写在29岁到来之际On Turning 29

A Note Before You Read

This is a long one. About 14,000 characters in the original — plan on at least 15 minutes.

Read it patiently, all the way through. And if you can finish it once, I'd suggest reading it again.

01 Looking Back

We're always saying we need to seize time, when in truth it's time that has seized us, tight.

Time is a fleeting flick of the fingers, a white colt darting past a gap — and in the blink of an eye it's another birthday. This time I'm really about to hit 30!

After twenty-odd years of long nights and days both bright and overcast have gone by, what have they left behind?

Looking back is like opening a yellowed calendar. The drops of joy and the threads of pain that once appeared in the past have all faded into the same color; on the yellowed paper the writing is uniformly dim and lightless, impossible to tell apart. This, it seems, is the road of life: living is always more vivid, more forceful, than remembering.

Memory surfaces after the years have slipped away, like a straw drifting up to a drowning person — memory can't restore the life of the past; it only reminds us: what did we once have?

And such reminders often take pride in "tampering," for people also need "sleight-of-hand" memories to satisfy the vanity within, to make the life that's passed seem rich and full.

Some memories aren't forgotten with the passage of time; quite the opposite — the longer it's been, the clearer they are, like the bright moon by the window, forever stirring up the past.

For me, writing, like sport, is good for body and mind, because I feel my life becoming whole. Writing gives me two lives — the real and the fictional, the present and the past.

Honestly, making a thing of age is a bit self-indulgent sometimes. First, because a lot of things have nothing to do with age — living more years doesn't mean you understand more. And second, even if age matters, plenty of important turning points have nothing to do with the day of your birthday.

Life is lived one day at a time; how could today and yesterday be that different? But one of the things humans do best is assign meaning — so I'll go with it, indulge in this, and use it to talk about the soon-to-be-30 me and a few things I've thought through.

Even though I'm about to turn 29, I hope I can still open my heart without reserve, and feel everything — grand or subtle — joy, pain, anger, and being moved. Whatever your age, the coolest thing is to care without reserve, to chase with everything you've got: succeed, and laugh out loud with pure joy; fail, and cry your heart out, then get back up and set off again as if you'd never failed.

Looking back on the year, I'll give myself a 70.

02 On Turning 30: There's No Standard Answer to Life — Better to Write Your Own Story, However You Please

Sometimes I think: I'd really love to write a script that runs my life 20 years younger and see which bugs I could've fixed back then. If I went back to 18 now, what would I think is cool? What would strike me as old and dated? What would I want? What would I look down on? If I had youth to burn and time to spend, where would I spend it? What would I consider meaningful?

(Figure in original.)

I think a passage from Zhang Yiming at 27 can answer this question of mine: I'm about to turn 30, and these past few years I've begun relearning and catching up on things I should have learned as a teenager: how to read, how to understand yourself, how to communicate with people, how to arrange your time, how to view others' opinions correctly, how to motivate yourself, how to write, how to keep exercising, how to be patient.

It's mostly these seemingly ordinary things that end up making a big difference: patience, reading, writing, exercising, understanding yourself, motivating yourself, communicating with people, arranging your time, viewing others' opinions correctly. And every few months, every few years, you can take them back out and reflect on them again.

I once saw someone on Moments sigh, "29 is amazing." Maybe so: 29 is the age of shedding childishness, the age of seeing many things clearly, and also the age when the pressure hasn't yet come crashing down like an avalanche. The days after it, on the whole, only get harder. 29 also means you have to start watching and maintaining all your body's metrics — you can no longer recklessly eat a ton, pull a lot of all-nighters. The cost of trial and error is a lot higher too.

"Don't look down on the young and poor" is a line you see most often when you're young. True — a twentysomething has nothing but time. But the premise is that you spend that time on the right places and the right people.

So I really like Yusen's take on adding to a position — Double Down is a way of thinking that can be reused across many domains, but it often gets overlooked, or even done backward:

• In relationships, strengthening the genuinely deep ones you already have is, in many cases, more beneficial than endlessly expanding weak ties.
• Young people should use their first ten years to build a strong competitive edge in some niche, but many prefer to keep being slash-generalists.

