Punch, the abandoned Japanese Macaque, and what his Story reveals about the Need for Love
What happens when love isn’t returned and why choosing yourself is the quietest form of strength.
We don’t seek love because we are weak; we crave it because without love, even strength feels empty.
A little Punch lives inside each one of us, one that needs love to feel whole.
But just like Punch, sometimes love does not arrive easily.
It does not choose us.
It does not knock at our door even when we are waiting with open arms to welcome it.
And here we sit in our loneliness, quietly trying to conceal it, as if our hearts know, the world will see us as weak.
So, we put on a SHOW.
A show of strength, pretending the void does not shake us.
We may cry on the inside, but on the outside, we want to be seen as someone who is unshakable.
In this wild pursuit of carrying loneliness within us without the world labeling us as alone, we hide our need for love, our desire to express it, our innate dependence on love to feel happy.
We begin to live as two selves.
But Punch did not mask himself.
He did not hide his emotions; instead, he expressed them openly and without apology.
He did not shy away from being seen as someone who needed love.
Punch: Japan’s abandoned baby Macaque
Recently, a story from a zoo in Japan went viral.
Punch, a Japanese Macaque born in July 2025 at Ichikawa City Zoo was abandoned by his mother due to exhaustion from her first birth in the heat of summer.
This has made the internet well up with tears. Right after his birth, the zookeepers took charge of raising him by hand.
While taking on this responsibility, they brought in an orangutan plush toy—a stuffed animal meant to comfort Punch during his initial days, when all he needed was love, warmth, and his mother’s fur to cling to.
They made it a substitute for his mother’s emotional support.
Over time, Punch formed an attachment to the orangutan plush toy and found comfort in it, as though it were a surrogate mother.
Initially, the other monkeys in the zoo were wary of Punch, and he faced constant othering whenever he approached or came close to them.
This indifference from the other monkeys led him to choose the orangutan every time; as a result, he could not let go of the stuffed animal.
There were clips shared online in which Punch appeared like an outcast, being bullied by fellow and adult monkeys.
In many of them, he was seen running with his orangutan, finding a corner where he would curl around it and snuggle.
These clips emanated a deep desire to be loved. Viewers not only connected with Punch’s attempt to find love but were also deeply moved by the emotion behind it.
Later, more videos were shared online, showing how Punch slowly acclimatized to the environment and gradually made new friends. He began to connect with other monkeys, and they, too, slowly started accepting him.
One little monkey moved the whole world emotionally.
While Punch’s emotion moved millions, the hashtag #HangInTherePunch became viral.
Punch gave us a reality check that emotions are among the most important things in the world.
He reminded us that belonging, hugs, warmth, love are what keep the world going, they are what make everything else possible.
Punch Didn’t Kill His Need for Love
Punch needed love more than anything else and when he found, love did not come easy, he did not kill his need for it.
Because it was hard to find, it did not lead him to abandon it.
Despite being abandoned by his mother right after birth and not being accepted by the other monkeys, he did not become cold or indifferent.
He did not indulge in any filthy row with the troop even when he was bullied.
He did not attack, instead he chose something more powerful, something that demanded courage.
He chose to nurture his need for love by playing with and hugging the orangutan plush toy.
He did not let his situation abandon his emotions or his need for love.
When he didn’t receive love from others, he replaced it with a stuffed animal toy.
On the surface, it looked like an ordinary gesture – to play with a toy, but deep down it had a huge lesson for all of us.
When the world fails to love you, don’t let the love inside you die.
Punch did not just play with plush toy; he saw it as someone who loved him back and this made him fuller in love.
He found a place where love could grow, even if it did not come from others.
It’s a moment to reflect on.
Punch could have become bitter in this harsh environment, but because he saw a companion in the stuffed toy, it helped him preserve the love he was born with.
Choosing Love in a World That Trains You to Abandon It
At some point in life, we all carry a little Punch within us.
