WHY, LATELY, I HAVE FELT so beaten up? It's almost as though a number of people have sandbagged me and then put me in a bag before throwing me into the river with a large piece of steel attached to it to make sure that no way I would escape the death penalty. Why?
The best method to answer this question, needless to say, is to ask myself and then look inside my own mind, trying aggressively to find out what has happened in the past few days, weeks, or months. We have a name for this method: introspection. It was the political philosophy Thomas Hobbes who popularized the term.
In Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Common Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil, Thomas Hobbes argues that the only way to arrive at the best system of governance is by introspecting: What is it that we want the most from the government? Is it wealth or happiness? Or, it is a constant pleasure? Hobbes argues that it's none of these. What we want the most -- which is the reason, as he has famously said, "why else would we lock our doors at night?" -- is safety.
Therefore, for Hobbes, the role of the government is to provide safety at all cost. What about ourselves, then? The key to introspection is to be reflexive and objective. Being honest about oneself is the only way. When you're looking inside your own mind, you don't need to pretend that other people are watching. You can honestly ask yourself what exactly has made you feel the way you feel. Often, those things are not the things conventionally acceptable by the society.
It could be your excessive (and most of the time illicit) sexual drive; it could be your aggression against the religious establishment. Or, it could be how you feel so uncomfortable about something simply because we're lacking in words to describe all the discomforts. Most of the time, it's easy to tell ourselves a lie when we feel this kind of discomfort. It's even easier to blame your emotional discomfort on others: that it isn't you where the problem lies.
Once and for all, let's get this right: there is only one cause of an emotional discomfort, and that is our expectation. I like reading Hobbes but I must also accept that I have not read him thoroughly enough to discuss with rigor how he frames his use of the term introspection. The way I see it is that it has to do with the mismatch between what we expect and what we are getting.
You might say, at this point, though, that "sometimes I didn't even expect anything but I'd still feel the emotional discomfort." That's true; yet, what is likely to be the case is that we "subconsciously" something without even knowing it. We might subconsciously expect a bigger or a more expensive gift from someone because the gift we have given to that someone earlier was big.
But once you've found that what's in the box is small, it's hard to think of such a disappointment as simply the encounter with an unexpected. It's a disappointment, and it usually shows, because you have an expectation of what you would like to get whether or not such expectation was clear to you. I felt deeply sad when my father, someone so important to me and someone who I didn't expect to leave me so quickly, passed away. Did I consciously not wantibg him to die?
Of course I didn't want him to die. It's because he's important to me. Love is another thing -- maybe the worst thing out there to talk about expectation and most of us' failure to deal with our inability to arrive at a good compromise when the expectation is not met. Heartbreaking, that is to say, is nothing less than a solid mismatch of expectation. We usually think of a divorce, or a falling out between two people, as a state of incompatibility. It's not and it's never about incompatibility.
It only is the state of incompatibility only when you think of yourself as having done everything right, and other having done everything wrong. Love dies when your expectation is not met. For instance, Tony, a friend whose life story I had mentioned in a couple of posts ago, had fallen out of love with his partner because his expectation was not met. He expected her to be understanding, to give him an unconditional support and love, and to be there when he wanted her.
Tony had framed these expectations as "minimal" for a relationship and he could well be right, but the fact that matter was that his way of understanding of unconditional support and love was different from those of his ex-partner. She also had her own understanding of these; so, it's not possible for them to be together which was not because they were compatible, but because they expected someone else totally different and they could not discuss those differences in their expectations. Tony was disappointed because he had expected too much.
I think he was a perfect match with his ex-partner. They liked similar things. They shared the same interest in many activities. The only thing that was "incompatible" between them was their expectations. I was disappointed too, about love, because I used to expect too much. I wanted I was disappointed too, about love, because I used to expect too much. Once upon a time, I thought I had met the love of my life, but that relationship did not last long at all. Here're the reasons.
I used to want someone to want me unconditionally -- but that wasn't her goal in being in a relationship with me. All she wanted was someone to love her unconditionally -- but only when she needed it. She didn't want me to love her to the point that I would try to protect her from herself.
Also, while I wanted her to reciprocate my unconditional love by giving me the benefit of the doubt whenever something might not seem right to her urgent emotionality in the moment, she saw my expectation as unrealistic because she did not think I wanted that. I thought she liked me because I was critical, but it turned out that was not the case at all: She didn't want anything critical from me but a pat in the back, always. These were unfortunate mismatches in our expectations.
