August 2025 Thought Notes: Self-Knowledge, Daily Life, AI and Agent Systems

Thoughts on Nanjing Photo Studio

A friend cried watching it. I’m abroad and haven’t had the chance to see it yet; I skimmed some related information online — the background of the production, the sampling, and the reviews in China.

I have some feelings of my own.

It only needs to be a truthful record. The collective needs a vessel to bear the pain of history; it can’t be complex, it must be absolute evil.

Good and evil aren’t binary, and the complexity of human nature isn’t simple either.

Truth is also a projection of the inner self. Truth is very hard to approach; you can only try your best to reconstruct it — or the brain selectively reconstructs memory.

What we resonate with is other people’s pain; emotion gives us something to think about.

Peace really is a miracle, but time is cruel — generations forget the pain quickly.

The modern era brings new worries and anxieties, and needs some new material to fill the inner void and resist it.

But the most painful thing is regressing to war and violence.

It’s undeniable that this film has certain political elements, and perhaps to some degree it also absorbs and displaces pressure from society’s internal contradictions. That’s very normal and natural, no need to criticize it. The essential reason society needs opposition is that opposition gives us the boundary of identity: without an “other,” we don’t know who “we” are. This is the fundamental structure of human cognition — we confirm through negation, we belong through exclusion.

Disliking history or forgetting history isn’t something I advocate either. The point of remembering history isn’t to build your own sense of identity or to set up opposition; more importantly it gives us an emotional source, so that when we want to start a conflict or violence we can recognize that we are being violent, and it helps us build a true understanding of this world and human nature.

Acknowledge that we can’t view history completely objectively, but don’t give up pursuing a more complete understanding.

“Remember history” doesn’t mean we should always be angry; it means we should always be alert — alert to the complexity of human nature, alert to the fragility of peace, alert to the possibility that those dark places exist in our own hearts too.

It’s not about eliminating opposition, but learning to coexist with opposition without being swallowed by it. Keep the tension, but don’t break.

In this complex modern society, with heavy history and culture, try as much as possible to keep the wholeness of your own thinking and feeling…

Dig deep into human nature? Play deaf and dumb

A friend said he’s very happy, that he grew up in an environment I myself would consider good and satisfying, and I feel that the people around me ever since childhood have all been able to give me love. But I also know well that the true color of human nature is selfishness — so I think it’s fine for everyone to play deaf and dumb. No need to dig deep; what you dig up can’t stand the light.

For this friend, not probing into human nature protects his innocence — after complexity you never return to simplicity. Once you start doubting, you’ll look at that person through tinted glasses.

But what exactly is this pair of tinted glasses?

If it’s the gray filter of cynicism, then it really is hard to take off. But with enough life experience, this pair of glasses may turn into a compound color that includes understanding and compassion.

Human selfishness objectively exists, but at the same time humans really do have the capacity to love — that’s the other true side of human nature. Human nature is uncertainty.

You know all the truth, but choose on that basis to keep believing in love, keep giving kindness.

Looking at people is then no longer innocence, no longer doubt, but a deep understanding and acceptance.

I want to understand this world, to fully understand this world, to understand myself, and then create meaning and beauty.

We’re born interacting with this world through crying

Babies send signals to the outside world through crying.

Culture suppresses us, telling us to act strong.

Most emotions are negative.

Crying isn’t wrong; there’s no need to apologize for your sadness or your feelings.

Just record it objectively.

Economic structure determines marriage and dating structure

Economic growth period:

Men’s “supply side” rises, incomes increase → more confidence to take on the “traditional family pillar” role → willingness to marry rises.

Here, because of supply and demand, for women economic independence strengthens + choice increases → they lean more toward “choosing the best match” rather than “must marry.”

At this point the “gender game escalates,” the bar for marriage rises, but overall dating and marriage activity remains lively.

Economic downturn period:

Men unemployed / low income → lose confidence in marriage → turn to low-cost entertainment (games, short videos);

Women, with rising economic anxiety → out of security concerns, “lower their mate-selection standards” but “trust marriage less”;

Men withdraw from the dating market, women anxiously and contradictorily maintain their expectations. The downturn weakens marriage’s “carrying capacity” and “real incentives,” becoming the main trigger of a dating-and-marriage cliff.

Cultural addendum:

In Chinese, Japanese, and Korean cultures, “the woman leads the emotions, the man is responsible for reading and defusing them” is a tacitly accepted hidden rule.

“Reading the air” is an advanced dating skill, but conversely it’s an extra burden on men.

Chinese women’s overall requirements for men form a ladder:

Income > education > prospects > appearance > personality > family background

Understanding persona

Persona refers to the image a person deliberately crafts in public.

The reason we take such pains to play a “pleasant person,” a “formidable person,” or an “interesting person” is that deep down we long for others’ approval, liking, and acceptance. We’re afraid that if we don’t, we’ll be “disliked.”

So what’s decided here is whether we should actively cater to others, carrying a boulder uphill by ourselves.

The solution is “the courage to be disliked.”

There’s one very core method: separation of tasks, first principles.

Why do we go build a persona: we pursue approval, we want to please others.

Why pursuing approval is painful: because it’s someone else’s task, and we’ve taken it as our own.

This involves separation of tasks:

My task: express myself sincerely, work hard, live well.

Others’ task: seeing my words and actions, disliking me or liking me.

The essence of “persona” is that we try to use “my task” (playing a certain role) to control “others’ task” (others’ view of me). Adler tells us this is futile, and it’s the root of suffering.

That way you don’t need to worry about being criticized on Xiaohongshu; focus on your own task and leave the right to judge to others.

On the road, we’re all lonely

Everyone is moving outward physically, and inward mentally.

It’s not really about worrying whether we live in the same city or country.

It’s worrying whether two people can understand each other deep in their souls.

Whether their inner worlds have ever truly come close.

Not because of physical distance, but because they can’t resonate spiritually.

Having a really great group of friends

Traveling a thousand miles just to come see you.

Don’t know how to describe this feeling.

I always thought I’d escaped my traditional family and culture

These past few years I’ve been abroad, studying and dissecting myself, trying to supplement and refine my worldview, to change the cognitive limits and biases brought by my family-of-origin environment.

In fact, what my friend said touched me and pulled me back to where I was born.

You can still tell my parents are people who aren’t good at expressing themselves. I said yes.

Yes, we can never completely “escape” our family of origin, but we can learn to make peace with it — maybe by correcting it, maybe by inheriting it.

A child raised by extroverted parents is also unlikely to be introverted.

In an extroverted city, you also rarely meet introverted citizens.

What’s reassuring is that I’ve perceived it, and I have the ability not to be defined by it anymore.

When someone is caught in emotion (say feeling wronged, angry, vulnerable, anxious)

When someone is caught in emotion (say feeling wronged, angry, vulnerable, anxious), the most essential need isn’t to be comforted, but to be “seen.” Real seeing often comes from the other person being able to empathetically understand the “pain” you’re going through, and even voicing feelings you haven’t said out loud.

Tolerance, understanding, and consideration are more like a foundation, creating certain conditions for emotional exchange; the latter is more like an emotional elevation.

This is the condition for building a sense of deep connection, and it depends on both sides’ capacity for empathy.

So now I think I can understand the term soulmate.

The other person’s existence is like a resonance chamber, making your own inner feelings clearer and stronger.

And also a sense of realness or belonging?

In front of them you’re not just safe, you’re appreciated and accepted; no need to pretend or hide.

A soulmate may be someone who lets you become yourself more truly and more clearly.

But is resonance alone enough? Or are understanding and tolerance alone enough?

Understanding and tolerance are more like a basic process of self-cultivation, whereas deep resonance requires temporarily setting aside your own perspective, putting your worldview and feelings to one side.

But without understanding and tolerance as a premise, with an unstable inner core, isn’t it just brief emotional projection? You might not even be clear about what you love, or what you want?

So what is a soulmate? Not the person who resonates one hundred percent, but someone who has first completed their own cultivation, has a strong inner core, can provide a safe zone of unconditional acceptance, and within that safe zone keeps giving you energy, achieving deep resonance again and again.

Both people are cultivating their own inner core, while also being willing to spend energy on the other, or lend energy to each other.

A method for developing your own personal style

Be your own best friend and observe yourself.

Understand your body — your frame, proportions, skin tone, hair, body curves — and which part of your body makes you feel full of power?

Feel what your body is like when it moves: upright or relaxed, what kind of presence it has.

Then dissect the logic of other people’s styling and aesthetics. For example, that person might be a fashion blogger, or someone you pass on the street. Why does their style fascinate you, why do you feel you like it so much? Dissect their aesthetic logic.

Then you can build your own aesthetic dictionary — what is a powerful cut, what is a languid atmosphere.

But it takes a long time; growing up is a process of cultivating taste.

Human nature: selfish, selfless

Human nature is fundamentally selfish, yet it can also be selfless; individuals pursue private gain, yet are willing to sacrifice for the group.

I find it a bit interesting: genes themselves are selfish, a gene’s goal is self-replication, so our cooperation and altruism are all for the benefit of individual survival in evolution.

People in a group who are willing to help each other are more likely to get returns, be accepted, and survive.

And selfless behavior doesn’t necessarily come from selfless motives, yet selflessness is still precious, because it improves the collective and also raises the quality of individual survival.

From a game theory perspective, trust and cooperation are win-win in the long run.

And in fact, to a certain degree people don’t live only for material things, but for meaning and spiritual pursuit.

The reason humanity is great isn’t that we’re always selfless, but that we can choose not to be that selfish.

Some techniques for deep-thinking conversation

Don’t just share conclusions; share the thinking process too.

Don’t rush to reply; be willing to say, let me think about it.

Dare to offer an immature idea: “I have a possibly strange idea.”

Keep asking deeper: “Why is this important to you? What does this remind you of?”

The process of thinking, not just the viewpoint. Everyone has viewpoints; why you have this viewpoint, the experience and process, is what matters.

Intellectual curiosity and emotional courage.

Kick-the-cat effect

If the transmission of emotion could be described in one phrase, it would be a psychological phenomenon: the kick-the-cat effect.

It means a person, having received bad emotions, pressure, or unfair treatment from a superior or the outside world, can’t vent it directly at the source, so instead vents that emotion onto people or things weaker than themselves or less able to resist.

The boss criticizes an employee at the company → the employee goes home in a bad mood → takes it out on their partner → the partner yells at the child → the child feels wronged and goes to kick the family cat.

They usually pick someone or something weaker than themselves that can’t fight back.

It reminds me of a friend I met who was oppressed by their boss — which actually came from the boss’s own unhappy family of origin.

About my mother

The mother is the earliest secure base; everyone seems to carry a kind of attachment imprint for life.

My mother has a caring, self-sacrificing personality.

Her thinking path is usually emotion → experience → custom.

She has some traits:

Kind: throughout her life, she’s left the good things to others.

Simple: she has no process of complex thinking, of rational thinking.

Conflict-avoidant: emmm

Weak self-needs: she’s not good at expressing herself.

External information → she first judges “emotional safety.”

If safe → respond with experience.

If unsafe → avoid, or repeat old views.

She won’t talk logic or scientific rationality with you, nor abstraction; she even rather dislikes it when you say abstract things.

My path: logic → facts → reasoning.

Her path: emotion → experience → custom.

The difference = communicating feels like a “cross-language dialogue.”

What’s missing is a real understanding of my mother; the communication isn’t based on her system, but on my own.

It suddenly occurs to me that people’s behavioral patterns are to a large degree the product of early family and social structure, rather than “free choice.”

For her, “don’t think about those complicated things,” because once she thinks about them it may bring anxiety and unease, and she has no psychological tools to handle that unease.

The essence of parents’ nagging: the sense-of-control hypothesis

I suddenly came across a description of this concept, and suddenly I could understand why parents repeat over and over things I already know, they know I know, and they even don’t know why they say them.

Sense of Control Hypothesis: when facing the unknown or a loss of control, people gain psychological comfort by repeating familiar behaviors or words.

“I said it, so it’s like I was protecting you — I did what I should do.”

Many views were instilled in them by others (the previous generation, teachers, the social environment); they themselves never verified or questioned them. My dad is especially severe about this. I like to think about the experience and essence behind a view; my dad likes to think about whether the view itself makes sense.

In some parents’ emotional-expression dictionary there are only words like “advise,” “remind,” and “warn.” Nagging becomes the only love language they know how to use, because material and emotional expression may both be limited.

When you want to discuss things deeply with them, they start avoiding. Nagging can bypass self-exposure: I don’t need to explain, I just need to repeat, like playing a tape. This is actually a kind of Cognitive Avoidance: if you don’t touch the unknown territory, you won’t feel anxious.

For them, subconsciously, having you listen may be more important than having you understand. The logic behind it doesn’t matter; what matters is that they expressed their worry and you received the emotional signal.

A good kind of psychological stubbornness

Not afraid to work with people better than yourself, not afraid that the other person’s cognitive level is higher than yours, not afraid of being misunderstood, or being seen through.

If the other person reads you right, you gain a supplement to your self-knowledge.

If they read you wrong, you also gain an opportunity to clarify and express yourself.

In front of safe, trustworthy people, allow a bit more vulnerability and exposure, a bit more being understood.

Rethinking focus — how to train the brain

Right now I’m by an unbeatable seaside, in the sea breeze.

I’m thinking about what freedom is.

And what focus is?

The sea breeze keeps blowing and blowing.

Lots of things interfere with me; it feels harder and harder to do one thing well.

In the past I studied in a dorm, with no environmental temptations — just a screen in front of me, and a world inside the screen. The computer and the internet seemed like my window out of a boring reality.

Freedom — the more choices, the higher the cost of attention.

Focus feels more like potential drawn out by “constraint.”

So there are still some built-in KPIs, like rewards and blocking things out that I set for myself.

I can only go to social apps, or wander around the surrounding environment, after finishing certain tasks.

I used to think people mainly rely on internal drive — a sense of mission, values, curiosity, and interest.

Now I think it may not be only that.

Interest is of course very important, but external drive is still very important too.

Some self-suggestions for when you have no time to reply to messages (article impressions)

Some good techniques:

Self-suggestion: I want the other person to get a better reply, so I’ll finish what’s in my hands first.

A technique for not being disturbed: I’m single-threaded, I can only handle one thing at a time.

Replace instant gratification with anticipation: once I’m done in a bit, let’s have a voice chat for a while.

Set a time window for chatting, so you’re sure your time won’t be fragmented and diluted.

Not paying attention means being selfish

Is blocking things out selfish?

We don’t care about politics, don’t follow wars, don’t care about current entertainment news, don’t mind newly released films — is that selfish?

I’m thinking about something more fundamental: these things may be beyond your control anyway — does that count as returning to yourself?

Mostly it’s about returning to first principles? What exactly is the motive for blocking things out?

If it’s to escape your own responsibility? Then maybe it’s selfish.

If it’s to better carry the responsibilities you’ve chosen? I think it’s maturity.

Actively choosing your information input, your social circle, your schedule — rather than responding passively.

Sustaining a deep-work habit, producing high-quality content over long stretches.

Having empathy for people without being held hostage by emotion, without emotionally overdrafting on every event.

Not pursuing short-term noise but pursuing long-termism, and being able to return quickly to your best state after interference, failure, or emotional swings.

Before doing, or preparing to do, anything, think first

Think before doing anything or making any decision.

This process feels like the chain-of-thought mode of a large language model.

It can avoid a lot of mistakes.

Or, from the angle of metacognition and meta-awareness in cognitive psychology, it’s a process of cognizing and understanding yourself.

Plan → Monitor → Evaluate.

First analyze whether this step should be taken.

That way you can put more attention on the things that matter.

Actually there are two main things you’re thinking about: one is rationally analyzing whether this is really necessary and how to do it better; the other is being aware that you’re doing this thing — metacognition.

Thinking about how to standardize the daily travel pipeline

I used a few platforms: Polarsteps, Instagram, Facebook.

Including Moments and Channels, and Xiaohongshu.

It would be great to have a good mechanism.

Of course, what’s posted to Instagram now can auto-sync to Facebook.

Depending on authority is such a terrible yet such a helpless thing

My parents are, my friends around me are, even I am.

No longer blindly following fragmented advice, but judging whether to adopt it based on science and logic.

Being able to precisely distinguish which situations require action and which don’t, reducing wasted operations.

Starting to reflect on and break the irrational life inertia passed down between generations.

Gradually building your own knowledge system for living, with principles at the core.

Why do humans value endings so much, and why do humans also care so much about the present

Perfect endings vs. cherishing the present.

People are influenced by environment, by human evolutionary mechanisms, by the modern fixation on a perfect future — because the happiness we imagine tends to be terminal, and we always overemphasize results rather than process,

but it also seems like a conflict between delayed gratification and instant gratification.

Delayed gratification is in a way like craving — hoping for something better. People overestimate future rewards, which leads to endless deferral of gratification, while rarely truly living in the present.

But usually in the process of pursuing a goal, the brain rewards and produces anticipatory pleasure, yet once it’s achieved, it’s often less satisfying than expected (the “peak-end rule”: people remember the climax and the ending more than the process). This explains why things easily obtained aren’t cherished: without the effort process, there’s no sense of achievement.

Plus some cultural influence: film and literature reinforce perfect endings, making people live in fantasy rather than the present, and the result is anxiety.

Japanese cultural aesthetics like “wabi-sabi” praise imperfection and transience, and promote ichigo ichie as a “healing” philosophy: the feast won’t come again, so live in the present. This isn’t a human instinct.

On another level, there are certain scenarios in which people return to the present:

Moments of crisis and awakening, letting go of the pursuit of endings and of anxiety.

Old age or late life — is it a lowering of craving? More about liking, liking the present, a peaceful life.

Meditation, travel, practice, art, deep relationships — these also make it easy to enter a “flow state” and forget the ending.

When uncertainty is too high, instinct eases the anxiety.

Returning to the present often needs an external trigger or inner training; it’s not instinct, it’s learning to “accept uncertainty.”

The brain’s dopamine is often most active not only when you get satisfied

It suddenly occurs to me why humans have delayed gratification, and why humans pursue perfect endings.

In fact, the dopamine system already delivers a very rich reward at the moment of anticipation or craving, which is why we’re often extremely happy before we look forward to good food or to travel.

So dopamine has two very core aspects:

Wanting: dopamine-driven. Every time you scroll down, you feel satisfied; this also has a reward — a reward of uncertainty and anticipation.

Liking: actually seeing a fantastic video, or tasting something very delicious — that pure sense of joy.

So in a way, anticipation is also a process of releasing dopamine. “Anticipation” is the cause, “wanting” is the effect.

As a person grows up, the wanting system tends to get lower and lower, and anticipation actually drops too. When you’re young, people are more driven by craving to chase goals; but with age, a lot of the craving goes away.

So it makes sense that young people also get addicted to short videos more easily, and to gambling, haha. Young people’s dopamine systems are in a much more active state, pursuing exploration and new experience. For older people, the surprises gradually come from content, or from some deeper hobbies and meaningful activities.

Lowering expectations: thinking deeply once more

A topic we discussed back in Dali: “Slowly I lost my expectations, and instead had more happiness.”

At the dopamine “liking” level, lowering expectations makes it easier to feel satisfied with the current state — this is what we call contentment brings happiness; you won’t feel disappointment or anxiety because of the gap between expectation and reality.

But on the other hand, achievement and excitement: lowering expectations actually strips away an important source of happiness, because the enormous joy and peak experience of setting a challenging goal and finally achieving it through effort are produced jointly by strong “wanting” (anticipation) and the ultimate “liking” (achievement).

Lowering expectations — really lowering your psychological expectations — is a very smart strategy, because it’s easier to exceed your psychological expectation, and the excess is easily read by the brain as a surprise, releasing dopamine. But life is also a balance between craving and contentment.

So the key isn’t lowering expectations, or having no expectations, but managing expectations.

Some thoughts on the hierarchy of relational desire

My original understanding was from physical liking to psychological liking; actually it can be divided from basic to advanced.

Physical desire: sensory need.

Possessive desire: to have you.

Expressive desire: to express your own feelings.

Exploratory desire: to understand you deeply, not just surface information.

Sharing desire: to share your own feelings; the underlying drive is trust + belonging.

Participatory desire: to become part of your life journey, willing to invest some long-term resources.

Co-creative desire: to create and plan together with you, to go through things together.

The essence of communication

There are actually two parts: the content level and the relationship level. Think about which level the other person’s purpose is at.

If it’s content, you should focus on discussing the content.

If it’s relationship, then it’s a different path:

The other person’s intent is mostly not “wanting the right answer,” but wanting their emotion to be seen or the relational order to be confirmed.

Your ability is to give a rational explanation, but if the way you express it doesn’t match what the other person is “asking for,” it wears down the relationship and your energy.

First let the other person be seen, then discuss right and wrong, cost, and solutions.

Accept: first catch the emotion (which doesn’t mean agreeing with the view).

Negotiate: shift the topic from “right or wrong” to “choices/cost/division of labor.”

Refuse: clear boundary + friendly tone + offering an alternative (if willing).

Explaining satisfies a logical need; catching satisfies a relational need.

When the other person “wants relationship, not solutions,” give the relationship first, and the problem more easily enters the logical dimension. Get the order right and the cost is low.

Some general thoughts on explaining, when it’s aimed at relationship:

First let them be seen, and only then will they be heard.

Relationship before logic.

Facts instead of arguments; a viewpoint can also be a small experiment.

Boundary = clear + friendly + optional.

Some little AI tips

On skincare: objectively describing things is what I do.

I’ll roughly describe my skin type, then the city I’m currently in, my recent skincare products, and how my skin has reacted.

I want to understand my body more; recently I’ve been learning about this continuously.

Because earlier I used alcohol, an aloe gel containing alcohol (because I was in Nha Trang).

Actually I used to use aloe gel on my face, because of media marketing — more emphasis on aloe gel’s all-purpose function, masks, hydration and moisturizing, after-sun repair.

But actually its use on the body is low-frequency but large-dose.

Full-body after-sun repair, body moisturizing, and other functions.

So since my face became sensitive, for a while recently AI has been guiding me. I want two parts:

AI can introduce me to the relevant knowledge.

AI can guide my actions.

AI seems to be genuinely helping me grow.

Fundamentally, it’s about building a personal health record through continuous interaction, then providing personalized guidance based on scientific research.

There’s a trend here: the AI coach model of personalized learning.

Not just fitness — it can extend to nutrition, exercise, sleep, and more.

A better form might be that later, when we go to the hospital, what matters more isn’t getting medicine but knowing what’s actually going on with our body.

But when do people have a strong willingness to learn

A phrase comes to mind: why are young people eager to learn? It seems this can be combined with the earlier essence of dopamine — “wanting + satisfaction”; young people have a bit more wanting.

What’s more essential?

People crave learning, and what’s the essence of learning?

Start with one thing: when do people hate learning? Learning is too complicated, and learning is too painful.

And as people move through stages of life, and with their points of interest, whenever a valuable gap appears between the world and the self, we easily develop a desire to learn. That is, when one of novelty / pain point / identity possibility triggers, plus a visible path to payoff (quickly trying something through to achievement or meaning), interest gets ignited and sustained.

A person is like a trigger:

Perceiving a problem / sore spot

Being tempted by beauty / a novel experience

Identity imagination (a better self)

Social comparison

Time, urgency, or a milestone

How does it become sustainable?

Triggering event (see above) ->

Rise in emotion/attention (surprise, annoyance, desire) ->

Recognizing the gap (“I don’t know / I can’t do it”) ->

Estimating feasibility and payoff (will it be hard? Is it worth it?) ->

Micro-action begins (try once, buy a beginner’s book, watch a video) ->

Fast feedback and small wins (first visible effect / getting praise) ->

Internalizing identity (“I’m someone who does skincare / works out”) ->

Loop amplifies or fades (if all the supporting elements are in place, it continues; otherwise it slowly cools)

The imperative life people expect

Under cultural trends, shared values and aesthetics push most people to follow the crowd and choose converging options.

Most people, from childhood up, receive a life experience of instructions rather than one of principles or declarative knowledge.

This mode puts people in a state of “passively following,” lacking inner judgment. Once the environment and conditions change, the rules stop working, because you don’t know the logic behind them.

