Philosophy

Prologue: A May Without flomo For the entire month of May, I did not write a single flomo note. I barely posted to my feed either. This was not laziness. It was a conscious decision. I had already decided on April 30 that I would stop. The reason is simple: I no longer felt I needed it. Or more accurately — could it have a better form? I want to use my own product. It is not perfect yet, but I want to fully think through and ship the thing I have in my head. The remaining steps are few. It is close. ...

On the edge of a cliff, all logic fails. Only intuition can connect with the world. I wrote this sentence one night in Lhasa. Finding it now, I feel it can serve as the entry point to this review. Over these past fourteen months, I’ve been living on the edge of cliffs — almost literally. Encountering ice slopes on ACT mountain trails with drops beside me; every step at the altitude of Genie Sacred Mountain requiring all my strength; riding a motorcycle around the outer circle of Angkor Wat for three days with a splitting headache, yet not stopping. But I also know that those “cliffs” were more often internal. They were the cosmic-level monologues in one’s own mind after getting drunk late at night in a foreign country, with the world fading into the background. They were that night in Shenzhen, standing under DJI’s light beams, feeling like I hadn’t even reached the starting line. They were a certain morning at the end of 2025, suddenly realizing that exploration itself no longer provided enough traction, without knowing where the next fulcrum would be. ...

Preface: This article was written on a night in Lhasa. At an altitude of over 3,000 meters, the air is thin and the stars are very close. One evening I stood in the courtyard, alone, and watched the moon in the sky for a long time. That moon doesn’t lose a bit of its light because of AI’s existence. The moonlight is still truly beautiful — What do humans still possess in the AI era? ...

Introduction and self-positioning Annual Preface and Background 📅 Hi! 2025 ~ TIP: This article has a high density of information and is highly subjective. I have tried to include fewer opinions and more descriptions of my experiences, including my own experiences traveling, reflections on things I have experienced, and some experiences in making products. Experience is valuable, and I hope to leave more room for you to be touched and think. Just choose the content that interests you from the TOP. ...

During a 48-hour engineering task, I wrote down one sentence: “At this point, I’ve spent half the time designing, researching, understanding the requirements, judging the boundaries, and developing my taste and intuition. I haven’t started writing code.” The task began as a limited feature. After I kept discussing it with AI, it quickly grew a product model, system boundaries, and a complete design. Every step had a rationale. Every piece connected to the next. I could feel myself thinking faster and farther, holding more layers in mind at once. ...

At dusk, I sat on the rooftop of Youli Café and raised my coffee cup toward the twin pagodas of Kaiyuan Temple. The camera recognized the distant towers and ignored the hand in front of it. Cup and fingers dissolved into a red blur; across the old city, the pagodas held their edges. ...

I had only asked my second brain to organize the thoughts of a friend. It placed scattered notes in order by time, theme, and cause, then tried to explain how she thought about work, money, and freedom. A few thousand words later, I looked at the resulting portrait and realized that the person it had revealed most clearly was not her. It had shown me why I never stop building systems. ...

This piece is a thought experiment in simulated interviews. The respondents are synthesized from existential philosophy and behavior design perspectives—this is not verbatim dialogue from any real person. One June day, perhaps like this. I woke around noon. My phone lay on the pillow. First I checked the time, then the messages. Nothing was urgent, so I opened a short video. The algorithm did not require me to decide what came next. By the time I looked up, more than forty minutes had passed. ...

This piece is a thought experiment in simulated interviews. The interviewees are synthesized from field anthropology and documentary practice perspectives and do not represent any real person’s actual words. I work with AI, yet I am consistently moved by life outside of AI. The blackness of caves in Laos, the sting of a wound after a motorcycle fall, the wind along the Mekong, a stranger who read a story in my eyes, and the stretched-out time of walking instead of riding on the Four Thousand Islands—none of these experiences has model-like efficiency or can be reproduced with one click. ...

This piece is a thought experiment in the form of a simulated interview. Its two fictional voices combine perspectives from behavioral decision research and high-risk outdoor practice; they do not represent the words of any real person. Nothing here constitutes investment, medical, or outdoor safety advice. In May 2026, I injured my leg in Vang Vieng and still walked into the cave. Over the past two years, I’ve also been able to leave traditional systems, live long-term abroad, and place both income and identity within greater uncertainty. ...

This piece presents a thought experiment in simulated dialogue. The respondents are synthesized from phenomenological and psychotherapeutic perspectives and do not represent any real individuals’ words. It is not intended as psychological diagnosis or therapeutic advice. I excel at stepping back. Entering a city, I quickly see how its industries, spaces, and history shape life. Entering a relationship, I analyze attachment patterns, projections, scarcity, and familiarity. Developing a product, I first deconstruct systems, identify boundaries, and map information flow. ...

