Reflections on Destiny

This year, I found myself watching Paolo Sorrentino’s film Parthenope on a continuous loop.

Set in Naples, a city bathed in the eternal, golden light of the Mediterranean, the film follows the lifelong journey of its protagonist, Parthenope. Named after the city’s ancient Greek siren, her life quietly drifts through youth, ageing, beauty, devastating loss, and the endless search for meaning.

Whenever the film’s theme song, “ Era già tutto previsto” (Everything Was Already Foreseen) by Riccardo Cocciante, begins to play, his raspy, raw voice fills the room:

“Era già tutto previsto...”

Everything was already foreseen, even the end of all this was expected.

There is a cruel sort of tenderness hidden in those words. It sounds like someone standing on the distant shore of time, looking back at their entire life and sighing. That melody captures a beautiful, tragic sense of surrender. It is the exact feeling I have been chewing on all year: the profound sense of destiny (宿命感).

It is the sensation of sprinting forward with all your might, only to hear the faint, metallic grinding of gears turning high above your head. You believe you are making monumental, independent choices, but in reality, you are merely turning a pre-written page in a script that was finished long ago.

Looking back at my own wandering path, from New Zealand to the United Kingdom and to Portugal, I realise that my cherished “free will” has always been gently but firmly guided by an invisible hand.

My journey to find a home in the most isolated island nation in the Southern Hemisphere was built on a series of absurd, almost impossible coincidences.

Fresh out of university, I faced the ultimate dilemma of every international student: Should I go home, or should I stay? Visa policies were shifting like quicksand, and finding a job felt virtually impossible. My logical brain was working overtime, frantically calculating variables: What are the job match rates for my major? How many months of savin…