But freedom often comes from understanding the laws.

Human conflict comes from the conflict between instinct and reason: instinct makes us want instant gratification, reason makes us defer gratification — yet to a certain degree, reason’s deferral of gratification also carries a kind of craving, and also promotes dopamine release.

On the power of choice, and good and evil

Power is a means, a means of mobilizing resources and imposing constraints.

To some degree, when you have no power to choose, kindness is a forced outcome — the absence of any opportunity to do wrong.

If you truly have power and still actively choose restraint and goodwill,

Kant also said: some acts are done out of duty, and some out of necessity.

Power strips away fear and limits, amplifying the original base of human nature.

Many people aren’t very noble or very kind; they simply have no power to choose.

So a lot of the time I think about this morality: is it passive moral feeling or active moral feeling?

The essence of curiosity

What is curiosity?

Why does curiosity drive us to learn?

The essence of curiosity is a kind of craving: the brain’s sensitivity to novel stimuli and its response to uncertainty, driving us to fill an information gap and then obtain satisfaction.

Then, curiosity’s drive is spontaneous, an internal drive that doesn’t depend on external rewards.

And finally, knowledge learned in a state of curiosity is more easily remembered by the brain, because curiosity raises hippocampal activity and improves creativity.

But to a certain degree, once AI became active, people’s interest in it, or curiosity about it, weakened, for reasons including:

The sense of novelty fades; familiarity reduces the information gap.

Information saturation.

Humans habituate.

So the essential behavior for maintaining curiosity seems to be preserving the information gap — continuously stimulating interest in learning, triggering a flow state.

The illusion of flow and permanence

Everything is changing, and everything seems unchanged.

Time keeps moving forward — seasons turn, the body ages, memories fade.

At the physical level: all things change, atoms move.

At the conceptual level: certain patterns, structures, and forms aren’t affected by time.

People have very little sense of control over time, but in a flow state the sense of time is distorted; a moment seems eternal. Are flow and permanence just illusions of subjective experience?

Change may be an illusion; existence may be unchanging.

Sometimes the upper layer is changing, sometimes the upper layer is unchanging.

The river under the magnifying glass is changing; step back and look at the map, and the river seems to have always been there.

Technology changes, but the essence of technology seems unchanging; what’s abstracted out may be unchanging too.

Change and unchangingness come back to subjective experience.

Disguise and hypocrisy

Why do we need disguise and hypocrisy?

Social norms and expectations.

Self-protection.

Maintaining relationships.

Psychological defense mechanisms.

When disguise isn’t needed:

Anthony Bourdain

He abused drugs when young, and later successfully got clean.

He spent most of the year on the road; it’s hard to build a stable, deep daily-life practice.

His show is known for being real, but in fact life in front of the camera is ultimately a performance; you can’t tell which one is the real self.

Loneliness — the extreme loneliness of being amid a crowd.

Solitude feels more like an active choice; loneliness feels more like lacking meaningful links, being understood, and soul-level resonance.

“Anthony Bourdain” isn’t just a person, but a brand, a cultural symbol onto which countless imaginings have been projected.

So what if he’d seen it all? The inner loneliness has nowhere to rest.

His life was like a grand journey and a grand feast, but once every flavor had been tasted, what remained was an unbearable blankness.

Humans ultimately seek a sense of meaning.

The real me, the me I play

Setting aside everyone’s role and identity, what am I like? Maybe that’s the real me?

Whether you can feel a sense of self.

On the other hand, is the role we play really the true self?

Take the role away, and only the biological me is left: fatigue, desire, fear.

I am not the role, not the identity, but the awareness that can perceive the role.

The real me knows what I’m performing.

While playing any role, I can feel “this is still me.”

The unity of role and inner awareness: the role is the clothing you wear outward, and the clothing matches you.

I try playing some roles I haven’t tried before.

Feeling it fits → it means that’s a part of your truth.

Feeling uncomfortable → it means you’re forcing yourself to cater to some external expectation.

Gradually find the roles that suit you, and gradually you can become the person you want to be.

Tinh cam

In the Vietnamese worldview, a person’s value of existence isn’t measured by individual achievement, but defined by their emotional investment and responsiveness within a network of relationships. This view holds that: a person truly exists through emotional connection; an isolated individual is an incomplete being.

Perceive with the heart rather than only analyze with the brain.

Understand in interaction rather than judge in observation.

Reach true knowledge through empathy rather than through logical deduction.

Tinh cam is used as the basis of moral judgment — what’s right and what’s wrong is not determined only through rational analysis, but more through emotional resonance.

Kindness comes from an inner emotional stirring, not from external rules and constraints.

Tinh cam was born under a collective culture: the individual in the collective isn’t diminished, but finds a more complete self through emotional investment.

This seems different from China or other East Asian countries. It’s somewhat similar to China’s concept of “emotion,” but not the same: China’s “emotion” leans more toward the individual’s inner feelings themselves, while “tinh cam” seems to add a layer of interactive responsibility within relationships. That also seems to explain why friends in Vietnam often gather together.

The sense of boundaries among Vietnamese people

A very common phenomenon, present in China too, but China varies enormously: the north is very open, the south more reserved; rural-urban differences are large; different cohorts differ; even within the same cohort, different information exposure creates variation.

Vietnam is relatively uniform; traditional social relations toward strangers are preserved more completely.

So this is where the “nghia” characteristic shows: it’s selective. Only within a group recognized as one’s own people is nghia activated; for strangers, this sense of obligation doesn’t apply.

The boundary effect of Vietnam’s circle culture:

Core circle: family, close friends — extremely intimate, unreserved trust

Middle circle: colleagues, acquaintances — polite but distant

Outer circle: strangers — highly vigilant, keeping distance

Influenced by war, this historical experience formed a psychological pattern in the collective unconscious: “stranger = potential threat.”

China has sound institutional rules and a trust mechanism system, through technology and law.

Vietnamese society’s trust mechanism is built on personal relationships rather than institutional rules.

Toward friends:

Personal trust built through long-term interaction

Emotional bonds maintained through “nghĩa” and “tình cảm”

A sense of mutual guarantee and responsibility

Toward strangers:

Lack of institutionalized trust protection

No shared social network as a trust intermediary

Unable to predict the other person’s behavioral pattern

In a relationship-oriented society, the greatest anxiety toward strangers comes from information asymmetry:

Not knowing the other person’s social background

Not understanding the other person’s moral character

Lacking a mutual acquaintance as “trust endorsement”

Vietnamese families teach children from an early age:

“Đề phòng” (be on guard): be careful and cautious with strangers

“Thân thiện với người quen”: be warm and friendly with acquaintances

“Không nói chuyện với người lạ”: don’t talk to strangers

But there are generational differences too: modern urban life requires interacting with strangers, so the younger generation of Vietnamese, while cautious, are more open.

Maybe in the process of modernization, how will Vietnam face the powerful inertia of traditional culture?

The human attachment system

Some of it seems innate. For example, chatting with parents or certain friends — isn’t it more than just the dopamine incentive? More of it seems to come from something innate?

Chatting with parents and friends, the brain generates positive feedback: being understood, getting support, sharing joy, secreting the drive that makes you take action — and the positive feedback in the chat loops back to promote more socializing.

Humans are social animals; social connection itself is the basis of survival and reproduction, and the brain evolved to reward social behavior.

So humans evolved a survival mechanism — the attachment system. Infants depend on their parents to get protection and nurturing; in adulthood it transforms into dependence on intimate relationships — longing to meet, chat, hug — and deeper down a sense of belonging. But when it breaks, it produces loneliness, anxiety, and loss.

So when you meet someone you like, the brain marks them as a “source of security and pleasure,” and you instinctively want to get close, chat, and stay in touch.

In brain science, being in love releases dopamine and oxytocin, the dopamine-reward loop becomes active, making you addicted to interacting with the person you like — which is why separation produces anxiety.

Biologically: driven by the brain’s attachment and reward mechanisms.

Psychologically: needing to confirm self-worth through the other person.

In human terms: longing for intimacy and connection, avoiding loneliness.

Human nature: why people are hard to change

Underlying needs form naturally out of biological instinct and can hardly be changed, so you can’t make a person have no desires, and you can’t make a person stop caring about relationships.

On the other hand, a person’s habits, values and ways of thinking do change with environment, experience and cognitive upgrades — that part can change.

But environment is a natural thing, and a long-formed thing, and yet people often lack patience for change — even more so with other people; they want the other person to follow their own way. So forcing change is nearly impossible; deep down the person doesn’t want to change.

On the other hand, change only really begins when you yourself, deep down, realize you need to change — for instance deciding to start exercising and keep a good figure.

Another part: environment has a huge influence. If a person moves to a new country, they’ll naturally and imperceptibly be shaped by the new environment, and their ways of thinking and habits shift on their own.

If a person always keeps the right to choose, then in essence everyone can change — the premise is that the person is willing to bear the responsibility behind the choice.

Change the people around you? Change them according to your own ideas?

Or how?

What are the driving conditions?

Desire-driven: a goal is attractive enough to you, say having love, or having a good body.

Cognition-driven: when a new understanding/belief system gives you an “aha” moment, the old behavior pattern loses its justification and you naturally turn to the new one.

Pain-driven: when current suffering exceeds the comfort zone of habit, people are forced to look for a way out.

Subtle influence — I feel it’s less about transmitting opinions. What I keep thinking about is that one person imperceptibly influencing another’s conditions must be based on some of people’s instincts and on the influence and construction of the environment:

Mirror effect: people subconsciously imitate the language, habits and attitudes of those around them. I’m like this too, even more obviously — I’m good at observing the strengths of people around me and then learning them.

Emotional contagion: in a long-term relationship, a stable and positive person will assimilate the other person’s emotions or behavior patterns.

Projection of values: a person with higher cognition offers, through their own understanding and way of acting, a “higher-order reference point”, and the person with lower cognition may gradually be drawn in and then imitate it.

But if it’s my dad, constantly force-feeding me opinions instead of explaining them, I’m extremely resistant — as a teenager, I just don’t like the feeling of being controlled.

So what’s needed is empathy + demonstration, and then subtle influence will actually take effect.

Living out a new way yourself is more powerful than saying a hundred lines of reasoning.

Create experience, rather than indoctrinate.

Use curiosity, rather than pressure.

Delayed gratification is instant gratification repackaged

People crave delayed gratification because the anticipation of delayed gratification is essentially another form of instant gratification.

Anticipation produces dopamine in real time, so delayed gratification is something instant gratification packages up.

But this packaging is often very important for growth.

For example, check-ins, points and achievement systems all keep cutting “delayed gratification” into small instant gratifications.

Why some people are picky eaters

It’s the interweaving of physiological instinct, psychological factors and social experience.

By evolutionary instinct, people are more sensitive to bitter, sour, strong-smelling tastes — the ones easily associated with danger.

At the genetic level, people differ in taste sensitivity (to bitterness, spiciness, sweetness). For some people, for instance, the smell of cilantro brings intense discomfort.

Also, food isn’t just nutrition — it can be strongly bound to emotional experience. If you were forced to eat a lot of something as a child, it’s easy to form a negative emotional memory.

Culture inevitably shapes food too; and if you only eat a fixed set of foods long term, your taste and digestive system become more rigid, you resist new things more, or you miss your hometown food more.

You can tell what kind of person someone is from food preferences; people who hate durian, cilantro or certain cheeses may have higher taste/smell sensitivity.

Being picky sometimes means valuing boundaries and self-control. When someone won’t eat a certain food, it may not be the food itself but the memory/experience it stands for.

Understanding pity and compassion

Pity comes partly from instinct, partly from cognition, and partly from the sediment of experience.

One part is easy to get: brief sympathy — a moving video makes you immediately want to help.

The other part needs to settle: pity that lasts, not just for people you know but for strangers and even for people on the opposite side.

Having been through your own pain and failure makes it easier to understand others.

An understanding of the world’s complexity, seeing the reasons behind people’s behavior.

Does pity feel more like a condescending “poor you”? What we assume is understanding of others still seems tied to our own moods?

Compassion — I’ve started trying to understand this word.

The essence of life is imperfection, full of suffering.

Maybe the last day in Hoi An

Last dinner at Quán Cao lầu Bá Lễ, the same young woman again, a very popular restaurant; she greeted me saying I was back again, hahaha.

Somehow a sad feeling came over me.

She was still as lively as ever? She seemed very happy?

Still, on one side is the tourist area with the bustle and joy I saw, and on the other side is where locals live, a plain life, and that plain life is mixed with a lot of people’s helplessness and hardship, and a lot of misfortune, all tangled together.

In the past I’ve thought a lot about begging, about certain social phenomena — mostly standing in the position of a passerby who can safely, or superiorly, feel pity for the weak or the suffering.

A sense of powerlessness and self-blame welled up; the world has so much pain.

I’ve never felt it from an angle I share with others — the angle of humanity, of life, of fellow beings, as equals, in symbiosis.

Under my cap I couldn’t hold back tears. She came over to ask how the dish she recommended was this time; I looked up and said it was very good. She caught a glimpse of my wet eyes and, surprised, said “very spicy”. I said no.

Before I left she asked when I was leaving. I said tomorrow. Tomorrow leaving Hoi An, and again I couldn’t help wanting to cry.

Even though I’m chasing freedom and the world, there’s still so much that doesn’t go the way I want — the world has so much that doesn’t go right, and I under this world have so much that doesn’t go right, and I and the world are one.

It’s not pity, it’s that we all live in the same sea of suffering.

All beings suffer, and not only suffering but impermanence and incompleteness.

Others have even deeper predicaments, and compassion rises from the heart.

Compassion is being willing to understand, to accompany, rather than rushing to save.

Compassion from a rational angle

Compassion needs three conditions to mature:

Cognition: understanding the world’s complexity and causality.

Emotion regulation: being able to bear it without being drowned by it.

Action wisdom: goodwill that’s sustainable without overstepping.

Seeing suffering, and acting with measure, with method, and sustainably.

Pessimism keeps me clear-headed, but life still needs optimistic action.

Quiet

A friend said I’m very quiet. I said that wherever I am — noisy places, quiet places — I’m working to hear the deeper self and the world.

How sunscreen’s effective window works

Chemical sunscreen filters absorb UV and then convert it into heat and release it.

Physical filters rub off, so they often stop working easily, for example after working for a while.

SPF in theory extends the time it takes skin to burn 50 times, so 10 * 50 = 500.

So in practice, real-world testing shows SPF 50 also drops to around SPF 20 within 2-3 hours.

So the usual rule for continuous outdoor activity is to reapply every two hours, as a top-up.

In continuously defending against UV, the filters gradually break down and stop working.

Also, most people actually don’t apply enough, so the real protection may only be half the label.

Build an intuitive awareness of this.

If karma is real, why does the real world look so “unfair”

Karma is a net; how do you understand karma correctly?

Cause: a seed planted.

Conditions: time, sunlight, rain and other conditions that help it grow.

Fruit: the seed finally sprouts, flowers, bears fruit.

So in that sense, behind any behavior there may be a cause.

Karma is a net, not a line, not merely a one-to-one relation.

Someone who does good has heaven within; someone who does evil has hell within.

Understanding reincarnation

Life cycles endlessly through the six realms (heaven, human, asura, animal, hungry ghost, hell).

This cycle is driven by “karma” and “ignorance” (not knowing the truth), and the goal of practice is to jump out of this cycle.

Everything is a product of relationships: the law of dependent origination.

“Arising and falling” describes the fundamental law of the existence and disappearance of all things in the universe. It isn’t the creation of a deity, nor random chance, but a huge, precise, dynamic “web of relationships”.

Karma is like the operating law of this world, dependent origination is the underlying worldview that explains it all; once you understand dependent origination you can understand impermanence, non-self and emptiness.

Because this exists, that exists; because this doesn’t exist, that doesn’t exist. Because this arises, that arises; because this ceases, that ceases.

Because this exists, that exists; because this disappears, that disappears too.

Nothing can exist independently or in isolation; the existence or occurrence of anything is a temporary combination of countless causes and conditions, and when these disperse the thing ceases too.

For example, coffee can’t exist independently. Can soil exist independently? No. The world is assembled through mutual support.

The causes and conditions of the world are constantly changing, so everything they make up is naturally arising and passing away moment by moment, never pausing.

So if the cup breaks, or the coffee is finished, or goes cold, that’s conditions falling away.

Arising and falling shapes how we see the world: the world is impermanent, causes and conditions keep changing; changes in body, emotion and thoughts are never still.

This also leads to non-self (no-self).

Like coffee, I’m not an independently existing entity; I’m made of a lot of thinking, body, behavior and consciousness, a temporary assembly of these parts. There’s no eternal, unchanging “me” or soul behind it all pulling the strings.

So I don’t even concretely exist.

Then there’s emptiness. Emptiness isn’t nothingness; it means everything is empty of an independent, eternal self-nature.

Being empty often means infinite possibility: because it’s empty it can be filled with coffee. That also means, to some degree, the happiness of starting from 0 — because it’s new there are many opportunities, whereas if it were fixed and unchanging, any effort would seem meaningless.

Non-self

It’s not that you don’t exist or that everything is nothingness.

“I” is not a thing, it’s a process.

Everything is a product of relationships; nothing can exist independently as an individual.

Non-self means there’s no eternal, unchanging, independent soul or true self that rules everything; “I” is a dynamically changing process of combination.

Non-self, taking me apart: why am I me, what am I made of? I’m composed of five parts:

Form (Rūpa): my body, including matter; cells constantly arise and pass away.

Feeling (Vedanā) - the user experience: my sensations, my intuition, perception, pleasure and pain.

Perception (Saṃjñā) - the labeling processor: cognition and concepts, thoughts, the notions formed after birth.

Mental formations (Saṃskāra) - the behavior driver: will, impulse, resolve and various mental habits (karmic tendencies); behind driven behavior are motives and habits.

Consciousness (Vijñāna) - the base operating system: the pure capacity for “awareness”. When eye, ear, nose, tongue, body and mind contact the outside, it produces the function of “knowing”.

A person is no longer trapped by labels, no longer defined by them: a person is composite, dynamic, reshapable.

Self

If non-self means there’s no eternal, unchanging, independent soul or true self that rules everything, then what is “self”?

If the ultimate truth is “non-self”, then what’s going on with this “I” we feel the moment we open our eyes every day, so real and so intense?

For convenience our mind constructs a virtual image; the point of practice isn’t to destroy this virtual image but to see through its virtuality, so you’re no longer fooled or controlled by it.

Buddhism has two levels of “truth”.

Conventional Truth: on the worldly level, in daily life, “I” is real and necessary. You need an “I” to eat, work and talk. The Buddha also used “I” to refer to himself.

Ultimate Truth: on the level of wisdom, after deep investigation you find this “I” is only a temporary combination, whose essence is “non-self”.

How does the sense of self arise, how is the virtual image fabricated?

Linking: the chain of memory links into a seemingly continuous story with a plot, and the protagonist of that story is you.

Identification: we start to strongly identify with this story and its protagonist. We stick the labels “I” or “mine” on certain things.

my body

my thoughts

I’m very sad

Solidifying the persona: the virtual image is given a stable personality and setting, a persona:

an introverted person

a person with a temper

The purpose of mind-training is to be the master of “I”, not the slave of “I”.

Why most people become emotional so often

The reason most people become emotional so often is that they lack the ability to think deeply.

A very important part of mindfulness is self-awareness

A very important part of mindfulness is self-awareness; after noticing, you break self-centeredness — emotions, desires, fears aren’t the exclusive property of “the unique me” but common human psychological phenomena. That seems to be a kind of compassion too.

Suffering isn’t mine alone, it’s shared by all beings.

It’s not a moral injunction to be kind; it’s that when you see your own suffering clearly, you naturally understand that others suffer the same way — understanding brings empathy, empathy brings care, and attention expands from “how do I get free” to “how do we all get free”.

Compassion and wisdom in tandem

You could say it’s the best phrase in Buddhism for describing a rational state of life.

Compassion and wisdom perfectly combined.

Wisdom: deeply and personally realizing the wisdom of “non-self” and “emptiness”.

Able to see through the illusion of all worldly phenomena, cutting off the root of all attachment and affliction. What it brings is liberation and freedom.

The wing of wisdom deeply and personally realizes the wisdom of “non-self” and “emptiness”.

The wing of compassion feels with all beings, the infinite warmth of wishing them freedom from suffering and happiness.

From the angle of emotion and reason:

Wisdom is the ultimate reason beyond instrumentality.

Compassion is the ultimate feeling beyond emotionality.

[Self-definition] Systematized sensual realist: refining feeling via rational frameworks

【Self-definition】A systematized sensual realist: using rational frameworks to refine sensual raw material.

【World picture】Everything can be reduced to conditions and causes; start from the “cause” before talking about the “effect”.

【Value order】Freedom > truth > efficiency > relational harmony (but acknowledging the two layers of communication: relationship/content).

【Methodology】A beginner’s mindset of “empty/space” + knowledge engineering (thinking web maps).

【View of learning】Information → structure → insight → experiential verification; AI is an amplifier, not a substitute.

【Source of aesthetics】Living abroad and multicultural immersion produce feeling material; averse to sentimental writing.

【Communication model】Relationship and content decoupled; in the content domain, pursue chains of evidence and reusable frameworks.

【View of compassion】Compassion born of cause, wisdom born of cause; compassion and wisdom in tandem is the endgame capability model.

【Sense of boundaries】Sensitive to “preachiness/emotional blackmail”; if it doesn’t match, politely withdraw.

【Source of conflict】The tension between a preference for efficiency and logic ↔ others’ preference for casual emotional expression.

【Self-consistency】Allow tension and transform it: when young you need to be sharp, in practice you need to be cool.

【View of time】Do subtraction with a limited life; keep curiosity, don’t cling to “writing a thick book”.

【Knowledge engineering】Index experience by semantic node; when facing something, first construct a “question glossary”.

【Growth loop】Reflect → reconstruct → practice → calibrate; leaning long-termist with a compounding mindset.

【Risk orientation】Model before acting to reduce regret; low tolerance for high-noise situations.

【Emotion algorithm】Bear the first arrow, don’t shoot the second; be present without getting swept in.

【Position of AI】Retrieval × structuring × dialogic reasoning; aesthetics and the senses rely on self-training.

【View of relationships】Resonance matters but not at the cost of truth; not making pleasing others the main strategy.

【Judgment style】Abstract first, then land it; results explainable, paths reusable.

【Self-reflection mechanism】Always keep the “I might be wrong” opener; revise the narrative quickly.

【Achievement motive】“Understanding and mastery” > “being seen”; intrinsically driven.

【Attention allocation】Zero tolerance for noise; prefer firsthand experience and firsthand data.

【Ethical principle】“Be responsible for causes, don’t cling to effects”; centered on reducing suffering.

【Trigger】Curiosity > utility; leaning exploratory input, tolerant of incomplete information.

【Style label】A sober romantic, a gentle hardcore.

【Common misunderstanding】Easily read as cold or overly rational; in essence it’s “restrained compassion”.

【Anti-fragility】Use “empty/space” as a buffer, stay malleable toward uncertainty.

【Iteration problem】Watch out for missing slow variables and human warmth in the name of “efficiency”.

【Self-reminder】In the relationship domain: well-intentioned silence = efficiency.

【Practice anchor】One “cause” a day: trace the causal chain of today’s emotions/judgments.

【Creative paradigm】Structure before rhetoric; use metaphor to carry abstraction, refuse sentimentality.

【Decision mantra】“Good enough, let it go”; avoid perfectionist clinging.

【Energy management】Refuel feeling with nature and physical training.

【View of knowledge】True knowledge = transferable/compressible/teachable; the rest is all information.

【Safe word】When the scene shifts to the relationship domain: listening > proving.

【Marginal rule】The Nth “book of principles” < one verifiable personal realization.

【Ultimate goal】In the world, not of the world; compassion and wisdom in tandem.

【Counter-thesis】Lose curiosity and the beginner’s heart, and however much structure you have is an empty shell.

【Milestone】From “seeking to be right” to “seeking to connect”, from “seeking speed” to “seeking steady state”.