So, here is the takeaway message: If you don't want to be disappointed, don't expect too much from anyone (including yourself) and from anything. Lord Buddha had said this more than two millennia ago. The only way to be content with life is to not expecting life to give you what you "think" you need.
Some of what people "think" they need, as Lord Buddha had pointed out, are unrealistic, such as wanting someone to be with you all the time, to love you no matter what, to have the best of everything and anything, and to live a fulfilling life without any efforts to fulfil it meaningfully. Lord Buddha's suggestion may be too radical and too difficult to implement in real life. The French Enlightenment thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau, meanwhile, has a better suggestion that is, in fact, along the same line as Lord Buddha's.
Rousseau's idea is that the root of our desire for external objects (e.g., clothes, cars, jewelry) is the creation of an artificial superstructure that the people in power produce to keep those in a socio-economically inferior position in a perpetual stage of poverty. We don't and never ever need any of these, Rousseau has argued centuries ago (I'll return to this point in my next post on my take on the new -- and the only way of a good life -- thinking about life: minimalism).
The same goes with the notion of romantic love and family. Karl Marx, adding to Rousseau's claim, argues that we "love" because the powerful and economically superior people want us to think that it's a "good thing to love." By "wanting to love," we are reproducing more and more laborers to serve the economically powerful (God damn bastards, aren't they) -- and therefore chaining ourselves to the perpetual chains of inescapable slavery. We are worse than slaves, Marx argues, because we can't emancipate from this slavery.
As waged laborers, we have to get up to work -- because of our love for our spouse, parents, and kids. We work long hours to pay bills because we feel as though there's an aura of actuality that makes us feel that we do so because we are responsible for other the lives of those whom we think we love. According to Rousseau, those whom he calls the "noble savages" are the ones who are free from all of these superstructures.
They're freer than we are, and they're happier than we are, claims Rousseau. This superstructure makes the inferior class desire what they do not need. By constantly creating a series of unnecessary desires, the superior class is essentially putting the inferior class to work in pursuing desires that can never be completely fulfilled. Members of the inferior class are made slaves to the superfluous needs that the rich have created to keep them in check. We have too much and too high expectations and that is not natural.
It's by design. So, the takeaway, again, here: Don't expect too much from anyone and about anything. Most of our desires are not that necessary anyway, so why expect them? Why want them?
post Day 68: A Minimalist (or -ism) Manifesto Mon, 01 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Why all the sudden am I becoming a "minimalist?" (At least I'm hoping to become one). For one I am moving out of the city that I have been living in for three years and I cannot possibly take all my belongings that I have mindlessly accumulated over the past three years with me.
So, I am becoming a minimalist not only to manage my expectations and objects that I own but also to keep track of what "realistically" and practically matters to me. The real reason, however, is that I have recently realized, thanks to many of the failed relationship I have had with people, that the more doesn't mean the better. The more expectations you have, often, the more disappointments to which they lead.
There is a cost for maintaining everything, whether that be the financial cost or the cost of opportunity; say, how many great opportunities you have missed by keeping an unworthy person in your life? I have stuff kept in a storage that I have been paying money to rent, and I have never gone back to take them out and use them. I'm sure I'm not the only one who is doing this.
But since I have accumulated so much in that storage room, it's impossible to go there and to spend days sorting out what are there and what are there that are worth keeping and what are not.
It's like a lost and sunk cost which I will have to continue to pay until that one day (when I don't have a full-time job anymore, perhaps) during which I could and would have the time to go through my stuff and find the way to throw some of them away, once and for all. The same principle also applies to talking. Most of the problems we have, make no mistake about it, are results of ineffective communication.
Hence, the more we talk, the more we tend to make some kinds of mistakes that would make other misinterpret your intention, your point, your stance and things and therefore misunderstand you. So, it's better to keep everything in life to just a "bare minimum." Identifying what are not meaningful to your life, and what kinds of people are too selfish, sociopathic, and superficial will help you make a decision.
This blog post is timely one because the trend of being a minimalist is picking up steam, especially in Japan where not being a minimalist can cost you your life. In the country constantly hit by an earthquake, the more stuff that you own, you riskier for you to be buried under them when your house collapses because of when the earthquake strikes. Take this Japanese minimalist for example: Take Fumio Sasaki, for example (pictured below).