The Grandmaster says: if life had four seasons, then before 40 I was all spring. If a person can live to 80, and you divide a life into 12 months, 80 ÷ 12 means each month represents growth of about 6.6 years. So 24 is mid-March, 33 is only May — peak summer hasn't arrived. June is 40, and it's not even harvest season yet.

At 30 you're right around May, summer — and summer is of course the most vibrant, alive season and state of the year. So what's there to be anxious about? Who doesn't love summer?

But at the same time, 30 is not the new 20. Roughly 80% of the most important moments in a person's life happen around 35.

That means eight or nine times out of ten, the decisions, experiences, and "epiphany" moments that determine your life show up in your mid-30s. And your personality changes more in your twenties than in any other period.

At 30, I think three things matter more:

• Forget the identity crisis, and gain some identity capital and career capital. Gaining identity capital means doing things that add to your own value, investing in the person you want to become. But identity capital will become the capital of your identity. Don't do pointless exploring, though — that's not exploration, it's procrastination. Career capital describes the scarce, valuable skills a person holds in the workplace. You have to create work you love; that's the key currency. "Working the right way" beats "finding the right work" by a mile.
• Don't "look at the sky from the bottom of a well." A good friend can drive you to the airport, but if a twentysomething only associates with like-minded peers of the same age, it limits their circle and their possibilities — what such peers know, think, and say won't differ much from your own. New things come from what we call weak ties: our friends' friends' friends. If you say you have a fixation you just can't shake, then let me teach you a method: go talk more with people who have a similar personality to yours but are 5 or 10 years older. See whether they had fixations back in your era, and which fixations they gave up 5 or 10 years later — and you'll know which fixations you might want to shed in your own future. So it goes for fixations, so it goes for job choices, so it goes for industries. One thing I felt last year: you can be idealistic, but too much idealism easily slides into nihilism.
• The best time to work on your marriage is before you marry. This means choosing love as actively as you choose a job. Choosing your family means choosing rationally: what kind of life you want to live and with whom — not just to kill time.

A twentysomething is like a plane that's just taken off from Beijing Capital International Airport, flying east. A tiny change to the flight path at takeoff leads to a completely different destination — as different as Alaska and Panama.

30 is not a new 20. Understand your adulthood, gain some identity capital, use your less-direct ties, choose your family, and don't be limited by what you don't know or haven't done.

On "at 30, one should be established," my own view is: have ideals, have the right way of thinking, and have good methodology. The order of those three can't be wrong — too many people have it reversed, so that when middle age hits they get a midlife crisis and have to go searching the whole world for their dreams and the meaning of life.

Of course, all of this has preconditions: you need a healthy body, you can't be under high-intensity life pressure, you have to work hard enough, and you have to have enough patience. The internet makes people too restless — even a modest, relative patience is getting harder and harder to find.

"At 30, one should be established" is a "tradition" handed down from ancient times, but in today's society it's really a false proposition, because in a big city, past 30, most people can't get "established" at all. I think being established by 40 is already rare and precious.

So maybe we need to reinterpret "at 30, one should be established" from a new angle: not to establish a career, but to establish an aspiration.

Don't compare yourself with others — just compare with yourself. Greatness is mostly bought with humility. By the world's definition of success, a lot of people are failures; most talent needs time to prove itself. However many high moments there are, there are bound to be low troughs to match. No one's strength and endurance is innate.

Everyone's looking for their own battlefield, but many find the wrong one. I've always felt the resemblance between life and the marathon is this: just like running a marathon, different runners have to find their own comfortable pace and rhythm and then stick with it, rather than always trying to chase others at a pace beyond their aerobic capacity — which only ends in getting blown up by them.

I once did a bit of research: I looked at the ages at which scientists, inventors, entrepreneurs, composers, and novelists created their finest work. It turned out to be roughly 40 across the board. So there's still hope for life, my friends!

We're all chasing a life without regret, but one mental shift I had last year is: life is simply full of regret, and what an individual can do is far too little. Sometimes accepting regret — starting from a different dimension and angle — isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Freedom is precious because, of all the words humans have, freedom carries the highest price. And bravery is precious because bravery is among the scarcest of human qualities. I hope everyone, while bravely pursuing freedom, can also stay safe.

As you get older, facing many things in life takes courage; the further forward you go, the more you need to keep refreshing your understanding of "meaning": there can be meaning, and there can be no meaning, and in the end, the most precious quality should be bravery.