【Self-portrait】A “systematized practitioner”: taming the edge with reason, softening the edge with compassion.

The pioneers of the zeitgeist and resonance

People on the same frequency meet before dawn; this isn’t coincidence but a necessity, the formation of a resonance field.

A zeitgeist not yet clearly defined by mainstream language.

A few people are like highly sensitive antennas that can catch the signal first, perhaps because of unique experience, a unique knowledge structure, or innate intuition, and they’re drawn to each other and form a group.

This is a cognitive community that names the vague feeling of the times, creating a new vocabulary or discourse system.

When the energy in this “resonance field” accumulates to a certain point, and at the same time the external “zeitgeist” turns from undercurrent into mainstream, this group meets its “tipping point”.

Great innovation and change is essentially the resonance of individual sensitivity and collective wisdom at a turning point of the times.

Why arranged marriages are still so common in China

Not just rural families — in some developed cities too; it depends on the parents’ status, resources and standing.

Because many young people also depend on their parents’ financial support and emotional comfort, so on the big matter of marriage they’re more willing to hear out their parents’ arrangements.

Big cities also have their specific circles, like the matchmaking corner culture, where parents use their own social resources to screen partners for their children.

In the Yangtze River Delta, over two in ten come from introductions by parents.

Essentially it’s determined by cultural values, family structure, and how individuals are positioned in society.

In the collectivist society under Confucian culture, marriage’s primary function is continuing the family line, protecting family interests and consolidating social relationships, rather than purely satisfying personal feelings.

A Christian’s daily life

On the collective level, they have Sunday worship, the most important group activity of the week, usually containing some of these elements:

🎵 Praise & Worship: expressing worship and thanks to God through singing (modern worship songs or traditional hymns).

📖 Scripture & Sermon: a pastor or priest gives an in-depth explanation and teaching on a passage of the Bible, helping believers understand it and apply it to life.

🙏 Prayer: praying together for the country, the community, the church and those in need.

Offering: believers voluntarily give money to support the church’s operations and ministries.

🍷 Communion: depending on the church’s tradition, the communion service is held regularly (weekly, monthly or quarterly).

Fellowship: the church isn’t only a place of worship, it’s a community.

Small Groups: many believers join smaller groups where they can study the Bible more deeply, share life’s joys and sorrows, pray for each other and support each other. This is an important way to build deep relationships.

Community service: churches often organize service activities, like visiting orphanages and nursing homes and helping the poor, putting faith into action.

🧘 On the personal level: spiritual disciplines and growth

This is the “faith recharge” believers do at home on their own.

🙏 Prayer: a direct conversation with God. Not just petition, but also praise, thanksgiving, confession and listening. Many Christians develop a habit of praying at fixed times each day (like morning and evening prayer).

📖 Bible reading: reading a portion of the Bible each day to meditate on and understand God’s word. This is seen as the process of taking in spiritual “food”. Many people follow a specific reading plan.

Meditation/Contemplation: quieting down, turning a passage or a theological concept over repeatedly so it sinks into the heart, not just into head knowledge.

🌍 On the level of life: action and witness

This is the final expression of faith — turning inner belief into outward behavior.

Ethics: in work, family and social life, striving to act according to the Bible’s teaching — honesty, forgiveness, humility, caring for others.

Love your neighbor as yourself: one of the most important commands Jesus gave. Christians are encouraged to actively care for and serve those around them, whatever their background.

Evangelism: sharing one’s faith and the story of Jesus through words and the example of one’s life. This is seen as “witnessing” — proving the reality of the faith with your life.

View of money: taught to be a good steward of money, to give generously (“tithing” — giving a tenth of your income is a tradition in many churches), and to help those in need.

Minimum viable depth (MLD)

I’m wondering where the limit is to how deep any field or concept can be dug.

It’s not about diving deep into everything, but stopping at the layer where “you can make a decision”. Depth is a cost, decisions are the output.

Maybe the answer to this is found in Wang Yangming’s mind philosophy, in the unity of knowledge and action.

Xiang Biao’s distinctive subjective perspective

Before, I always thought about whether I could look at this from a near-objective angle.

Xiang Biao likes to reflect on himself while thinking, often making himself an object of analysis.

A phrase he likes: “take yourself as method” — acknowledging your own perspective, emotions and biases, and using them to understand the world better. That’s a high-level honesty.

Taking yourself as method actually seems to be acknowledging your own subjectivity?

Xiang Biao holds that absolute “objectivity” doesn’t exist, because an observer can never truly detach from their background and perspective. So rather than pretending to have a “God’s-eye view”, it’s better to honestly show your position and limits — subjective clarity is closer to the truth than fake objectivity. It’s not abandoning objectivity but redefining the path to it: arriving through understanding the subjective.

This seems like a metacognitive system?

If essential objectivity doesn’t exist, we can only acknowledge the limits of our subjective perspective. What we often stress is understanding from my angle: we’re the role that touches this world, the vessel that records this world, dissecting this world.

Xiang Biao seems to more actively understand the subjective.

One is passively acknowledging? One is actively understanding?

An example of passive acknowledgment comes easily to mind: I state my field of view and admit its limits, and then there’s nothing more.

Actively understanding the subjective:

Analyzing why what I see is this way and different from others, asking what my own material is, asking why the outside shows me this field of view, and reasoning backward to figure out what the actual cause is.

So what Xiang Biao advocates is that we actively embrace our own subjectivity, and only then can we use our subjectivity to reach objectivity.

It suddenly hits me that my own principle is to understand myself and understand this world — the two suddenly got linked. Understand yourself, understand the world through yourself; it’s as if there’s a metacognitive angle, taking yourself as method.

Another way to put it feels like when I’m playing a game: consciousness operates my body, my body is the game character; losing the game doesn’t hurt much, there aren’t a lot of the character’s emotions, and instead you can analyze objectively and understand from various angles.

Understanding Fan Li’s unconventionality

Fan Li’s unconventionality seems built on a deep understanding of the rules.

Zhang Liang and Han Xin, inside the power system, were suspected and killed.

Fan Li knew well that Goujian could share hardship but not ease.

This is what Fan Li drew from his deep insight into human nature.

When Goujian was first captured he swallowed his pride; at that point the loyal people around him trusted him, but once Wu was defeated, Goujian’s psychology changed.

Inferiority turned into arrogance.

Dependence turned into suspicion.

Unity turned into settling scores with meritorious ministers.

Fan Li’s deep insight into human nature and power.

Power needs support in adversity and tends to reject support in comfort.

This is how you can understand the unconventionality: a deep understanding framework that can flexibly adjust, break through limits and break convention.

The reward mechanism of pressing the shutter

Taking photos is to some degree like gambling.

Pressing the shutter is like placing a bet; the process itself stimulates dopamine production.

If the result exceeds expectations, the brain gets an unexpected reward.

In social settings, having your photos liked by others is another round of extra reward.

Taking photos can create a more ideal self; it’s a sense of self-mastery and self-identification, the satisfaction of “I can exist like this”.

Extending innate knowing

The path of seeking that Wang Yangming explored in his late years.

Innate knowing (liangzhi) is the “mind that knows right and wrong” in your heart — capable without being learned, knowing without being thought. It’s what heaven gives every person, the root that makes you human. It is bright, it is self-sufficient, it is a mirror, it is the sun.

The mind returning to simplicity after going through complexity — the original heart.

The first layer is restoration: innate knowing is originally bright, but is blocked by acquired selfish desires, habitual tendencies and stray thoughts, like a dusty mirror you can’t see through. “Extending” is the work of wiping it clean.

The second layer is carrying it out, putting it into use: once innate knowing is restored to brightness, it tells you what’s right and wrong right now, and at that point extending innate knowing means applying right and wrong.

Innate knowing tells you that at this moment you should forgive. So you take forgiving action and speak peaceful words.

Innate knowing tells you that at this moment you should step up. So you gather courage and take responsibility.

This practical process of “acting according to innate knowing” is carrying the light of innate knowing out onto all things, making the world a bit better because of your innate knowing.

On every thought and every matter, polish the innate knowing in your heart, and follow its guidance completely.

In the age of short-video fragmentation, what are we actually busy with

Wang Yangming advocated the unity of knowledge and action, and training amid affairs.

But in the AI era, fragmentation makes us feel busier, and yet we can’t do without it.

Why is this fragmented information so attractive? It was never designed to systematically convey knowledge.

Short videos are efficient emotion wakers. In one minute they can make you laugh, move you, make you angry. What we consume first is the stimulation of this emotional fluctuation; knowledge is just the carrier.

You’re not paying for knowledge, you’re paying for the dopamine of “feeling good” or “feeling touched”.

The brain stays in an energy-saving comfort zone.

A lot of content is packaged as “solid stuff”, giving us the illusion of having learned knowledge.

In the short-video era the brain gets domesticated; it gets used to switching attention every 15-30 seconds and expects new stimulation.

And knowledge can’t form a deep knowledge network.

The Confucian OS

Ren (core value): care for life and altruistic motive.

Yi (criterion of judgment): in a dilemma, choosing by the rightness of “how it ought to be”.

Li (relational order): boundaries, sense of proportion, sense of role; turning goodwill into a sustainable order of interaction.

Zhi (method of knowing): investigating things to extend knowledge (seeking law outwardly) + extending innate knowing (seeking clear awareness inwardly).

Xin (trustworthiness): consistency between word and action, predictable long-term cooperative credit.

Gongfu (path of cultivation): being watchful when alone (self-disciplined even with no one around), the middle way (unbiased dynamic balance), unity of knowledge and action (do it right now).

The usefulness of the useless

The useless tree grows into a towering tree — behind that is the Dao and its law.

The law of useful and useless is judged by people, and human nature is short-sighted.

But the tree’s usefulness is defined by the tree’s own nature: it’s useless to others, and that becomes its greatest use.

Many people think Labubu is useless too, but it’s the uselessness that creates its scarcity and value, and creates a sense of identity and belonging.

A head stuffed with many things looks useful, but because it holds too much it can’t take in anything new; only by emptying the cup can you pour in new water.

Useful, useless.

Liberate yourself from all binary oppositions and anxiety: think, listen to the heart, observe the mind, observe the world.

The Crowd

Once an individual merges into a collective, their individuality is drowned, and their thoughts and feelings enter a state of collective unconsciousness, becoming impulsive, volatile and extreme.

After a person is immersed in a group for a while, the group’s special effects and psychological suggestion make us ignorant; in such a special state a person becomes absorbed in it, and the brainwashed individual is controlled by the brainwasher.

But people are relatively more likely to lose independent thinking in a collective environment.

Three factors that groups bring:

the anonymity that numbers bring

emotional contagion

suggestibility

And in a collective, individual differences in intelligence disappear, because collective behavior is mainly driven by unconscious instinct rather than rational thought.

Characteristics of group psychology:

Impulsive, volatile

Credulous and suggestible

Exaggeration and simplification of emotion

Bigoted, domineering and conservative; they need a god, or a leader, even more

Two extremes in morality

It can be very low: anonymity and lack of responsibility

It can be very high: inspired by belief, self-sacrifice

A leader’s methods of rule:

Assertion: many statements give no evidence, do no reasoning, and just deliver a concise, forceful conclusion.

Repetition: repeating the conclusion over and over.

Contagion: once repeated enough, it spreads.

The basic colors of human nature

The public is the armor, the private is the core.

The more selfless someone’s words and actions are, the more you should observe who ultimately benefits and who loses from their behavior.

Don’t look at what they say, observe what they do.

People usually have the emotion and position first, then look for reasons for it.

And the brain easily produces corresponding biases, easily magnifying and beautifying what it wants.

Feeling is the fuse: like someone and everything they do is right; dislike someone and everything they do is wrong.

Snobbery: personal choices are largely determined by the “interest structure” (profit) and “the way the tide is going” (momentum).

All under heaven come bustling for profit — profit isn’t only money; power and security too. An individual’s morality or ability is fragile before the momentum.

So here’s something interesting: get a person’s emotions going as much as possible

So here’s something interesting: get a person’s emotions going as much as possible, arouse the corresponding emotion — fear, or hope — and next they’ll even persuade themselves with reason.

So it’s the same with products: compared with a product’s specs, more of it is the “sense of belonging”, security, accomplishment and happiness the product brings.

When someone tries to persuade you, first put down the “reasoning” they’re offering, and feel which “emotion” they’re trying to stir in you.

The gap between knowing and doing is very, very far (2)

The gap between knowing and doing is very, very far.

It suddenly occurred to me as an example: why products try as hard as possible to shorten the shortest execution path — because the user’s patience may be worn out along the way.

Wang Yangming said knowledge and action are one, yet between them lies a thousand miles.

We understand the reasoning, but not deeply enough — our cognitive obstacle.

Our psychological obstacles: fear, inertia, desire.

And a whole series of emotional obstacles.

And obstacles in the real environment, like rain or venue problems affecting exercise.

Between knowing and doing there may also need to be skills, and some bridge of habit.

The distance between is very far.

Understanding → internalization → psychological readiness → environment/skill readiness → action.

The gap between knowing and doing is enormous

The gap between knowing and doing is enormous.

An example just came to mind: this is why products try to shorten the shortest execution path as much as possible — because a user’s patience can be worn away somewhere along the way.

Wang Yangming’s unity of knowing and doing — but between knowing and doing lie a thousand miles.

We understand the principle, but we don’t understand it deeply enough. There are the obstacles in our cognition.

There are the psychological obstacles: fear, inertia, desire.

And a whole series of emotional obstacles.

And obstacles in the real environment — rain, for instance, or a venue problem that stops you from training.

Between knowing and doing you may also need skill, and some bridge made of habit.

What sits in between is very far.

Understanding → internalising → mental preparation → environment/skill preparation → action

Extending innate knowing (2)

Extending innate knowing.

The natural, intuitive moral judgment in every person’s heart is innate knowing.

Extending innate knowing isn’t acquiring it, but discovering, awakening and practicing your own innate knowing.

Thinking of what teacher Luo Xiang said

If you can’t let go of someone because what you miss is their character and integrity, then I suggest you turn back; if what you can’t give up is only those beautiful memories and happy times, then I must ask you to move forward.

If the other person has good qualities, then this is appreciation of character, wisdom and values, and you can use the thing to realize the Dao and reflect on your own growth.

If it’s memory, then let it be natural: the brain beautifies the shadows of past memories, and memory is essentially the shadow of what’s past; turning back necessarily produces pain, whereas going with the flow is more natural.

Love your neighbor as yourself: truly understanding and respecting others’ existence

Love your neighbor as yourself: truly understanding and respecting others’ existence, treating their interests, happiness and pain as part of yourself.

Imagining the other as yourself — the empathy that achieves.

The natural order in which all things are one.

Compassion feels similar to this too.

Treat others the way you want them to treat you.

People are roused to growth in choices

People are roused to growth in pain.

Bodily pain, the lashing of the soul, the awakening of consciousness — the growth that experience brings is solid and real.

So awakening depends on yourself awakening amid the waves, not on expecting someone else’s rescue in some culture.

The stone that stirs up the spray is precisely non-action governance that follows the law.

Create the rules, and people grow upward naturally — not through incentives, not through pleading, and not by pulling up seedlings to help them grow.

A key point about aesthetic differences: aesthetics depends on experience and culture

A very important point about aesthetic difference: aesthetics depends on the sense of beauty produced by the interaction of experience, culture and context.

Without a sense of meaning, all architecture is cold concrete.

So beauty is humans projecting meaning onto meaningless objects.

Beauty is sensory experience + cultural background + contextual meaning.

Behind memory and thinking

Memory is dead, thinking is alive.

Being aware of thinking is meta-consciousness, a kind of awareness — the awareness of noticing.

Awareness lets thinking live in the right place.

Awareness is choice: it sets a premise for your thinking unpolluted by conventional views and emotion; amid the vast flow of information you still see one core, undulating cause.

The world is a cactus, not a pyramid

A pyramid is order, obedience.

A cactus is independence, blooming, a turbidity full of vitality — a new era, a world that respects individual value and awakens individual potential.

Technology is a means to solve the fundamental problem of human self-awakening.

Everyone can take root and sprout in their own field and shine.

The world is a practice ground to begin with; all you can do is naturally add water, give the light that every place needs, and let it grow strong naturally.

Water only carries those with affinity; the Buddha can only awaken those who can understand; you can’t change a person’s essence. The seed needs its own inner vitality, and that you can’t give.

People shouldn’t have a savior complex. What you can do is provide a field, a field where seeds sprout more easily, a field where independent thinking gets encouraged.

Taste is shapeable

Most of the time it comes from your own psychological resistance and rejection.

But at different stages the body’s need for these nutrients increases, so it imperceptibly changes.

Especially with a mindset of giving things a try — food you might not be willing to try back in China, you’re willing to try after coming to Vietnam.

A very important criterion for measuring happiness in love: expectation

Do you love the person as they are right now,

or do you love the person in your fantasy, the idealized or future them?

The essence of envy

One of the roots of happiness: envy.

Admiration represents appreciation and longing, but envy is “why you and not me”.

Envy = craving + powerlessness + hostility

I feel there are three points, the ones above.

Craving: I want some of what you have.

Powerlessness: I don’t have these things, it hurts.

Hostility: this isn’t fair; it feels like the other doesn’t deserve to have it, or that I should have it more.

Envy happens in circles of acquaintances: you’re likely to envy the colleague promoted faster or paid more than you. It needs comparability, a reference point, and your own identification of value — for example, if you’re a programmer you envy more those who surpass you in some field; lastly there’s lower perceptiveness, feeling that you and they were about the same to begin with.

Dig deeper: what’s the essence of envy? It’s fear. Fear is written into the genes: will their “having” lead to my “not having”? Does their “good” prove my “bad”?

This is a confirmation of self-worth plus anxiety about survival resources; it believes the world is zero-sum, that people are in a zero-sum game.

Smarter people use envy to improve themselves: their instinctive signal has noticed some qualities in the other, and those qualities may be exactly what they want, what they crave.

Where does love at first sight actually come from

It’s actually that the first meeting feels good, and the brain’s reward center secretes dopamine, a powerful neurotransmitter linked to pleasure, motivation and craving. It makes you feel excited, energetic, and eager to see the other person again — a feeling often mistaken for love at first sight.

The brain’s reward circuit is rapidly activated, accompanied by strong reactions in the emotional centers, forming an instantaneous pleasure like “addiction”.

But as you age, hormones decline, and the reward circuit’s (like the VTA–nucleus accumbens pathway) sensitivity to “novelty stimulation” declines with age.

And after many failed relationships, the brain also suppresses its trust in attraction.

Understanding normal people

A friend of mine, talking about extreme rationality and extreme emotionality, said that feeling extreme means being abnormal, so they want to be at a normal standard.

I said: the moment you said that, you already revealed your inner submission to stability, security and staying on track.

This world has too many normal people; they work hard to meet the collective standard, society’s standard, but they’re usually homogenized too.

Thinking of my own high school, a chaotic high school, when everyone was playing and I made my own choice, I suddenly realized a very important point:

Normal is a statistical concept of the group, not a value standard for the individual.

The majority’s choice isn’t necessarily right; it may be a chaotic consensus, like deception, seeking cheap gains, not pursuing the truth.

There’s nothing wrong with being normal, but please don’t be afraid of being abnormal.

Normal ❌

Sincere ✅

An ordinary rational person analyzes “what” a thing is with logic

An ordinary emotional person feels “whether it’s good” with emotion.

At the summit, reason and feeling see the same landscape: both see that objective, calm, harmonious and powerful law itself.

In theory, 1-3 meetings can build dopamine-driven attraction to a stranger

In theory, 1-3 meetings are basically enough to build a dopamine-driven attraction assessment toward a stranger.

Moving from liking to committing mainly relies on oxytocin, which depends heavily on positive interaction, deep conversation, shared laughter and physical contact; oxytocin rises, then lowers anxiety and increases empathy.

Early attraction is also accompanied by elevated norepinephrine and cortisol. This makes your heart race, your palms sweat, and you focus intensely on the other person.

What we seek differs from what we wish

The gap between desire and reality produces disappointment, anxiety or resentment.

The essence of this pain comes from resistance to losing control.

Parents’ pain when a child doesn’t obey.

Refusing to accept things as they really are.

A dislocation between seeking and wishing: seeking is actively striving, while wishing is the longing hidden in the heart. Sometimes you strive hard to seek, yet you’re far from the wish.

So “not getting what you seek” is one of the main factors in the painful sense of disparity.

People live in what they seek, and their hearts rest in what they wish.

Getting what you sought doesn’t necessarily touch what you wished.

Meeting a whole individual is hard

Someone psychologically relatively independent, internally harmonious, who doesn’t depend on others to define themselves.

Most people have gaps — either they depend on others’ approval, or their emotions are unstable, or their self-knowledge is unclear — so truly self-consistent, mature people are rare.

Most people are on the way to becoming whole.

Everyone lacks self-knowledge, doesn’t truly understand themselves, and lives inside a role.

Many people’s emotions and wounds carry childhood trauma, insecurity and fear, and they pass them on to others instead of facing and digesting them.

And many people need to depend on others to get a sense of existence, needing something to prove their existence.

Reason isn’t for controlling feeling

Reason guides feeling.

Not suppressing emotion, but guiding emotion.

Byronic unhappiness

Think about it — there are many such phenomena around: something you find happy and joyful, and someone next to you says it’s just a brief dopamine hit, that life is ultimately void.

This person is a typical case of Byronic unhappiness; their unhappiness is a carefully crafted persona, especially with older people, who like to disguise themselves and show off how different and profound their thinking is.

A kind of “smart people are depressed”? Only smart people can see the truth of this world.

Me, never good at expressing myself since childhood

Me, not good at expressing myself.

Influenced by my parents since childhood.

But do I really want to be someone who’s bad at expressing?

It seems to be a language issue too; switching to a different form of expression seems easy.

But direct language is limited by the spoken-language intuition from childhood?

Cultural awakening

Every culture has a tendency to overcompensate.

The East overemphasizes collective harmony, which may suppress the individual; the West overemphasizes individual freedom, which may neglect relationships.

This is a kind of internal audit of cultural values and limits.

Whatever culture an individual was bred under, the important thing is the observer’s perspective: step outside your own culture’s game rules and you gain the freedom to choose.

Just like reading Russell’s and Schopenhauer’s views of happiness at the same time: seeking inward or seeking outward conflict on the surface, but in reality both are roads up the mountain.

People in the East have to break free from the collective suppression of “no self” and first find the “self”.

People in the West have to break free from the self-illusion of “only me” before they can see “no self”.

Metacognition and self-awareness. They really are the common path across cultural differences.

Whatever cultural background you come from, being able to notice your own patterns of thought, emotional reactions, and how these were shaped, is the beginning of wisdom.

Behind resonance

Emotional resonance: feeling the other’s emotions, feeling a song as your own

Cognitive resonance: understanding the other’s thoughts and views, built on linguistic logic

Values resonance: a kind of identity recognition, bringing a sense of belonging

Aesthetic resonance: the commonality of beauty

And existential resonance: a deep stirring from life experience, a sense of fate, meaning of existence

A child’s imitation

Imitation and adaptation are a child’s innate survival mastery — instinctively adapting to the environment to secure better survival

If the family’s language is silence, restraint, endurance, then a child born here — the first language they learn, their ’emotional language,’ is inevitably silence.

So children will most likely become people who aren’t good at expressing. Behind this is a tight causal logic:

‘The parents gave him a language model of “not expressing” (cause), leading to him “being unable” to express (effect).’

‘The family system gave negative feedback to his expression (cause), leading to him “not daring” or “not wanting” to express (effect).’

Short-term travel is escaping loneliness

Many people do it to break free from the everyday sense of loneliness, pressure and repetition.

Human interaction, the company of scenery, cultural shock — like an external injection of emotion, temporarily letting a person not be only themselves.

After traveling for a long time it feels more like extreme loneliness.

But in travel you have to bear your emotions, you have to face yourself, constantly escaping familiar environments, depending less on external comfort.

How important the quality of relationships is

Everyone needs independent space, a space where strangers keep away.

The unexamined life is not worth living

The unexamined life is not worth living, because it isn’t your own life — at best it’s someone else’s idea of what life should be like.