The 36-year-old book editor lives in a single-room apartment in Tokyo with three shirts, four pairs of pants, four pairs of socks, and a few other belongings. He wasn't always like this. The transformation to minimalism occurred two years ago, when Sasaki grew tired of trying to keep up with trends and maintaining his collections of books, CDs, and DVDs. He got rid of it all, which he says isn't as difficult as it seems, thanks to the sharing economy.
My suggestion is: Think minimalist; do it now and do it fast. You can't afford to wait to be a minimalist. Once you have started to look around you, carefully, you'll see that there are so many things, people, and matters that are extraneous to you life. They not only weighing you down but also holding you back. The sooner you can get rid of them, the faster your emotional engine will work at full speed.
I will get to the philosophy behind it at some point in this post, along with some indirect philosophical idea such as Marie Kondo's Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. What I want to say right now is that after having done so, quite rigorously, I have never felt better with my life. The trend of "minimalistic living" is not new.
In fact, it's quite old and this blog post is to give the best reasoning (ever, yes, ever) to convince us that going back to those ancient wisdom might be the way to get out of the troubles we have in the modern era.
While the Japanese and the Daoist are among the best known for this type of living in the east, the famous Cynics in Ancient Greek are the epitome of the so-called "bare minimum life." The Cynics, in fact, have taken the bare life idea to the extreme by famously living in a pot, and only wrapping themselves with used clots that other people did not need. The Theravada Buddhist monks, in essence, are supposed to have done the same.
These monks, in fact, are supposed to reuse the cloths wrapped around corpses in preparing for the cremation (once the bodies are unwrapped for the preparation for the cremation, the monks can take the clothes and re-use them as their clothing fabric), as, that way the monks are truly re-using both of form and essence of life.
The idea behind it is simple: The more things, relationships, and commitments that are floating around your life without any purposes, the more you're likely to be drawn away from understanding your true needs. The political philosopher Thomas Hobbes has made these belonging essential to his doctrine. According to Hobbes, we "lock our door at night" because we are afraid of people coming to you house and taking your properties, and hurting you in order to take your belongings.
Well, if you live like a Cynics, a Daoist, or a Buddhist monk, the chances that you won't have anything valuable that anyone would ever want to take from you is probably quite high. So, you'll a much better sense of your life and a peace of mind. As I have discussed, also, in my previous post, we don't need a lot of things to have a decent life.
All these desires -- for the tasty, beautiful, and lustful things -- are temptations to divert our attention from the reality; to make us not living in the moment. When you are not living in the moment, it might be sound to say that you might not be living at all. In the words of the talented John Lennon, "life is what we live when we are not busy doing other things." That is to say, these unnecessary things are, essentially, distractions.
Tasty food distracts you from the essence of food which is nutrition. Beauty distracts you from the essence of relationship which is compassion. Money distracts you from what you really want which is a healthy life that provides you with the ample ground to thrive for the betterment th society. You get the idea. I personally disdain the sweet desert, beautiful faces and bodies (especially cosmetic), and money, for that reason.
Think of yourself, for instance, opening a closet just to find out that you have more than ten sets of dresses of shirts from which to choose. You're likely to spend a lot it time finding the right match for the day. Sometimes, you might even antagonize over the abundance of choices. Most of the time, that is to say, the more doesn't lead to better time management. Truth be told: the more sometimes doesn't lead to the effective pairing of clothes neither.
This conundrum is precisely what leads many people living in the contemporary society to think, "wouldn't it be nice if there is only one 'perfect' dress or shirt in the closet instead of ten?" This notion of, what the renowned psychologist Barry Schwartz calls, "the paradox of choice" is the emotional underpinning of the real need to cut down on unnecessary consumption.
This very idea can be related to the notion of constructed desire that I have discussed in the previous post (just to recap here: we have so many desires that are given to us by the society). The idea of having "a closet full of dresses or shirts," for example, is also one of those constructed desires.
The society, by ways of consumerism, wants us to consume, consume, and consume, by shaming us to believe that wearing the same dress or shirt every day is a symbol of economic lack, anachronism, and the shortage of financial capital to pursue a variety of available forms of aesthetic representations. But why should that matter? Even in the innovation field, the idea of going out there to learn to live like the "not have" could essentially become a true source of innovation.