And what is bravery? It's becoming more yourself, rather than a better version of yourself. It's doing, not preaching; and if you must preach, let the product do the talking.

Three years of the epidemic, and it feels like a lot of introverts suddenly appeared — social networks now feel flooded with introverts, and I don't know whether three years of the epidemic turned everyone introverted. There "suddenly" appeared a lot of people who don't want to go to work, don't want to be employees either; everyone's thinking about starting a company, doing business, forever talking about financial freedom.

As someone who's worked "for so many years" and seen a lot of big shots, let me say a few quick words about this financial-freedom thing.

The reason modern people are anxious is that, influenced by social networks, they forget they're ordinary people and take on the baggage of successful ones. Think about it: in a normal society, how could there possibly be this many chances at financial freedom?

"Financial freedom" ought to count as one of the biggest "scams" I've ever encountered. In China, the vast majority of rich people I've met are working — and the richer they are, the harder they work — right up until their health breaks down or something goes wrong at home and they're forced to stop. But even when "resting," they're still anxious, can't sit still at all, and go off to study investments or watch over the business.

By contrast, some people around me who gave up excellent business or career opportunities can live the life of idle clouds and wild cranes — and without exception, when people mention them, it's with a Vitalik-esque, eternal sighing of regret: "If only he'd worked hard back then, none of this would've gone to so-and-so," "If he'd stayed at so-and-so, he'd probably be P11 by now." Likewise, if you're a working person, as long as your annual pay tops 600,000, you very likely can't stop.

So, "finances" alone can never buy "freedom" — only "letting go" can win you "freedom."

Surveys of salaried workers show that, in people's imaginations, the main benefits financial freedom would bring are these:

• Not having to weigh salary too heavily when choosing a career.
• Not having to worry too much about budget when vacationing abroad.
• Being able to spend on your hobbies without hesitation — skiing, photography, golf, and so on.
• Being able to pay cash outright for a car, or even a snowmobile and a speedboat, instead of financing.
• Paying off the mortgage.
• Being able to be more generous in front of family and friends.

From these wishes you can see that financial freedom isn't really about having "money you can never spend" — it's more about security and freedom in life. Financial freedom is a means to the end of freedom; our ultimate aim is personal freedom. If you can reach that aim some other way, then don't fixate only on making money — still less lose your freedom for the sake of making it.

(Figure in original.)

Once you understand that financial freedom is only a means to personal freedom, not the goal of one's efforts, you no longer have to live so hard. And you'll be a little kinder to yourself, in both money and time.

03 On Work: There's No Success, Only Growth

Three years of the epidemic, and suddenly there are a lot more people who don't want to go to work. I never once imagined that my 26th-birthday reflection would become the most-read and most-liked piece of everything I've written. Back then I wrote: do what you're good at, and what you genuinely have a passion for.

I suspect a lot of people didn't grasp what I actually meant back then: following your passion matters, but simply "following your passion" isn't good advice, because for most people there's no pre-existing passion lying in wait to be discovered and matched to some career.

Whether at work or in other settings, motivation matters. Three basic psychological motivations are the necessary and sufficient conditions a person needs at work:

• Autonomy: feeling you have control over what you do and over your life, and feeling that what you do is important.
• Competence: feeling you're good at what you do.
• Relatedness: feeling you can connect with others.

Rephrase those three motivations, and the requirements and hopes for good work become:

• Creativity: what you do isn't simple, day-after-day repetition.
• Impact: the product you make or the service you provide can change or influence some people or their way of life.
• Autonomy: no need to show up at the office nine-to-five. No one tells you what time to get up or what to wear.

There's a slightly exaggerated but pretty accurate metaphor that used to go around online: the sense of achievement of a worker on a mega-corp product with tens of millions or hundreds of millions of DAU is worth less than collecting a few plastic bottles yourself and turning them in at the recycling station for a few cents.

The root cause of the missing sense of achievement is that the work isn't yours. It's the combined effort of countless people, and you can't even measure how much value you contributed. Every time something ships, you have no idea how much your own value amounted to. What's more, 99.9% of the decisions you had no part in — you're just a nail drifting with the current.

