who will give you a lesson about growing up, moral resignation, social values, norms, ego, self-betrayal and ultimately encouraging your dream (if i get the right message) at the same time? not your parents i reckon, nor your daily newspaper reading, then probably that can only be your philosophy teachers. but not really, he is dayo wong, or known as wong zhi-wah, in his recent stand-up comedy.
it’s quite a joyful thought to only think that he speaks of the term 哲學 several times to a group of people whom don’t seems to hear such term normally. just think about yourself, who will ask you in office “shall we talk about philosophy today?” what i encountered most was “what were your major?” “Philosophy” … and dead air arrived instantly. He, as a philosophy graduated too, tries to simplify those hard topics by using daily examples for easy understanding. i indeed quite appreciate such effort, it is no easy job at all to give people lesson but mask it as not. cos people might just want a laugh, but not listening to all the hard & vague stuff, so he has to take the balance, and he did it well enough. And if people think about what he really wants to express, he is succeed in his own way.
i was most impressed by the second part of the show that he talked about self-betrayal. it is quite easy to related to. our own betrayer is always here with us, for whatever reasons, we listen to what s/he told us. that might just be the mixture of those social norms and at the same time, the darkness of one’s heart. it seems like we have no solution for such betrayal happening, but dayo did offer us two pills to choose for at the end. thankful, i am quite happy after that (oh just as the name of the show!).
something lost, nothing gained 