In the book The Ten Faces of Innovation, Tom Kelly of IDEO, a world-renowned creative consultancy, writes about how IDEO has been able to come up with so many cutting edge ideas simply by taking away the luxury of life. It's easy to not seeing any problems when you are surrounded by objects that are providing you with convenience. "Try to live without a computer for one day and you'll realize that there're many other ways to receiving news," Kelly writes. That's true.
It's very unlikely for anyone to be able to think about anything creative if being surrounded only be convenience. There would no discontents to think about, no problems to solve, and no design questions to tackle. Innovation is about creating something that is new and effective -- and innovators usually think about something new and innovative when they have to live with the old objects/ideas/services by which they feel discontent.
In my own experience of working as an architect, the best way to learn what is needed to be built is to live like the people for whom we're building. For instance, when we're building a housing community in a remote area, we'd decided to spend two weeks with the local, living like them to understand their basic needs. In that community, the locals didn't have running water and electricity, so they're living a very different kind of life to which I wax acquainted.
It's a minimalism from a different perspective. The locals got up in the morning when the sun came up and did everything for which they needed the power of the sun to do before going to bed once the sun had come down. This way of life got me thinking about the design that would fit their needs and benefit them rather than me because, at the end of the day, they're the ones who would be living in the architecture that I would create.
"Scarcity is the mother of all innovation," Tom Kelly has provided an example: To create something new, you may have to take something away. For example, MTV does what they call "deprivation studies," where they get their most frequent viewers to go "cold turkey" (the abrupt and complete stopping) for thirty days of no MTV, just to see what clever alternatives they come up with. So try your own version of scarcity. That is, want to learn about sustainable food consumption?
Try to limit yourself to a small budget per day for food and you'll realize your physical need and the value of money that could fulfill such need.Want to learn about the importance of physical communication? Try to live without a cellphone for a week would do the trick. "Not having enough makes you realize not only the beauty of what you already have, but also the problems that you can use design thinking to tackle," Kelly writes.
He calls those who are good at "doing more with less" (whom I'd call "minimalists") "hurdlers," as they love to turn lemons into lemonade. "Give them a constraint, a tight deadline, a small budget, and they're likely to excel," Kelly also writes. I am determined, in the next 3 weeks, to get rid of 90% of "stuff" in my current room, and two-thirds of people with whom I no longer want to be in touch.
I am also determined to let go of the collections of feelings that are hurting my soul -- the feeling of having a burden of having to care for others who do not care about me, as well as the weight of having to maintain relationships with are no longer fruitful. I believe that this would be a solid step toward a "bare minimum life," in which I could eventually get to live it.
[gallery ids="4997,4996,4995" type="rectangular"] Let me end this post with the best description of minimalism by no one else except the legendary fictional detective Sherlock Holmes in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's first book A Study in Scarlet where Holmes responded the following to his pal Watson when asked what does Holmes' understanding of what he thinks he needs to know: I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose.
A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic.
He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.
post Day 69: The Herzfeld's Rules Part 2 Tue, 02 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000 In this post, I'd like to introduce some more titbits of the Herzfeld's Rules. I have learned over the years from the man himself that some of these mistakes do have an impact on how you are perceived by your colleagues and superiors. As one anonymous person once said: "Grammar is what about knowing the difference between your shit and you're shit." I could not agree more.
In fact, also over the years, I have learned the joy of learning about grammar, especially syntax or the arrangement of words and phrases to create well-formed sentences. Syntax, a topic elaborated in beautiful and great detail by the linguist Noam Chomsky in the classic Syntactic Structure (published in 1957), is definitely a topic that I would like to write more about, but it's a topic for another time. I'd like to suggest, in this post, an additional 12 easy-to-remember and easy-to-practice rules. Now, let's get right into it.
First (and just that, not Firstly) when you feel the urge of using "scare quotes," (or "air quotes" when you make a gesture with your fingers in the air as though there's a pair of quotation marks around the word you're saying) ask yourself: do you really "need" it? Scare quotes could mislead your readers to think that you are being sarcastic when you might just well be honest. Over the years, I have seen excessive uses of scare quotes.
#It's #almost #as #annoying #as #seeing #excessive #use #of #hastags (#). Only use scare quotes when you want to draw attention to an inaccurate use of a word, or when you are quoting someone directly. Scare quotes, in these two cases, indicates the idea that you are being sarcastic, or that which is not your words. You'd absolutely need it when you are quoting an offensive term used by others to tell your audience that it isn't you who had said it.
