You’ve heard the advice.

“In the age of AI, don’t compete with AI on efficiency.” “Make things with a human touch — that’s the advantage AI can’t replace.” “Learn to share your personal experiences, your emotions, your unique perspective — that’s your moat.”

Sounds reasonable. Sounds right, even.

But something quietly unsettles you. You can’t say what.

Let me start with something real.

AI is genuinely changing things. Big companies are cutting headcount. Certain jobs are disappearing. Finding work is getting harder. That pressure is real — not an overreaction, not imagined.

Any conversation that sidesteps this is just noise.

But precisely because the pressure is real, what comes next is worth pausing for.

The “human touch” logic does something quietly strange.

It starts from an assumption: AI is a threat, people need to find their place, prove their value, secure a position in this competition.

Then it hands you an answer: analyze what the human touch is, cultivate it, output it, use it to build your irreplaceability.

Sounds reasonable. But think it through:

Is the human touch something that needs to be analyzed — and then acquired?

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When someone is genuinely curious about something, genuinely stuck on a problem, genuinely sad, genuinely excited — isn’t that something people already have? Does it need to be learned? Cultivated? Optimized before it can be expressed?

When you sit down and seriously analyze “how do I add more human touch to my content” —

that analysis itself is already a completely mechanical way of thinking.

You’re using an efficiency logic, a competition logic, an optimization logic — to handle something that is, by its nature, opposed to all of those.

The result is that the “human touch” you produce is designed human touch. Analyzed human touch. Optimized human touch.

Which may be the least human thing of all.

There’s a deeper problem.

That logic pulls you into a race — AI on one side, you on the other, and you need to find your edge and hold your ground.

But who set the rules of this race?

Not AI.

The rules were set by the logic of efficiency above all else — everything measurable, replicable, scalable.

And the people now teaching you to “preserve your human touch” are using exactly that same logic — turning human touch into an analyzable skill, an acquirable advantage, an outputtable product.

You’re working frantically to find your place inside this logic. And as you search, the way you think about things starts to look more and more like the very thing you thought you were resisting.

You haven’t stepped outside the race.

You’ve just switched lanes and kept running.

I’m not saying don’t use AI. I’m not saying the anxiety about AI is manufactured.

I’m saying that precisely because the pressure is real, this logic is more dangerous than it looks.

It appears when you’re most anxious. It gives you an answer that sounds reasonable. It makes you feel like you’re responding actively, thinking seriously, finding a way forward.

But it quietly does one thing:

It gets you to redefine yourself using AI’s logic.

The human touch isn’t something that needs to be recovered.

It’s already there. It’s there when you’re genuinely confused about something. When you say something you didn’t know you were going to say. When you make a decision you can’t fully explain but know is right.

Those moments don’t need to be analyzed, optimized, or packaged into a competitive advantage.

They only need to be noticed.

And that noticing — that’s where this actually begins.

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That morning, my hand was already reaching.

Not a decision I made — it was already moving before I was fully awake. The phone was right there on the nightstand. The screen lit up. A video started playing — either the one I’d fallen asleep to, or one the algorithm had picked for me in the night. I couldn’t tell.

The delivery app was already open. I’d ordered lunch before nine in the morning.

That day, I didn’t “decide” anything. My body handled everything for me.

Growing up, I’d see it on TV — families in the countryside keeping pigs. Early in the morning, someone carries a bucket over, pours the feed into the trough with a splash. The pig hears the sound and walks over. Head goes down. Eating begins.

That movement isn’t a decision the pig makes. It’s what the pig’s body has been trained to do. Hear the sound, walk over, eat.

That morning, lying in bed, my hand already reaching —

I thought of that pig. And then I thought: structurally, there is no difference between that pig and me.

The word “livestock” isn’t flattering. But I couldn’t find a more accurate one.

Think deeper, though, and it gets more complicated than I first assumed.

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You might think there’s still someone in control — the person pouring the feed. The platform founders. The engineers writing the algorithms. The capital sitting in the back, counting. They hold the shovel. We’re at the trough.

But the algorithm doesn’t filter for “this makes people happy.” It filters for “this makes people stay.” Anger produces the longest retention. So anger got optimized in. Nobody decided to make you angry — the system followed its own logic and grew that result.

And the person holding the shovel? They’re being pushed by growth metrics, by investors, by the logic of *this quarter must be better than last quarter.* They hold the shovel, but someone is guiding their hand. Go looking for that someone, and they’re being pushed by something too.

There is no farmer.

But everyone is at the trough.

Including the one you thought was holding the shovel.

Then there’s the layer that’s hardest to sit with.

The pig doesn’t know it’s being kept.

I know.

And yet that morning, my hand was already reaching.

Which means I’m not only the pig at the trough — I’m also feeding the system. Every second I stay, the system gets another second of fuel. My attention, my emotions, that small flicker of irritation — all of it is what the machine runs on.

There used to be a clear distinction: livestock were the means, people were the end.

Now, most people have become means for a system that nobody designed — but that everyone participates in sustaining.

Somewhere that afternoon, it hit me:

An entire day had passed. I’d ridden the emotional rollercoaster through several loops. I’d eaten the delivery food. I’d watched the videos. What had stayed?

In that moment, I felt something specific — a mild, physical nausea.

Not because the food was bad. Not because the videos weren’t entertaining enough.

Because I’d suddenly seen the structure.

And then the nausea came.

But here is the one fundamental difference between livestock and people:

Livestock don’t feel disgust.

That nausea was something in me the system can’t reach. It can feed your body, feed your emotions, keep you at the trough all day — but it cannot feed the thing that suddenly feels sick.

That thing doesn’t survive on being fed.

Have you ever been doing something — and somewhere in the middle of it, you looked up and two hours had gone by? Not because of anything you scrolled through. Because of the thing itself. Your phone was dark. Nobody was waiting for your reaction. There was no next thing queued up. Just you and what you were doing.

Those two hours, the system got nothing.

Not because you resisted anything. Because you were somewhere else.

Somewhere the system can’t find you.

That morning, my hand reached before my mind did.

That afternoon, the nausea arrived before my mind did too.

Both of those things are real.

Both of them are you.

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A few times, I’ve sat down and started working on something.

Writing an essay, studying photography, stumbling through an unfamiliar language.

Then I looked up and several hours had passed.

What I felt in that moment wasn’t tiredness. It was a quiet kind of satisfaction — not the satisfaction of having finished something, but something else, stiller. As if those hours were already their own answer, without needing to point anywhere else.

I found out later that this state has a few popular names. The names don’t matter. What matters is that it was the first time I discovered:

Work doesn’t have to be for something else.

Before that, I only understood work in two ways.

The first was survival. You work because you need money, food, a way to keep going. This logic is the most honest — and the heaviest.

The second was desire. You work because you want more — a better life, a higher position, a larger reach. This desire is sometimes your own. More often, it’s been carefully engineered and dangled in front of you.

Both of these share the same structure: work is a means. The point is somewhere else.

Now doesn’t matter; later does. Process doesn’t matter; results do. The thing you’re doing doesn’t matter — only what it can be exchanged for does.

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This logic was so obvious to me that I never questioned it. No one taught it to me on a particular day. It was in the air — in every “what do you want to be when you grow up,” in every goal-setting spreadsheet. I breathed it in and ran on it for years.