Of course, most people are already proud to be at a mega-corp; I think that's really an illusory happiness, and the pay they give you depends solely on the market conditions at the time — it doesn't represent your actual value either.

One way to approach work and career: an output-centered view of your career, focused on the value you bring to the world (your work), on what you've made. This mindset is crucial to building a career you love.

The work is the person. It's not a part of the person, but a phase of the person. It's the whole of who you are in that phase. If you're strong, the work has a good reputation; if you're hollow, the work is hollow; if you're fragile, the work is stiff; if you're arrogant, the work is petty; if you're shallow, the work is wicked. If you're lazy, there's no work at all.

(Figure in original.)

Job, career, and calling aren't the same: a job is a means of making a living; a career is the path by which work gets steadily better; and work that becomes a calling is an important part of one's life, a key part of one's identity.

Passion matters, but I think the hard part is this: most people don't know what they truly love, or how much money is "enough" to earn in this lifetime.

The former requires constantly getting to know and questioning yourself; the latter is easily yanked back and forth by comparison, desire, and status games. Having a job you're satisfied with, or living a life you feel happy in, depends to a large degree on how you view yourself, wealth, and the relationship between the two.

For myself, an A- or even B+ life is enough. I'm not a particularly aggressive person. To become the A+ person at the tip of the pyramid takes not just fate and luck but a great deal of sacrifice. For me, I'm someone who places great weight on happiness and experience, and I'm willing to concede on this part (success) — so A- and B+ are just fine.

My material desires are very low; wearing athletic gear is what makes me feel most relaxed and free. I don't smoke, don't game, don't drink to excess, and don't go clubbing to pick up women. My unchanging long-term hobbies are just running (running shoes), reading (buying books), and travel (flights and hotels).

As for work, I have three "only" criteria for judgment, for reference: low energy demand, high growth, big reward — any project that has all three, congratulations, you've won the lottery! The career sweet spot! Any two of the three is worth doing; if it's only one, you have to think it over. If it's none, sorry — do whatever, drop it and walk.

Choose high freedom + low risk, and you have to accept low returns (freelancing); choose high returns + low risk, and you have to accept low freedom (an office job); the impossible triangle always exists.

What you like, what you're good at and not good at, which parts you can work to improve, which need to be temporarily compromised, which you'll hold to unchanged; what wealth means, what it's ultimately for, how much you need, whether a dignified life is enough or you must reach the stage of enjoyment and showing off, which prices you're willing to pay for it, and what you refuse to give up.

Once these questions are thought through, people will more likely — or naturally — find suitable work.

Rather than simply following your passion, I think it's better to follow your mission: when there's some long-term thing to do, the short-term anxieties all vanish, and it's more that you find your time isn't quite enough.

You're only likely to feel happy when you're focused on wanting one thing — the way, when you're sick, all you want is to get well. In college I thought it was unbelievable that office workers would wish they were sick; now, after the epidemic, I can roughly understand it.

In terms of long-term effect, learning, work, and sport all need to be in moderation — keeping long-term continuity matters more than manufacturing short-term bursts.

A lot of people push too hard all at once, exceed their limit, sap their enthusiasm, and need a long recovery for body and mind before they can pick it back up — and it also breaks the brain's memory and the muscle's memory. It looks bitter and effortful, but it's not scientific at all, and it rarely produces masters. Make recovery your first priority. # 10x Is Easier Than 2x #

I think that "recognizing your own gifts and passions" also contains an important part: "recognizing the weaknesses you'll find very hard to improve." Just knowing what you like and are good at isn't enough; knowing what you'll never do well in this lifetime, and steering clear of it, matters too.

Don't choose a career that fits your weaknesses and aversions: challenge the limits of what you're good at rather than challenge your weaknesses; and admit your incapacities and find other people's help. That's the whole process of exercising your talent, not just the first step out the door.

An industry you're not interested in, have no love for — a company and field you joined purely because of high pay — you of course can't out-compete the people who genuinely love it. It's like competition in business: a professional manager and a founder are completely different.

Navigation apps often say three things: "You have deviated from the route," "Rerouting for you," "Please make a U-turn at a suitable spot." Life needs this kind of navigation too: when you've deviated from the right direction, you need to replan the route, make a U-turn at a suitable spot, and start over.