The misuse of scare quotes could easily lead to your audience thinking of you as being uncertain about the complexity of the meaning of the world around which you put the scare quotes, and, the worst of all, being "simple-minded" for not knowing that doing so could lessen the credential of your claim. By the way, you should know by now that the scare quotes around "simple-minded" aren't actually needed. Second, use "due to" only as an adjective and not as a conjunction.
So, "it was due to the rain that I come late" and not "it came late due to the rain." In the second example, use "because" (a beautiful and probably the most useful conjunction) or "owing to." This is not a matter only obsessed with by a grammarian, but a matter that those with the astute logic of the sequence of actions could make use of in making their expression clearer and, usually, more meaningful. Third: This is one of my favorite: Fewer/less.
Although many grammarians have all agreed that we could be chilled out about this -- both works as long as the core of the message about the quantity is clear -- it's still good to be able to know the distinction between these two adjectives. Why? Because it had made Stannis Baratheon "the One True King"!
Yes, I am talking about (***spoiler alert for those who have not seen but planned to see Game of Thrones -- skip this part immediately; knowing the difference between fewer and less doesn't worth being spoiled of the joy of watching the show uncontaminated). What's the fuzz here? Educated people (like Stannis) would know that we must use the determiner fewer, not less, with numbers of individual items or people.
So, yes, he's right to correct Yarwyck that the correct locution was "fewer enemies" and not "less enemies" -- because it's about the numbers of the individuals to be killed rather than a group of an uncountable noun for which less is appropriate.
For instance, "less than £200," "less than 700 tonnes of oil," "less than a third," and "less than 5 minutes," because, according to The Economist's Style Guide, "these are measured quantities or proportions, not individual items." Fourth, avoid saying "of course" and "needless to say" when you are not sure that everyone would agree with that you that there's no other way of thinking about it. It's better to not use them altogether.
Usually, the proper use of them is when you need to occasionally give your prose a personal tone. Fifth, indecisive singular gendered pronouns are ugly. In the words of the great anthropologist Sir Edmund Leach writes in his classic Social Anthropology published in 1982: Humankind is male/female, betwixt and between. However, the English language faily consistently treats "unmarked" nouns as male rather than female.
Ordinarily this does not matter but a male anthropologist, writing in the 1980, risks his neck with feminist colleagues if he implies, even by oversight, that either the anthropological observer or the individual who is observed is more likely to be male than female. But I must risk it A text whch is excessively literred with "he(she)," "him(her)," expressions becomes unreable. And anyway, why not "she(he)?" I fairly stick to male pronouncs for unmarked category nouns. I should not on that account be rated as a male chauvinist pig.
It's also violating Bill Strunk's "omit needless words" rule. I am talking about the use of "he or she," "him or her" and "his or hers" in a sentence. Turn them into a plural pronoun.
So, instead of "each student needs to think about his or her need," instead say "students need to think about their needs." If you absolutely need to use a gendered pronoun, the rule of thumb is to use the male pronoun for a neutral matter (or whatever you are not sure of whether or not it is a good or bad thing), so "each student needs to think independently about his individual and personal need." And use a female pronoun for the matter that is absolutely more good than bad; for instance, "a great philosopher is consistent with her own words." It has recently been acceptable to use "they" as a singular generic personal pronoun, although it may seem a bit counterintuitive as "they," as we all know, is a plural pronoun.
So, the advice given by Grammar Girl (my frequent source of knowledge about the topic and one of my favorite podcasts) is to use"he or she" if you want to play it safe, or use "they" -- if you feel bold and are prepared to defend yourself. Sixth, try to not putting anything between the "to" and the verb that follows.
The fancy name for this verb form is "infinitive." We use this kind of verb form all the time, such as "to go," "to play," "to drink," and so on. If you have an adverb that you would like to put before the verb (which, commonsensically, is the most appropriate place to place an adverb) put them after the verb instead.
So, instead of "to actively play soccer," instead say "to play soccer actively." Many grammarians and language specialists have debunked that this act of "splitting infinitive" is not a crime and the original of the myth that infinitive shall never be splitter comes from the mistranslation of a Latin grammar rule into that of the English language, i.e., verbs in Latin are all one word so by default one can never split an infinite in Latin.