Until those moments of looking up.

For the first time, I felt what it was like for work to not point outward at all — to be complete while it was still happening.

The only comparison I could find for that feeling:

Waking up, suddenly, from a long stretch of autopilot.

But I want to say something more complicated.

There’s a very common objection to this, and I think it’s real — it can’t be sidestepped:

*”Easy for you to say. Work becoming its own purpose is a luxury for people without financial pressure. Some of us have a mortgage. Don’t talk to me about deep work.”*

I can’t argue against this. I haven’t lived under genuine, crushing survival pressure. I have no standing to tell someone fighting to survive how they ought to approach their work.

But I’ve noticed something that makes me think this isn’t quite as simple as it seems:

Some people, once the survival pressure genuinely lifts, still can’t get there.

The conditions changed, but the logic — *work is only a means* — didn’t. They have room now, but the room gets filled with bigger goals, more ambition. The experience of being absorbed in the work itself never arrives.

And some people, in genuinely difficult circumstances, still find their way into that state.

Not because conditions are good. Because they happen to be doing something they actually want to do — something they’re not yet sure they can pull off. And then the state just comes, uninvited.

These two kinds of people, side by side, point to something:

What’s blocking you might not be external conditions. It might be the logic itself — work is only a means — which arrived earlier than any financial pressure, went deeper, and is much harder to see.

Survival pressure is real. But sometimes it’s just the most convenient reason not to face a harder question.

That harder question is this:

When was the last time you did something you weren’t sure you could do?

Not something you’re good at. Not something you can count on. Not something that would make the numbers look better.

Something still at your edge — where you didn’t know yet if you were capable — where you’d lose track of time in the middle of it.

If you can’t remember —

Maybe the problem isn’t that you lack focus, discipline, or effort.

Maybe it’s that you haven’t stood at your own edge in a long time.

And that edge is where the state actually happens.

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My family’s grave is on a mountain.

Not a maintained trail — a genuinely difficult one. No steps, no handrails, overgrown with grass. We have to go once a year, and if we don’t, the path disappears. Literally disappears — swallowed by vegetation, until even knowing where it was becomes uncertain.

So we go every year. Not only to tend the grave, but to walk the path again — to keep it from ceasing to exist.

Then the town developed. The older members of my family moved into apartment buildings, one by one. Elevators. Smooth tile floors. Roads right outside the door.

A few years later, at a Lunar New Year gathering, I noticed that several of them could no longer make it up the mountain.

Not because of illness. Not because of any accident.

Because the roads had been too flat, for too long.

City roads keep getting better.

Smooth, even, accessible. Elevators where there are slopes, escalators where there are stairs, and where stairs remain, they’re perfectly uniform. We call this development. Progress. Making life easier for people.

None of that is wrong.

But something goes unsaid:

The resistance that was removed — it had been a form of connection all along.

My relatives’ legs didn’t fail because of age. They failed because the relationship between those legs and that mountain path had been interrupted long enough that both sides quietly atrophied. The path, unwalked, disappeared. The legs, unused in that particular way, did the same.

These are the same thing.

Once, planning a trip abroad, I deliberately excluded every English-speaking country from consideration. I ended up choosing Russia.

The reason was simple: going somewhere I could speak the language felt too easy.

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Shared language, familiar cultural logic, an exit route available whenever things got hard — that kind of place would let me feel like I’d never really left. And leaving wasn’t the point if I was just going to continue my existing life in a different location.

Russia was difficult. The language was impenetrable. The culture was completely foreign. Every day required effort.

But the effort meant I was genuinely *in* that place, not gliding through it.

Every day drew on things in me that normally go unused. That feeling wasn’t suffering — it was a very real sense of being present.

I’ve come to think these two things share the same structure.

My relatives climbing the mountain each year weren’t only tending graves. They were maintaining a relationship with their own bodies, with the ground beneath their feet. That path was a thread connecting them to themselves.

When the thread was cut, no one felt it. The elevator was convenient. The tile was smooth. Nothing seemed wrong.

Until that New Year, when the legs didn’t cooperate.

Modern life is exceptionally good at one particular thing:

Removing friction, layer by layer, under the name of *doing good.*

Smoothing the road — for your benefit. Installing the elevator — for your benefit. Navigation replacing the ability to find your way, delivery replacing cooking, algorithms replacing choosing — each substitution, taken alone, is reasonable. Convenient. An improvement.

But what gets substituted away isn’t only inconvenience.

Some of it is the way you stay connected to your own body. Some of it is the friction between you and real life — and that friction, precisely, is what lets you know you’re still in it.

The friction disappears, and you don’t feel it go.

Just as no one felt anything wrong the moment my relatives stepped into the elevator.

I’m not saying live with difficulty for its own sake. Convenience isn’t the problem.

What I’m saying is that one question is worth pausing for:

When the friction in your life was removed — did you notice, as it disappeared, that something in you disappeared along with it?

Maybe not. Maybe nothing was lost.

But if something was —

that thing might matter more than the smooth road that replaced it.

You’ve probably taken the test.

And when the result came up, you read that description and felt something land. “Yes, that’s me.” “This is so accurate.”

You memorized the four letters. Brought them up in conversations. Maybe felt, for a moment, that you finally understood yourself a little better.

Same here.

But something started to feel off later.

Not that the result was wrong — it was that I noticed, once I had those four letters, I’d started using them to explain my own behavior. To pre-decide my own limits.

“I’m this type, so I’m not good at this.” “I’m this type, so I’ll be uncomfortable in situations like that.”

The label had started making decisions for me.

What I hadn’t noticed: while I thought I was getting to know myself better, I was quietly fitting myself into a smaller box.

MBTI has one very clever feature — the answer it gives you lands in exactly the right place to keep the conversation going indefinitely.

You say you’re an INTJ, someone says “yes, exactly,” someone else says “you seem more like an INFJ,” you retake it six months later and get a different result. The discussion can run forever. There’s no endpoint that truly settles it.

But that’s not a flaw in the design. That is the design.

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A question that can actually be answered ends once it’s answered. But a system that gives you identity needs you to keep coming back — to compare, verify, update.

What it fills isn’t the question “who am I?”

It fills the suspended, unresolved feeling that question produces.

Those are not the same thing.

There’s a word I keep coming back to: resolution.

We usually use it for images — the higher the pixels, the clearer the detail.

But applied to people: a person is one of the highest-resolution things in the world. Decades of growth, countless specific choices, contradictions that resist explanation, moments you can’t account for even to yourself —

all of that together forms something far more complex than any classification system can hold.

There are billions of people on this planet. Forget sixteen types — even sixteen hundred couldn’t meaningfully sort creatures this complicated.

But the problem isn’t just that the numbers aren’t big enough.

The deeper problem is this: any self-definition you truly commit to will start lowering your own resolution.

Not just MBTI.

“I’m a very emotional person.” “I’m naturally bad at math.” “I get anxious around strangers.” — the moment you nail it down, it starts drawing borders for you, pre-empting your reactions, deciding what “isn’t for you.”

You think you’re describing yourself.

You’re actually shaping yourself.

MBTI just makes this unusually visible — because it hands you a four-letter label you can carry around. Pull it out when you meet someone new. Use it to explain your behavior. Ready to deploy at any moment.

Convenient.

But convenience has a cost.

