Reflections on Trip Back in China: 2026
The Marks of Time on Bodies of Different Ages
It has only been two years since my last visit home. When I came back in 2024, my younger sister was only 11, about 150cm tall, innocent, and carefree. She had a great time playing at home—in Japanese, you would say sugu uchi-toketa (we quickly broke the ice). Today, two years later, she is 13 and entering her first year of middle school. Her height has shot up to 170cm, she has some acne, but the most obvious difference is the emergence of her self-awareness. She no longer initiates play or gravitates toward anyone; instead, she retreats to her room or plays her favorite games on her tablet. The arrival of puberty marks the end of one developmental stage and the beginning of a new self. As an observer who can only visit at certain nodes in time, I see snapshots of different stages. I see that the person from the previous era is gone, and a new her has arrived. The self in every era is time-limited; once missed, it never returns. The interactions and experiences of each period subtly shape the next version of her. Are we not the same?
I also feel the marks left by time on the body when I look at my grandmother. My grandmother is 90 this year, and her spirit is as sharp as ever. You can catch the clarity of her mind just by the coherence of her sentences, but the decline of her sensory organs makes it occasionally difficult for her to grasp external changes. For example, both of her ears are struggling to hear quiet sounds, to the point where sometimes a sentence must be repeated three or four times before she registers it. But the most obvious change is in her bones and muscles. Coming back this time, it is visibly apparent that her spine is more curved than in my memory. The outline of her spine protrudes sharply beneath her loosened skin, running like a mountain ridge across her back. Due to the weight of her upper body and her habit of pushing a wheelchair, her back has set into a permanent posture. Whenever she chats with us, she has to strain to lift her head just to meet our eyes. The once tall will all shrink. Those who once cared for us gradually become the ones we must care for.
Imperative Tones and Conversations Steeped in the Smoke of Daily Life
My relative's second son is 8 years old, in the second grade. At their house, you frequently hear his parents urging him to do his homework, while he clearly prefers to play with his toys or watch TV. During the brief span of two meals we stayed for, their conversations revolved almost entirely around whether he had finished his homework, what he should be doing, and the consequences of not finishing it. The mother is a full-time homemaker, managing the family's meals, daily needs, and all other tedious logistical work, while the father focuses primarily on his job. I remember the initial trigger that made me want to write this short piece: during dinner at their house, the mother used the exact same tone she uses to correct her son's procrastination to tell us to eat. It was along the lines of "Eat!" "Eat more!" "How can you not eat more!"
The table of home-cooked food was delicious, and there is no doubt she simply wanted us to eat well. But for someone like me, unaccustomed to her style of communication, it suddenly made me realize that her days and nights over the past ten or twenty years have likely been spent urging her two sons and her husband in exactly this manner. Her words and tone have been subtly pulled, altered, and ground down by her environment into what they are today. Her imperative tone doesn't cause a ripple in their household; it is simply a daily admonition carrying a trace of helplessness and love.
During my extremely brief stay in my hometown, I witnessed conversations between my father and my stepmother in various places and scenarios. In their eyes, their communication style is entirely ordinary, but to me, as an eavesdropper, it sometimes sounds more like a primitive, straightforward, turn-based argument. Whether driving, at the post office, or in the wet market, it always starts with a divergence of opinion or choice. My dad states his position, and my stepmother points out what he failed to consider or suggests a better way to do something. The process is always strikingly similar. At its most intense, their interaction sounds like mutual accusation, yet there is no malice. They are merely pointing out the flaws in each other's opinions or repeating their own stance at a higher volume. The sheer volume and intonation fill the words with the thick smoke of daily, domestic life. The verbal tug-of-war seems to make them disregard each other's feelings; pointing out the imperfection in the other's opinion is enough. This dynamic—sometimes like boxing, sometimes like tug-of-war—eventually reaches a silent consensus. Witnessing this style of communication was a shock because it stands in stark contrast to the conversational habits I recognize and am accustomed to, particularly the Japanese way of communicating. The contrast is incredibly sharp.
The Bubble Gun and the Little Girl Pulling the Trigger
A scene I witnessed while walking the streets of my hometown reminded me of a quote I read recently: "People who love technology are anti-human." It implies that all technological inventions accelerate in the exact opposite direction of primal human nature and habits. Thus, those who love and create technology are inherently anti-human.
I was out for a walk that morning. On the way back, I passed a shop. Standing in front of it was a young girl, probably in the lower grades of elementary school. She held a plastic bubble gun in her hand. With the trigger pressed, the motor inside whirred continuously, shooting out a flurry of small bubbles that drifted down around her. In the few seconds I walked past her, she just kept the trigger pressed down. More and more bubbles shot out, drifted, and popped. I couldn't find any spark of joy in her eyes; her expression was almost numb. No joy, no disappointment. Just standing there out of habit, pulling the trigger, letting the subsequent physical phenomenon play out.