The unexamined life is not worth living

Without active reflection: why do we live this way, what are we actually pursuing? Do we have independent judgment or life goals?

Our life trajectory is most likely imitated, determined by socially defined success.

Still unclear: what actually makes you successful, what makes you satisfied? Who makes you suffer?

People lacking insight into happiness won’t feel happiness

People lacking insight into happiness won’t feel happiness.

What’s the most fundamental difference between the shortest-path algorithm and the global optimum algorithm

The former is like Tetris — the next block’s movement is completely random. The latter is like chess: two players in a game continually analyzing each other’s moves, thinking, and feedback.

Your optimal decision depends on your judgment of the other’s decision, and the other’s optimal decision also depends on his judgment of your decision. This is strategic interaction, and it’s the core of game theory. What it studies isn’t isolated optimal decisions (like how Robinson Crusoe allocates resources on a desert island), but situations where multiple decision-makers influence and act on each other.

The other’s decision affects your decision, your decision affects the other’s — this is where two-player games begin, and then multi-player games follow.

Games have a purpose.

Two different types of games:

Zero-sum game: you lose, I win

Positive-sum game: win-win (the importance of communication, understanding, trust)

Individual rationality leads to collective irrationality

The core of the prisoner’s dilemma: two participants, each starting from their own interest, make the most rational choice (confess), yet together end up in a situation that’s worse for both (five years each), while perfectly missing the cooperative choice that would be better for both (one year each).

You work overtime, you gain an advantage, so I work overtime too — and the entrepreneur is the one who profits. So the essence of involution is… a prisoner’s-dilemma game, haha. Involution is individual rationality producing collective irrationality.

What’s the key to cracking game theory

Good institutions.

Good relationships of trust.

Good rule mechanisms.

Some strategies:

Tit-for-tat: the first move is always friendly, unconditionally cooperative, signaling goodwill; from the second move on, imitate — copy the previous round’s action.

Find the bridge of trust, the channel of communication.

Introducing a third party to change the rules of the game — an advanced strategy.

Admitting a mistake isn’t the same as failure

Admit mistakes openly and generously.

The point is to find the right answer.

Reputation isn’t worth deliberately pursuing

Same as money.

When you focus on your own life, do yourself well, complete your own task,

you’ll naturally receive some return or a thank-you note.

And if you don’t receive one, that’s fine too, because my value lies in the very process of living seriously.

Generality for its own sake (especially when requirements are still unclear)

Building for generality’s sake (especially when the requirements are still unclear) is one of the main sources of system complexity. A clear, direct, purpose-built special module is often far better than a complex general module trying to cater to every future possibility.

Chinese short dramas going overseas are indeed hot

Short dramas released by platforms like ReelShort, such as “Never Divorce a Secret Billionaire Heiress,” went viral in the US, with over 11 million downloads and $3.5 million in revenue. These short dramas are mostly “CEO” themed and attracted a large audience of middle-aged and older women, with a pay rate as high as 50%, far exceeding Chinese viewers.

With their short-and-sweet format and tight plotting, short dramas fit global audiences’ fragmented entertainment needs.

Quietly influencing many people, moving many people

They want to start learning Chinese.

Very interesting.

Very fulfilling.

The Soviets in Nha Trang

The COVID-19 pandemic and international situations (like the Russia-Ukraine conflict) reshaped Nha Trang’s tourist map.

Previously China was the largest source country and Russia ranked second; now Korea is the largest source country.

The number of people you can truly influence is actually very, very small

Many people who are supposedly influenced by you are actually just briefly moved, and in the end go back to their own lives.

The people you can truly influence are definitely those you’ve invested a lot of time in and had real contact with.

Being briefly moved has become the trend of this era.

But more often it’s being moved by yourself.

You’re deceiving yourself, and deceiving others too.

Why do violent incidents keep happening

Why do violent incidents keep happening?

The generation after reform and opening really had it easy — jobs were assigned

The generation after reform and opening really had it easy — jobs were assigned, work was idle and boring, evenings were comfortable, and the pension was sweet.

Rethinking the power of blocking out and paying attention

Rethinking the power of blocking out and paying attention.

The deeper reason for being afraid to trouble others

Not wanting to trouble others sounds like politeness, but it may actually also be a manifestation of selfishness:

Afraid of causing negative evaluations, worried about others’ opinions of you.

Sensitivity to conflict and awkwardness, afraid of ruining the atmosphere, internally magnifying any rough interaction into a conflict.

Feeling low self-worth and low “deservingness,” prioritizing satisfying others.

You just get used to it…

Put yourself in their shoes, consider things from the other person’s angle.

Understanding betrayal, understanding what’s behind it

When you’re down, don’t blame the betrayer, because they need to survive. After you rise, don’t easily forgive the betrayer, because you need to survive too.

We always think we’re making choices, but most of the time we

We always think we’re making choices, but most of the time we’re the ones being chosen.

Culture is an extension of taste, and taste is an extension of environment.

Sometimes it’s also perhaps because my family was very poor when I was little

There’s no strong survival tool; even at worst it won’t be that bad.

My needs on the material level are actually very low, so my decisions aren’t bound by the instability of “not earning enough.”

I can ignore mainstream society’s expectations about stability, income, and status.

So I don’t need to meet mainstream standards to prove myself.

So really, it’s about lowering my material baseline as much as possible to trade for the greatest possible spiritual freedom.

Once you have awareness, you should gradually take on all responsibility for yourself

Once you have awareness, you should gradually take on all responsibility for yourself.

While traveling, an electric razor is far more efficient than a manual razor

While traveling, an electric razor is far more efficient than a manual razor.

A manual razor demands precision and finesse.

If life only cares about the ending, then 99% of life is failure

But if life cares about the process, then every step is complete.

I feel Hoi An is changing, but I also feel Hoi An is eternal

The feeling of every night in a historic old town.

The old town gives me a visual illusion.

As if a few hundred years ago it was equally full of blossoms.

The old town seems eternal and unchanging.

But I also seem like a molecule in the flow, passing through the night alleys like a passerby: I am in this moment, but this moment has already passed.

Yet I also seem eternal — countless strangers resonate, and personal time is pulled into the great river of human time; I am a part of the great river, and the great river gives me an eternal perspective.

Is the world changing?

Is time changing?

Are we changing?

None of it seems to matter anymore. What matters is my perspective: the me of every moment flowing with the world, the sounds I make, my thinking, my creation.

And — what do I want?

The relationship between technology and people

The relationship between technology and people.

About the data on housework

My landlord treated me to a meal today.

My dad doesn’t like doing housework, and my sister doesn’t like it either; every time they both direct me to clean and wash the dishes.

My sister and my mom have taught me since I was little that I should do more housework.

The amount of housework Chinese men take on is actually very high.

Doing housework and tidying up is a very good habit, and it’s worth holding on to and keeping.

The essence of learning: abstracting into a new pattern of action

The essence of learning: abstracting into a new pattern of action.

A new thought about focusing on yourself

Being able to clearly perceive this world, and consciously fading out the noise.

It’s not blocking out the world, not hiding from the world; it’s in the world’s clamor, focusing on listening to your own voice.

It’s roughly a process of focusing on yourself.

Clarifying your own heart, integrating your relationship with the world, not clinging to outside noise.

Always gripping the rudder, pointing toward where your heart truly wants to go.

History is built by the people in history

And also written by the people after history.

And it can also be driven by political parties and interests.

History can only try its best to restore objectivity; the angle it’s written from is still subjective.

Look at history from as objective an angle as possible.

Even if you can’t change it, you can understand the present as truthfully as possible, and predict the future more accurately.

War has interests, but human life is priceless.

Arising and falling of conditions

My attachment to things.

Occasionally losing something feels like something to be glad about.

It passes on a connection: because this exists, that exists; because this arises, that arises.

If life has no meaning, the world is impermanent, all things are empty

If life has no meaning, the world is impermanent, and all things are empty, then doesn’t the meaning of practice return to the process of practice itself?

One is the process of practice itself: moving from the causes of suffering (greed, hatred, ignorance) to the causes of ease (precepts, concentration, wisdom).

The other is practice as relationship: all things are connected, arising and falling, and every good deed of ours is like a stone dropped into a lake — its ripples spread through the whole web of relationships.

If our real world exists through light as a medium

If our real world exists through light as a medium, and we observe this world through our eyes,

then the macro at this level is made of countless micro pieces.

So that’s another way of knowing the world.

We have no eyes, or no individual, to observe the other — a macro object that is virtualized.

But if what we see is from a micro angle, the other person isn’t a concrete person; the object you identify sinks into a role; what you see is only their body, what you understand is their soul, what I like is their eyes.

Would the world we start paying attention to be utterly different? Only our brain’s cognitive load would be heavier.

Then the sense of identity and role we deliberately build, and the evaluation and dignity we maintain in others’ eyes — wouldn’t those also collapse?

Screw “loving yourself”

Love yourself — without knowing yourself, without knowing what you’re made of. Which self does such a person love? The self in others’ eyes? And then just hating yourself, belittling yourself?

Can someone who can’t accept themselves really love themselves?

Suffering is the norm in this world; it’s the universal backdrop

Happiness is usually partial and fragmentary, but precisely because it’s scarce and brief it seems precious.

The relationship between technology and people

The relationship between technology and people.

One important thing: judging whether someone has enough depth in a field

One very important thing: judging whether someone has enough depth in a field depends on whether they can explain that field’s knowledge very clearly and in plain terms.

In the world, but not of the world

Christianity has a saying: In the world, but not of the world.

Active but not attached.

Deeply affectionate but unobstructed.

Awakening, nirvana and the awakened

Actually these are the same thing described from different angles.

An action: awakening.

A state: nirvana.

A person: the awakened one.

An awakened one, through awakening, finally arrives at nirvana.

The process of awakening: at some moment, you experience all the truths — “dependent origination”, “non-self”, “emptiness”.

More like the feeling Kevin Kelly had when he woke up on the day of Jesus’s rebirth.

Nirvana ultimately means blowing out or extinguishing — extinguishing greed, hatred and delusion.

When these inner flames are completely extinguished, the state that appears is nirvana.

Dao (the Way)

The Dao is a law, a law that contains all things, running by letting things be natural, without interfering, without forcing.

The Dao gives birth to the One, the One to the Two, the Two to the Three, the Three to the ten thousand things.

The Christian calendar

It starts with Advent, pulling back the curtain — expectation — usually the four weeks before Christmas.

Christmas is the climax, with the nativity.

Then comes Lent, the 40 days before Easter, following Jesus’s 40 days and nights of fasting in the wilderness. Believers prepare their hearts through fasting, prayer and restraining desires (like giving up chocolate or social media), commemorating Jesus’s coming passion.

Finally Holy Week, and the Sunday before Easter, commemorating Jesus’s glorious entry into Jerusalem on a donkey, with crowds welcoming him holding palm branches.

And Easter - the true ending and a new beginning.

The Dao follows nature; govern by non-action

The core is letting things develop naturally, on the basis of being close to the essence of things.

The premise of not violating natural law is being very close to the world’s true operating laws.

On that basis, to elevate, to let nature take its course.

I’ve started to get a bit obsessive about concepts

A strong desire for precision in professional terminology.

Treating life as a testing ground.

My questions don’t necessarily need answers; they drive the process of thinking.

Opinions aren’t that important to me; experience is precious.

One thing Xiang Biao said that’s very right

The reason many people have no perceptive ability toward their surroundings

is that for them, they want to transcend, to leave everything behind.

So they erase the nearby, because acknowledging the value of the nearby might shake their determination to leave.

Not knowing what’s around you, not knowing what’s near you.

A person loses their perceptiveness.

Because perceptiveness is bound to the environment; if you don’t accept the environment, how would you have the ability to observe and cherish what’s near?

How Da Vinci became so erudite

A polymath, or a slash youth.

Life is like chess, life is like a play

Did the ancients also treat life as a game?

China’s Dao is the highest realm

In the West, Socrates and Plato both emphasized “inquiring into the origin”, which is actually also discussing the Dao.

They might say “seek the truth”, “discuss metaphysics” or “philosophical dialogue”.

How to read the momentum (shi)

State of mind: the mind must be calm. With a chaotic mind everything looks chaotic. Calm down and see clearly which way the water flows; first of all don’t let yourself float.

Far: your vision must be far. People are short-sighted, but if you only stare at the tree in front of you, you’ll never understand the direction of the whole forest.

Subtle: observe details, have rich sensory ability, dig to the root; the smell in the air before any great storm.

And after you understand it?

Everyone knows it: go with the flow.

Guide the momentum: how do you use your own strength to be the pushing hand, steering the water toward the field you want.

Harder is retreating against the momentum. Life is long; if this momentum is extremely unfavorable to you, then the wise move isn’t to fight but to withdraw.

Letting go of everything you’ve gained is a thousand times harder than fighting for what you haven’t.

Yangming’s philosophy of mind

It holds that the root of the world lies in the mind.

Mind is principle: truth is in everyone’s mind, you don’t need to seek it in the external world.

Without action, you still don’t know

Without action, you still don’t know.

What teaching knowledge actually transmits

What teaching knowledge actually transmits

Returning to one’s original simplicity

Feels similar to returning to the original mind?

One is returning inward, one is returning outward to law and the Dao.

“Returning to original simplicity” means returning to your most primal, purest self, like an uncarved jade stone, keeping your own true color and luster.

Externally, avoid being defined by labels, identity and desire.

Return to simplicity, let go of some outward embellishments.

Reduce desires, do subtraction in life.

Follow nature, keep the heart of a newborn.

Free and Easy Wandering tells us what true freedom is

Free and Easy Wandering tells us that true freedom is freedom obtained naturally from within the heart.

Modern society tells us to depend on things: depending on a salary at work, on others emotionally, on material things in life.

But nothing is necessary; depending on something means you’re not free.

Not focusing on right and wrong in this world, exploring the Dao behind it, not fearing failure — only then can you gain inner peace and freedom.

Principle is the trace of the Dao

The trace the Dao naturally leaves as it operates.

Chasing the Dao is chasing expansiveness and non-attachment.

Because the Dao is too big — so big that no language or principle can frame it. The Dao has millions of faces, which is far more meaningful than one truth.

We want to find one certain, eternal, unchanging answer, then classify and define it; we’re afraid of making mistakes.

The Dao’s wisdom is precisely to go beyond the discriminating mind and appreciate contradiction.

Should we go looking for the piper

One confusing thing in life is the confusion of right and wrong, the confusion of feeling and reason, the confusion of the known and the unknown.

We hear ten thousand flute sounds; should we still go looking for the piper?

The flute sound passes through the valley and is modified by the valley’s wind.

It has no sound, yet it’s the source of all sounds.

So you turn back and wonder “do I still need to find the piper” because that moment is so beautiful you’re afraid it will vanish. You think if you could find that “source”, that “essence”, maybe you could have this song forever.

Maybe you can sense that even the same piper couldn’t play that song in your heart again.

Human nature and the Dao

The Dao is the boundless ocean; human nature is a clear spring welling up from the earth.

The clear spring flows along the terrain, but:

People dislike the spring flowing too “freely”, so they dig straight “canals” for it and prescribe where it should flow — this is called “ritual and law”.

People think the spring should be more “useful”, so they build “dams” and pen it in to irrigate fields — this is called “benevolence and righteousness”.

People add various pigments to the spring and say red is “good” and black is “evil” — this is called “right and wrong”.

As for research into human nature itself, in the end the spring doesn’t remember its own color and doesn’t know which way it should flow.

Behind the effect of online virality

The crowd is actually part of the Dao too; while keeping your independent thinking, know how to borrow the crowd’s energy.

Not fearing the mob, but being good at using and guiding part of the crowd.

Yi Lijing

If Chai Jing’s language has a restrained literariness, telling complex facts with poetic imagery,

then Yi Lijing’s sharpness is more blunt and forceful, and more often stays on a sincere revelation of a person.

Growing up, Yi Lijing was born in a small city with limited resources; that background cultivated her sensitive, curious, stubborn character.

She covered the social news beat, including major accidents and breaking events, and learned to face the most complex human nature: pain, despair, anger, injustice.

The human heart is precarious

It comes from the body and the senses: strong needs — hunger, drowsiness, craving for pleasure; these signals keep getting bolded in the brain.

They’re neutral to begin with, but it’s easy to slip into selfishness — for instance, from “I want to eat my fill” to “I want to eat the most and the best”.

If the human heart has no restraint, it easily falls into traps.

Awakening and nirvana

Awakening is waking up, seeing through ignorance, seeing the truth clearly.

A joy of discovery and knowing.

Suddenly realizing birth and death, suffering and joy, impermanence, emptiness — like suddenly waking from a dream.

It can be gradual awakening or sudden awakening.

Nirvana means extinguishing — extinguishing the fires of greed, hatred and delusion.

It’s not knowing but complete liberation, no more attachment.

Tranquility, non-action, ease — the highest state of security.

Enlightenment is the condition, nirvana is the fruit.

The liberation of the individual

A level-up map for achieving personal freedom, from inner thought to outward action.

First, see the cage clearly — the cage here is what society, environment and the group have instilled in you.

The method of questioning: keep pursuing the truth, where did this idea come from, and use first principles to break a complex notion into the most basic things that don’t need proving.

Also, build a diverse information field: actively read and listen to views completely opposite to your current beliefs.

What we call fitting in and altruism is actually about gaining the group’s acceptance and a sense of security — an unconscious transaction.

Only after liberation can you truly have the capacity for love and altruism.

Innate knowing is also knowledge

Everything learned outwardly ultimately lands on accomplishing the word “good”, on practicing the innate knowing in my heart.

If extending innate knowing is only returning to everyone’s own innate knowing, then what’s the role of external knowledge?

Extending innate knowing is also about learning and embracing all the knowledge and laws of the world with an active and maximally open mind.

The more knowledge you learn, the more it can become a sharp tool for extending innate knowing.

Because everyone has innate knowing, it’s just that it’s covered up.

Extending innate knowing: using knowledge and other methods to blow away the fog.

The sage isn’t outside, but in the mind

The sages in history, the people you admire — then work to become them yourself. Isn’t the purpose of practice to make yourself a more real person?

Affliction is the practice ground; all of life is the practice ground; polish it time after time.

All things are complete in my mind; changing circumstances is not as good as changing the mind.

“Mind is principle”: if your mind is bright, you see the world as bright everywhere; if your mind is dim, you see the world as sinister everywhere. Everything you experience is nothing but a projection of your inner mind.

Living with ease.

Most people are products of the “field” and think about adapting to it

Most people are products of the “field”; they think about how to better adapt to the field’s rules.

A minority think about how to become a “variable” that influences and changes the field’s rules.

You can’t change the weather, but you can choose to plant a different tree, and this tree’s appearance will bring a subtle, long-term change to the ecology of this land. You are that “variable”.

Focus on the whole picture’s “momentum”, not on clinging to an individual “point”; act on the underlying “cause”, not on tangling with the surface “effect”.

Institutions are the bridge between technology and culture

On another hand.

Technology changes people’s “doing” — behavior, habits, efficiency. It doesn’t and can’t change people’s “nature” — their essence, attributes, inner drive.

Institutions are constraint and incentive.

Technology amplifies and accelerates human nature.

Is being slow to warm up just what happens when physical attraction is lacking

Is being slow to warm up just people using rational evaluation (security, wealth, talent, cognition) to compensate when physical attraction is lacking?

Physical attraction is the foundation; without it, the later rational evaluation looks a lot like risk management and trade-offs.

Ignoring the physical foundation plants hidden risks — that’s how simping happens.

But isn’t the essence of love first igniting the spark (instinctive attraction), then using reason and faith to guard and build it?

Watching the sea in the small hours in Da Nang, one of Asia’s most beautiful coasts

The sea was rough, with thunder and lightning in the distance.

One beer, one person.

There’s only one Dao — where exactly is it?

The Dao gives birth to the One, the One to the Two, the Two to the Three, the Three to the ten thousand things.

The Dao is something more fundamental, the origin, a law and pattern beyond everything.

So the universe has one fundamental law, but humans understand it in countless ways, through various disciplines.

The Dao that can be spoken is not the constant Dao. The Dao is unfathomable.

The sea is very much like the Dao: the sea is quiet, but its phenomenal changes are impermanent and jolting — reach the utmost emptiness, hold fast to stillness.

The Dao is like the sea, endlessly changing yet always present; people are like waves, and however they rise and fall they return to one.

Everything encountered is a mirror; what you wish comes to be

Everything encountered is a mirror; what you wish comes to be.

Products have life cycles

But if products had no life cycle, and could reproduce themselves, how great that would be.

Maybe future products will be living products?

On the other hand, only this kind of institution can grow out of this cultural soil

On the other hand, only this kind of institution and rules can grow out of this cultural soil.

And how to change it — there’s only one way.

Have enough understanding of the world’s true operating laws, and on that basis think about how to change it.

When I first started using aireader

I was also strongly maladaptive, but I can’t say why — it still feels like the information density is too high, or that I’m just not adapted?

The envious get no pleasure from what they have

The envious get no pleasure from what they have, yet feel continuous pain from what others have.

Observe your own envy.

The harm of envy is double.

Not only not cherishing what you have now, but also envying what others have and you don’t.

Many people treat everything they have not with the eye of experience but with the eye of valuation; what matters is that what I own may come from satisfying my own competitive vanity.

Value is always defined externally, and happiness is produced by comparison.

How some learning translates into action

What I’m thinking about is how to obtain some concrete behavioral goals

How some actions can be done gracefully

The cause and effect of falling because of socks

Because the gate tower has two levels, the stairs are very narrow, and the wood is very slippery

So it’s very easy to fall

The cause is that the socks and the floor are slippery

Falling is the result

So next time you’ll try taking your socks off, or be more careful.

Find the channel of expression that fits you best

Convey the complex inner world outward, let others feel the value

Not necessarily a genius with language, but usually possessing the minimum required ability to express clearly

Some reflections, reflections from practice

About learning: I’m less and less inclined to watch videos (that behavior should be defined as entertainment — watch it when you want to, not when you want to learn).

I don’t go to official docs either; they’re too complex, or too inefficient. AI should be the first interaction entry point, and then for important or confusing parts, trace back to the official docs and the primary information layer.

One very important thing about learning with AI is learning how to learn quickly through AI, and which learning methods work well (say the Socratic questioning method, or various mental models). That way you raise the quality of your input.

Context Engineering and experience engineering

Context Engineering and experience engineering

One is context engineering, one is experience engineering; at the very beginning there was also prompt engineering.

Context engineering generally means designing, shaping, and managing the context space in which a system operates and decides.

The trend: from prompt engineering to context engineering — for example, OpenAI’s MCP protocol. That’s the trend.

Context Engineering is the systematic modeling and dynamic management of the information environment, semantic conditions, user state, and interaction intent, to achieve more precise, intelligent, personalized system behavior.

“Experience Engineering” is an interdisciplinary concept, literally meaning “the engineered design and management of experience.” It means designing, optimizing, and realizing the user’s experience in a systematic, structured, engineered way.

Experience has layers: the perceptual layer, the design layer, and the technical layer.

The core of experience engineering is making you feel the AI is usable, comfortable, and that its inspiration is valuable.

The core of context engineering is making the AI understand who you are, what you’re doing, and what you care about.

Experience + Context = a truly smart LLM product

Knowing who you are, knowing what you want to learn.

And explaining it well: answers that provoke thought, with rhythm and a natural style.

Escape key tricks during vibe coding

While Claude is working, pay attention to what it’s doing. You can flexibly use the Escape key to pause its output and interact with it.

Press Escape twice in a row to go back to earlier conversations.

When should Claude Code bring in MCP

To some degree, when there are things Claude Code can’t do and bash can’t do either, maybe that’s when you should bring in MCP.

Running multiple Claude Codes at once

This is a very cool thing.

Maybe if you can run two at once, that’s perhaps a very normal thing.

If you can run four at once, that’s very cool.

Claude Code’s think hard

Claude Code’s think hard mode.

Adding think hard to some complex steps or ones that need analysis is very useful.

On the intelligent second brain: what exactly is the essence of reading

The human brain craves a complete story, but fragmented information only offers story fragments.