The cost is that you’ve started substituting a low-resolution version of yourself for the real thing.

I’m not saying don’t take it. Taking it for fun is fine — it genuinely offers an interesting angle on certain things.

What I’m pointing to is a different question:

Has there been a moment when you used those four letters to sidestep something you actually needed to face yourself?

People who truly know themselves probably don’t need an answer they can hand over.

Because they know that answer might be different tomorrow.

And that difference isn’t because they haven’t figured it out yet.

It’s because they’re still changing.

Scroll long enough, and a feeling starts to build — hard to name, but real.

It’s not that any particular piece of content is wrong. It’s a vague sense that the person on the other side already knew what they wanted you to do before they started making it.

You can’t point to what’s off. They’re not saying anything false. The points are reasonable. Sometimes you finish it feeling like you genuinely got something out of it.

But that feeling stays.

I tried to think through what’s actually happening.

The same sentence, placed under different intentions, becomes a different thing entirely.

Someone tells you “you need to learn to say no” — maybe because they’ve been burned by this themselves, thought of you, and wanted to say something. Or maybe because they know that line will make a lot of people nod, and nodding means shares.

The words are identical. But those are not the same thing.

The first is someone talking to you. The second is someone using words as a tool.

What intention changes isn’t the surface of the content. It’s the relationship between the content and you.

To put it more precisely:

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When a piece of content has already designed you into it before it was made, you are no longer a person inside that content. You are a subject to be converted. Your emotions, your sore spots, your desires — those are the raw material. Before they started, they were already asking: what kind of opening will make you stop scrolling, what kind of conclusion will make you think “yes, exactly,” what kind of ending will make you share or follow.

There’s a philosophical formulation for this: people should be treated as ends in themselves, never merely as means.

Inside that content, you are the means.

Here’s what I find interesting.

That discomfort is usually hard to articulate. You can’t identify anything they said that was wrong. But something is off.

I think it’s because intention doesn’t live on the surface of content — it lives in the structure. Content that has been engineered has its pacing, its emotional arc, its information density all pushing in the same direction. That’s not something you can easily point to. But your perception picks it up.

Like watching someone smile and not being able to say what’s wrong — but knowing the smile isn’t real. That perception is usually right.

Before, translating intention into content still required someone with real skill to execute it.

Not anymore. Production cost is approaching zero. An intention can become a well-worded, structurally complete, emotionally precise piece of writing in seconds.

Which means the ratio of intention to content on the internet is shifting at a speed we haven’t seen before. Content is multiplying — but the intentions driving it are concentrating around the same small set of goals: traffic, conversion, retention.

The environment your perception is navigating is getting louder.

I’m not going to give you a checklist for identifying high-quality content.

What I want to say is something else.

Once you start being able to sense the intention behind what other people express, you will eventually turn that same attention on yourself — what’s behind the things you say, the things you write, every message you send?

Are you talking to people, or using words as a tool?

This isn’t only about making content. Everyday expression is content too, just less formal. We send signals constantly. We are constantly submerged in other people’s signals.

There’s no clean answer to this question.

But once it appears, it’s very hard to pretend you haven’t seen it.

There are principles we’ve understood for years.

Live in the present. Don’t compare yourself to others. Do what you believe is right and stop caring so much what people think.

We accept all of this. Sincerely.

But you and I both know — the anxiety still comes. The impulse to compare still rises. Other people’s opinions still press down on us.

We call this “knowing but not doing.” We sigh. We carry on.

I have a very specific version of this lately.

I make serious work — things that ask you to slow down to read them. And I genuinely believe this: finding the right audience matters more than chasing reach.

I can say that clearly. I mean it when I say it.

And yet — every time I post something and the numbers go nowhere, that difficult feeling comes anyway. Not faintly. Concretely. A specific, real discomfort.

I cannot use that principle to block it out.

I’ve come to think this is actually a very good question in itself:

Why does a principle I genuinely believe in disappear completely the moment it’s actually tested?

It’s not that I haven’t thought it through. It’s not that my belief is insincere.

It’s that the principle sits in my mind — but it hasn’t seeped in.

”You can understand all the right ideas and still not be able to live well.”

This line circulates widely because nearly everyone has felt it.

We usually interpret it as an execution problem — a gap between knowing and doing, and if you just try harder, you’ll close it.

But I think that explanation misses something.

Because it assumes: if you work hard enough to “do it,” the principle will kick in.

Sometimes that’s not the issue. Sometimes the principle simply hasn’t truly entered you yet.

It lives in your understanding. Not in your being.

There’s a concept in Buddhist practice: tǐ zhèng — embodied realization.

Not understanding. Not agreeing. Not memorizing.

It means going through something with your entire being — letting it truly happen in you — so that afterward, you are no longer quite who you were.

This concept resists instruction. You can’t hand someone a three-step process for achieving it.

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But what it points to is real:

There is knowing with your mind. And there is knowing with your whole self.

These aren’t different degrees of the same thing. They are different in kind.

So where is the gap?

My current understanding: it’s at the first moment the principle is truly tested.

Not when you’re calm and can recite it clearly. When the actual situation the principle is meant for arrives — your emotions, your body, your first instinct — where are they, in that moment?

I believe finding the right audience matters more than reach.

But in the moment the numbers came back flat, my body’s response had nothing to do with that belief.

That was the moment I understood: I haven’t yet realized this in my bones.

I only know it.

Here’s what most people do in that moment:

They reach back for the principle. Run it through their head again. Tell themselves “I know, reach isn’t what matters” — and talk themselves back to calm.

There’s nothing wrong with that move.

But it steps over the gap.

The difficult feeling arrived. Got pressed down. The principle was brought out to hold it at bay. Then life continued.

The gap is still there. The next time the same situation comes, the same reaction will come with it.

Because using a principle to suppress a feeling is not the same as having actually lived through that feeling.

Embodied realization isn’t something you can engineer.

It doesn’t happen because you decide to really feel something this time.

It’s more like this: you can’t go around the difficult feeling. You can only actually be in it for a while — let it happen in you completely — and then walk out the other side carrying something you didn’t have before.

Not a principle.

A new kind of memory in your body. So that the next time this comes, your whole self knows how to respond — without your mind needing to reach for the principle again.

I still feel that difficulty about reach. It still comes.

But I’ve stopped rushing to block it with an idea.

I try to stay in it a little longer. Look at its shape. Listen to what it’s actually saying.

Not because I want to suffer.

Because I’m starting to suspect that the difficult feeling itself —

might be exactly what embodied realization looks like while it’s happening.

Sometimes I feel something I can’t quite put into words.

I finish a piece of work I’m genuinely proud of. Post it. The numbers go nowhere. Then I scroll for thirty seconds and land on a video with no nutritional value whatsoever — hundreds of thousands of likes.

I know that comparison is immature. I know likes aren’t value.

But the feeling is real.

At first, I repackaged that feeling into a more presentable question:

Why does serious, substantive content have so little reach on the internet?

That question sounds like cultural critique. Like concern for the content ecosystem. Like thinking seriously about human nature and platform design.

But honestly, part of it was just avoiding something more personal:

The things I make haven’t found their audience yet.

Admitting that is much harder than diagnosing the era. Because one is the era’s problem, and the other is mine.