One more thing: mindset matters a lot. Much of the fragility in people's careers comes from the fragility of their psychology. A common case, for instance: someone gets promoted early, before their ability is fully ready. It looks like luck, but it's actually a hidden hazard and a curse: the lack of ability leaves them unable to handle the work that comes with the new level.

And mentally they often can't accept going back to the previous level's work, so they're stuck, barely scraping by on whatever happens to fit. After a while, for lack of enough real training, their ability doesn't grow at all, and their rank progress instead falls behind others promoted later. In the end they can only start over by switching teams or even leaving.

Finally, stop hyping "30 Under 30" and "40 Under 40" year after year. What matters most is that a person makes something — it has nothing to do with age. You can go observe: those who made their name young, how do they end up when they're old? What I'd rather see is "80 Over 80" and "90 Over 90" — that's what it truly means to be a friend of time.

And stop chasing WLB, too: work and life were never a scale to be balanced, but a dual-engine drive.

Something I've come to see, after years of work, as the real thing worth showing off: the ability to sleep without insomnia and without any aid or medication, a healthy thyroid, and a body free of any nodules or hidden dangers.

04 On Life and Living: Store Up Love, Review Your Likes

If I had to pick one phrase to describe or capture the present, I'd pick the past continuous: it's every past moment that made me the person I am now.

Looking at the past, I understand the future better — better than looking at the future does. A person who looks backward and can sense where they're headed is like a slingshot: pulled back, they have a better sense of where to charge.

Almost every confusion any of us ever has can be traced back to one question: how do I want to spend my one life? And behind that question lies the finitude of time and life — every person has to think about the way they'll choose to live out their days; life is fragile, and it could end at any moment. Seen this way, your view of life is your view of death.

Only 5% of a person's life is wonderful, and only 5% is painful; the other 90% is ordinary. People are often lured on by the 5% wonderful, endure the 5% painful, and pass their days in the 90% ordinary.

A person is a pendulum swinging between happiness and suffering, sun up and sun down, round and round. Most people can't really claim happiness, nor really claim suffering — maybe the absence of misfortune is itself happiness.

Happiness is the feeling of being content with the mundane. Content — meaning you can taste sweetness and happiness even in the mundane. Anyone who can savor the "present" anytime, anywhere, is happy. Whatever is intense may be deadly; whatever is plain is good for the health.

These two or three years of the epidemic had an enormous impact on everyone's life. The greatest loss in life was losing so much sense of presence. Presence is a source of much happiness — one that streaming shows and scrolling social media can't replace.

At the same time, at some moment each year I fall into a state of feeling everything is empty. Even competitive sport can't cheer me up. Lately I've been a bit unable to run, unable to lift my legs.

A: real happiness and false prosperity

B: false happiness and real prosperity

If you could only live one way, which would you choose?

Beyond no longer expecting so-called mutual rushing-toward-each-other, another new realization this year is: unconditionally accepting yourself is an especially important thing.

Not accepting yourself because of what you did or who you are, but accepting yourself no matter what you did, no matter who you are — unconditionally. Same thing I always say: this honest, heartfelt acknowledging, facing, accepting, embracing, and liking of this less-than-perfect self can only be given by yourself, to yourself — and it's the most worthwhile of all.

"I" is, in a sense, a verb — it's me shaping me.

The three elements of life are health, wealth, and happiness. We pursue wealth, health, and happiness in that order, but ranked by importance, it's the reverse.

Most people don't realize: your energy and your time are extremely scarce resources. Life is lived away, and it's gone, and looking back, you're as ordinary as ever. Put your head down for three to five years and you can reach the top tier of some field, or master a skill in that time — but life doesn't have nearly that many three-to-five-years.

Li Xiaolai says: there are three invisible big pits in life, crowded with people — basically 90% of everyone is in one. But sadly, because everyone's in a pit, everyone looks the same, so not one person knows they've fallen in.

The three pits are: "inexplicably joining the crowd," "frantically following the herd," and "worrying yourself sick over other people's business." You have to put all of your most precious attention on yourself, on your own growth.

(Figure in original.)

Life's big pit: worrying too much about others' business, doing too little of your own. Commit to thorough execution, and in a year or two you can surpass 80% of your peers; keep at it and you can achieve something big: most results come from diligence, not from cleverness and talent. Surpassing 80% of people really isn't much of a problem.