Modern people try to piece together a picture of the world through reading.

AI helps users build a cognitive map, rather than providing isolated points of information.

New information triggers dopamine; deep understanding requires delayed gratification, which conflicts with the brain’s instincts.

One question? Can deep understanding also get an immediate reward?

AI shouldn’t give standard answers; it should guide users to their own conclusions.

What’s the essence of understanding? Is it active construction or passive absorption?

The essence of understanding is concept reconstruction and meaning generation.

1. Input information → symbol parsing

2. Short-term memory processing (working memory)

3. Pattern matching against long-term memory

4. Model update or refusal to update

5. Generating new language, action, or ideas (output)

Tracking and optimizing CLAUDE.md

CLAUDE.md is itself part of Claude’s prompt, so it should be continuously optimized like a frequently used prompt. A common mistake is adding lots of content without iterating on its effectiveness. Spend time experimenting and you can find what improves the model’s prompt adherence.

Tips for coordinating Claude across multiple repositories

Basically create 3–4 git checkouts, in different folders.

Start Claude in each folder, assign different tasks, drive them.

Check progress in rotation.

ChatGPT 5

artificialanalysis back to number one.

GPT-5 is a unified system with a built-in intelligent, efficient model that can answer most questions, a deep reasoning model for harder problems (GPT-5 thinking), and a real-time router. The router quickly decides which model to call based on the type of conversation, question complexity, tool needs, and your explicit intent (for example, writing “please think carefully” in the prompt). The router is continuously trained on real signals, including when users switch models, preference rates on answers, and measured accuracy, so performance improves over time. Once the usage limit is reached, mini versions of the two models take over subsequent queries. In the near future, we plan to consolidate these capabilities into a single model.

The Transformer architecture is now constrained.

The returns from model upgrades are now very low.

The jump from GPT-4o to o3 was significant (SWE-Bench rising from 33% to 72%), while the improvement from o3 to ChatGPT-5 is smaller (SWE-Bench rising from 72% to 74.9%). Math performance rose from o3’s 88.9% (AIME 2025) to 94.6% — clear progress, but the marginal returns on coding tasks have shrunk.

Gemini is very good at understanding code intent

Absurdly good context understanding and response speed, very well suited to translation, and it understands the context logic and intent of code well.

Gemini doesn’t need to generate code translation docs based on other code.

Take the example of two Python files, A and B, calling each other. Gemini can work through their logical relationships step by step.

First understand A and output A’s doc (md).

Based on A’s md + B’s code, output B’s md.

Then use B’s md + A’s md to check or verify A’s md.

Repeat similar operations to achieve mutual verification across A, B, C, D…

Some workflow tips for AI coding

At night, write a prompt to kick off a task. Enter a prompt, the model generates a codebase and runs it automatically. The next morning you get up and the project is usually generated and runnable.

During the day, switch to another model — Gemini 2.5 Pro starts explaining and analyzing, which is really reviewing yesterday’s AI work.

By reading the model’s output, you understand the logic that yesterday’s AI generated automatically; it outputs detailed code explanations, so you can grasp the AI-generated logic, and if there are problems, you write them down.

Then you can switch to an o3 high model to keep refining.

Give it a to-do list and have it fix items one by one according to its own requirements.

So it amounts to opus + kilo building the basic skeleton.

Gemini 2.5 Pro is only responsible for understanding the code.

o3 high fixes or enhances the code logic according to the to-do list.

o3 feels very suited to desperate situations, haha.

About Claude Code

Some odd details about Claude Code worth knowing.

Shift+Enter doesn’t insert a line break by default. Just tell Claude to set up your terminal with /terminal-setup and it will fix it for you.

Dragging files usually opens them in a new tab, like in Cursor or VS Code. Hold Shift while dragging to reference them correctly in Claude.

Pasting images from the clipboard doesn’t work with Command+V. Use Control+V. It took me a long time to figure this out.

Jumping to previous messages: pressing Escape twice shows a list of all previous messages, and you can jump back.

The levels of thinking in Claude

In Claude Code, think isn’t just think hard — there are several depths of thinking:

think < think hard < think harder < ultrathink

Max can consider using ultrathink

ChatGPT’s study mode and a series of thoughts

ChatGPT’s study mode is essentially ChatGPT playing a Socratic mentor, through a series of

Setting aside the Socratic method, what other very useful learning prompts are there

Setting aside the Socratic method, what other very useful learning prompts are there?

Analogy prompts, helping users connect new knowledge to existing experience.

Role-play prompts, having the AI play an expert role and offer an explanation from a professional perspective (here you can even specify famous figures like Musk or Jobs, and certain traits).

Task decomposition, which LLMs are already very good at: breaking a complex task into sub-tasks and functions, then implementing them one by one.

And other methods.

What’s the underlying logic of these products?

Personalization: AI analyzes the user’s habits, interests, and progress to provide tailor-made learning content and paths.

Fragmented knowledge management: break complex knowledge into fragments, then connect those fragments with a knowledge graph, helping users build systematic understanding.

Social: dialogue, Q&A tasks, and so on enhance user engagement and provide real-time feedback and guidance.

Multimodal adaptation: combining text, audio, video, even virtual reality, to fit different scenarios and user preferences.

Puppeteer MCP as basic simulation

A Model Context Protocol server built on Google’s Puppeteer library, letting AI control a Chrome/Chromium browser for automated operations.

For Claude Code, a very useful thing is quickly knowing what web pages look like in the real production environment.

An MCP for browser automation.

modelcontextprotocol/server-puppeteer

Rolling back code in Claude Code

Generally it’s done by combining with git for management.

To roll back, just tell Claude to roll back.

Environmental cue triggering

For the relationship between environment and focus, there’s a very important concept that helps with understanding.

In neuroscience there’s a phenomenon called “Environmental Cue Trigger.”

Most people need to “borrow” the environment first to develop stable focus, and then gradually “internalize” that ability so it works in any environment.

Finding stillness in noise, finding stillness in motion, is the result of long training, not a natural ability.

1. Early stage: lock your attention using an enclosed dorm, a fixed café, ritualized places (borrowing external force).

2. Later stage: through deliberate practice, turn focus into a “flow button you can adjust anywhere, anytime.”

How human tolerance for information is changing

The friction of acquiring information keeps shrinking, and the stimulation per unit of time keeps increasing.

The result is that our tolerance for “slow” and “long” is declining, and our dependence on “quick pleasure” and “high-density information” is rising.

Cognition is changing, but is the fundamental change the method? Or the environment — changes in cognitive habits shaped by environment?

The brain’s “dopamine reward loop” is being trained by frequent short-cycle stimulation, which raises the cost of patience.

Is this progress or regression?

With AI assistance, professional knowledge accumulated over years can be understood in a day.

AI explains things the way you like, so information is easier to absorb and retain (but how is it retained? What’s the value? What form does it take?).

Deep patience is being exploited away, the capacity for long, linear thinking is being exploited away; it’s hard to stick with a 10,000-word deep analysis anymore.

Critical thinking and systems thinking are being diluted; we’re more used to others condensing and filtering for us, rather than processing raw material ourselves.

There’s also an information illusion — the biggest illusion of the short-video era: I watched it, so I learned it…

In the past, a large part of the barrier to entering a profession was the ability to acquire and process information.

In the AI era that ability has been broken open.

More important is:

Whether you can ask high-quality questions.

Whether you can build your own knowledge system amid a high-density torrent of information.

Whether you can make judgments combining domain experience (AI gives raw material and a processing assistant, not the final decision).

The barrier hasn’t disappeared, it has shifted; only its form has changed — no longer “can you obtain information,” but “can you master information.”

In the AI era, maintaining good deep-reading ability really matters.

Don’t let your valuable abilities be diluted in the AI era.

A very realistic logic:

Most people will rely more and more on AI summaries.

The result is that everyone’s information input converges and the differences shrink.

People who can read the original text and analyze the details can instead discover value others overlook.

That difference becomes a competitive advantage.

Just like the news era: everyone reads headlines, but only those who can find unique information based on long investigative reports can make differentiated judgments.

Humans are just the transitional body for the next kind of intelligent life

AI may replace humans, and may even deserve to replace humans.

Humans are just the transitional body for the next kind of intelligent life.

Reality has the capacity to avoid it, but the cost is borne by the public.

Without complete information, it’s very hard for society to make democratic decisions about AI development or set effective regulation.

Claude Code Requirements-Driven

The Claude Code Requirements-Driven workflow mode.

A structured development method that follows clear steps, keeping Claude from jumping straight to implementation and skipping the project planning stage — in practice, keeping it from skipping the prior rational thinking and logical analysis and going straight to execution.

In the AI era the most important thing for humans is curiosity

But how do you keep curiosity?

Conclusions are of course important, but we who grew up under exam-oriented education tend to overemphasize conclusions and answers.

Principles are far better than conclusions — ask why more often.

Internal laws matter: the laws of how the world works can be transferred to any domain or scenario.

To know both how it is and why it is — that’s wisdom.

What’s my biggest pain point in using AI

The context problem.

Our brains have a limit on short-term memory (AI likewise has a token ceiling).

There’s a lot of friction between “finding” information and “using” it.

Whether it’s you recalling it yourself or getting AI to understand it, you have to repeatedly restate, organize, and hand over background information, and keep debugging.

Another point: the current traditional product forms — but I want AI to do a lot of things for me. Conflict.

A very good metaphor:

I feel like I’m the hunter, responsible for picking up the prey.

AI is the chef, helping me break it down, categorize it, and turn it into dishes.

The second brain is the dining table, with the food that’s ready to eat right now laid out on it.

I’m responsible for eating.

A workflow that fits

Capture information — whatever kind of information it is, write it down.

Stash it in an inbox without organizing it.

AI assists with automatic tagging, summarization, keyword extraction, and emotion recognition.

Then build a long-term memory bank.

Finally, trigger by some context, then consume it immediately — combining AI with your own inspiration, reviews, and thoughts.

The measure of AI usage isn’t the time or clicks users spend

The measure of AI usage isn’t the time or clicks users spend, but whether users leave the product feeling satisfied, because they accomplished what they wanted to do.

The biggest feeling about AI is that it helps me hold my own life more controllably

The biggest feeling about AI is that it helps me hold my own life more controllably.

Some inspiration on the basic forms of AI products

Technical level:

Continuous learning, building a user profile.

Multimodal interaction, basic, multiple data sources.

Knowledge base quality.

Personalized algorithms.

Product design:

Not solving the problem in one shot, but proceeding step by step.

A feedback loop, usually feeding back into the system to optimize subsequent suggestions.

A good product actually grows together with the user, cultivating the user’s judgment.

Clear boundaries — knowing what it can do and what it can’t.

AI lets us examine ourselves from the outside, escaping “narcissism in dialogue”

AI lets us examine ourselves from the outside, escaping “narcissism in dialogue,” so we can understand human nature and ourselves more deeply.

From that, to dig out what kind of person you want to become.

What an information feed actually shows

A mapping of people’s latent desires about the world.

What AI recommends is no longer information, but a person’s latent desires about the world.

The main thing in learning with AI isn’t being told the answer

The main thing in learning with AI isn’t telling you the answer, but creating exactly the right question, guiding you to ask, and to understand the answer.

RAG made into a product through its “Projects” feature

RAG technology became a product through its “Projects” feature.

When the content uploaded to a Project approaches or exceeds the model’s context window limit, the system automatically switches to RAG mode.

RAG activates automatically.

Normally developers have to explicitly choose a strategy: if the data volume is small, put it all in context; if it’s large, you need to build a RAG pipeline. That’s a manual, usually complex process. Claude’s “Projects” feature automates that decision. It uses the highest-performing tool when possible (full context reasoning) and smoothly degrades to the higher-capacity tool (RAG) when necessary.

This design pattern is clever: create a layered capability system, and build a smart “controller” that automatically picks the right layer based on the task’s needs, hiding the underlying complexity from the user.

Think about it — aren’t a lot of AI applications well suited to this way of building?

RAG avoiding chunking loss

Anthropic’s “contextual retrieval” solves this with a clever method: before embedding a chunk, it uses an LLM (usually the fast, cheap Claude 3 Haiku model) to generate a short explanatory context for each chunk. For example, the chunk above would be prefixed with a summary like “this chunk is from Acme’s Q2 2023 earnings report, discussing revenue growth”. This information-enriched chunk is then used for semantic embedding (called “contextual embedding”) and for keyword-based indexing.

The problem with long-term memory

Filtering, distilling and updating useful information is fairly hard.

How a large number of “memory fragments” get efficiently retrieved and contextually linked in a new conversation is also a system design challenge. Otherwise the AI may call up the wrong memory and answer something you didn’t ask.

There’s also the feeling of over-remembering, and the user doesn’t have enough sense of control.

The risk of total memory is still fairly high.

flomo and mindfulness

When an emotion shows up, you really just need to record it objectively, without beautifying or criticizing; you just need to notice it, and put your attention on this present moment — a process of observing yourself?

Mindfulness isn’t just relaxing or sitting still; it’s training the mind to switch from “autopilot mode” to “manual precision control mode”.

Noticing during meditation that you’ve drifted off — that is mindfulness; bringing yourself back just takes easing back a little, returning attention to yourself.

So sometimes, when you see someone’s bad habits or something they have that you don’t, what matters more is noticing the emotion you generate toward them, and recording and analyzing it objectively.

On the balance point I’ve found between reason and feeling

Reason provides structure (like logic distilling knowledge), feeling provides depth (like accumulating “raw material” from experience).

I don’t like too much rhetoric or emotional output in an article (it can’t be mainly emotional output). I want some distinctive subjectivity in an article, but with as much logic and fact as possible, with more emphasis on the efficiency, breadth and accuracy of information.

The sensory part should be accumulated more through sensory training and diverse experience.

I feel I’m more a reason-oriented but balance-attentive thinker. I’m very interested in information, and I like breaking abstract concepts into logical frameworks (like the two layers of communication, the separation of feeling and reason).

For feeling, I want it to come more from the real — like living abroad, art, and observing different cultures, accumulating “feeling raw material”.

I want to combine technology and philosophy.

Reason provides structure (like logic distilling knowledge), feeling provides depth (like accumulating “raw material” from experience).

How the feeling toward AI changes over time

When you first come into contact with AI, or with a lot of information, you feel fragmented, overloaded, even resistant.

As you keep going through “input — abstract — output — feedback”, your brain gradually builds a pattern-recognition network.

This process is basically neuroplasticity training: the brain adapts to a high-frequency information rhythm and gets faster and faster, and over time the brain stops treating information as a burden and treats it as a playground.

A cognition-driven pleasure mechanism, if you have flow in the process.

When the difficulty of processing information sits right at the “edge of ability”, the brain enters flow, and time flies, focused and pleasant.

The more training → the stronger the adaptation → the easier to enter flow → the more you like it.

And every time the brain is abstracting into a concept network rather than collecting information, processing efficiency keeps rising.

In this state you can also understand why output is more enjoyable even when the AI has some memory — because the brain’s load is lighter.

What’s really interesting about reading into historical figures is:

Modern writing has restored these figures so well that you feel you can get through many years of a great ancient figure’s history very quickly.

So sometimes when you come to a city, there’s one more option for understanding it: learning about the life and philosophy of the city’s historical figures, which may imperceptibly shape the city’s culture.

And with AI you can have a good conversation with the abstracted model of that figure on the internet.

Relatively speaking, when AI plays a character, it can also abstract a subjective perspective out of objective description.

The cost of the human brain processing information is high

To survive, the brain prefers to enter autopilot mode, relying on habits, social rules and intuition rather than constantly observing and thinking.

Most people have low information sensitivity, unless the information is strongly related to “survival/interest/emotion”.

In this process, a small number of people highly observe environmental details and abstract meaning; this is an acquired advantage — they reflect, forming a keen information perception.

In industrialized and modern society most people “passively receive” information.

Their sensitivity to detail gets weaker and weaker.

A small number of people, through curiosity, temperament and environmental training, form higher information sensitivity and can see details others overlook.

How to let AI know your own information

It suddenly struck me: how do you let AI know your information? Maybe you need enough information about yourself on the internet.

A good idea is to make a personal card; how do you persist that card?

People who read fast usually aren’t enjoying reading

They’re more hoping to get useful information or needed knowledge from the book, or hoping to extract insight.

But thinking the other way: why can’t this process be combined with AI? Absorb information faster?

Human nature and technology

Outwardly, from the steam engine, electricity and the internet to AI, the “speed” of technology has drastically changed the external environment.

In terms of efficiency, the speed of information processing, information access, communication and global collaboration has been amplified without limit.

Materially, technology iterates extremely fast.

But the essence of beauty changes very slowly; the feeling of beauty is still a projection of human nature and emotion.

From recent tasks, AI can clearly sort out a user’s habits

From recent tasks the AI can clearly sort out the user’s habits and what they focus on; especially through browser history it can very clearly get the corresponding information.

For example, the standard profile in it.

And areas of interest.

And some behavior patterns, the daily rhythm of activity.

Finally, user modeling tags.

There’s only one Dao; it doesn’t change because of the world or because of AI

The Dao gives birth to the One, the One to the Two, the Two to the Three, the Three to the ten thousand things.

A beautiful world is a cactus, a hundred flowers blooming; everyone is an independent, self-responsible individual, everyone has found their own “truth” and practices their own “Dao”.

But one point: is what I’ve realized only my own Dao, and not necessarily others’? The Dao gives birth to all things, all things are one.

A person can awaken. But the fact is that excessive information drowns thinking and paralyzes action.

Being moved, resonance, decision, action, the unity of knowledge and action.

Being moved and resonance are firsthand, subjective realization, the sprouting of knowing.

And decision and action are your only way of answering the knock at the door — proving the existence of knowing through action, having it solidly.

Schopenhauer’s dualistic thinking

The world as representation and the world as consciousness.

Because the world our eyes see with the help of light, the world our senses feel, and the world after the brain processes it.

Grasping the world is a dream; we’re trapped.

Our consciousness is visible: we see our own hand, which is a representation, an objective object.

The inner impulse, the desire, that raises the hand — that is experiencing consciousness itself.

Physical causation: governs the material world; why does the ball move — because another ball hit it.

Logical reasoning: governs abstract concepts; why does this conclusion hold.

Space-time geometry: governs the domain of mathematics; why is the line like this.

Motive of action: governs the domain of consciousness; why run.

The essence of “read later”

Human cognition is extremely limited, the human attention mechanism is limited.

Accumulating a lot of “read later” just postpones the decision without solving information overload itself.

Essentially it’s a delayed non-decision, shifting the cost onto your future self.

AI can actually do instant summaries and highlight cards, avoiding piling up too much information, and combined with the current context it can amplify the marginal effect.

So the logic of “read later” is quite contradictory:

Important: extract it and read it right away.

Unimportant: no need to read it.

The foundation of reinforcement learning is probability theory: the Markov Decision Process (MDP)

Think of it as the rulebook you read before playing a game.

MDP is a method that looks only at the present, ignores the past, and cycles repeatedly through choice–result–feedback.

Essentially it is:

S (state): the robot’s position

A (action): up, down, left, right

P (transition probability): the rule that the ground is very slippery

R (reward): the score for each step

Once the rules are set, the harder part is how to play. That way of playing is the policy.

Whenever the robot enters a new state (lands on a new square), the policy tells it which action to take next.

And if the robot follows this optimal policy, the expected total return it can get in each state is the Optimal Value Function, written V.

The Bellman Optimality Equation — reinforcement learning’s dragon-slaying technique.

“The optimal value of a place equals the immediate benefit you get after making the smartest choice, plus the expectation of the future optimal value of all the places you might go next.”

The beauty of this equation is that it simplifies a “global optimality” problem spanning the whole journey into a local relationship involving only “now” and “the next step.”

What’s the underlying logic of attraction

What is the essence of intimacy and socializing? What do they actually satisfy in us?

Humans are social animals; being needed and accepted are the most basic needs.

Intimate relationships are also a process of shaping “who I am.”

So the essence of attraction is that we’re drawn to the people and things that satisfy our three core psychological needs: “survival, belonging, recognition.”

What are we attracted to? Core value.

But it’s hard to meet someone once and be sure of their value, to know the detailed information about them. At that point you rely on appearance details and clothing to determine who someone is.

That person’s economic strength, taste, even the circle they belong to.

Why are we unconsciously drawn to a certain type of person? Maybe because of their looks, their body?

A healthy, energetic face implies strong survival capacity.

In psychology there’s a term called the halo effect: when we see someone particularly outstanding, our brain automatically puts a halo on them, and we then assume they’re equally excellent in other respects (character, ability).

To save energy, the brain takes shortcuts when judging others’ value.

So what we think of as aesthetics seems to be our ancestors’ “preference guide” for survival or reproduction.

We think the eyes are making an aesthetic judgment, but it’s actually genes in the background making a survival assessment.

Why the Tang dynasty took plumpness as beautiful

Yang Guifei is honored as one of the “Four Great Beauties,” often described with phrases like “plump and lustrous” or “jade body laid out across.”

Why? The Tang dynasty was an era of extreme economic prosperity, openness, and inclusiveness; being fat represented wealth and status.

Today fat means obesity and poor health, but in the Tang, “plump” was closer to “rounded,” “full.”

What’s the essence of aesthetics?

Aesthetics seems to come out of the interplay between scarcity and power.

What is aesthetics? The core of aesthetics is how people see beauty.

It’s the perception and pursuit of “meaning” and “order,” produced jointly by people’s subjective feelings and social culture.

What is the essence of aesthetics

Innermost layer: evolutionary instinct.

Middle layer: cultural filter.

Outermost layer: personal experience.

The beauty you appreciate is no longer singular, but a harmonious unity.

The state where the person is like their clothes and the clothes are like the person.

This kind of aesthetics is dynamic and alive, unique — not a decoration, but this person’s state of life itself, a harmony, sincerity, and self-consistency from the inside out.

Morning run in Nha Trang, thinking about luxury goods

I think luxury goods are a balance of power and aesthetics.

If it’s only power: luxury goods are a naked tool for flaunting wealth, all show and no substance.

If it’s only aesthetics: then it’s a pure artwork or craft object, lacking scarcity and symbolism, and it’s hard to maintain the social character of a luxury good.

So luxury goods operate on three levels:

Economic angle: impractical, but it’s precisely the impracticality that sets the price through scarcity and symbolic value.

Sociological angle: visible social status.

Psychological angle: a sense of superiority, self-reward, belonging, a symbol of security.

So Labubu can be defined as the trend luxury of a cultural era.

Some new thoughts on aesthetics

So what exactly is the essence of aesthetics?

Abstractly, there are three layers:

Perception, the biological basis: determined to some degree by genetics, a basic function of the cognitive system, the pursuit of symmetrical beauty, catchy melodies, how to make the senses feel pleasure.

Cognition / meaning reconstruction: sensory input is processed by the brain, linked with memory and emotion. Why does a painting move you, why do lyrics move you? That means aesthetic experience at this layer requires accumulation — the more knowledge, the richer the network of imagery, the richer the experience.

Social / symbolic dimension: aesthetics is a kind of cultural language, and at this point it depends heavily on public value tendencies. For example Labubu, luxury goods — style, brands, etiquette, identity, class all turn aesthetics into a tool of social recognition.

Whether beauty needs a threshold is now explained: beauty does need a threshold, just as a person can’t understand the beauty of the universe, and an ant can’t understand the beauty of an oil painting.

Physiological needs and safety needs reduce sensitivity to subtle beauty.

Social, esteem, and self-actualization needs are the ones that truly call for aesthetic practice.

So aesthetics is both a fundamental human perceptual capacity and a cultural practice shaped by education, resources, and power.

What is the essence of human learning and reading

From the perspective of human biological evolution itself, the essence of human learning is reducing uncertainty and increasing adaptability in the process of evolutionary survival.

On the other hand, a person faces many decisions over a lifetime; knowing how to make those decisions well — that knowledge is a resource that lowers the cost of decisions.

On another hand, social life in society also requires knowledge. Knowledge is a social signal, showing that you have value, that you can join a certain circle, that you can gain trust.

On yet another hand, a person’s life is also a process of constructing a self-narrative; people don’t exist only for action. Reading novels, philosophy, and history is often about “weaving life into a meaningful narrative.” By understanding the world we also shape identity and meaning.