But here’s what’s interesting:

That anxiety — the one I didn’t want to look at — pushed me toward a question I actually find worth sitting with.

Is the platform training people toward short and shallow? Or is human nature already like this, and the platform just followed?

I’ve thought about this for a long time, and I’ve come to think the answer might not matter. Both are probably true, and they reinforce each other — there’s a part of human nature that’s drawn toward stimulation and instant reward, platforms identified that, amplified it, and now that part of human nature becomes harder to resist inside the amplification. The loop doesn’t stop just because you’ve figured out which came first.

So why should serious content have reach at all?

My first instinct was that the question itself was wrong — why does serious content need reach? Make it well, and the audience will come.

But I immediately argued back against myself: why shouldn’t it?

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In a world where only fast, frictionless content circulates — do the things that require you to slow down in order to feel them actually disappear? Or are they just pressed down somewhere, waiting for a crack to open?

I don’t have an answer.

But I have a feeling, faint but persistent:

Serious content — the kind that’s deep, the kind that asks you to stay — corresponds to something equally deep in people. That part doesn’t make noise. It doesn’t surface on its own. It’s easy to drown out.

But it’s there.

I know it’s there because I’ve felt it myself — reading a sentence and feeling something loosen. Finishing a video and carrying it around in my head for days. Those things didn’t come from short and fast.

So I keep making this kind of work.

Not because I’ve resolved the question of reach. Not because I’ve found a way to fight human nature and the algorithm.

Because that feeling of “I can’t fully explain why this is worth doing, but it is” — that feeling is itself the engine.

The things you can explain very clearly tend to be the things that are finished once you’ve done them.

The things you can’t explain — the ones you do anyway, without being able to say exactly why —

that inability to explain might be precisely where their weight lives.

The difficult feeling is still there. I haven’t resolved it.

But I’m at least willing to admit it now.

Have you ever done this —

Researched everything before you left. Which day to go where. What time to arrive. The exact angle for the photo. Which restaurant the guides recommend. How to avoid the crowds.

A schedule with no gaps. Every hour accounted for.

Then you come home, scroll through your photos, and realize every single one looks identical to the pictures in the guides.

You replicated someone else’s trip. You were an executor.

And you can’t quite say what went wrong — nothing did, really. You hit every spot. You ate everything on the list. The photos turned out well.

The other extreme is also real.

No plan at all. Just follow your heart. And then you’re stranded somewhere unfamiliar with nowhere to sleep, you’ve missed the last bus, your phone has no signal, and you don’t speak the language.

That isn’t freedom. That’s panic.

When you’re in a panic, your senses shut down. There’s nothing to experience.

So the question seems to be about *how much* to plan.

But I don’t think that’s really the question.

The real question is: what you’re planning, and what you’re leaving empty on purpose.

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There are two kinds of planning, and most people collapse them into one.

The first is foundation planning — visas, flights, somewhere to sleep, a basic sense of where it’s safe to go. This is infrastructure. Skip it and the trip falls apart immediately. It has nothing to do with the quality of your experience, but it’s the condition that makes experience possible.

The second is experience planning — which landmark at what time on which day, which camera angle, which restaurant some guide recommended. The more detailed this gets, the more you’re executing someone else’s trip rather than living your own.

The anxiety most travelers feel doesn’t come from under-doing the first kind. It comes from using the second kind to fill every space that should have been left empty.

That empty space isn’t laziness. It isn’t an oversight.

It’s a door you’re leaving open for the unexpected.

The things you actually remember from a trip are almost never the things you planned — it’s the alley you wandered into that had a restaurant with no sign, the afternoon you got lost and ended up somewhere better, the stranger who said something to you that you’re still thinking about.

There’s a word for this: serendipity.

But serendipity isn’t a gift that falls on you at random.

It requires you to be in a particular state in order to receive it.

An over-scheduled traveler still encounters the unexpected. But their first response is *”this is messing up my plan”* — and they spend their energy getting back on track.

The unexpected arrived. They didn’t pick it up.

Someone who’s done the foundation work but left genuine gaps in their schedule — when the same unexpected thing happens, they might stop. Look around. And follow it.

The real purpose of planning isn’t to design your experience.

It’s to make you safe enough to relax. Relaxed enough that when something unexpected happens, your first instinct isn’t “this is a disaster” — it’s “that’s interesting.”

Once in Xinjiang, my drone went down. Crashed on a mountainside at over five thousand meters.

I had altitude sickness. No trail. I climbed for over an hour.

When I finally found it, my first thought was to get back down — stay on schedule, keep shooting, follow the plan.

Then I looked up.

The landscape in front of me stopped me cold.

It was the first moment in the entire trip that I was actually *present.* Not because I’d planned it. Because the unexpected had knocked me out of task mode and into that half hour on the mountain.

I sat there for thirty minutes. Told my friend I needed to rest.

That was an excuse. The real reason was that I wasn’t ready to go back to the plan yet.

So what does over-planning actually look like?

It’s not about how many days you’ve mapped out, or how deep you went into the research.

It’s whether your itinerary has a space for “I don’t know what’s going to happen here.”

That space doesn’t have to be large. An afternoon. A morning. A walk with no destination.

But it has to be genuinely empty — not “backup option,” not “if there’s time,” but truly unfilled, truly unknown.

That emptiness is the only door serendipity can actually walk through.

You didn’t go on this trip to execute a guide.

You went to encounter things you didn’t know you’d encounter before you left.

But those things don’t seek out someone whose every minute is already spoken for.

They only walk through a door that’s been left open.

That was shortly after I arrived in Russia.

On the subway, I’d stare at the announcements inside the car. Safety instructions, ads, station names—anything. Not because I could fully understand them, but because those Cyrillic letters were still a mystery to me, and a mystery is worth lingering on.

The Russians next to me looked at me as if I were doing something very strange.

They didn’t read those announcements. Not because they were uneducated, but because those words were too familiar to them. So familiar that they didn’t need to process them. So familiar that they simply disappeared.

Later, I thought about the Shanghai Metro.

I can’t even remember how many years I rode it. For a while, I took it every day.

If you asked me what the announcements on the subway say—I couldn’t tell you.

Those words passed before my eyes thousands of times, but they never truly entered me.

This isn’t a memory problem.

It’s our nervous system doing something for us: archiving the familiar, then removing it from consciousness.

This mechanism is incredibly useful. You don’t need to reacquaint yourself with every piece of furniture every time you walk into your own home. You don’t need to relearn how to shift gears every time you drive. Familiarity frees up cognitive resources to handle what truly needs handling.

It’s efficient. It’s normal.

But it comes at a cost few notice—

You think you’re experiencing life, but most of what you experience has already been filtered out by yourself before you even realize it.

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Those announcements were always there. It was your brain that decided they weren’t worth processing.

So why did that state of staring at the announcements on the Russian subway feel so good?

Not because I was learning Russian. Not because I’m more curious than others.

It was because that was one of the few moments when I was actually experiencing where I was.

Those words hadn’t been archived yet. That place hadn’t become background noise yet. My senses were still open.

I was present.

But there’s an essence to this state—it’s temporary.

Once you become familiar with it, it disappears. It’s not your failure; it’s its nature.

After I’d been in Russia for a while, those announcements gradually began to disappear too. I started riding the subway like a local, staring at my phone, not reading anything.