The problem is that almost no one is willing to do this; they just complain and wait, don't start, don't persist. But about other people's business, they're extraordinarily attentive: who committed harassment, who's fighting over a divorce, big-corp gossip, small-corp headlines — chattering away with relish. Forever worrying themselves sick over others' affairs, and muddling through their own carelessly.

Take me as an example:

• I don't use any news app.
• I don't follow any politics or military news.
• I don't follow any entertainment-industry gossip.

I generally care about only three things:

• Major events in the sports world, including but not limited to: marathon, basketball, football, tennis, badminton.
• New products, new tech, and financial reports of the major sports brands: Nike; Adidas; Lululemon; Puma; New Balance; Saucony; Asics; ANTA; Li-Ning; On; HOKA; Arc'teryx; Patagonia.
• Travel-related: cheap flights; visas and visa-free entry.

My requirements for the things I follow are:

• Always stay at the cutting edge, with core first-hand information.
• Shake hands with the top 20 people in the relevant field, keep tracking them, communicate over the long term, connect deeply.
• Take three to five years as the starting unit, keep loving it, and advance one step a day.

Liking is a form of long-termism. At bottom it's a kind of faith. A mistake many people often make: I'll find the thing I like, then act. Actually that's wrong. The thing you like will never fall out of the sky — you have to act first, and then bring your ability into play through action.

Overcome difficulties, gradually get feedback, and only then can you actually come to "like" it. Through your own trial and action, you discover that your ability happens to be enough to meet these challenges, and you don't mind the process of meeting them, and you can get positive feedback from it — that's the essence of liking.

I used to think idealism was merely a beautiful wish for the world; this year I think: idealism is the deduction, grounded in reality, of the diversity of answers to a problem. Its only difference from realism is the input-output ratio — whether you're willing to spend a greater cost to seek a better solution to the problem, and to defend it at any cost.

The realist cares about money; the idealist cares about time. A pure idealist won't go far; a pure realist won't build big. In our era, money matters a lot. But time is the ultimate measure. For the individual, it's about how to raise the quality of time; for humanity, it's not only the quality of time but the length of all of humanity's time, and whether it can be sustained. Making money is to spend money to enrich and elevate life's experience; spending money is to raise the quality — even the length — of time. The realists who revolve around money will, in the end, serve the idealists who revolve around time.

(Figure in original.)

The ultimate measure of life is time, not money or anything else. Almost everything, in the end, has to be tested by time — or, along the way, worn down and worn away by it.

There's a line I've always disliked: "take it seriously and you've already lost." But — not take it seriously, and how do you win?

The right mindset should be: want to win, but not fear losing; if I lose, I own it. I accept what fate arranges, but I won't just concede. Keep the blood hot — that blood can't go cold, because once it does, you won't have the strength for a lot of things.

At the same time, you have to have ambition, but a lot of the time it's a very intangible thing — it's not a concrete task. I usually only discover after the fact, oh, so I did this thing, rather than aiming at it from the start. And ambition isn't limited to work or career; it can be placed in life too.

My understanding of dreams is this: they're wild, you never know where you'll end up, and people are forever limited by their own limited imagination — so now, when I run into something I can't understand, I let myself go do it first. In a sense, ambition ≈ life force. Optimism + drive + defiance + courage.

Like Kerouac said: On the road. Sometimes you don't necessarily need a destination. If you know where the future is, it means it hasn't exceeded your vision — and when you can see the future, what's interesting about it anymore?

Finally, a passage I love, to share:

I'm reasoning by nature, idealistic, drawn to a youthful spirit. In many chance moments in the past I thought many times about whether to change — after all, a me like this is worlds apart from what the world lets me see. Later, in moments of frustration, I happened to run into a fair amount of idealism, and I thought about it a long time, and I decided the real reason I can't change is: so that, the next time a me like this stands in a moment like this, I can still choose not to change.

05 On Friends and Peer Pressure

Let me talk about peer pressure first. I've written before that a big bug in many people's lives is: who exactly do you count as your peer.

Many people's peers are: colleagues / classmates / people of a similar age — but they aren't necessarily your peers. First, "peer" is a dynamic concept; and second, under that dynamic concept, whoever you compete with is your peer.