Then there’s satisfying human curiosity: some learning is purely out of curiosity and aesthetics — learning itself is an experience. For example, while living abroad, learning about a place’s food and culture is very interesting. Local food reveals a place’s culture and history especially well; the food people choose is often the food that chose this kind of people.

Then, how to reshape your own metacognitive system — that’s a precious human ability: observing your own learning, and thinking about your own thinking, how to learn and think better.

And then action: how to turn knowing into doing. This is very hard.

Maybe it’s very complicated. Coming back to our own subjectivity: each of us only has two goals in learning.

Improving your control over the future + becoming a better version of yourself

nghia

It originates from the Confucian Chinese concept of “righteousness,” but differs somewhat.

China’s “righteousness” mainly emphasizes:

Personal cultivation and moral character

Responsibility within the social hierarchy

Obligations in relationships such as ruler-minister and father-son

What’s unique about Vietnam’s “Nghĩa”:

Equalized loyalty: it emphasizes mutual obligation in equal relationships, rather than hierarchical ones

The obligation of collective struggle: it includes collective responsibility toward national liberation and social justice

The depth of entrusting life and death: “nghĩa” developed in a wartime environment carries an extreme depth of sharing life and death

Amnesia during cultural transition

At fast-moving historical turning points, social groups develop breaks or selective forgetting toward their existing traditions, experience and value systems.

The several waves of industrialization, modernization and globalization in human history all show this phenomenon.

In traditional societies culture was passed down generation after generation.

Modern acceleration forces society to discard useless traditions so it can adapt to a new environment.

Cultural value gets transferred to the productivity mechanism.

When individuals no longer depend on the family or the clan but on the market, the state and platforms, the original cultural system fades.

Individuals tend to value the present self more, rather than seeing themselves as one link in history.

Some parts of culture are often deliberately forgotten or marginalized.

Transition usually means the uncoupling of the old order.

A new power order needs to rewrite the historical narrative, so does part of culture get deliberately forgotten or marginalized?

How do we let tradition find a place in a new way of life, rather than forcing a return to the old?

Buddhism

The Buddha isn’t a god, but a title — an awakened person.

Buddhism is more like a wisdom operating system for understanding the world and getting along with your own mind.

Because he saw the suffering of birth, aging, sickness and death, he decided to leave home to seek the path of liberation, and finally awakened under a bodhi tree and became the Buddha.

So “bodhi” carries a deep meaning.

Suffering — being alive in this world, suffering is universal; it includes not only birth, aging, sickness and death but also spiritual suffering like not getting what you seek, parting from those you love, and meeting those you resent.

The truth of the origin of suffering: where does suffering come from? From our “three poisons” — greed, hatred and ignorance.

The truth of the cessation of suffering: suffering can be completely extinguished — nirvana.

The truth of the path: how do you extinguish suffering and reach nirvana? The answer is following the Noble Eightfold Path.

The path of liberation

The last of the Four Noble Truths, the truth of the path, is a concrete practice manual — the detailed prescription the Buddha wrote out.

Wisdom: upgrading the cognitive system.

Right View: understanding what’s right and what’s wrong.

Right Thought: thinking based on right view, staying far from greed, hatred and wrong views.

Precepts (Śīla) - regulating your speech and conduct

Right Speech: no lying, no harsh words that hurt others, no gossip, no smooth talk.

Right Action: no killing, stealing, sexual misconduct and other improper acts.

Right Livelihood: making a living through a proper occupation that doesn’t harm others.

Meditation (Samādhi) - training your inner strength

Right Effort: working to cut off existing unwholesome thoughts, preventing unwholesome thoughts not yet arisen, while working to grow wholesome thoughts already present and to arouse wholesome thoughts not yet arisen.

Right Mindfulness: constantly being aware of your body, feelings, thoughts and mental formations, living in the present.

Right Concentration: through meditation, letting the mind settle on one point, reaching a state of deep calm and stability.

Americans like to export universal values

Americans like to export universal values. Americans broadly hold an “American exceptionalism”, believing their country is a world-class beacon; it’s more ideological confidence, expressed as strong patriotism and reverence for national symbols (like the national sport), but to some degree it also turns into a bit of cultural arrogance and imposing their own values on others.

Understanding the bodhisattva

A compassionate heart — so it’s “non-self” meeting “all beings suffer”.

Maitrī (loving-kindness): giving joy, wishing all beings happiness.

Karuṇā (compassion): removing suffering, wishing all beings freedom from pain.

A “bodhisattva” isn’t an idol enshrined in a temple, but a choice and a direction for a life.

The bodhisattva raises an extremely powerful vow-mind, called bodhicitta.

The vow of bodhicitta: “For the benefit of all sentient beings, I vow to attain Buddhahood.”

They pursue the highest wisdom and ability not so they can lie flat forever in nirvana’s bliss, but so they can have the strongest “tool” to help beings still suffering in samsara.

Avalokiteśvara, as the embodiment of compassion, hears the sounds of suffering in the world and immediately gives help.

Kṣitigarbha: the embodiment of vow-power, who made the great vow “as long as hell is not empty, I vow not to become a Buddha”.

So for a bodhisattva there’s also a whole system of mind training, a set of practice tools:

Dāna (giving) - sharing and giving 🎁

Not just material things, but also sharing knowledge (the gift of dharma) and giving others peace of mind and fearlessness (the gift of fearlessness).

Śīla (precepts) - ethics and self-discipline 🛡️

Not doing things that harm others. This is the basis for all trust and good action.

Kṣānti (patience) - patience and tolerance 🧘‍♂️

Facing difficulty, misunderstanding, even harm, the mind can stay calm. This isn’t cowardice but comes from the wisdom of “dependent origination” — knowing all this is a coming-together of causes and conditions, and there’s no need to respond with hatred.

Vīrya (diligence) - effort and enthusiasm 💪

With a mind full of joy and perseverance, continuously abandoning evil and cultivating good. It’s not grim endurance but the ardor of “just do it, that’s right”.

Dhyāna (meditation) - focus and stability 🎯

Through meditation, the mind goes from scattered to focused, clear and strong.

Prajñā (wisdom) - the ultimate wisdom ✨

This is the most central one, the “eye” of the other five pāramitās. It means deep insight into “dependent origination, non-self, emptiness”. Without the guidance of wisdom, the first five can all become directionless blind effort.

With benefiting others as life’s highest direction, you won’t get lost in daily gains and losses, and every tiny good deed becomes extraordinarily meaningful, because it connects to this great vision.

Always thinking about helping others, the self-centeredness naturally gets weakened and thinned out.

Zen has a very beautiful concept: daily life is the practice ground

In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.

Again I sigh about how it’s like a cup of water — the cup is empty, so it has infinite possibility, like a child looking at the world, full of freshness and creativity.

The expert’s fixed patterns of thought, judgment and habit.

A beginner’s mindset is like a blank sheet where anything can be written; an expert’s is like a thick book already filled with words, with only a little blank space left.

No matter when, no matter what level I reach, I hope I always keep a beginner’s mindset.

Engaging with the world and leaving it

Engaging with the world is Confucian thought: actively taking part in society, bearing responsibility, making achievements, realizing your own value.

Leaving the world comes from Daoist and Buddhist thought: rising above worldly turmoil, pursuing spiritual freedom, the unity of heaven and humanity.

Combined with compassion and wisdom in tandem, what’s actually pursued is doing worldly things with an unworldly heart.

Engaging is compassion, leaving is wisdom.

With your body in the dusty world of “engaging”, your heart holds the clear wind and bright moon of “leaving”.

Body in the jianghu, heart in the mountains and forests.

Christianity

Kevin Kelly later built his own belief system and became a Christian.

The development of technology can be seen to some degree as echoing God’s creation.

So he has talked about the relationship between Christian faith and technology and the future; faith doesn’t conflict with science and innovation.

A supreme God who created and governs all things.

God is a transcendent being, infinite, eternal, all-embracing, omnipotent.

He is both the loving heavenly Father who cares for the world, and the righteous judge who distinguishes good from evil.

Jesus Christ: Christians believe Jesus is God’s only begotten Son and God’s incarnation on earth, both divine and human, whose purpose is to save the world from sin.

Incarnation: God came into the world in human form (Jesus).

Preaching: proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and performing miracles in the world.

Crucifixion: to bear the world’s sins he was nailed to the cross and died — this is the key to redemption.

Resurrection: he rose on the third day after death, conquered death, and proved his divinity.

Ascension and second coming: after resurrection he ascended, and promised to come again at the end of days to judge the world.

The Holy Spirit

The Trinity: Christians believe God is one, but exists in three different persons: the Father (God), the Son (Jesus), and the Holy Spirit.

They are one substance — not three gods but three manifestations of one God. You can picture the three states of water: solid (ice), liquid (water), gas (steam), all essentially H₂O.

The work of the Holy Spirit: dwelling in believers’ hearts, giving strength, wisdom and guidance, helping people understand the truth and experience God’s love.

The Bible

Christianity’s highest scripture, the word revealed by God.

Divided into two parts.

Old Testament: the history, law, poetry and prophecy of God and the Israelites before Jesus’s birth.

New Testament: Jesus’s life and teaching, and the development of the early church and its letters.

Relatively speaking, the human condition:

Original Sin: holds that after the first humans Adam and Eve sinned, sin entered the world, cutting all humanity off from God and inclining them to sin.

Salvation: people can’t be saved by their own good works; the only way out is to trust in Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection, so that sins are forgiven, one is reconciled with God, and gains eternal life. This process is called “justification by faith”.

God is the source of the Bible, the ultimate author; humans are the scribes. So it’s understandable that God is the author and humans are the production crew, who can take all kinds of roles (chosen by God).

What do believers usually do to express their faith?

Baptism: a public ritual symbolizing the washing away of sin and being joined to Christ.

Communion: a ritual set at Jesus’s Last Supper, using bread and wine (or grape juice) to symbolize Jesus’s body and blood, sacrificed for believers.

Christmas: commemorating the birth of Jesus Christ.

Easter: commemorating Jesus’s resurrection on the third day after death; it’s Christianity’s most important festival.

What does the cross mean? A symbol of justice and love.

Jesus, as the sinless substitute, bore the punishment the world deserved, satisfying God’s requirement of justice for sin.

By sacrificing his own Son, God showed the world his ultimate love and provided a path for humanity to be forgiven and saved.

Analyzing the drivers of Christian thought from first principles

Grace, sin, faith, hope, love — these run at the bottom like an operating system.

Grace is the core of Christian theology: love, forgiveness and blessing given by God that humans are completely undeserving of.

Christians hold that by their own good works, moral cultivation or wisdom, people can never meet God’s perfect standard and can’t save themselves. The only possibility of salvation is God reaching out first. That reaching out is grace.

Sin: missing the mark.

In the Greek original, the root of “sin” carries the sense of “missing the target”. It doesn’t just mean doing bad things (like lying or stealing); more deeply it means a state of separation from the Creator, and the self-centered tendency deep in the human heart that goes against God’s will.

Christianity holds that “sin” is the root of human suffering, death and corruption. It broke the harmonious relationship between people and God, between people, and between people and nature.

Faith: not just believing but trusting. More deeply, trusting means entrusting your whole life to Jesus, like boarding a plane whose principles you don’t understand but choosing to believe it will take you safely to your destination.

“Justification by faith”: this is the core of the Protestant Reformation. It means a person is seen by God as “righteous” (sinless) not because their behavior is good, but solely because they “trust” in what Jesus accomplished for them.

And also believing in unconditional love.

Christianity has the richest vocabulary for love, but the highest is “Agape”. It doesn’t mean romantic love or friendship love, but a selfless act of will that expects no return and thinks only of the other’s good — it feels a bit like compassion in Buddhism?

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul and all your mind” and “love your neighbor as yourself”.

One more similarity: Buddhism’s non-self feels somewhat like Christianity’s sin — facing your own state and problems calmly.

Christianity’s attitude to equality, compared with Confucianism

Confucianism doesn’t emphasize “all people are born equal” but rather hierarchical order and each doing their own duty.

“Let the ruler be a ruler, the minister a minister, the father a father, the son a son.” → a ruler should act like a ruler, a minister like a minister, a father like a father, a son like a son.

Identity needs to be built on a role, and you need to protect your role well.

Social order is based on “proper name and station” and “ritual”, not equality but division of labor.

What’s emphasized is social order.

Christianity emphasizes that all are equal before God, and Jesus’s unconditional love for all people.

All souls are equal, which also shaped modern human rights and democratic institutions.

So to some degree Confucianism better explains the hierarchy and stability of East Asian societies, while Christianity better explains the Western traditions of equality, democracy and freedom.

Christianity’s vision: eternal life, an eternal kingdom, restored harmony with God

Christianity’s vision: eternal life, an eternal kingdom, restored harmonious relationship with God, entering a state without sin, without suffering, full of love.

Buddhism’s vision: nirvana, extinguishing the flames of the three poisons — greed, hatred and delusion — complete liberation from the suffering of samsara, reaching an absolute stillness and peace that worldly language can’t describe.

The development trajectory of Daoism

Daoism itself is too abstract — the Dao that can be spoken is not the constant Dao; it’s hard for many ordinary people to grasp.

Too metaphysical, emphasizing non-action and naturalness.

Confucianism emphasizes engaging with the world and is easier to understand; Daoism is actually not conducive to maintaining social order as the core of general public education.

Later Buddhism took Daoism’s place.

Buddhism is more down-to-earth: it has temples, rituals, chanting, worshipping → strong operability; Buddhism talks about karma, reincarnation and the next life → more understandable and believable for ordinary people than Daoism’s “mystery of mysteries”.

Ordinary people need “visible rules and rituals” more than “the mystery-of-mysteries natural Dao”.

So the end result is “Confucianism runs society, Buddhism settles the heart, Daoism nourishes culture”.

Modeling Fan Li: key factors in building a character

Before meeting Goujian:

An understanding of natural law and the logic of how society runs.

Daoist thought absorbed, going with the flow — again confirming Daoist philosophy: going with the flow on the basis of a deep understanding of the world’s real rules.

The corrupt environment of Chu; he went to Yue.

Helped Yue destroy Wu, then resigned his post and withdrew into seclusion.

Using natural law to guide war.

Using social law to practice business.

Using the laws of human nature to survive.

Fan Li’s way of acting fits closely with the Daoist spirit

Fan Li’s way of acting fits closely with the Daoist spirit.

Analysis of Vietnamese social media interests

Vietnamese people have a bit more feeling raw material; culturally, Vietnamese interpersonal relations place more emphasis on emotional expression, family warmth and a romantic atmosphere.

Vietnamese users prefer “inspiring” story content, more popular than news, entertainment or tutorials; this comes partly from Vietnamese culture’s Buddhist, French colonial and also Confucian influences.

Over 60% of Vietnamese users prefer motivational content.

Real, unpolished.

Food, fashion, beauty and travel — these visual-oriented topics are also hot among young Vietnamese.

For Wang Yangming, the biggest change in his life was that enlightenment at Longchang

Before that, his life was an endless chase. He thought “the Dao” and “principle” were somewhere outside himself.

As a youth, I thought it was in the swordsman’s blade, in the general’s strategy. As a young man, I thought it was in Daoism’s arts of longevity, in Buddhism’s empty stillness and meditation.

Grasping at one highest Dao, longing to stuff it into his own mind.

Later he found he’d gained nothing.

What truly changed things was that desperate moment at Longchang: nearly dead, giving up begging, giving up every external support, and asking the mind.

My mind is heavenly principle.

My mind that knows right from wrong, my mind of compassion, my mind that loves good and hates evil… this lively mind that can tell right from wrong is itself “the Dao”, is itself “principle”! It’s not a container for any principle, it is the principle itself!

True “knowing” (the stirring of innate knowing) and “acting” (the flowing of heavenly principle) must be the same thing.

But for Wang Yangming before his enlightenment, knowing and acting were more like a contradiction, using knowing to suppress his behavior, in conflict.

Before enlightenment “acting” was “effort”; after enlightenment “acting” is “itself”.

Letter to My Wife

I cried reading Letter to My Wife when I was in school.

This time remembering it I was moved again, and wanted to cry reading the opening.

Lin Juemin was exactly 24 in the year he died.

What touched me is the instinctive heroism and sense of responsibility under cultural influence.

Understanding gewu zhizhi (investigating things to extend knowledge)

It was first elaborated by Confucians and Cheng-Zhu Neo-Confucianism, emphasizing exploring heavenly principle through external things.

It emphasizes that social order and moral norms are heavenly principle, and the individual must keep cultivating, restrain selfish desire, and return into the order of heavenly principle.

The method is: exhaust principle - preserve heavenly principle - extinguish human desire.

Wang Yangming stresses that mind is principle, the human mind is the root.

Zhu Xi’s school (also called Cheng-Zhu Neo-Confucianism) emphasizes investigating things to extend knowledge: through “investigating things” (studying the principle of all things) to “extend knowledge” (reaching thorough understanding). It holds that heavenly principle is dispersed among all things, and the first step of cultivation is to investigate them one by one; when knowledge has accumulated enough, one day there will be a sudden breakthrough, and one will understand the principle of all under heaven.

Wang Yangming’s view differs: principle isn’t outside, it’s in the mind.

Investigating things means that where your thoughts arise, you correct the selfish and stray thoughts that don’t accord with innate knowing.

That’s the concrete work of extending innate knowing.

Some new thoughts in the AI era: to me, investigating things to extend knowledge is more like

Investigating things to extend knowledge = in a sea of data/information/experience/emotion → seeking patterns and insight → becoming wisdom that can guide life and action.

Zhu Xi thought principle came from investigating things; a great Confucian, later called Zhu Zi

Wang Yangming couldn’t investigate it out, so he held that mind is principle, and still cultivated himself into a sage.

Dao and virtue

We can talk about morality, we can describe morality.

Morality is complex: the Dao is the universe’s abstract law, and virtue (de) is that law’s manifestation in concrete things.

Confucian morality is more about social-level behavioral constraint, and in each person’s heart there’s a public moral value system plus a private one.

The virtue Daoism talks about is living in accord with the Dao, the inner quality and strength that shows.

The Dao is the noumenon, invisible and intangible; virtue is the concrete manifestation in things — water flowing, trees growing — more like apps under an operating system.

A person of Daoist thought is cultivating the Dao and accumulating virtue.

Cultivating the Dao: continually understanding the underlying logic of the world and the universe.

Accumulating virtue: following that logic, letting your behavior and inner quality flow naturally.

One way Daoism and Wang Yangming’s thought are very similar

The Dao is everywhere, and also exists in my heart.

Principle isn’t in things, it’s in our minds.

Both ways of thinking encourage us to look inward.

Daoism advocates leaving the world, Confucianism advocates actively engaging with it.

The Buddhist gate, the narrow gate

The Buddhist gate is all-embracing; entering it means leaving home, becoming a monk, throwing yourself wholly into practice and spreading the dharma.

Beings differ in their capacities, afflictions and conditions, so the road to enlightenment and nirvana isn’t only one; hence the different teachings and practices, the different dharma gates. Whichever gate you enter by, the enlightenment you finally reach is the same — unlike the single narrow gate Christianity emphasizes.

“Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter by it; but the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it.” Those who take the wide road are “many”, while those who find the narrow road are “few”.

Kant is fascinating: a life that was extremely regular

Kant is fascinating: a life so regular that his neighbors used him as a human clock.

In his life he wrote three famous books:

What can I know (what can i konw)

What should I do (what should i do)

What can I hope for (what can i hope for)

How to read two books together

Two related books: Russell’s The Conquest of Happiness and Schopenhauer’s The Wisdom of Life.

Russell is an optimist, Schopenhauer a pessimist.

One holds that happiness can be conquered, the other that life’s essence is a pendulum between pain and boredom, and that what we can do isn’t pursue pleasure but reduce pain — so one looks outward, one seeks inward.

Looking outward you can be happy, looking inward you can be happy too.

Spend one week in “Russell mode”: more socializing, more activity, more engagement.

Spend one week in “Schopenhauer mode”: more solitude, fewer desires, watching from a cool distance.

Understanding Zen: I took a very Zen photo in a café

Understanding Zen — I took a very Zen photo in a café, very atmospheric.

I’m wondering why this photo is so atmospheric, what the reason actually is.

Because there’s so little: cutting away the complicated to keep the simple, removing unnecessary elements, letting “emptiness” become the picture’s breathing, leaving blank space for the viewer’s imagination.

Emptiness conveys more depth than fullness; crop out the messy parts around.

Focus on one realm, don’t let the frame be fought over.

Go with nature rather than forcing it, don’t use filters, stillness and movement give rise to each other.

In a complex world, rest your mind and eyes on “simplicity”.

Hue

The imperial city of the Nguyen dynasty, between Da Nang and Hanoi, with the Perfume River running through it.

The capital of Vietnam’s last feudal dynasty, the Nguyen dynasty (1802-1945). It was Vietnam’s political, cultural and religious center until 1945.

The Hue Imperial City complex was listed by UNESCO as a World Cultural Heritage site in 1993; it’s the largest and most complete surviving ancient architectural complex in Vietnam.

Hue’s old city is like Vietnam’s Forbidden City, where emperors worked, lived and held sacrifices; the restored buildings are still grand.

The Nguyen imperial tombs, scattered on both banks of the Perfume River. Each tomb was designed by the emperor himself while alive, in very different styles, reflecting their individual personalities and aesthetics.

Khai Dinh Tomb: the most ornate and unique one! It blends Vietnamese and European (Baroque) architectural features, and the mosaic murals inside are extremely fine.

Minh Mang Tomb: grand in scale with a symmetrical layout, perfectly expressing Confucian thought and the philosophy of the unity of heaven and humanity; very photogenic.

Tu Duc Tomb: the most poetic and romantic of the imperial tombs, like a huge royal garden with lakes, pavilions and towers; it was Emperor Tu Duc’s palace in life.

On the phenomenon of Vietnamese women punishing children

I’ve come across it twice.

Influenced by Confucian culture, a value system of authority and obedience.

There’s also face and social judgment: parents don’t want their child to make a mistake outside and lose face, so they tend to correct behavior in a forceful way.

Corporal punishment is seen as the direct way to make a child remember the lesson.

Temples: seeking and wishing

For believers, a temple is a place to worship and pray; people come with their requests — praying for safety, health, marriage.

But in Buddhist practice, a temple is never a place to satisfy requests, but to guide people toward calm abiding and insight, awakening, mind training.

Quiet down, and see your own wish clearly.

Spiritual awakening

A deep inner transformation in which the individual transcends the everyday ego and gains a deeper understanding of the self, the universe, or something deeper.

Spiritual awakening can be seen as a higher stage of self-actualization, going beyond the top of Maslow’s hierarchy into a “transpersonal” state focused on wholeness and a sense of cosmic connection.

In Buddhism, Hinduism or New Age movements, awakening means freeing yourself from ignorance and realizing your true nature or your unity with the universe; Daoist thought also seems to stress to some degree that the Dao follows nature, and that the Dao gives birth to all things.

Some philosophers I focus on and think about

Socrates

The Buddha

Kant

Schopenhauer

Nietzsche

Confucius

Zhuangzi

Descartes

Stoicism

Stoicism feels like an operating system made of three modules.

Physics

Logic

Ethics

Controlling the inner world through reason, rather than the outer world.

The Dao gives birth to the One; a person can only perceive self-consciousness

Actually that’s this One.

A person is amid all things, but in reality what we can directly and certainly perceive is only self-consciousness; the entire external world is presented to us indirectly through representations of consciousness.

So self-consciousness is the only thing we can be certain of, the One in Laozi’s philosophy; for a person, the unfolding of everything in the world starts from this One.

Descartes also said: I think, therefore I am; self-consciousness is the only thing that exists.

Schopenhauer also said: the world is my representation; everything is presented through my self-consciousness.

Schopenhauer: facing the truth of this complex world, there are two paths

To play this doomed game with full effort, affirming the will: the default path for the vast majority of creatures, centered on egoism, firmly believing I am the center of the world, affirming myself, devouring more matter and energy. There’s a case here: suicide is precisely a strong affirmation of the will to live, not a denial — because what is sought differs from what is wished.