Even an unfamiliar place eventually becomes background.

But here’s a question more worth asking than “how to stay fresh”—

It doesn’t matter if subway announcements become background.

But have you, somewhere where you should be present, become completely absent because it’s too familiar?

Not subway announcements.

It’s the things you truly care about. A relationship happening every day. Something you’ve been doing for years. A city you’ve lived in for a long time.

You’re still there. You experience it every day.

But how long has it been since you truly saw it?

Has it quietly become background too—not because it doesn’t matter, but because it’s so familiar that your nervous system has archived it, removed it from your perception before you even knew it?

I can’t tell you how to solve this.

Because the archiving mechanism can’t be turned off, and it shouldn’t be. You need it.

But maybe you can occasionally do one thing—

Like a stranger who just arrived in a foreign place, take a look at a place you already know too well.

Not deliberate practice, not mindfulness meditation, not assigning yourself homework.

Just occasionally, stop, and really look.

The way you would have looked at it the first time you were here.

You have a bookmark folder.

How many “save for later” articles are in it — you no longer remember.

You also don’t remember the last time you actually reopened them.

But you’re still saving. A few more went in yesterday.

Our generation shares a common anxiety: “My way of consuming information is wrong.”

Algorithms create filter bubbles, so you need RSS. RSS is too narrow, so you add a bit of passive exposure. Fragmented content is too shallow, so you should read books. But books are too slow to keep up with change...

That anxiety itself isn’t wrong.

Information is lossy. That’s not a metaphor — it’s its nature.

An idea comes out of someone’s mind, gets compressed into language — and language can’t hold everything. Then it’s filtered by platforms, curated by algorithms, distilled into headlines. By the time it reaches your eyes, it’s no longer the same thing.

Every layer erodes it. Every handoff distorts it.

Today, with AI mass-producing content, this process is accelerated. The speed of production far outstrips anyone’s ability to digest it, and the signal-to-noise ratio keeps dropping.

So people start taking information intake seriously. They compare channels, vet sources, build systems.

That makes sense.

But there’s a blind spot here —

**We think “lossy” is a channel problem. Find a better channel, and the loss decreases.**

But there’s one kind of loss no channel can fix.

That loss happens the moment information enters you.

It’s not the platform’s fault. Not the algorithm’s fault. It’s the gap between someone else’s understanding and your own — a gap that can never be fully bridged.

When an author writes a sentence, behind it lies their entire experience, their confusions, a specific afternoon. When you read that sentence, you bring in your entire experience, your own confusions, and a completely different afternoon.

You meet the same string of words, but you don’t share the same encounter.

This isn’t a bad thing. It just means — the quality of information is never just a property of the information itself. Half of it is in you.

What you bring into it determines what you get out of it.

So back to that anxiety —

The problem isn’t just whether your channels are right, or whether the signal-to-noise ratio is high enough.

There’s a harder question:

**Did you actually bring anything into that information?**

Or did you just open it.

Here’s something that quietly happened —

**Acquiring became the destination.**

It’s not that you’re completely unaware.

You vaguely know — there’s a pile of “read later” in your bookmarks, and later never comes. You “know a lot” about a topic, but when you actually need to make a related decision, that knowledge isn’t there. You scroll for an hour, but can’t say what you read today.

You know.

But you have a narrative —

“I’m accumulating.” “Quantity leads to quality.” “Information is always useful — it’s just not time yet.”

That narrative isn’t wrong. But it’s very convenient.

It makes the act of “keep acquiring” always justified. It makes the act of “stop and digest” always postponable.

So you open the next one.

There’s a question worth pausing to ask, now and then:

**What was the last piece of information that actually changed something in you?**

Not the kind that made you think “oh, I see.” The kind that, long after you read it, on some day when you were making a decision — it was just there.

If you can’t remember —

Maybe the problem isn’t wrong channels, low signal-to-noise, or bad algorithms.

Maybe it’s that you’ve been working very hard at acquiring, but never really walked into any of it with anything to bring.

Without bringing anything in, even the best information just passes by.

That article saved for so long isn’t waiting for you to have time to read it.

It’s just sitting there, giving you the feeling that “I haven’t missed out.”

And that feeling is quietly replacing something else.

Have you ever thought about what it would actually mean to show up honestly on a dating app?

Not in the inspirational sense — not “be your authentic self.”

Literally.

An ordinary photo. An ordinary job. An ordinary life. No highlight reel. No carefully curated hobbies. No compelling personal brand.

Just what you actually are.

You run the simulation in your head. And you already know what happens.

You get swiped away in the first round.

Not because you’re lacking. Because in an interface built for infinite scrolling, ordinary gives no reason to stop.

Then you see the content telling you to “just be yourself,” and you feel something you can’t quite name.

Not anger. Not sadness.

A very specific kind of helplessness:

You agree that honesty is good.

But here, honesty is something you can’t afford.

A dating app is a performance everyone joins at the same time.

Inside this performance, there’s a default language:

Photos must be polished. Hobbies must sound respectable. Life must have texture. Personal brand must be legible. Height ideally above average, income ideally impressive, owns property, has a car, loves travel, enjoys film, works out occasionally.

Nobody invented this language. It was built collectively, through millions of swipes and filters.

The logic behind it is simple:

You have three seconds for a stranger to decide whether to stop.

In three seconds, ordinary has no competitive edge.

So everyone starts becoming extraordinary.

So everyone starts becoming the same.

Open any dating app right now and scroll — the faces and profiles flow past like they were generated from a single template. Polished, upbeat, interesting, ambitious, passionate about life.

Honesty didn’t disappear because people don’t want to be honest. It disappeared because honesty, in this three-second competition, is a cost.

Show up honestly and you bear that cost.

Show up dishonestly and you win those three seconds — but what you’ve won is another dishonest performance’s interest in your dishonest performance.

Two performances attracting each other.

No real encounter ever happens.

This system doesn’t forbid anyone from being honest. It simply makes honesty the choice that puts you behind. In a place where everyone is displaying their highlight reel, being ordinary requires a kind of courage most people can’t afford.

But occasionally you come across someone who doesn’t seem to be performing — someone who gives you that hard-to-name feeling of something real.

They can afford honesty.

Why can they afford it?

Look closely at the people who give you that feeling of authenticity.

They usually share one thing:

Their hard credentials have already cleared the first-round filter.

Their honesty is a bonus on top of something that already qualifies.

They can afford not to perform because even without performing, they won’t be swiped away in round one.

But for someone whose hard credentials are ordinary —

showing up honestly means voluntarily giving up the only tool that might make them look competitive, in a situation that’s already working against them.

This isn’t a question of courage.

It’s a question of very concrete circumstances.

We say “just be yourself” as if honesty were something everyone can choose equally.

But in this system, honesty has a cover charge.

The cover charge is: you need enough hard credentials first, and then honesty becomes a luxury you can afford.

Without that, honesty isn’t a choice. It’s a gamble.

A gamble with poor odds:

You show up honestly and you’re betting that in those three seconds, the person on the other side has enough perception, enough patience, enough resistance to algorithmic conditioning, to sense something genuine in an ordinary profile.

Who takes that bet?

Honesty is not a choice everyone can afford. In this system, honesty is a privilege — it belongs to those who’ve already cleared the hard-credential filter. For everyone else, honesty is a wager with unclear odds. And if you lose, you don’t even get to explain.

