Musings

For me, the phrase, "just do it" is almost synonymous with Nike. I'm not sure if this is a good or bad thing, but I must admit that it has made me completely numb to the phrase over the past five years. So numb that even when I hear the phrase in its appropriate context, removed from anything Nike-related, I just think of Nike and it has little to no effect on me. While this may seem like a super random introduction, pretty removed from the title of this post, it isn't. Doing is hard. Doing is so difficult that oftentimes people hold themselves back from achieving the things they want to accomplish simply because they don't do .  Honestly, I can relate to this more than I'd like to admit. Most of the time when we have something that we want to do, what keeps us from starting it is our belief about what might happen if we were to do it. The potential consequences. These consequences might include judgment, wasting money and time, and just being bad at the thing

Introduction: The rise of Andrew Tate and his swift acceptance by the Muslim community made two disturbing realities shockingly clear to me. One, much of the world, but specifically the Muslim community (Sunnis and Shias) hold shockingly anti-women views and are relatively uneducated about what the religion actually says in regard to women (more on this later). And two, and the topic of this particular post, how I’ve seemed to notice a strange trend of Islamic commodification. Before I continue, like any essayist worth their salt, first, I must define terms. On Commodification: What I mean by commodification is the act of transforming something, be it a value, idea, person, or service into an object of trade and exchange. Commodification is a phenomenon that many are familiar with. It happens with athletes and models, and probably, at least to some extent, is unavoidable with most things in market society as we know it today. In the age of social media, knowledge is becoming more and m