This piece is a thought experiment conducted through simulated interviews from the perspectives of cognitive neuroscience and AI memory engineering—representing no actual experts. In March 2026, I wrote in a note: In the AI era, perhaps forgetting is more important than remembering. The image that came to mind was simple: a water layer with hot, warm, and cold strata. Recently used knowledge resides in the hot layer, while content untouched for a while gradually sinks downward—only being retrieved under exceptional circumstances. If a knowledge system absorbs information without releasing it, it will eventually degenerate from wisdom into a mere repository. ...

This piece is a thought experiment conducted through simulated interviews. The two interviewees are fictional characters synthesized from environmental psychology, behavioral science, and urban studies—representing no real individuals or viewpoints. In May, I explored caves, rode motorcycles, and met strangers in Vang Vieng. By June, back in Shenzhen, I often did not come alive until after dark, relied on short videos to lull myself to sleep at two or three in the morning, and lacked the energy even to step outside during the day. ...

This is a thought experiment-style simulated interview. The respondents are fictional characters composed of developmental psychology, field anthropology, and the author’s personal experience—no real experts are quoted. In December 2025, I wrote in my notes: Exploration no longer provides sufficient momentum. At first, moving to a new city wasn’t just a change of scenery. New languages, social structures, and rhythms would disrupt your existing self. Once your position loosened, your identity followed; once your identity loosened, possibilities multiplied. For a long time, “traveling” and “becoming someone new” were nearly synonymous. ...

This is the final essay in Reckoning with Reality. The first six considered profit, competence, action, feedback, and technology. The last returns to a question no model or market can decide for us: what kind of life am I willing to pay for? When we discuss a choice, we habitually list the returns. How large is the market? How high is the income ceiling? Will growth come faster? Can the path eventually produce a moat? The more complete the spreadsheet, the more rational the choice appears. ...

This is the second essay in Reckoning with Reality. The introduction began with a dinner-table argument. This essay asks only one question: what exactly does profit record on its scorecard? “If a business makes a lot of money,” my friend said, “that means it creates value.” My first impulse was to argue. Then I realized that calling him wrong was easy. Explaining precisely where he was right, and where he went too far, was much harder. ...

This piece is me going back over my own books. Two years ago I wrote down a sentence I’d counted among the things I had figured out. Recently, while chasing the source of a four-character phrase, I pulled it back out — and found it may be backwards from top to bottom. A sentence I’ve been carrying for two years In October 2025 I wrote this in my notes: ...

The seed of this piece was a conversation that ran for several rounds — starting from small talk about the weather and sliding, almost by accident, into “what is life even made of?” It won’t hand you an answer, because the thing actually worth having grows precisely where there is no answer. ...

A Signal That Sent a Chill Down My Spine Let me start with a line from the retrospective of someone who uses AI heavily every day. Reading it gave me a bit of a chill: When I have a really enjoyable conversation with AI, it probably means I didn’t grow that day. They explained it clearly: a pleasant conversation usually means no friction was encountered. Real growth is always accompanied by some kind of discomfort — forcing a vague idea into a clear sentence, working through a problem you can’t figure out, being jolted into rethinking by an objection. None of that feels “good.” They kept using AI to remove friction, and the more they used it, the smoother and more pleasant the conversations got — until they stopped and realized: friction was exactly what they needed most, and they’d deleted it with their own hands. ...

“From love springs grief, from love springs fear; for one freed from love there is no grief—whence, then, fear?” —Dhammapada “Just as a mother would protect her only child with her life, so let one cultivate a boundless love toward all beings.” —Metta Sutta In the same scriptural tradition, love is both the source of grief and fear, and a boundless, infinite kindness. These two seemingly contradictory lines are the doorway to this essay. To walk through that doorway, we will first borrow five modern lenses to illuminate the whole elephant of love, and then return to the one vantage point from which the whole elephant can be seen. ...

A philosophical boundary and an engineering practice for continuity in AI agents Start by Making “Identity” Small Enough to Engineer Agent amnesia first damages the cost of cooperation, not the illusion of personhood. A strong session does not guarantee that the next one will preserve the same judgment. Users repeat preferences, teams restate constraints, and the system struggles to explain where an earlier decision came from. Long-term trust rests on these unglamorous forms of continuity: what the agent remembers, what it forgets, why it changed, and who approved the change. ...

I once thought metacognition meant thinking more deeply about an experience and explaining an emotion more completely. Over four months, I recorded hundreds of fragments: why anxiety appears, why travel quiets the mind, why I become more sensitive after drinking, how AI might change engineering, and what it means for a product to respect the person using it. The notes multiplied, and my explanations became increasingly refined. Yet the number of ideas was not what changed me. The shift came when I began to see how a thought appears in the body, how emotion amplifies it, how I turn it into a story about myself, and how that story quietly makes decisions on my behalf. ...