But here’s the more uncomfortable thing:

We’re criticizing this system.

But where did this system come from?

Did some company force everyone to present themselves according to that template?

Or —

was this system built by each of us, together, through every swipe, every filter?

You’re criticizing a system that turns people into algorithmically sortable products.

But the last time you swiped someone away — why?

The photo was ordinary.

The bio had nothing striking.

Height insufficient, income unlisted, life lacking apparent texture.

The standard you used was the exact standard you’re criticizing.

Not because you’re hypocritical. Because that standard has been solidified into the default language of this space by everyone’s behavior.

Not using it is like insisting on speaking a dialect no one understands in a room where everyone speaks the same language.

You’re being honest. But you’re alone.

This is the deepest layer of the system:

It doesn’t need anyone to actively maintain it.

It only needs everyone to keep doing the least effortful thing — judge a person in three seconds, use hard credentials as the first filter, save genuine interest for round two, if there is a round two.

Everyone is waiting for someone else to go first.

Everyone is waiting for a connection that doesn’t require them to take the risk first.

So everyone keeps waiting.

So honesty stays in round two.

And round two, most of the time, never comes.

The system is stable not because it’s powerful, but because each of us participates in it by doing what requires the least effort. The people criticizing it and the people sustaining it are usually the same person.

Back to the question at the beginning:

Would you be willing to show up on an app like this — as an ordinary profile, with genuine intentions?

Now you know this question has no easy answer.

Not daring to — that’s not cowardice.

It’s because the system genuinely exists. It genuinely turns honesty into a cost. It genuinely gives ordinary people no room to breathe. It genuinely asks you to take a risk first, with no guarantee of anything.

That reality is real.

But something else is real too:

The people who occasionally make you stop scrolling — the ones who give you that feeling of something genuine — they’re inside this system too.

They know the rules.

They know the cost of honesty.

And they chose to show up anyway.

Not because they weren’t afraid of losing.

Because at some point, they decided to stop staking their honesty on a competition that wasn’t worth it.

They’re not trying to win the game.

They’re playing a different one:

Not winning attention in three seconds — but finding the person willing to stop for something ordinary.

That person is rare.

But they exist.

And you can only be found by them if you actually show up.

Even if this system has made honesty a luxury —

If you don’t appear, you definitely won’t meet them.

If you do appear, you might not.

But at least you’re still inside the possibility.

We were taught from childhood to live for the next milestone.

I’ve been planning to move to the suburbs for a while now.

Not because city life is unbearable, but because I’ve always believed that once I got there, I could finally start living the life I want. Quieter, slower, and—yes, that’s the word—more “right.”

But one day, a thought hit me:

The way I’m waiting for the suburbs is structurally identical to the way I wait for my career to stabilize, for my finances to loosen up, for one thing to wrap up before another begins.

I’ve been postponing one thing. That thing isn’t the move. That thing is: starting to live.

This realization made me uncomfortable. Because it means that even after I move, I might be waiting out there for something else—for the room to be arranged, for the surroundings to grow quieter, for some vague “feeling right” I can’t articulate.

The postponement itself follows me.

I tried to trace where this habit came from.

One scene comes to mind, though I suspect it’s not unique to me.

As kids, adults would say, “You’ll feel better once you grow up,” “You’ll relax after the exams,” “You’ll be set when you land a job.” Every present moment was a bridge to the next “when.” We were never taught that the current state could have value in itself. We were only taught: “You’re not enough yet—meet this condition, and then you’ll count.”

So I learned one thing: to always place “starting” after the next milestone.

This isn’t laziness. It isn’t procrastination. It’s something deeper—a sense that “the current me doesn’t deserve to start yet.”

I haven’t reached a certain position, so my efforts don’t count. I’m not in a certain state, so starting now would be wasteful. I haven’t arrived somewhere, so the real feeling hasn’t descended.

I always believed that signal would be waiting for me somewhere.

It wasn’t until I thought of Thoreau that I realized: maybe that signal was never supposed to be an answer.

He went to Walden Pond with a question—he wanted to know what remained after stripping away everything unnecessary. And that question, he already had it before he went.

Later, I thought: I also have a question I want to live into and test.

If I move to the suburbs, it won’t be because the place will give me something. It will be because that’s where I choose to test this question.

Have you ever seen posts like these?

“All social interaction is essentially exchange and manipulation. You need to learn to use the lowest cost of honesty to get the maximum value from the other person.”

“Don’t talk about pure love—that’s just to fool the poor. Men want looks, women want money. In this marriage market, exchange is the only eternal truth.”

“Remember, if you’re not ruthless to others, they’ll be ruthless to you. Put away your pitiful compassion. In this jungle, only hunters survive.”

After reading them, you feel an unspeakable unease.

Then you want to argue.

But you find you can’t.

There really is exchange in social life. There really are interests in relationships. Some people really do climb over others. The law of the jungle really does hold in some places.

Every single sentence has a real example to back it up.

So all you can say is: This doesn’t feel quite right, but I can’t articulate why.

That elusive why is what I want to make clear today.

These statements have a very clever structure.

They pick up a real side of human behavior—exchange, competition, interests, calculation—magnify it to the extreme, and then proclaim: Look, this is the truth. Everything else is an illusion.

The power of this move lies in the fact that the side they’re talking about *is* real.

You can’t say “there’s no exchange in social life,” because there is.

You can’t say “there’s no consideration of interests in relationships,” because there is.

You can’t say “the law of the jungle never applies,” because it does.

But there’s something that’s not being said here—

Humans cry for complete strangers.

Humans share food with strangers even when they themselves are struggling.

Humans created art, music, literature—things that have no meaning in pure jungle logic; they consume resources and offer no direct return, yet humans are willing to pay a huge price for them and devote their lives to pursuing them.

Humans do things they believe are right, even when no one is watching and there’s no reward.

These, too, are real human behaviors.

And likely more universal, deeper, and closer to what the human species truly is, than those jungle behaviors.

But in those statements, this part disappears.

Not because it’s unreal, but because acknowledging its existence would make the whole theory crumble.

These statements aren’t lies; they’re a mutilated version of the truth. They use one real side of human behavior to completely obscure the other side. You can’t refute them because you’re searching for counterarguments within the boundaries they have drawn. But the real problem is that boundary itself—it excludes half of reality from the very beginning.

So why does that obscured half never show up?

Not because the people saying these things have never seen kindness, genuine connection, or relationships not based on interest.

They have.

So why does that part never appear in their words?

Listen closely to what these statements are really doing.

“All social interaction is manipulation”—so it’s okay if I manipulate.

“True love is a scam”—so it’s okay if I don’t give my true heart.

“Harvesting is a calling”—so it’s okay if I hurt others.

“Only hunters survive”—so it’s okay if I am cold and indifferent.

Every single sentence is doing the same thing—

Giving the listener a permission slip to free themselves from a certain predicament.

What predicament is that?

It’s the predicament of genuinely getting close to another person. It requires you to give your true heart, to risk being rejected, hurt, let down, and to make yourself vulnerable before another.

This is hard.

Not because people don’t want to, but because it requires you to expose your real self with no idea how the other person will respond.

This uncertainty is a real fear.

What these statements are ultimately selling is a way out of this fear—

You don’t need to be real, because being real is useless.