When we feel out of place in the world, unloved, or betrayed by others, it becomes harder to choose love, nurture it, and continue believing in it.
When we face bitterness, we start to see love as an emotion that weakens us or even destroys us. Sometimes we bury it deep inside and put on a mask to face the world.
But in doing so, we don’t truly become powerful, we simply live in fear of being exposed.
Our need for love can never be extinguished; at most, we create a façade and live in the delusion that we have overcome it.
No matter how the world treats us, our desire to be loved can never die.
The mask no matter how confident and independent it makes us appear, slowly churns inside us.
We become a performance, outwardly composed yet constantly rehearsing to keep our desire hidden.
But when you choose love in a world that trains you to abandon it, it isn’t a sign of weakness, it is an act of rebellion.
Those who become aware that love serves us more than anything else in the world will see the act of abandoning it as their biggest loss.
Choosing love doesn’t require the world’s permission; it is what sustains us, even when the world refuses to.
Love, like oxygen, is not a choice—it is something our soul cannot live without, even when the world withholds it.
Once we choose love from a place of awareness where we embody it as naturally as we breathe, we experience a profound shift in how we perceive the world.
The fact that love may not come from the world should never make us abandon it within ourselves.
The Absence of Love Is a Call to Choose Yourself
May be Punch was abandoned so that he could choose himself and in doing so, give the world a message: the absence of love is a call to choose yourself.
Perhaps Punch’s story was trying to punch us in our face for those moments when we abandoned ourselves just because someone else did not choose us.
It serves as a reminder: sometimes, we need to teach ourselves not to wait for love to come and soothe us, but to pour it into ourselves, by ourselves.
We fail to live in the truth that the source of love is never outside in the world; it is right here within us—a place we seldom explore because we are too busy searching for it where it runs dry.
So when love is blocked from the outside, perhaps it is simply giving us time to be with ourselves,
to find love within, to choose ourselves, and to connect with the true source of love.
External Love Comforts Us — But Inner Love Liberates Us
If Punch had received his mother’s care and the love of his fellow monkeys, it’s true he might not have experienced the sadness and loneliness.
But what he would have missed is discovering the love within himself.
The moment he realized external love was missing, he turned inward, toward the orangutan plush toy and began to cultivate love within himself. This not only liberated him but also made others choose him, because they no longer saw him as needy.
When Punch became the embodiment of love, swinging in joy with his little stuffed animal, the other monkeys no longer saw him as a threat or an outsider.
They came close, not out of mercy, but because they felt in Punch something that was also within themselves—Love.
When self-love became loud and visible, acceptance came effortlessly and instantly.
This applies to humans as well.
When we chase love, seek it in the world outside, we give a signal that we are incapable of loving ourselves, that we need someone to take responsibility for our happiness and make us feel loved.
Sometimes this neediness elicits compassion from others; other times, it signals a sense of burden.
When it signals burden, others feel repelled and, instead of returning love, they move away.
We then have no choice but to choose ourselves, to look within and create a love that stays, builds, and liberates us.
When our neediness elicits compassion from others, it feels wonderful and comforting but it isn’t guaranteed, and it does not promise to last forever. In this way, our joy in external love always rests on uncertainty.
People might change, relationships might go through rough phases, and bonds might falter. In those moments, we feel tripped.
What once felt comforting suddenly becomes a painful space to inhabit.
Not because they changed, but because we made them our source of love and now, as it runs dry, we are left feeling abandoned and unloved.
In both scenarios, what truly frees us is INNER LOVE.
Once we choose to embody love rather than treat it as a transaction, we become a source of it, one that no external entity can take away.
Inner love is liberation because it does not deform us in the name of love.
When the world failed to love Punch, he loved himself enough that his liberation through self-love attracted even more love.
Let this sink in and serve as a reminder:
Lead life not from needing love, but from embodying it.
True liberation is becoming so full of love that the world cannot help but be drawn to it.
