukuna, however, cruelly mocks Yuji’s plea, refusing to intervene, and Junpei dies in Yuji’s arms. The image comes directly from that scene.
I consider the panel brilliant for multiple reasons. Yuji’s idealism is crushed by the nihilism of Mahito and the cruel indifference Sukuna treats him with. It’s this image that truly kills Yuji’s belief that he can save everyone, makes him realize what true evil is, and shows him just how powerless he is in the face of forces outside his control.
But there’s one other reason I love this panel, and that’s the reason it appeals to me: Yuji’s pain is caused in large part by his yearning. His suffering arises from his desire for a perfectly happy ending, with no lives lost and good completely triumphing over evil. In the anime’s opening theme, there’s a part where he imagines this exact happy ending, with major characters from his story. The point is that his suffering is a direct result of his attachment to his perfect story and his desire for resolution. And that’s what we have in common because this is my 2024.
What does it mean to suffer?
As a teenager, I had a brief flirtation with Buddhism (who didn’t?). I even fantasized about making a ton of money, leaving it mostly to charity, and going to Tibet to become a Buddhist monk (again, who didn’t?). I still think about it sometimes. I’ve mostly left the school of thought behind and forgotten a sizeable chunk of what I’ve learned, but something that has stuck with me is the concept of “Dukkha”, which, simply put, means “suffering”.
Dukkha, in Buddhist thought, is “the true nature of all existence”, and is one of three basic characteristics of existence — along with impermanence (anichcha) and the absence of a self (anatta). Dukkha is a deep, persistent dissatisfaction or unsatisfactoriness that’s woven into the fabric of human existence.
To understand dukkha, imagine you’re trying to get comfortable in a chair that’s slightly off — no matter how you shift or adjust, there’s always something not quite right. That’s a physical metaphor for dukkha, but it extends to all aspects of life. Even when things are going well, there’s often subtle anxiety about losing what we have or wanting more, or things changing.
The root of suffering is craving, or “taṇhā”. It is “the thirst that leads to attachment”. My 2024 was centred around one goal and one goal only. I effectively “bet the house” on that one goal. In doing so, I became a massive hypocrite. I’m the guy who constantly talks about career optionality and being a generalist to anyone who would listen, but for a lot of 2024, I was a one-trick pony. It was a massive undertaking, and even before the end, it was clear that I’d need to do a massive reset, but I thought it was a goal worth risking everything for.
I reoriented my life, and my sense of self-worth and happiness became completely dependent on achieving specific outcomes in specific ways. To borrow from Buddhist thought once again, one could say that my yearnings got transformed into “upadana”, — a kind of clinging or attachment where yearnings had become more than aspirations — they had become the sole measure of worth and the only imagined path to happiness.
This post would not be about suffering if I had succeeded. Maybe I’d have used the “Suffering from Success” meme as an anchor image instead of what I used. Or that Kobe Bryant image where he looks sullen even with an NBA Championship. Or I’d have kept with the tradition of borrowing from JJK and used the “Throughout heaven and earth, I alone am the honoured one”.
But it is about suffering as a result of failure, so here I am.
Buddhism divides dukkha into three layers:
First is the immediate suffering (dukkha-dukkha) — the raw pain of rejection, the isolation, the feeling of failure. This is the surface level that most people can readily understand and empathize with. It’s the crushing weight of expectations not met, opportunities lost, and dreams deferred (that ISWIS episode about sunk costs is the best they’ve put out).
But beneath that lies viparinama-dukkha, the “suffering that comes from change and impermanence”, or the changing nature of all things. I built an entire vision of my future (complete with a full hero’s journey) and invested everything into it. The Buddhist insight here isn’t just that plans can fail, but that attaching our happiness to specific outcomes inherently sets us up for suffering because nothing in life is guaranteed or permanent. Even if I had gotten what I wanted, that satisfaction too would have been impermanent.
The third and most subtle form is existential suffering (sankhara-dukkha): “the basic unsatisfactoriness of conditioned existence”. This is the recognition that all constructed experiences are ultimately unreliable and cannot provide lasting satisfaction. I constructed a perfect path — the networking despite being introverted, the intense preparation, the self-imposed isolation to focus — all in pursuit of a constructed idea of success and redemption. The Buddhist perspective would suggest that this very construction, this attempt to control and perfect everything, contains within it the seeds of suffering (in this aspect, it’s extremely similar to my other teenage obsession: Stoicism).
I’ve wrestled with calling the worst periods of 2024 “suffering” as if it’s too heavy a word for me to use. Maybe ‘pain’, ‘mild inconvenience’, or ‘brief intermission’ would be more accurate. Suffering is meant to be used for truly soul-crushing periods like the loss of a loved one, or a truly horrendous break. But the experience of suffering is to ‘come to a knowledge of (something) by living through it’. I certainly did live through the cruel recognition of this fundamental disconnect between my aspirations and reality.