You don’t need to be vulnerable, because vulnerability is a sign of weakness.

You don’t need to take risks, because smart people only calculate, they don’t bet.

They make loneliness and coldness sound like a wisdom that sees through the world.

But it’s not wisdom.

It’s fear wearing a coat of wisdom.

These statements are viral not because they speak the truth, but because they speak what many people want to hear—you don’t have to be vulnerable anymore, you don’t have to take risks anymore, you can redefine the thing that scares you as stupidity. After hearing it, loneliness makes sense, coldness becomes correct.

But there’s a deeper question that never gets asked—

What do the people who choose to believe this system get?

Do they really live better lives because they’ve stopped being vulnerable, stopped giving their true hearts, and treat all relationships as exchanges?

Or do they gain a sense of security, but lose something else—something they might not even realize they’ve lost?

When someone truly believes all social interaction is manipulation and starts using the lowest cost of honesty to get maximum value—

What happens next?

They get good at scheming. They *win* in many exchanges. They feel like they see through others and have mastered the rules.

But one thing starts to disappear.

They begin to feel that no relationship is real.

Not because others aren’t real with them—but because *they* aren’t real with anyone. So they’ll never know how the other person would respond if they showed up authentically. They never will.

Because they’ve never tried.

This eternal *not knowing* is a special kind of loneliness.

Not the loneliness of being alone in a room, but the loneliness of being in a room full of people engaged in exchanges, where no one has truly *seen* them, even for a second.

And they haven’t seen anyone either.

And at the deepest level—

They can no longer believe that anyone truly *likes* them.

Because within their framework, “liking” doesn’t exist. Only “using” exists.

So when someone is kind to them, their first reaction is: What does he want from me?

When someone says “I love you,” their first reaction is: What’s the strategy?

They’ve locked themselves in a room where no one can truly get close to them.

Not even themselves.

*Those who choose the law of the jungle gain one kind of safety—they won’t be let down because they never place a bet. But they lose something else—the possibility of being truly seen. That possibility only exists when you show up authentically. If you don’t show up, it doesn’t exist.*

So, back to those statements.

“All social interaction is exchange.” “True love is to fool the poor.” “Only hunters survive.”

Now you know why you couldn’t argue but felt something was off.

Because they are true, but only partially true.

They use one real side of human behavior to obscure the other side—the side where humans also cry for strangers, give without expecting anything in return, and risk vulnerability for the sake of a connection.

They aren’t selling wisdom. They’re selling a permission slip—you don’t have to be vulnerable anymore; from today, loneliness and coldness shall be called “seeing through the world.”

And those who choose to live inside this logic gain safety but lose the chance of being seen.

That being seen only exists when you show up authentically.

If you don’t show up, no one can see you.

Including those who say, “In the jungle, only hunters survive.”

They survive.

But no one has truly *seen* them.

And they haven’t truly seen anyone.

In that sense, they are the loneliest animals in the jungle.

Not because they are alone.

But because they live in a room they built themselves, the door locked from the inside, and even they’ve lost the key.

Have you ever read a sentence and felt a sudden clarity—

Then after some time, you realize that clarity left nothing behind.

It’s not that you forgot the sentence, but that the sentence never truly changed the way you see anything.

You only felt something loosen in the moment you read it.

Then nothing happened.

Now you scroll through various content, vaguely sensing something is off, but you can’t articulate what’s wrong.

It sounds reasonable, logically coherent, even evokes a slight resonance in you.

But something makes you pause—

Is this true?

Or does it just sound true?

You find you have no way to answer this question.

Not because you’re not smart enough, but because that line is getting harder and harder to find.

We usually think the problem with toxic positivity is that its content is false.

But the most insidious toxic positivity doesn’t have false content.

It might be true, or at least half-true.

“Your suffering comes from wanting too much.”—This sentence is true from a certain angle.

“Accept your ordinariness and you’ll be happier.”—This sentence is true in certain circumstances.

“What others think of you doesn’t matter, what matters is what you think of yourself.”—This sentence has its moments of validity.

You can’t say these statements are wrong, because they’re not entirely wrong.

But you sense something is off.

That wrongness isn’t in the content of the sentence.

It’s in what it does to you.

Wisdom and toxic positivity have one fundamental difference—

Wisdom opens you, toxic positivity closes you.

Wisdom makes you start thinking about more things after reading it. It gives you a new perspective, you use that perspective to look at your life, and you see things you hadn’t seen before. It creates new questions, not just gives you answers.

Toxic positivity makes you stop thinking after reading it. It gives you a feeling—okay, this matter is settled, I don’t need to think about it anymore. It closes questions, giving you an illusion of having arrived.

That feeling of sudden clarity exists in both wisdom and toxic positivity.

But they are two completely different kinds of clarity.

You can’t distinguish toxic positivity from wisdom not because your judgment is lacking, but because you’re looking at the content of the sentence, but that line isn’t in the content. It’s in whether your thinking opens or closes after reading that sentence.

But here’s a problem—

The same sentence opens one person and closes another.

“Accept your ordinariness.”

For someone who has been tormenting themselves with unrealistic standards, this sentence might be a genuine loosening, allowing them to catch their breath from that torment for the first time.

For someone using “accepting ordinariness” to avoid what they should really be doing, this sentence is a permission slip, allowing them to no longer face what they’ve been avoiding.

Same sentence, same content, completely opposite effects.

So is the difference between wisdom and toxic positivity in the words, or in the person?

This question has no comfortable answer.

Because the answer is: both.

Some statements are designed to shut down thinking—they give you a conclusion that doesn’t require further thought, in a way that sounds profound.

But some statements are inherently open, just received differently by different people.

The key lies in your posture of receiving it—

You read a sentence, feel sudden clarity, then what do you do?

You stop at that clarity, feel satisfied, then scroll to the next item—this is using it to stop thinking.

You stop at that clarity, then you start thinking: What is this sentence saying? Under what circumstances does it hold true? Under what circumstances does it not? What does it have to do with my own situation?—This is using it to think.

Same sentence, same feeling of sudden clarity, two completely different follow-ups.

The first way, that sentence comes in, then disappears, leaving nothing behind.

The second way, that sentence comes in, collides with what you already have, and after the collision, somewhere on your cognitive map is different from yesterday.

This is what wisdom truly does—not give you an answer, but open a new crack in your cognitive map.

But the deepest thing hasn’t been said yet—

Why is toxic positivity becoming more insidious?

Not because it’s gotten smarter, but because it has learned to mimic wisdom’s most core characteristic.

Not mimicking wisdom’s content, not mimicking wisdom’s tone.

But mimicking the feeling wisdom gives people—

Sudden clarity.

And there are two kinds of sudden clarity that, from the inside, feel almost identical.

The first kind of sudden clarity—

You truly see something clearly.

That clarity is real, it changes the way you see something, and that change is permanent.

After today, the way you see that thing is different from yesterday.

The second kind of sudden clarity—

You finally don’t need to think about it anymore.

That relief is real, it liberates you from a kind of unresolved tension.

But that tension existed because that thing originally needed you to keep thinking about it.

You stopped, not because you arrived, but because that sentence gave you a reason to stop.

These two feelings are indistinguishable from the outside.

From the inside, they feel almost identical—both are a kind of loosening, a lightness, a feeling that something suddenly became clear.