Avoiding placing anything before the verb helps to remind the reader what is it that they are being told, as sometimes the adverb can be very long, such as, "I like to occasionally and sometimes thoughtlessly though not that intentionally play soccer." By the time one gets to the verb play, the meaning of this sentence has already been lost. Seventh, avoid using a foreign word when an English word can do the job -- and 99% of the time that which is the case.
It just gives the sense of pomposity. So, say "blank slate" instead of "a tabula rasa." Say "masterpiece," and not "magnum opus." Say "existing condition," and not "status quo." Eighth, avoid using idioms that you do not know the origin of -- because sometimes people can be sensitive about it. It's easy to hear something that sounds "kind of cool" from the television and want to use it in real life right away. Look it up first, and make sure that you really know what it means.
I have met a number of people who use "lo and behold" in lieu of "surprisingly," which is the opposite meaning of it. Someone I happen to know use "if you're up for it" as lieu of "if you would like to" without knowing that the former implies, also, a challenging tone which is not her intention. Ninth, "like," in addition to being a verb (as in "I like soccer") and a noun (as in "the like") is a preposition and not a conjunction.
So, "I feel like having a drink now" is wrong because a proposition can only govern (be followed by) a noun; hence, instead, say "I feel like drinking" (or "I feel as though I'd like to have a drink now").
"Drinking" here is a grammatical element that looks like a participle ( a word formed from a verb, such as running, jumping, standing) but is actually a noun (surprise), so "drinking" -- and an act concerning how a person take a liquid into the mouth and swallow) is a noun and therefore can be governed by the preposition "like." Most of the time "as though" and "as if" are interchangeable, so you could substitute them to give your prose a variety.
That said, "I want to have a drink now" might also do the trick. Many are saying "like" all the time these days without knowing what its linguistic function is (especially teenagers). We would call this wrong use of "like" a verbal tic. (if you don't remember what it is anymore, please visit the Herzfeld's Rule Part 1 ). Tenth, still on the common mistake with gerunds.
"Gerunds are nouns" -- say this mantra as many as times as it'd take for it to wrap around your nervous system -- and therefore should never be preceded by a personal pronoun. For instance, "I was awoken by him snoring" is wrong, and it should be "I was awoken by his snoring." Eleventh, think twice before using "zombie nouns." The linguist Helen Sword has coined the term to explain the kind of n ouns formed from other parts of speech.
In The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century, Stephen Pinker explains: " The nominalization rule takes a perfectly spry verb and embalms it into a lifeless noun by adding a suffix like –ance, –ment, –ation, or –ing." For instance, instead of "he intensifies the situation," writers who use zombie nouns would instead write "there is a manifestation of the intensification of the situation. "This way of turning parts of speech into nouns has a linguistic jargon: the nominalization.
Helen Sword writes: Academics love using zombie nouns; so do lawyers, bureaucrats and business writers. I call them "zombie nouns" because they cannibalize active verbs, suck the lifeblood from adjectives and substitute abstract entities for human beings. That's pretty damn harsh! In The Sense of Style (again, one of my favorite book): Stephen Pinker is no less harsh: Zombie nouns lumber across the scene without a conscious agent directing their motion.21 They can turn prose into a night of the living dead.
Don't let nouns like that sucking lifeblood from adjectives! So, instead of thinking nominalized nouns, think what exactly you would like to say. It may seem cooler to say "my current introspection of my physicality is imposing a sanction on the optimization of my verbalization of contestation, than simply "I'm too hungry to say anything now," but we all know which one better convey the message.
As Bill Strunk (again) has reminded us: "Write with nouns and verbs." Finally, Restrain yourself from the temptation to write long sentences and from using "weak verbs": Think of Ernest Hemingway and his writing style. What makes it so profound is that, first, his sentences are always short. And how do you make short sentences meaningful? Hemingway also has an answer for you: Think active verbs that connect the subject with the rest of the sentence.
Is/am/are is a weak verb because it doesn't say much about the action that the subject is engaging let alone how such an action affects the situation. Psychological speaking, as Steven Pinker has pointed out, we have a limited cognitive capacity to understand the linearity of the contents provided to us in a form of verbal communication. The more you remove the main idea from the subject, the less likely your audience will get the gist of what you are trying to convey.
The weaker the verb that you use, the more likely your audience will misinterpret your meaning. For instance, "an old man lives by the sea" is better than "there is an old man whose life and livelihood is depending on his residing by the seaside, therefore he is living close to the sea." All for now, have a great (for some, the rest of the) weekend, guys!
A Nonism Dictionary