Technology allows us to effortlessly achieve predictable results. Its existence has replaced the toil of the past. Saving time, saving effort, and skipping the process brings convenience and grants complete control over the outcome. But after various experiences, especially this scene today, I feel very clearly that when it comes to things unrelated to basic survival, extreme convenience does not bring something beautiful; it brings disaster. It brings the experiential backlash of extreme acceleration. A fully controllable process leads to the death of meaning. Meaning itself requires resistance, randomness, and friction to emerge. A 100% predictable result erases all randomness, along with the surprise and resilience born from the process itself.
Just like play, travel, dance, or musical performance—the meaning of these activities is not to reach the end of the process as quickly as possible, but rather the wholehearted engagement in every single moment of doing them.
This reminds me of a recording from Alan Watts, which I deeply appreciate:
"When we naively consider what we truly desire, we often imagine having absolute control over everything—creating things like fruit that doesn't rot, clothes that never wear out, conveyances that get us from one place to another instantly, so we don't have to wait, power to do anything that you could conceive—to get this funny technological omnipotence. However, if you apply your imagination to this scenario, you will realize that is not actually what you want. The moment your life is completely under your control and the future becomes entirely predictable, it effectively ceases to be a future and instead becomes the past; you lose the element of surprise, which is the very thing that makes life exciting and meaningful."
A hyper-convenient society indiscriminately accelerates every aspect of life, manufacturing a modern vacuum of instant results. This compression of the process doesn't just happen with a toy gun; it has spread into our social systems and survival strategies. In our pursuit of optimal solutions, efficiency, and convenience, we surrender the moments that make our hearts leap and our eyes shine. They are consumed, worn down, and devoured in the process of being accelerated, compressed, and vacuum-sealed.
The extreme convenience brought by technology stems from fully controllable results, yet this characteristic of total control is fundamentally mutually exclusive with the generation of meaning. To bypass the process of doing something is to bypass the prerequisites for meaning to exist, and to bypass meaning itself.
Therefore, living in a world where technology itself is rapidly accelerating, we must realize that we have a choice, and we must make one. We can press that accelerating trigger, or we can set down the artifact that speeds everything up. We can seek out the old, un-convenient environments—which now feel new and require a psychological adjustment—to rediscover those moments that only exist in a world that isn't quite so convenient.
Kids in School Uniforms and People in Delivery Uniforms
I am no stranger to the school uniforms worn by students in China. I wore them in elementary school, grew up on a high school campus, and worked in a Japanese high school. I've seen all kinds of uniforms and the students wearing them around schools. What I am less familiar with are the uniforms of food delivery companies and the people wearing them. Because my family's home is in a teachers' residential building, I have to walk around the high school's perimeter every time I go home to enter the complex gates. Countless e-bikes are parked along that road. When leaving in the morning or near the end of classes, you see many parents of day students riding e-bikes, shuttling their children back and forth. In the brief seconds they ride past, you can see some kids chatting cheerfully and energetically with their parents, but others wear expressions of extreme exhaustion, as if they haven't slept well or haven't rested properly in a long time.
Around lunchtime, you see students in uniform flooding out of the school gates, a sea of identical clothing scattering in different directions. Appearing at the exact same time are young people wearing delivery uniforms of various colors. They ride their e-bikes, weaving through the students and pedestrians, glancing at their phone screens while dodging obstacles. Everyone is acutely aware of the rules of the system they are embedded in, racing against the clock, fighting for a not-so-certain future. People wearing two types of uniforms, tailored for two different systems, intersect before my eyes. It is as if I am witnessing two snapshots of the same demographic. One is the past, the other is the future, yet they both exist simultaneously in the present. There is no direct connection between them, but I saw the microcosm of a group of people within an era.
How many uniforms are worn by people who can't wait to tear them off, and how many are worn by those who eagerly anticipated putting them on? Putting on a uniform means joining the game as a player. This game has its rules, and therefore, its limitations. And all games are built upon the interactions of people and objects in the real world. The players in the game will change, the rules of the game will change, and the prerequisites for the game's existence will slowly erode over time. Overly long-term or microscopic plans and goals become absurd because the preconditions are no longer valid, yet the game is constructed entirely on those preconditions. As a player in an entirely different system, I can't help but wonder: do the preconditions for all the games in my world still hold true?
The People Feeding Kids at the School Gates
Near lunchtime, a large crowd of parents gathers outside the side gate of the high school near my house to deliver food to their studying children. They stand outside the iron fence, lunchboxes in hand, searching for their children's silhouettes. When the bell rings, students swarm out of the gates. Many walk home, some hop on their parents' e-bikes to go eat, but a number of families complete a literal "feeding relay" right at the school gate. Those kids stay on the inside of the gate, waiting for their parents. When they spot each other, they move to the side. The parents hand the lunchboxes through the iron bars, and the kids eat the freshly delivered food right there at the gate before heading straight back to campus. The whole process takes less than ten minutes, but it happens almost every single noon. This scene inevitably reminds me of the avian world: adult birds flying out to hunt, bringing nutrient-rich food back to regurgitate for their chicks. Except, there is no college entrance exam in the birds' world—only the most unreserved, law-of-the-jungle feedback from the physical world.