In 2024, especially in Q4 2024, I understood what it meant to lose and to suffer as a result of that loss.
How does one break out of suffering? — The Middle Way
Most human yearning is like walking a tightrope or carrying a bowl of water. If you clutch water too tightly, it slips through your fingers. If you don’t try to hold it at all, you can’t carry it. I spent 2024 on the “clutching water too tightly lane”, and I let it slip. Pursuing one single goal like a fanatic and subduing everything else to it turned me into Gollum, Isildur, or even Sauron in the thrall of the One Ring: so obsessively in the clutches of “the ring to rule them all” that nothing else mattered.
The Middle Way is a pretty simple concept in Buddhism — an understanding that neither extreme leads to true understanding or freedom from suffering. It’s not quite a compromise, or a “both sides are right” thing. Instead, it is a completely different approach that transcends them.
Think of it like tuning a musical instrument. If the string is too loose, it won’t make music. If it’s too tight, it will break. The perfect tension isn’t found by calculating the mathematical middle point between these extremes, but by carefully adjusting until you find the precise tension that produces harmony. This is the Middle Way. Balance. Easy to understand, hard to practice.
Thank God for Side Quests
“My greatest regret in life is that I didn’t make Partner at McKinsey”, said no one ever.
In gaming, a side quest is ‘a part of a computer game that has its own aim and story but is not part of the main game’. The best parts of the year involved things that had little to no bearing on my overarching goal but added variety and positive character development in 2024. I just did those for fun.
Two of the most important highlights of 2024 were:
The Bridge Program. The ultimate sidequest. Even though I had completed the traditional onboarding process, I believed I would ultimately find an excuse to pull out of the camp. I skipped the first two days for a legitimate reason and was thinking of completely ditching it by the third because I felt sleepy. Ultimately, I rebelled against my instincts and chose to attend. I did not regret it.
I remember my first day (a comedy of errors) and being shell-shocked that everyone else was wearing some corporate or corporate-passing outfit while I looked all casual. I was thinking “You and who?” especially since I saw people I knew personally looking like junior consultants at BCG. Unfortunately, I chose to adjust what I was wearing, but I kept my mask. What was meant to help me blend in had the effect of singling me out. Only one other person was wearing a mask, and he wasn’t in my class (we struck up a good connection so that counts for something).
In my first class, I wasn’t in the mood to speak to anyone. I had just come to Ikeja in the hot sun and spent an ungodly amount of money on an Uber. My classmates’ first impression of me was someone who thought of himself as superior to them. Bringing out my laptop to watch a series instead of talking with them was also not a good idea. Safe to say, the day did not end well, but I adjusted with time. I kept my backseat, though.
The BootCamp project was another thing entirely. It didn’t help that the case study we were given to work on was vague and filled with buzzwords, but my teammates and I probably set a record for the most unserious team in the entire cohort. We did a lot of work, but we focused more on the “Let’s have fun” part of the project rather than the “Let’s create a workable solution” part of the project. Until “Demo Day”, we had nothing to show for all our work except a list of questions and a bunch of vague ideas filled with buzzwords. We still won an award though, although I can’t remember what it was for. I do remember arguing with Dunsin and Shakira over musical preferences (I was usually on Lanre’s side) while Oyinkan (the actual adult in the room) looked on with disappointment (I was supposed to be the adult in the room).
My best experiences ever have been situations where I was free from the burden of expectations, self-imposed and otherwise. For those two weeks, I expected very little of myself, and no one expected anything from me. Brilliant recipe.
I finally graduated. This isn’t quite a “for fun” activity, but after a six-year stay in uni that should’ve been four years, I’m glad to be out. It was a somewhat rushed end with an anti-climatic feel, but it was fun. I’ll miss quite a few of the characters, and the impersonal nature of life outside can leave one feeling nostalgic for the closed environment that is university, but it was coming. Bye bye to jati-jati.
This year, I learned a lot about myself — some new, others a reemphasis of forgotten truths. I was reminded that I’m a really, really sore loser and that my greatest strength isn’t some “natural talent”, but the fact that I can be a complete pest to get what I want.
I learned that Football Manager can be extremely addictive (and is great for being on “autopilot”), that if you’re a naturally calm person who doesn’t easily get angry, losing your shit just once (even if it’s for a completely silly reason) will make people automatically take you seriously.
I learned that people love to talk about themselves and their career journeys, and all you need to do is reach out. I learned the importance of a really good LinkedIn profile picture (bless the folks at TBP, they changed this broke nigga’s life).
Most importantly, I learned that you really can just do stuff, but it’s not supposed to be easy, and sometimes it just takes over your life.