But their directions are completely opposite.

The first kind, after that sudden clarity, you can see something more clearly than before.

The second kind, after that sudden clarity, it’s harder for you to see that thing clearly than before—because you already feel it’s been resolved, you won’t look at it again.

Toxic positivity is becoming more insidious because it’s creating the second kind of sudden clarity more precisely, making it look like the first kind.

It no longer deceives you with false content, it deceives you with genuine feelings.

And that feeling is the hardest thing for you to question.

Because it’s something you felt yourself.

Back to the opening scene.

You read a sentence, felt sudden clarity, then nothing was left behind.

You now know what that was.

It’s not that the sentence was false.

It’s that the sudden clarity was the second kind—

You finally don’t need to think about it anymore.

The relief of not needing to think anymore feels almost the same as the relief of truly seeing something clearly.

But the directions are completely opposite.

So judging whether a sentence is wisdom isn’t about asking if it’s right or wrong.

It’s about asking yourself one question after that sudden clarity—

Do I now want to keep thinking about this more than before, or less?

More—that sudden clarity opened you.

Less—that sudden clarity closed you.

This question is simple.

But you need to ask it while that feeling is still warm.

Because the smartest thing about toxic positivity is that it makes you feel you’ve already arrived.

People who have already arrived don’t ask for directions anymore.

Zhang Xuefeng died next to the company treadmill.

Not in bed, not at the dinner table—but by the treadmill.

Forty-one years old, with a workout routine, doing what everyone says you should do.

But he also worked over ten hours a day, chronically stayed up late, and endured constant high stress.

The treadmill was there. He used it.

Then he died.

---

We usually think it’s either exercise or no exercise.

But there’s also a phenomenon called the Active Couch Potato—hit the gym for an hour every day, then sit at a desk for ten hours.

Research finds: that one hour of exercise doesn’t cancel out the metabolic damage from ten hours of sitting. Blood sugar, blood lipids, cardiovascular risk—they’re still there.

It’s not that exercise doesn’t work. It’s that that one hour and those ten hours aren’t the same thing.

---

This starts from a longer view.

Our bodies are designed for a different kind of life.

Our hunter-gatherer ancestors didn’t exercise for an hour a day—they moved all the time. Walking, carrying, squatting, standing, chasing, digging. Those actions weren’t called exercise; they were called living.

Then we moved into offices. Sit down in the morning, stand up at night, and in between, eight hours where the body barely moves.

The body’s evolution can’t keep up with this change. That all-day-moving design is still there, but the conditions it needs to function have vanished.

That’s when the gym was invented.

Its logic: You lost those eight hours of scattered activity, so I’ll give you one concentrated hour to make up for it.

This invention is clever, and it works—it really does.

But what it solves is, “I didn’t exercise today.”

What it can’t solve is, you sat for ten hours today, slept for five, and were mentally on edge for sixteen.

Those are the things your body truly endures.

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After the workout, you walk out, grab your phone, and order takeout, with an indescribable sense of relief.

Worked out today, so today’s okay.

You probably know that feeling.

That one hour becomes a settlement—everything owed today gets paid back between 7 and 8 p.m.

But in that ledger, exercise is just one line.

Sleep, stress, those eight hours you almost never stood up—those lines are still hanging.

You feel the debt is cleared, but the ledger isn’t closed.

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Zhang Xuefeng had a treadmill right in his company, within arm’s reach.

He did what he thought he was supposed to do.

But what he owed wasn’t just the exercise line.

That treadmill could fill one line, but it couldn’t fill the whole ledger.

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So the question has never been whether to exercise.

Exercise is good—that’s not wrong.

The question is: after you do that thing that makes you feel like the debt is cleared, do you look at the other pages of the ledger?

Or do you close the book and go on owing with an easy conscience?

A friend came back from Yunnan and posted a nine-photo grid on social media.

I opened an AI image generator, waited thirty seconds, and sent him a set of my own.

I joked, “See? All that exhausting work you did to take these, and mine look better without even lifting a finger.”

He replied with a “haha.”

I could tell he was caught off guard. Honestly, so was I—because after I said it, I wasn’t even sure if I was joking anymore.

***

Those AI-generated images really were better. More saturated colors, cleaner compositions, perfectly balanced lighting.

My friend’s photos had tourists, utility poles, and a stranger who wandered into the frame.

But I had a strong gut feeling they were fundamentally different. If you pressed me to explain why—I couldn’t quite put it into words.

“Different experience,” “the process matters,” “the result isn’t everything.”

Those are all things I could say, but they’d feel like reciting a tagline. Even I wouldn’t buy it.

***

I thought back to a trip.

Xinjiang, over 5,000 meters above sea level. I was flying my drone to capture the landscape when it crashed, landing on a patch of terrible terrain on the mountain.

I was already struggling with altitude sickness. But the drone was expensive, and I still needed it for the rest of the trip. So I gritted my teeth and started climbing.

There was no trail. Every step meant choosing where to plant my foot. I was oxygen-deprived, my body heavy, my mind foggy. After over an hour, I found it.

Once I packed up, my first instinct was: get down fast. Stick to the schedule, keep shooting, follow the plan.

Then I looked up.

Just that one motion.

And suddenly I realized how beautiful the view actually was.

***

That realization wasn’t because the scenery had changed. It was because I hadn’t been looking before.

What had I been looking at the whole time? The drone’s screen. Composition, battery, obstacle avoidance, signal.

My eyes had become tools—scanning the landscape, judging whether it was worth shooting, then moving on to the next scan.

Before the crash, I wasn’t traveling. I was executing a task called “shoot the scenery.”

That accident forced me to climb for over an hour, drained my body, and ended the task. The next task hadn’t started yet.

In that gap, I looked up.

My senses came back online. Not because the view was more beautiful, but because I had no task at that moment. My eyes became my own again.

I sat there for half an hour. Told my friend, “I need to rest a bit.”

That was the first moment of the entire trip when I was truly present.

***

So what does AI really lose at?

I thought about it for a long time, and finally realized I’d been asking the wrong question.

AI doesn’t lose on photo quality. It doesn’t lose on “authenticity.” It doesn’t even lose on “the process.”

It loses on something more specific: it doesn’t crash.

It won’t throw you an accident. It won’t give you a climb with no output. It won’t give you that blank space after a task ends.

It’s too efficient—so efficient that you’re always producing, always receiving the next image, never landing in that gap.

And that gap is the doorway for your senses to come back online.

***

Lots of people travel without ever being there.

They fly to a place, but their eyes are on their phone screens. They stand at a mountaintop, but their focus is on editing photos. Their bodies are in Yunnan, but their sensory system is switched off.

AI pushes this trend to the extreme—you don’t even need to go to the mountain anymore.

But for some people, AI could be something else. It can take over those mechanical, repetitive tasks done purely for “output,” freeing up time to actually look at what’s in front of you.

Not by leaving your phone or drone behind.

But by carrying them without being glued to them the whole time.

***

My friend came back from Yunnan and posted nine photos.

The ones I generated with AI were definitely better than his.

But on some turn of the mountain road, did he ever stop and just zone out? At some meal, did he forget to take a picture and just sit there?

Those moments aren’t on social media.

They’re not in those nine photos.

Even if they were, they wouldn’t be in the ones I generated.