Parents uproot themselves to accompany their day-student children; the entire family's efforts orbit the child's academic life. What I see is merely the reality of my tier-5 or tier-6 city, but this reality is repeated in hundreds and thousands of cities, across millions of families. Because there is no better option, multiple generations are forced to crowd onto the single-log bridge of exam-oriented education. At this current node in time, a good university diploma is still the stepping stone into the workplace. However, we are stepping into a world where artificial intelligence is highly developed and traditional employment opportunities are rapidly being reshaped. In this new world that no one has fully grasped yet, the old systems, goals, and "optimal solutions" have begun to decouple from reality. Yet systemic change is always excruciatingly slow, because the existing system involves the vested interests of too many people in power. Therefore, just as we realize that no one—no state or government—can underwrite our future, we must continue to learn. But the purpose is to iterate our own cognition, to clearly understand ourselves and this world.
Subsequent Thoughts
I feel that in the upcoming transition period of accelerating change, the disadvantages of goal-oriented thinking will increasingly outweigh its benefits. The preconditions supporting these goals and plans will be subverted before or during execution. The more microscopic the plan, the more points will need correction as change accelerates, until the speed of change makes the cost of adjustment unaffordable. A goal established by goal-oriented thinking is just a snapshot. It has a clear destination, but arriving brings disillusionment. Long-term, sustainable long-termism, however, provides a direction. It emphasizes a process of continuous accumulation, and the results it brings are merely the byproducts of its execution.
The most vital distinction of long-termism is the continuous and earnest attention to every present moment of the important aspects of life. This is the beginning of all positive change.
We must realize that there is an order of operations to our changes. We must first embrace long-termism to build a resilient, even antifragile, foundation for life. Only upon that foundation can we boldly play our own infinite games. Because only with an unbreakable foundation can we fearlessly experiment, make mistakes, and start over. Because none of us are Alex Honnold. We need a safety net to catch us when we fail, rather than plummeting into the abyss after a single wall strike. Those fundamental elements are the preconditions for trial and error. The defining trait of perfecting these underlying elements is that they have no deadline. Assigning a deadline contradicts a long-term life element. Just like maintaining physical and mental health: it is a direction, not a destination. Its purpose is not to be reached, but to establish a bearing—like the North Star, helping us orient ourselves to see if we are heading where we want to go. Walking straight north doesn't mean prosperity is waiting for us; we just need to know where North is. Where we ultimately end up is something we must walk and discover for ourselves.
In my understanding, long-termism and infinite games are synonymous. Long-termism benefits from compound interest, and compound interest comes from the accumulation of actions in every given moment. In our lives, regardless of how the outside world changes, we are concrete individuals living concrete lives. We should tackle the top-right quadrant of the Eisenhower Matrix: the important but non-urgent tasks, the things that are easily and persistently ignored. For example, aerobic and anaerobic exercise, interacting with family and friends, reading and learning, creating and sharing. Because these concrete actions correspond to the fundamental elements of a sustainably prosperous life; they are the bedrock of our lives. Physical and mental health, resilient trust and intimate relationships, continuous growth, and so on. These are actionable things that we can start managing daily right now. They don't require grand blueprints or designs; they can be achieved bit by bit. Regardless of your resources or social status, the importance of these things remains constant. I cannot imagine any change in the external world fundamentally shaking the importance of these underlying factors.
Conversely, I believe the solidity of every individual's foundation will be tested in this new wave of technological development. New technological developments are often likened to a wave, but they can also be compared to a massive earthquake. Our cognition is our foundation, and our lives are built upon it. The stress and load each of us bears are different. Some will emerge unscathed, others will be leveled to the ground, but in all likelihood, whatever was built on past paradigms of thinking will be damaged. We will all be reshaped to varying degrees. But no matter how the structures on the surface are rebuilt, an incomplete foundation guarantees being leveled again in the next earthquake.
Therefore, if your foundation is earthquake-proof, or even antifragile, you will only grow stronger, and those around you will benefit from you. Even if leveled, you can regrow at any cost.
It is hard for me to write about what the future will be like, because I believe "the future" is a pseudo-proposition—a sometimes useful pseudo-proposition. We only have the present, so I will focus on the present, while occasionally imagining the future. Whoever you are, I think for the vast majority of ordinary people, all we can do is focus on our present, use every concrete action to make small changes, complete positive accumulations step by step, and create a new world with dignity, companionship, and meaning.
The future has no standard answers. So why not rethink the question you want to ask this world?
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