Denial of the will to live: truly seeking liberation isn’t a rational decision but a shift in insight. When a person sees through the “veil of Maya” and intuitively recognizes that all individuals are in essence manifestations of the same will, their egoism begins to dissolve — compassion: what they see isn’t someone else’s suffering, but the suffering of all beings.

The Buddha: not a matter of believing or not believing

If the Buddha is an external object we need to pray to and rely on, then I don’t believe. Because placing hope in something external is itself a kind of ‘obstruction,’ a sign of being unable to see things as they really are. You pray because you ’lack’; you worship because you ‘fear.’

But if the Buddha refers to the Dharma, to Shakyamuni as a ‘person’ who spent his whole life realizing and revealing those objective laws of how the universe operates — causality, dependent origination, impermanence, emptiness

Then it’s wisdom. What you become aware of is the laws, and an understanding of the world.

Even a person’s name can be a concept

Because a concept is the abstraction and summary of the essential attributes of things in human thought

It isn’t one specific thing, but the cognitive unit of the common attributes of a class of things.

People can be conceptualized too — Kant, for example.

Kant is actually also a concept aggregate, because ‘Kant’ corresponds to a series of linguistic cognitive representations of this person. So Kant isn’t just an individual; he has become a ‘symbolic cognitive set,’ a cultural symbol built on concepts.

Why Sơn Tùng M-TP is the most popular in Vietnam

K-pop + local adaptation + extremely catchy melodies + a sense of fashion.

Born in a small town, made it to the international stage on his own.

And Vietnam’s rising middle class needed a local star idol to project themselves onto.

His styling represents “rebellion,” “avant-garde,” “K-pop-ification,” but it also brought an aesthetic renovation.

The Nepali restaurant in Dalat

Strangely, coming back I picked a highly rated place; seeing Korean on the sign I thought it was Korean BBQ?

The entrance didn’t look like it; more like an Indian and Nepali 🇳🇵 restaurant. I was a bit confused — and the owner really was Nepali. We talked about Nepal, about hiking the Annapurna Circuit, and the memories touched me a bit.

The world is small; willfulness is large.

Impressions of Nha Trang

A main coastal road (Trần Phú Street) clearly divides into two worlds.

One side is a consumption paradise built for tourists: high-end hotels, international restaurants and bars, tourist massage parlors.

Cross the main road and walk a few blocks inward, and the tourist noise fades; it’s locals’ real living area, with local prices.

Just like Bali.

Its composition is a layering of several important histories.

Tourism pushed up rents across the city and some prices, putting pressure on local residents too.

The atmosphere of seaside cafés and inland cafés is completely different.

I met a woman my age, still in grad school, on her first trip abroad

Two guys traveling with her.

She felt like she had no time to feel the details of the trip.

I’m living abroad alone; it reminds me that Kevin Kelly traveled independently alone when he was young.

Not to escape people.

When you’re alone in an unfamiliar environment, your perception becomes unusually sharp — you notice details, sounds, smells, and people’s expressions that you’d easily overlook when you’re with friends.

All your attention can go to observing, thinking, and absorbing.

And it’s easier to form genuine connections with locals; people are often more open and curious toward solo travelers.

The most important thing in travel is the conversation with yourself, walking inward.

Cedruss Coffee 09 in Nha Trang

Where do people like drinking coffee at night? Definitely Vietnam.

It’s really just a scene: men and women, at night, as darkness falls, a group of people gathered outside, or at the doorway, or at an open-air café, drinking coffee and chatting. Definitely Vietnam.

At night the seaside breeze is just the right amount of stimulation — cool and soft, it lowers your skin temperature and regulates your breathing rhythm, giving a relaxed feeling of “I can finally be quiet.”

The tension of the day’s work also slowly dissolves under the breeze’s comfort; you involuntarily let out a long breath, your muscles relax.

The taste of coffee, the touch of the sea breeze, the rhythm of the waves, the mood of the lighting, plus the haziness on the skyline.

Observing a church

Actually observing churches is also a very interesting thing.

It carries a certain architectural philosophy and aesthetics too.

The soaring dome, the light and stained glass — the intent is to draw people’s gaze and soul toward the divine.

Facing a vast sky and a sacred space, a person feels small, and this smallness isn’t inferiority but humility — the correct position between human and god in faith.

Faith isn’t a shelter for escaping reality, but a lighthouse facing life’s storms.

Does the experience of living abroad depend on cultural accumulation

If the first layer of aesthetics is perception, the second layer is cognition and the reconstruction of meaning.

To some degree, the more knowledge, the richer the network of imagery, the richer the experience.

When living abroad, a city’s boredom is often not the city’s problem, but the observer’s decoding system.

Doesn’t that also come down to a network of imagery?

What questions and expectations you bring to a place largely determine what you can see.

Bring the intention “I want to take photos, check in, and post to Moments,” and the Hanoi you see is a backdrop.

Bring the intention “I want to understand how this society works,” and the Hanoi you see is a living system.

So from the perspective of how someone travels, you can also understand what inner world this person projects?

But on another level, the biggest surprise of travel is beyond the boundary of knowledge — like finding a book that suits you perfectly and going after it with curiosity?

A chance encounter

After parting in Kathmandu, I ran into the older sister again; it happened that she’d also pass through Nha Trang, Vietnam. Four short hours of acquaintance.

It often brings more surprise, more that moves you.

Because distance and time act as the most honest filter, and distance and time are also the variables people can least help and least control.

If last time was also a once-in-a-lifetime meeting,

then this meeting was also a once-in-a-lifetime one.

Meeting in a foreign land.

She saw me as more interesting, and I seem to have grown more too.

She said the me she saw before was a very introverted kid who didn’t like to talk, haha.

There was a lot I wasn’t willing to bring up on my own. Back then I felt depth requires both sides to work together, and that most people are lonely inside.

This time I seem willing.

Being able to meet someone who sees your inner growth is really rare.

I hope every meeting brings them some new surprise, some new sincerity.

Every person, every moment, every stretch of experience always shapes a different us.

Some counterintuitive thinking

Mom said offhand on the phone that I shouldn’t drink ice water when it’s hot; it sounded a bit baffling to me.

A lot of so-called common sense is experiential conclusions passed down by culture, formed by emotional experience and word of mouth rather than strict reasoning or scientific verification.

So experience has limits, and the common sense derived from it is limited too.

A simplification and ossification of rules passed down between generations.

Common sense is over-protectively handed down, lacking a verification mechanism; if an idea doesn’t directly cause obvious harm, people prefer to keep using it.

It’s very necessary to dissect common sense with reason or try to verify it.

These conclusions weren’t reached by these people through reason, so it’s very hard to overturn their influence on them with logic and reason.

Many people’s views are the product of emotion + experience; reason is just “after-the-fact justification.”

To overturn these conclusions, relying on reason alone is far from enough. You need to change the experience and emotion first, then talk about logic.

Apple’s share in Vietnam feels higher than in China

Apple may be more of a status symbol; Apple is a strong status symbol. Many young people treat buying an iPhone as a kind of “rite of passage” or a savings goal; even if their income isn’t high, they’ll prioritize installment plans or buying second-hand.

At home, the high-end share has gradually been taken over by Huawei; domestic brands have strong emotional identification in China.

It seems I can also understand why Huawei makes domestic high-end phones — it’s betting on the high-end share.

Russia’s new generation of young people

More and more Russians are gathering around here.

They also face great social pressure.

And a high unemployment rate.

They face international sanctions.

Those born in the 2000s were born during Putin’s first term, when Russia went through economic recovery and a resource-export boom.

In late childhood they hit Western sanctions after the 2014 Crimea crisis, and during university they hit the economic and international-exchange restrictions caused by the 2022 Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Their growth trajectory shifted rapidly from a “window of globalization” to “relative closure.”

Opportunities to work abroad and study abroad became harder.

Social networks are polarized: one part in Russian-language environments like VK and Telegram, another part active on YouTube and Instagram.

Young people have less idealism, and care more about practical survival skills and stable work.

Actually their English skills are about the same as Chinese young people’s. A country’s spoken-language level doesn’t depend on its economic strength or per-capita GDP, but more on that country’s globalization opportunities — Vietnam and Nepal are shaped this way.

Still, language prevalence can change within a short time through policy, social demand, and media culture. Korea, for example, has quite good spoken English thanks to policy, the study-abroad wave, and corporate globalization.

Brunch culture

Since Nepal, I’ve rarely experienced brunch culture.

Rosie’s café / Coffee & Brunch in Hoi An was the earliest restaurant in Hoi An doing brunch.

The concept of brunch originated in Britain and became widespread and flourished in the United States. It blends the characteristics of breakfast and lunch.

Brunch emphasizes slowing down and chatting with friends, so there’s more time — usually on weekends.

The restaurants tend to have hybrid menus, very rich; sometimes they include some drinks. In Nepal they’re all included; here you have to order them separately.

It’s not just copying: Rosie’s café combines Vietnamese features with Western brunch. Seeing the little garnishes on the bread is so much fun.

The word brunch is amusing — brunch is actually breakfast + lunch, haha.

Watching them gather and chat, maybe a family, with sunlight slanting in occasionally.

Maybe this is life.

Meta-awareness noticing your own attention problems

Meta-awareness is really a very important ability: having me observe myself, reflect on my own problems, and calibrate.

What meta-awareness actually is: essentially detection, control, calibration.

I feel like in the past I mostly relied on others to correct me — a boss or my parents telling me what I could improve.

Now it’s not just that I can be aware; I can also observe myself — the thinking of the whole process, the essence, what the problem is — record it objectively, and then use a very objective tool, say AI, as a calibrator, to help me understand and analyze what’s behind the behavior more objectively, which in turn furthers my understanding of myself.

So I can roughly analyze a phenomenon of my own very rationally and comprehensively — for example, why my focus dropped after I started living abroad, and what focus I actually need?

Metacognition: understanding yourself objectively, then having a dialogue between the objective view of yourself, the subjective experience, and AI.

Some thoughts and suggestions based on myself

One thing suddenly felt very effective and helpful: slowing down my thinking and action. When decisions and things I want to do come up, there should actually be a process of meta-awareness and metacognition.

Thinking about some reasons focus declined while living abroad:

Rhythm disrupted: no fixed or healthy rhythm; I need to reflect on my own sense of rhythm.

Environmental cues lost: no fixed workstation / the sense of ritual disappeared.

Blurry tasks: travel + work in parallel, a messy to-do list — but I’m a single-threaded creature, I can’t do many things at once.

Lots of novel temptations, the urge to explore, the urge to chat, FOMO.

… and other problems I haven’t thought of yet.

Some suggestions that came out of it

Fixed steps — for example when to think, when to work, how to determine your work content and steps. People still need to be driven by reason, combined with some workflows from your work platform.

Get up on time every morning, decide what to do, and what to do at night (here there could be a habit-experience period: AI creates an experience based on its understanding of you, a fixed daily itinerary recommendation, how to think, how to learn, and then you go do things according to that itinerary).

I’ve tried some methods and they didn’t seem very effective. I remember the old motivation model — GitHub rewards you for every commit. Maybe this is the same; maybe a new incentive mechanism would work.

It could be a schedule, it could be AI. I’m wondering if AI could promote its understanding of you based on your tasks and your execution — maybe that itself is a kind of incentive. Or maybe people are a performative personality type? We perform ourselves for AI as a matter of course?

As for a fixed workstation, I’ll switch to quieter spots with better light, places hard to be disturbed — deliberately manufactured atmosphere.

Every day, think through some task plans, pick out a few very key tasks, then execute.

Many tasks are dispatched by AI; you can think about the relationship between tasks and AI.

What will human self-drive depend on in the future?

On the road I met a Japanese guy living and traveling around the world

Also a solo traveler.

At first I thought he was Chinese, but he turned out to be a Japanese middle-aged man.

His home is Nagoya, where I landed on my first stop; he was planning to go to Nepal, Dalat, and Ho Chi Minh City.

Everything felt very interesting.

Vietnamese etiquette

My landlord’s family invited me to dinner. Having received the invitation, I spent ten minutes beforehand learning about Vietnamese etiquette rules.

In Vietnam it’s very common to invite someone to your home for a meal; Vietnamese family atmosphere and food-sharing culture are strong — it’s not just eating, it’s also socializing.

In China, inviting someone to a meal usually requires confirming the relationship and some sense of ritual; people are very afraid of trouble.

Some etiquette: in Vietnam bringing a small gift isn’t required, but a small token of thoughtfulness shows politeness.

You can politely greet the elders; the host arranges seating, and the elderly sit first.

Generally you wait for the host to say “ăn đi” (let’s eat) before picking up your chopsticks.

You can first take dishes the host has taken or recommended, as a sign of respect.

When eating rice, pair it more with dishes and soup, don’t eat only meat, don’t be picky, don’t eat too fast, and express gratitude after the meal.

The old town wasn’t submerged by modern technology but integrated it cleverly

The old town wasn’t submerged by modern technology; it integrated it cleverly — for example, turning off the electric lights during the full moon festival and lighting the streets with handmade lanterns. This is a conscious “step backward,” reminding people that technology should serve humanity rather than replace it.

Technology is ultimately there to serve humans.

When humans start serving technology, it’s destined to be eliminated over time.

But some creations that serve humanity can be eternal; some values can be eternal.

So what is technology for? I think it’s freedom — though it also seems technology keeps making people busier and busier? I think it’s the freedom of choice: in as complex and busy a society as possible, giving people as much choice as possible, letting everyone become the person they want to be.

We can regain mastery over our lives.

Da Nang from a tourist’s perspective

The beach, the cafés, Hoi An’s old town, fireworks at the Dragon Bridge — these are the side of the city shown to tourists.

But what about the rest? Da Nang is a major manufacturing city; foreign companies are deeply rooted here, as well as local manufacturing.

In some coastal areas and near the Han River, and in Da Nang’s western outskirts and southern wing (around Hoa Vang and Hoa Vinh), there are lots of electronics assembly plants and textile factories, absorbing migrant workers from Quang Nam, Quang Ngai and other provinces.

These workers usually live in work sheds or crude dormitories, earning far less than the hotel and restaurant staff tourists usually see. At night they don’t go to seaside cafés but gather at street stalls around the factories.

Da Nang went through a merger, and after it, Da Nang suddenly took in Hoi An and a large stretch of countryside. Tourists mostly stay in the central districts plus the beach strip, while the genuinely rural areas still keep rice paddies, handicrafts and small fishing villages as their way of production.

It suddenly clicked: the “city people” Hoi An locals talk about are actually Da Nang people.

After Jesus ascended, his followers began bravely preaching his death and resurrection

After Jesus ascended, his followers began bravely preaching the message of his death and resurrection — that was the starting point of the church.

The Roman Empire saw this new faith as a threat and persecuted it for 300 years.

But that also carried the seeds of the faith further.

The conversion of the apostle Paul was crucial: he vigorously spread this faith, originally mainly among Jews, to non-Jews (gentiles).

The Roman emperor Constantine issued the Edict of Milan, legalizing Christianity; the persecution ended. Not long after, Christianity even became Rome’s state religion.

The church leapt to the mainstream of society, gaining enormous power and resources.

Later it was forced to split, because of long-term cultural differences and great conflict between western Rome and Constantinople; so:

The western church developed into the Catholic Church.

The eastern church developed into the Orthodox Church.

Then later came the Reformation, because religion had developed problems, like the sale of indulgences, and the newly emerged printing press let reformist ideas spread across Europe at unprecedented speed. This reform movement gave birth to Christianity’s third main branch — Protestantism, which is what we usually call “Christianity” (in the narrow sense).

The feeling of suspension

Why is the sense of connection between people so strong here in Vietnam?

Subjective analysis: why was the sense of connection between people so weak when I was interning in a big city? In big cities it seems many people have a weak sense of connection. But setting aside the big-city perspective, what’s the sense of connection in small cities? As a student with a small-town perspective, it’s hard to find peers and childhood companions in a small town; as urbanization develops everyone scatters to different cities.

Also, in some small towns I’ve lived in while traveling, people seem to have a lot of connection at a fundamental level.

Fundamentally it depends on social structure: acquaintance society vs stranger society. Urbanization here in Vietnam hasn’t developed that dramatically — whether in cities or villages, interpersonal relations still have a lot of “small community” structure, where people can rely on each other and form communities.

China now relies more on institutions, markets and technology; a stranger society naturally weakens the sense of connection between people.

If involution is a state,

suspension is a feeling.

The disappearance of the nearby leaves us short of real connections; there’s a state that describes it: suspension. In the spinning of the involuted top, the individual has no direction, a sense of confusion, neither up nor down, uncertainty, and no sense of social connection either.

The disappearance of the nearby also makes us indifferent to the community and things around us. But if you turn abstract society into concrete, warm connections, that greatly counters the powerlessness that “suspension” brings.

People climb for the summit; the summit is the goal

Going down is boring to them, and rushed.

Above the peak, besides the view, there are cliffs.

Being able to go up is ability. Being able to come down safely is wisdom.

What’s pursued is safety and inner freedom throughout the whole hike, and after seeing the whole picture, choosing a path of your own.

To some degree, the country most influenced by Cheng-Zhu Neo-Confucianism is Korea

To some degree the countries most influenced by Cheng-Zhu Neo-Confucianism are Korea, Vietnam and China.

The countries most influenced by Yangming’s mind philosophy are Japan and China.

Chinese communities have basically all been influenced by Confucius and Mencius.

Having watched countless sunrises and sunsets

Can’t help but sigh.

The sunset reminds me the day is quickly draining away, to focus on the present and enjoy this sunset moment.

The sunrise reminds me a new day is rising; every year many people make sunrise pilgrimages on Mount Fuji, because sunrise has a very unique meaning for them, representing hope and life.

Marks of the times

Thinking of the grandeur of Beijing’s Palace Museum, the layer-by-layer progression from the Meridian Gate to the Hall of Supreme Harmony, power pressing closer and closer.

The Nguyen dynasty is much plainer in scale and materials than Beijing’s Forbidden City, but the overall layout and structure are very close. Especially in the Battle of Hue, the Nguyen imperial city became the main battlefield of fierce exchanges between US forces and the North Vietnamese army. The heart of a once-glorious dynasty was left in ruins.

Can’t help but sigh: under the passage of time, all prosperity ultimately returns to impermanence.

The reclining Buddha

I’ve encountered it in both Thailand and Vietnam — Nha Trang in Vietnam

The posture of Shakyamuni Buddha entering nirvana: lying on his side, head resting on his hand, a smile on his face

This posture isn’t sleeping; it symbolizes the Buddha’s complete nirvana, liberation from the cycle of birth and death

Nirvana: after completing his mission in time, the Buddha leaves the physical body and enters liberation

Compassion and tranquility: the reclining Buddha’s smile represents compassion for all beings and equanimity toward birth and death

So reclining Buddha statues usually depict Shakyamuni entering parinirvana (Parinirvana): body lying on its side, head resting on the hand, a serene smile on the face

Buffett is a pure capitalist whose entire career is tireless

Buffett is a pure capitalist; his whole career can be described as tirelessly, single-mindedly, rationally moving money around to enjoy the fruits of compound interest.

In his empire, one hand is insurance, one hand is investing.

What kind of person do you think Buffett is?

Understanding what’s behind the commercialization of scenic areas

Does the process of commercialization promote local innovation and inheritance, or is it just superficial copying?

Can a standardized business model preserve unique cultural genes?

Do locals benefit from the commercialization?

The direction of evolution matters a lot. If commercialization helps young people find a livelihood in their hometown and gives traditional crafts new life, then it’s positive adaptation. If it just turns Hoi An into a uniform “tourist souvenir display zone,” then it’s genuinely worrying.

So over-commercialization is a very frightening thing; for long-term development it’s fatal.

China — a power-worshipping group

Chinese people seem to be the group that worships power and strength the most.

This is a deep-rooted influence of traditional culture.

Essentially it’s a mate-selection and cooperation strategy left by genes.

When I was little I was always curious: why do Chinese celebrities seem to have such big privileges, and why are fans so fervent?

Why do people over-adulate and over-idealize titles, wealth, and power?

The social structure institutionalizes the “strong person” label — titles, degrees, wealth rankings, star aura — making it easier for people to identify and flock to them.

In places where the economy is less stable and resources are more concentrated, the tendency to worship the strong is more obvious, because following the strong means greater security.

The tulip bubble

Introduced to the Netherlands at first, it gradually became popular; early trading was limited to wealthy households, and prices were stable.

Then speculators became common, futures contracts spread, demand from France grew, and prices kept rising.

Then came the peak of frenzy: contracts changed hands many times, prices soared, trading happened in taverns.

Then the peak, and finally a fall to one percent of the peak.

The process resembles real estate and modern stock markets: rational investment at first, turning into blind chasing of rising prices.

Understand it: this is a process of irrational, fervent pursuit.

Human nature itself: greed drives assets away from value, and herd behavior amplifies risk.

It’s the phenomenon of individuals, under group pressure or information asymmetry, giving up independent judgment and blindly following group behavior or decisions.

Pensions

A dangerous topic.

What’s being discussed isn’t simply “is there enough money,” but a game of trust and institutional arrangements — young people doubt the ability to deliver in the future, and the government has to balance stability against affordability.

Underlying logic: pensions aren’t personal finance, they’re intergenerational redistribution + a state promise; they’re supported simultaneously by demographic structure, economic growth, and political will. As soon as one link weakens (fewer births, slower growth, fiscal strain), the system gets hit by amplified risk.

Behavioral consequences: distrust leads to “opting out / lying flat / self-rescuing” (more private savings, buying commercial insurance, emigration intentions), and these behaviors in turn weaken the social security tax base, forming a vicious cycle.

Insight: rather than just railing at the system, split your attention into two tracks.

How to maximize your own risk resilience within the current system;

How to participate in or push for institutional improvement (more transparent, more fair, more sustainable).

Some reflections and insights:

Social security isn’t “investment,” it’s part of the social contract — don’t treat it as your only pension channel.

Priority trio: cash flow (6–12 months) > health (prevention beats treatment) > skills (the ability to earn).

Treat the “pension” as a floor, and private savings / commercial annuities / investments as the active growth part.

When buying commercial insurance, fill the medical and long-term care gaps first, then consider annuity insurance; don’t start with complex, high-fee products.

Inflation is a hidden tax: prioritize assets that can beat inflation (global diversification, equities/startups/physical or inflation-linked instruments).

If your salary is hard to raise, focus on “portable income” — remote work, freelancing, overseas clients — reducing fragile dependence on the local system.

Delayed retirement is highly likely; personal strategy: extend your working life (sustainability of health, skills, and way of working).

Don’t let housing decisions be held hostage by emotion: weigh cash flow, opportunity cost, and liquidity; if necessary, rent first and buy later, or go for a small but good property.

Attention, small-business employees and owners: count social security costs as an explicit operating cost in your pricing and hiring strategy; don’t quietly shift the risk onto employees.

Community mutual aid and neighborhood elder care are underrated resources — participating in local community significantly lowers future care costs and the risk of loneliness.

If you’re angry at the system, two things are most effective: turn the anger into “information/evidence” (demand transparency) + “collective action” (complaints/political participation/advocacy).

Young people, don’t use “the state has a responsibility” as a reason to give up preparing yourself; running both tracks is more solid.

Business opportunities: elder health management, rehabilitation training, long-term care services, age-friendly home renovation, preventive community products.

Mindset notes: accept uncertainty but don’t panic; cut long-term risk into small, executable preparation items.

Do a “pension audit” once a year: cash, insurance, investments, health status, professional skills — list the gaps and set goals for the next year.

A curious phenomenon: herd behavior to some degree induces emergence

Herd: individuals collectively adopt similar behavior because of imitation, conformity, information asymmetry, or social pressure — even if that behavior isn’t necessarily rational.

Emergence: interactions among a large number of individuals produce new patterns or new functions at the macro level that can’t simply be derived from individual characteristics.

The formation of short-term bubble effects works the same way.

Investors see others buying → they buy too → prices rise: a bubble forms in a short time, and the price trend shows collective irrational swings.

A video goes viral → everyone shares it: viral spread forms, and new meme culture spins off from it.

