Self-Discovery

Quick Navigation Start with the long read: 12 sections in the body above. 34 archived notes this month, filed under 7 themes: Self-Knowledge and Psychology · 13 Daily Notes and Everything Else · 5 Business, Investing and Career · 5 AI and Agent Systems · 4 Product, Engineering and Open Source · 3 Content, Craft and Recording · 2 Reading, Ideas and History · 2 Prologue: A slack surface, and high density underneath In June I came back from Laos to Shenzhen. ...

Quick Navigation Start with the long read: 9 sections in the body above. 1 archived notes this month, filed under 1 themes: Daily Notes and Everything Else · 1 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. ...

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? ...

about me #Last College Career #Travel Observations #Transnational Adventure #Life Change #Growth Story #Exploring the Unknown #Memoir #Cultural Experience #Natural Beauty #City Walk #History Precipitation #Outdoor Adventure #Mountain and River Camping #First Time in Life #World Heritage #Food Experience #Life and Work Balance #Graduation Countdown #From Wuhan Go to Shenzhen #Anhui Huangshan #Explore the ancient city of Shexian #Lijiang Ancient City Tour #江西武公山 adventure #Hong Kong MacLehose Trail #Macau Parisian Travel #Western Sichuan Snow Mountain Shocking #MalaysiaSolo Travel #SingaporeExplore ...

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 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. The interviewees are composed of social psychology, editorial practice, and creator research perspectives and do not represent any real person’s original words. In November 2025, I recorded the phrase: “The creator’s loss: the scarcity of positive feedback.” In April 2026, I wrote: “Understanding generates positive feedback.” Together, these two sentences shift the question. Do creators truly seek only praise? When one hundred people like a piece but none articulate the contradictions it addresses, that void persists. Conversely, a single reader who precisely identifies how a detail altered their judgment—without public dissemination—might reignite the creator’s resolve to continue. ...

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-style simulated interview. The respondents are composed of cognitive science, archival studies, and product design perspectives and do not represent any actual expert’s original words. In May 2026, I stopped using flomo. That month had no daily reminders, no faint sense of debt from “today’s notes still pending,” and no rapid conversion of thoughts into cards. Surprisingly, life didn’t thin out. Instead, Laotian cities, caves, injuries, strangers, and bars coalesced in late May into a more complete self-reading than fragmented pieces. ...

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 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. ...

Creation Is the Outward Half We’ve reached the final layer. Information has been denoised, records have been sedimented, knowledge has been structured into repeatedly callable capability — but up to this point, every stage has been solving your own problem. Knowledge makes you stronger, but it doesn’t automatically turn into something others want to read. Creation is the layer that reverses the direction of this pipeline. Knowledge faces inward; creation faces outward. Knowledge asks “can I reuse this”; creation asks “can others receive this.” Creation corresponds to a platform’s recommendation logic, a particular group of users’ reading habits, and the substantial research you did to support this specific piece of expression. It has exactly one goal: have the audience receive it, understand it, and want to connect with you. ...

The Semi-Finished Product Filed Under “Knowledge” In most people’s mental model, notes only have three tiers: see information → turn it into knowledge → use it to create. The act of “recording” in between gets quietly filed under “knowledge.” But as I said in the overview, records deserve to stand alone as their own layer. Because it’s an independent intermediate form: it’s relevant to you, but not necessarily useful forever; it might just be something you’ll need someday, or something you’re using right now to clarify your own thinking. That kind of thing doesn’t yet qualify as knowledge — only what’s structured for repeated future reuse counts as knowledge. ...

The Default State of Information Is Noise The previous essay laid out the framework: information, records, knowledge, and creation are four distinct stages. This one deals with only the first — information. The single most important thing to understand about information is this: its default state is noise. We have a natural greed for information. See a good article, want to bookmark it. See a great quote, want to save it. See a reading list someone recommended, want to add it to your queue. Every act of “saving” gives us a small illusion of “I’m making progress.” But saving, at its core, is just moving information from someone else’s warehouse into yours — it hasn’t gone through any processing by your own machine. ...

Four Names for Four Different Kinds of Work My notes used to grow in one direction: inward. Links entered, fragments accumulated, folders changed names, and the archive became heavier. I mistook possession for processing. AI made that mistake cheaper to repeat. A model can generate, summarize, classify, and reformat text quickly, but speed does not turn a source into evidence, an observation into knowledge, or a draft into something I should publish. It can make the warehouse larger without improving the machinery. ...

This is Part 3 of “Ignite and Settle,” and the close of the series. Part 1, The Quality and Time of Companionship , asked why we turn away just as we come close. Part 2, Avoidant Attachment , described how the “turning away” person is made. This part describes the other half — the one that looks opposite, and bites tight to the previous one at the bottom: the anxious. ...

This is Part 2 of “Ignite and Settle.” Part 1, The Quality and Time of Companionship , described the act of “running when someone gets close.” This part focuses on its origins and repair. Part 3 will describe anxious attachment — its mirror, with which it is biting at the bottom. ...

This is Part 1 of the “Ignite and Settle” series. Part 2 is on avoidant attachment — why we want to run when someone gets close. Part 3 is on anxious attachment — why we keep seeking reassurance in love. You can enter from any of the three. Read together, they form one map. Opening: A deceptively simple question Let me start with a deceptively simple question: in companionship, which matters more — quality or time? ...

Pascal wrote in the 17th century: “All of humanity’s problems stem from one thing: man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Three hundred years later, I thought of this sentence late at night in Lhasa, and added one more: They’re not sure who exactly is the one sitting in that room. Introduction: The 3 AM Emptiness For a while, I woke up almost every day at 3 AM. ...

July 2025, Hakone · Mount Fuji · Tokyo, 10 days November–December 2025, Kansai autumn — Wakayama · Kumano · Nara · Kyoto, 15 days It’s March 2026. I’m sitting in a café in Siem Reap writing this. Two kilometers outside the window is Angkor Wat — those sandstone corridors, each stone hundreds of years old, the whole complex like it’s wrestling with time through volume, through weight, through stone that will never rot. ...

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. ...