So it requires us to figure out who we are, what we're here to do in life, what game we're playing, and who exactly we're competing with.

For instance, our parents' generation is roughly the same age as Jack Ma and Pony Ma. Jack Ma is so rich — does he create peer pressure for our parents? Absolutely not.

Or take this: a couple of days ago, a Shenzhen University Class of 2018 alum from the School of Economics, Zhang Yufeng, personally donated 50 million yuan. By academic year, Zhang Yufeng should have graduated only last year, and just a year later he donated 50 million to his alma mater. Do you think his classmates still count as his peers?

Now let me talk about friends. Frankly, I don't think of myself as someone with a lot of friends, and I know that although I treat many people as friends, the reverse doesn't hold.

At 26 I wrote this: in everyday speech, I don't use the word "friend" lightly.

"Acquaintance," "someone I know," "we've crossed paths a few times somewhere" — none of these equal "friend." If someone's a friend, just say plainly they're a "good friend."

Over time, the people who naturally gather around you become the ones you genuinely want to draw close to. "Because we're connected, each of us also becomes a little freer."

Loneliness is the default state, and free will is rare and precious. A good relationship is one where you can find the mutual understanding, empathy, and support of kindred spirits, and also keep maintaining and developing your own free will within it.

The more like-minded friends you have, the more you realize how rare and precious it is to "come together without forming cliques."

Lately I've been thinking and reviewing all kinds of things: why do some work partners become friends, while some friends end up strangers? What makes a friend worth having, a person worth loving? I thought a long time, and my final conclusion is: my criteria might come down to three words — truth, goodness, beauty. In descending order of importance.

Around 2018–19, I was especially confused about relationships — I felt out of step with the industry, and felt I had no real friends. 2020 was a turning point in my life, at least at the level of understanding.

One big gain from the epidemic is that it made me understand more clearly: I really do prefer real, singular, deeper social relationships. What I prefer is real people, one by one — people you can sit down and talk and eat with — not so-called thousands upon thousands of contacts and connections trapped inside a phone, with all their tedious, complicated, showy "titles and tags." Too complicated, too tiring. I don't like it.

I can't imagine some of the elites around me sorting their Moments audience into thirty-odd groups, still needing to distinguish whether someone's from their own school's business program.

And over these past two years, many small details answered my confusion about friends — these were especially two years of feeling loved.

When I first moved to Shanghai in '21, one day right after lunch I suddenly had chest tightness. That evening after work it was still tight, so I went to Changzheng Hospital. When I finished, the nurse wouldn't let me leave and had me stay overnight for observation — sleeping in the lobby, not even a ward.

Staying for observation also required cash as a deposit; electronic payment wasn't accepted, and I thought, excuse me? I hadn't brought my wallet or bank card either. So my friend, at 11:30 at night, took a 40-minute cab to bring me cash, a power bank, toiletries, and so on. I slept the night in the lobby. By the time they'd dropped all this off and gotten home, it was nearly 1 a.m.

This year, too, I kept receiving my friends' love — plus a friend gave me a Friends-edition Lego set, and I got a gift before my birthday.

Reflecting on it afterward: although I've never had the experience of being betrayed by friends or badly hurt in love, I have sincerely treated a friend only to later discover they were two-faced, serving different dishes to different people. But I didn't let that change my mindset or attitude toward other friends. And although the VC/startup circle has plenty that makes me uncomfortable, I did learn a lot from it.

The most important thing I learned is to carry the investing principle of forever daring to place bets into life: with matters, stay at the table, keep chips in hand; with people, dare to keep giving sincerity and a true heart — even if you misjudge a few times, it's fine. Admit it's a problem with our eye, keep betting, and meeting friends and partners who treat you with a true heart is only a matter of time.

Sincerity and kindness are never wrong; what's wrong is failing to tell the right target apart. What we should reflect on is our own judgment, not doubt our own sincerity.

I'm someone with a lot of odd ideas, and one day with nothing to do I took a sheet of paper and, following what I'd written before, made a set of axes out of feeling-exchange & value-exchange versus interest-exchange — four quadrants, up, down, left, right. Suddenly I found that most of the people I consider good friends, who treat me similarly, fall in the quadrant of high goodwill but low interest-exchange — and most of my time and energy is spent on them too.