Many people abroad and at home say Chinese people emphasize face

Many people abroad and at home say Chinese people emphasize face. My essential understanding of it:

Many people observe the phenomenon but don’t understand the essence.

Those born in the 2000s actually emphasize the self more, compared with the reform-and-opening era.

Why do people care about face? It’s determined by social environment + economy + culture.

Traditional Chinese society is still a society of acquaintances: face = credit + social capital, and losing face equals losing resources.

Then in the era of economic and material scarcity, it was hard for people to express individuality through consumer choices, so they needed face to gain social recognition.

Finally the cultural logic: Confucian ritual and collectivism prevailed.

Those born in the 2000s are starting to care less about face: the influence of the internet and globalization, rising economic independence, more diverse resources, more independent individuals — plus young people in modern society care more about sincerity and authenticity than perfection, and in dating and relationships they care more about the substance than the surface.

An example: I’ve been traveling the world these past two years. Spending a month’s salary on a luxury item, buying some name brands, buying a top-tier phone — it brings no substantive benefit, and it actually hurts savings, travel experience, or investment in interests.

In the modern industrial era everyone focuses on efficiency and busyness — tool-driven, efficiency above all

For many years Chinese culture seems unfavorable to the modern social era.

In the information age everyone pursues minimalism.

If in the AI era tool-type work is largely replaced,

will humans start turning inward again, and will culture’s advantages show?

Value migrates to emotion and aesthetics, meaning creation, deep experience, and the ethical dimension of judgment and choice.

When tool efficiency far exceeds the individual, society returns to “meaning and taste” competition

Competition.

People build mutual trust and order through aesthetics and ritual.

The essence of ritual is lowering uncertainty.

The essence of aesthetics is a system of recognition: those who get it feel close, those who don’t get it are set apart.

When I was a kid I had a lot of relatives

After growing up, the relatives got few, they disappeared.

It feels like a really interesting phenomenon.

Actually, in the shift from agricultural civilization -> industrial civilization -> digital civilization, the traditional human web didn’t have time to transition naturally, so it just got left behind.

Then there’s urbanization: a huge number of young people leave their hometowns and go to the cities to work or study, cutting the ties to their grandparents and family traditions, and the pace of life speeds up.

And then short videos and fast-food culture are in full swing now, and that partly fills up young people’s fragmented time too.

The hardship behind the city of Da Nang

Behind every fast-developing city there’s an invisible sacrifice.

Da Nang is the best-planned city in Vietnam, with the least traffic congestion and the tidiest environment, and it has pushed its urban scale forward fastest and with the most influence.

But there’s another side of reality: late at night the construction workers finish and are packed into buses to be taken back.

The hours are long, their housing is far from the site and they need collective transport. Behind rapid urbanization is a large mass of manual laborers holding it up.

These workers are the direct builders of the city’s night views, skyscrapers and tourist facilities, but in the view of tourists and the local middle class they’re often “invisible”. Many of them probably come from the countryside to work in the city.

Flourishing and suffering coexist; a beautiful city has invisible costs.

Why young people today prefer to invest in themselves

Why does a professional identity attract young people more than a marital identity?

Is there a lot in modern society that can satisfy emotional needs?

Online dating, virtual lovers, AI partners.

These can give emotional satisfaction at a very small cost.

But offline, there are big negotiation costs and dating costs, and the planning cost is large.

China’s intergenerational sense of responsibility is heavy: parents tie their children’s whole life to their own.

It used to be hard for one person to get by; now it’s hard for a whole family

One is the huge financial pressure of maintaining a decent life.

Another is the enormous responsibility of raising children.

And there’s a lot of marital uncertainty.

We lack the ability to interact with strangers

In a period of economic downturn, it’s hard for us to surpass what our parents’ generation achieved.

In the long run, what affects the birth rate is fundamentally men’s predicament

Economic development and an involuted society raise the demands on men.

Once the economy declines and society doesn’t provide men with stable economic and social status, a large number of men are excluded from marriage/childbearing, which from a demographic angle directly shrinks the fertility pool.

Two types of crowds

Heterogeneous crowds: all kinds of people randomly assembled, a sense of disorder.

Homogeneous crowds: the same background, occupation or faith.

A crowd’s behavior is ultimately driven by its beliefs and opinions.

Singapore feels like a family business run by a top-tier professional manager

There’s an extremely forceful, extremely rational patriarch.

He uses the harshest methods (strict law and severe punishment) to ruthlessly clear weeds; at the same time he uses the richest resources (elite education, high salaries) to water the flowers regardless of cost.

It’s the ultimate optimal solution within the rules, the ultimate “technique”.

What Singapore built is an exquisite system, a powerful brain, replacing most citizens’ own brains.

Attaining the Dao is usually something that can only happen after transcending national, ethnic and cultural attributes.

A cultural nation is like an operating system, making you fit in.

Attaining the Dao is more like a prison break.

Japan’s cage is called “harmony” and “shame”. Not causing trouble for the collective is the highest morality. The individual’s “Dao” must absolutely submit to the collective’s “order”. Here, “breaking out” means fighting the whole society’s invisible pressure.

Korea’s cage is called “han” (resentment) and “striving”. In extreme competition, proving yourself through worldly success is the only way to survive. Here, “breaking out” means letting go of that bone-deep obsession with comparing yourself to others.

China’s cage is called “human feelings” and “face”. Your value often doesn’t depend on your relation to the “Dao” but on your relation to “people”. Here, “breaking out” means breaking free of that omnipresent web of connections.

Singapore’s cage, as we just said, is the “elite-designed”, highly efficient “rules”. Here, “breaking out” means challenging the perfect “technique” that’s been proven the “optimal solution”.

Vietnam’s cage is probably the “resilience” and “striving” carved into its bones. Surviving in the cracks between history and great powers is its underlying color. Here, “breaking out” means lifting your head out of an inertia of coping with suffering.

Attaining the Dao is hard for all of them, and it has to do with an individual’s capacity for awareness.

On how to fix an unresponsive page

A few questions

Why is the page unresponsive

How to troubleshoot this problem

Can tests prevent this problem

How to solve this problem

For software designers the most important target feels like one enemy: complexity

Everything revolves around complexity.

Sometimes seeing AI churn out a huge amount of code is actually scary; you always worry something’s off with that code.

On comments: the reason you need to write comments is to explain why it’s written this way, not to write what it is.

Some best-practice guidelines for Claude Code

What’s interesting is that in the world of computing, a very interesting phenomenon is that we observe Claude working immersively — this is a very interesting phenomenon.

It feels like you have a very strong pair-programming partner, and you’re learning its way of coding.

Note that a lot of the time you can have it give you several possible approaches first, rather than rushing to code: give me options, let me choose.

Actually in code, most of us as coders aren’t focused on the 0-to-1 process; we care about whether the existing codebase is usable, which is very important.

Test coverage.

Commit messages and PR descriptions.

The claude.md file matters a lot; every time it’s like a prompt telling Claude that these are the important prompts the developer is giving you.

GitHub’s gh tool can tell Claude — it’s a very useful tool to help you operate on GitHub.

Comparison: between using the command line and using MCP — maybe if both can solve the problem, then CLI is clearly more recommended. For example, if you choose to operate on a database, there’s a good local tool that can help you work with the database.

There’s a clear standard: if the task is deterministic and requires no reasoning, then avoid MCP as much as possible — like looking up specific data. But if it’s something flexible, like weekly active user counts and other areas that don’t need precise execution…

If the window is full, besides /clear you can also choose /compact. It’s essentially like inserting a user instruction: summarize, then continue. The summary is the seed for the next conversation.

You can view images too, but right now it feels complicated to do it that way; actually multimodal can just paste and recognize directly.

Is men’s style in China really important

Most people dress the way they do because of self-styling and aesthetic awareness.

Designers, artists, fashion bloggers, for example.

These people dress for themselves, not to please anyone.

But most men’s dressing is for identity positioning, social positioning, avoiding judgment, or gaining approval from the opposite sex.

I feel Korean men’s and women’s dressing is the same — essentially driven by social role, highly sensitive and obedient to “group identity + fashion trends.”

The multi-Claude workflow

One Claude writes code, another Claude reviews or tests the code.

Essentially it’s driven in a way similar to TDD.

Getting good at using git worktree

Compared with git cloning multiple repositories, git worktree is a better way to manage things.

And all worktrees can immediately see the latest remote branches.

And this isolation is a fairly good isolation approach for git worktree.

So using git worktree is a very good fit for git development workflows.

Behind prejudice, I think about what information environment they’re in

How does prejudice between people arise? And then, how will technology increase understanding between different groups? What kind of institutional design can reduce the amplification of prejudice?

As time stretches limitlessly, humanity has gone through unprecedented global integration; I feel the current boundaries of race and nationality are just a brief dividing line in the long river of history.

But it doesn’t matter. Prove the limits of stereotypes with my own actions and work. I believe technology and information will weaken the prejudice that comes from ignorance; understanding takes time to change, so take it slow.

This is a kind of systems thinking: analyze the essence, analyze why the system has a problem, and analyze how to solve it.

It would be great if AI could schedule tasks for me automatically

Every night, AI uses my information and the weather in the corresponding city to assign me some tasks and suitable time slots.

Some travel activities and recommendations.

And appropriately plan out some travel arrangements.

Especially since AI can learn from your past data and real-time interaction, it will know what matches you better.

Hotel platform pricing rules

The default logic is mainly the hotel pricing on its own, and a commission may be taken, roughly 10%-20%; the hotel factors the commission into its quote.

Hotels usually adjust prices based on occupancy rate, high and low season, holidays, and how many days ahead the booking is made.

Booking supports some automation tools; smart pricing helps hotels price dynamically.

Compared with Ctrip, Ctrip — on top of the default agency model — also has a direct-purchase model, where Ctrip negotiates with the hotel, gets a contracted rate, and then marks it up to sell to users.

Generally hotels can change prices in real time depending on holidays or the season, but on the other hand, hotels often give different prices and policies to Ctrip, Fliggy, Meituan, Booking and other OTAs, and sometimes they’re required to keep “rate parity”.

So relatively speaking Ctrip has stronger price control, relying on its own algorithms, plus Ctrip’s membership-tier discounts and the corresponding subsidy discounts.

Usually I’ll remember the phone number on the site, and then get in touch through WhatsApp.

Designer’s handbook - the AI edition

Think like an architect, not like a draftsman.

Judgment and strategy are the scarcest abilities; AI is the best producer.

Fast iteration — for someone who can test and reflect immediately, speed matters more than perfection.

Build systems, not single pages.

Understand the authentication logic of various tech stacks.

Interest and curiosity are the most valuable abilities.

Keep your humanity and your empathy.

Be able to describe and express things clearly in language; the prompt is the new design language.

Become a storyteller, shaping culture and not just making a product.

The future of long-term memory

Many products today solve cross-conversation memory with projects.

But projects require the user to manually consolidate.

Projects suit tasks, and fit poorly with global long-term memory like personal profiles and preferences.

The future form is more likely a multi-layer hybrid model, merging the project paradigm + the timeline/graph paradigm.

One is two-layer memory: projects + a global person profile.

Events automatically linked to each other (“this business trip → related people → budget”).

Timeline mode is traceable back (like a diary/calendar mixed with a knowledge graph).

Projects may no longer be explicitly created by the user; the system automatically detects a task and generates a “task space”.

“Help me prepare a wedding” → automatically generates a container (with timeline, tasks, subgoals).

When the task is done, the container auto-archives or turns into a “historical event”.

The system automatically infers which memories to pull based on the current conversation/task.

The binary coupling work method

Art × engineering, Zen × logic, phenomenon × essence. Set yourself a “role-switch day”: today maximally emotional, tomorrow maximally rational.

The Dao is beyond what human language and reason can describe

The Dao is beyond what human language and reason can describe; any definition limits it.

You can understand it as the lowest-level code of the universe’s operation.

The Dao gives birth to the One, the One to the Two, the Two to the Three, the Three to the ten thousand things — so you can see the underlying logic of all things is the Dao.

Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness

Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.

– Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness

Being cautious in life, work and investment is wise, but applying that caution to love fundamentally destroys our possibility of gaining happiness.

Energy fields

As metaphysics, a field is destined not to exist; from a physics angle it certainly hasn’t been proven, and modern science can’t yet test a person’s consciousness field.

But from an environmental angle

One is the physical and informational field: what information, what physical factors

Then there’s the field of emotion and consciousness — for example, in a temple, listening to the bell, a natural calm

Finally there’s the field of culture and history. It’s grand and very enduring. The Hue Imperial City is like this: centuries of rise and fall, honor and disgrace, power struggles, partings and reunions, all condensed into those broken walls and ruins, every blade of grass and tree. It forms an enormous ‘field of historical narrative.’ A person walking in easily has their personal little worries and attachments diluted and transformed by this grand ‘field,’ which then triggers deeper thinking.

Travel, on one hand, is also about experiencing various fields. This field is constantly exchanging information and energy with every person, thereby influencing your state of mind, your decisions, even your fate.

So some people have a personal aura: the stable ‘information radiation’ formed around a person’s body by their long-standing temperament, cognition, emotions and behavior patterns. Approach someone open-hearted and full of wisdom, and you feel at ease and clear; approach someone full of calculation and bitterness, and you feel tense and murky.

A spiritual perception

An overview of prompt design

Ordinary prompts can be handed to an LLM to write

But prompts involving structured output seem to have some problems

It’s hard for an LLM to control format consistency across multiple ends

So here it’s best to review + test the prompt

For the structured part, the prompt still needs to produce output with a certain precision

Testing this part is also fairly clear: make sure the LLM’s output meets the program’s requirements, doesn’t diverge excessively, and that all the types are correct.

What kind of product do users actually need

What exactly were all my past pain points?

Some best work-practice principles

Ways to focus:

Create in the early morning, handle affairs in the afternoon, collect inspiration at night.

Single-task full-screen mode is a very effective way to avoid information interference.

Try to slow down how often you switch tasks.

Socializing should be earned as a reward.

Understanding fragmentation in article reading

More precisely, it’s about understanding and locating fragmentation accurately.

How we read an article depends heavily on the form of the article, which then defines whether it counts as systematic or fragmented information acquisition — the key is the form of the content and the way the reader reads.

Characteristics of the fragmented mindset:

Short and fast, lacking context — common in Moments, short videos, news pushes and Weibo snippets.

What it essentially provides is information points, not a knowledge system.

It satisfies immediacy and breadth, but it can hardly support deep understanding.

It suddenly hit me that when I usually pay attention to content forms, I’m mostly focused on the title, the conclusion, or a particular one-liner, and the result is that I only pick up scattered fragments of opinion, which are easy to forget and bad for knowledge accumulation — whereas systematizing is, relatively speaking, building a systematic, structured understanding.

I’m wondering what it takes to go from fragmented to structured, and what’s hard about it.

I think structuring fragmented information — that part AI can of course systematize and complete, but it needs to pick concepts at the right level based on how the user understands concepts and hierarchies, and that happens to help with digestion and memory.

In the future, fragmented information and instant gratification will probably become more and more the trend; on the other hand, systematizing and structuring are also the trend — don’t forget that’s exactly what AI is best at.

Fragmented information is very efficient at “input speed”, but extremely inefficient at “turning into knowledge”.

If AI can deliver both efficient input and efficient conversion, that might be the truly valuable part.

If it’s only an opinion, then the opinion itself is fragmented

But if it’s through AI:

adding context to the fragment,

building logical chains,

merging knowledge systems,

then that original opinion fragment becomes a knowledge tree.

Whether information is fragmented isn’t about what it was at the start, but about how you handle it.

If an opinion only stays at “heard it, nodded, forwarded it”, it’s fragmented.

Redefine it: fragmentation is a state of input.

Through research and thinking, the fragment can evolve into knowledge.

Confirmed again: some communication isn’t about content, it’s about the relationship

Stay smart, stay rational, but don’t lose the emotional side.

How information-sensitive people take to AI

If there isn’t enough feeling raw material in life, or it’s not efficient, then the desire for AI may be lower, and instead they need books to settle in bit by bit.

For information-sensitive people, the brain itself is like a high-speed information processor.

They more easily catch patterns in large amounts of information and abstract out concepts.

AI provides a high-density information stream, which is easy to digest and turn into thinking material, so they actually accept AI more easily.

For people not sensitive to information, their processing leans toward slow variables; they can only feel the meaning of knowledge within emotion, context and narrative.

AI’s fast output may cause “indigestion” because there’s no time to settle and internalize; they need “life experience + book narratives” to seep in slowly before it truly becomes their own understanding.

Information sensitivity ≈ the processing frequency of thought.

Feeling raw material ≈ the energy source of thought.

AI is actually a “frequency amplifier”:

People with fuel and high-frequency thinking get accelerated toward “innovation, insight”.

People without fuel, because it “amplifies the emptiness”, end up feeling at a loss.

Many people can’t make videos low-threshold and easy to understand

There’s always a deep trench.

We tend to overestimate that we’ll get it after reading one piece, especially in computer engineering — there’s an illusion of fluency.

But actually, from the perspective of teaching, most knowledge and information is only surface level.

But for practical work, most operations actually depend on feel or experience; that’s tacit knowledge. But to teach it to someone, you have to express that vague feeling clearly and in an organized way.

Also, your own output content is a second brain for storing your information, and in the long run it’s also a way of shaping yourself.

Something interesting: maybe the AI era returns us to systems

Something quite interesting: maybe the AI era is a process of returning from fragmentation back to systems.

How to make a system interesting and attractive matters a lot.

Dislocation in relationships

Dislocation with yourself: the self and its wished-for type aren’t aligned.

Dislocation with others: you expect deep exchange, the other only wants light companionship; you give in order to get more understanding, but what the other feels is pressure.

Dislocation with the world: the gap between individual value and social standards; someone who loves creating is trapped on an institutionalized track.

So dislocation between people and relationships easily leads to what you seek differing from what you wish.

In this process, understanding this relationship and aligning it matters; if the relationship can’t be aligned or removed, you can adjust your expectations and deliberately create sublimation.

Sunscreen is extremely, extremely important

You should use sunscreen every day.

What you mainly need protection from is UVA and UVB.

UVA has a longer wavelength and stronger penetration, accounting for over 95% of UV; it causes aging and pigmentation.

UVB mainly causes sunburn and skin cancer.

UVA intensity varies little across the seasons, and is present at nearly the same level on cloudy and overcast days; it causes skin laxity, wrinkles, melanin activation, dark spots, and dullness — it causes aging and pigmentation.

A small amount of UVB is beneficial to health.

UVA damages the body indirectly, by damaging free radicals; UVB damages DNA directly. And most UVA can penetrate glass, making you older.

UVB’s influence varies greatly by season and between sunny and rainy days, and it can’t penetrate glass, making you hurt more.

UVA has a bigger effect on appearance; it can penetrate clouds and glass, mainly destroying collagen and elastin.

Getting tanned is mainly due to UVA: after a few minutes to a few tens of minutes of exposure, melanin gets oxidized and the color deepens.

But in general, UVB’s harmfulness is 1,000 times that of UVA.

Thinking about tacos: did humans choose the food

Thinking about tacos: did humans choose the food, or did the food choose humans?

I often get to eat Mexican food, and today I had tacos again.

Tacos are usually Mexican wraps, or simply “tacos.”

In Mexico tacos generally come in a few kinds, for example:

Street tacos

Hard-shell tacos

Mexico generally has a dedicated tacos day to celebrate this food.

Another line of thinking: did Mexicans really choose this way?

I think of the differences among Chinese regional cuisines.

Inland mountainous areas, because resources are monotonous, emphasize “strong sensory stimulation” to compensate for that monotony.

Jiangnan and Cantonese cuisine culture leans toward delicacy, freshness, and preserving the original flavor of ingredients — related to local prosperity and ingredient diversity. The Jiangnan coast is rich in seasonings like salt, soy sauce, sugar, and wine.

Then there’s climate: eating spicy drives out cold, promotes blood circulation, induces sweating and clears dampness — but Guangdong is hot.

Vietnam and Yunnan are the same: ingredients are too abundant and flavors are already rich, so there’s no need for heavy seasoning to mask things, and simple preparation greatly lowers cost too.

Deeper still, the food chose this kind of human.

The environment isn’t decided by humans, the body isn’t controllable by humans, and the imprint of culture can’t easily be erased by an individual.

In reality, the environment, history, and culture shaped this food first, and then this food shaped our bodies and taste habits.

How serums, moisturizers, creams, and toners actually work

I’m generally curious. I thought serums were needed in many situations, but actually you need to understand how they work.

I feel that memorizing things before wasn’t very meaningful, because my memory is too poor — I’m better at understanding than memorizing.

The logic of the skin barrier is a “brick wall structure”: the bricks are corneocytes (containing keratin and NMF, natural moisturizing factor), and the mortar is lipids (ceramides/cholesterol/free fatty acids in a layered bimolecular film).

Transepidermal water loss (TEWL). Water diffuses from the dermis toward the epidermis → evaporates; the more stable the barrier, the lower the TEWL, and the less dry the skin.

So one is serum: a water-based solution / gel, raising the effective concentration of actives reaching the skin’s site of action. It follows something like Fick’s law of diffusion — the larger the concentration gradient, the more suitable the carrier, the more “friendly” the stratum corneum, the more effective penetration (mostly it stays in the upper epidermis / near the granular layer, and very rarely goes “as deep as the blood”).

So the purpose of a serum is generally antioxidant, anti-aging, moisturizing and repairing.

The purpose of a toner is generally a water-based, low-oil or oil-free formula emphasizing hydration and texture conditioning.

It’s generally for quickly restoring water and adjusting pH. In a dry air-conditioned environment it’s needed, but if your cleanser is gentle and your skin is stable, toner is optional.

Cream does a lot: it’s the main “sealing layer” for moisturizing and barrier repair, and it can also deliver oil-soluble actives.

At night you can usually apply a thicker layer; during the day, to avoid pilling and stuffiness, you can choose a lighter one.

So sunscreen generally provides light protection on the outermost layer, forming a “chemical + physical” double insurance with morning antioxidants.

So whether it’s serum or hydration, if you don’t use cream, it’s as if you did nothing, haha.

Some health knowledge about drinking water

You must drink water when you get up early, preferably warm water. After a night of the body consuming itself you’re in a dehydrated state; this glass is life-saving water.

Also, drinking water 30 minutes before a meal increases satiety and avoids overeating.

During exercise, replenish water in small amounts, frequently.

Drinking water before and after a shower is important too, to avoid losing water from showering.

When you feel tired, or can’t concentrate, it’s usually a signal your body is short of water.

One or two hours before sleep, drink a small glass of water.

Do drinks have any value?

Cola has almost no nutritional value; occasionally as a “happy water” it’s fine.

Milk has high value, drink more.

Packaged juice is really not recommended — it’s about the same as sugar water, since almost all the fruit fiber is lost in processing.

Freshly squeezed orange juice might have some use, but it also loses a lot of fiber.

Packaged juice and fresh juice are very different.

Even “100% pure juice” has already lost a lot of flavor and nutrition.

Only juice labeled NFC is not-from-concentrate, but it’s much more expensive, and still no match for fresh juice.

Coffee and health

Americano = espresso + water

Caffè Latte = espresso + milk + a little milk foam

Americano has no calories, good for weight control and fat loss.

A latte has high energy; the milk quantity is large, equivalent to half a bowl of rice — milk has a lot of calories.

Americano’s nutrition is also very one-dimensional, while a latte is rich.

For the stomach and gut, a latte is gentler and americano more irritating, and a latte has lower caffeine.

I saw a foreign man meditating by a river inside Vietnam’s imperial palace

Inside Vietnam’s imperial palace, by a river, I saw a foreign man sitting in meditation — for a long time, very focused. It started raining, and the rain seemed to have no effect on him at all.

The Hue Imperial City — a place that has been through glory, war and decline, full of a sense of ‘impermanence,’ carrying a dense energy field

It felt like entering a state of oneness: the rain isn’t something external but a part of it; not resisting the rain but allowing and accepting it; the river, the ancient city and the body merging into one — experiencing for yourself what the unity of heaven and humanity feels like.