Frankly, in the earlier years I was especially troubled by relationships, especially when I first entered the VC/startup circle. I felt I had no real friends, and was very troubled about how to maintain long-term relationships with people in the circle. My answer to that, to this day, is still: impossible. I mean, of course, the real, true-hearted friends.

I actually used to envy people whose casual Moments post got dozens or even 300 likes, and who had a whole crowd together on their birthday. But later I realized: a lot of that is just vanity at work. I'm not a hundred-yuan bill — I can't make everyone, or even most people, like me. Being with a few close friends is enough.

So later I stopped caring about Moments, and stopped caring about likes. I post whatever I think of; take it or leave it.

Social media's selfies + likes + information cocoons — everyone has reasonably and infinitely magnified their own self, everyone for themselves, everyone pleasing themselves. You can try it: if you stop liking your so-called friends' posts, will they still come find you, will they still like yours?

You have to build a true circle of friends. They're safe in their energy, mature in their spirit; they hold tolerance toward you, not hostility; empathy, not judgment. They'll spend time caring about you and your experiences, grow through life alongside you, and sincerely wish you well.

We always assume that what time brings are friends, and since they're friends, there's a need to keep getting along and maintaining the relationship. We don't realize that time is also a river, and there's always something to be swept away — only true treasure can sink and settle and stay.

Some time ago, chatting with a friend, we touched on warmth going unanswered. I think that's actually normal — being too close can sometimes backfire. Actively offering warmth is of course rare and precious, but getting along with people can't rely on moving yourself again and again, and don't put the other person in a hard spot either.

None of us can make everyone like us, and there's no rule that the other person must respond to your warmth. One-sided warmth may, to another, be a burden.

Take a thousand steps back — warmth going unanswered is no big deal; just cut your losses in time, don't torment yourself. Same thing I always say: cherish what's in front of you, and save more of your gentleness for family and friends.

You have to believe that you'll always meet the right person willing to accept your true heart and treat it as a treasure.

Many people say I'm a calm person. I don't know how to define or understand "calm," but I do have fairly stable emotions, and I don't care about or follow a lot of the things online at all. Taking part in sports and watching games are perhaps my few moments of excitement.

I later thought this through carefully, and the explanation I gave myself is: maybe I've seen the good (things), and I also know what the bottom looks like.

What does "seen the good" mean? From the top students in childhood, to later encountering Tsinghua/Peking dynasties: from Tsinghua-affiliated elementary all the way through Tsinghua undergrad and master's; from Tsinghua/Peking undergrad to Harvard/Yale/Princeton/MIT master's; from HSW (Harvard, Stanford, Wharton) MBAs to Harvard/Yale/Princeton/MIT undergrads; from the local richest family whose assets used to be in the billions, to "friends" who could attend the gambling king's wedding — truly, excellence and wealth have no end.

I always thought I was born into humble origins, but later learned: "humble gate" refers to a lineage of low standing — specifically a family of lesser gentry influence, also called a commoner clan — not the impoverished class. During the Wei, Jin, and Northern and Southern dynasties, families outside the aristocracy were mostly ordinary small and mid landlords. After the Wei and Jin, the emergence of the imperial examinations broke the aristocracy's decline, and the notion of "humble gate" appeared. Only after a distinguished family has fallen can you call it "humble gate." So we shouldn't casually call ourselves children of humble origins — we're not qualified.

So we can't be "humble gate"; surely we can at least be commoners? Not even that. Because the ancients only called those with houses and land "commoners." In ancient times, a person with no land and no house was called a "drifter," and a person with no proper occupation was called a "vagrant." So, by the ancients' classification, we can only call ourselves the grassroots — the new era's "drifter-vagrants."

I can't become them, and I don't want to become them. My requirement of myself, I think, is still: I want to be a free and unbound person, not simply a rich person. I hope I won't get lost in someone else's dream and become an "unhappy elite."

(Figure in original.)

I need work, but I don't want a job. I can do the work well, shoulder my responsibilities, keep learning and improving my professional abilities — but not at the expense of my life balance, not by losing myself and going astray. You need the ability to be relaxed and free, but the goal is still to be relaxed and free.

06 On Shanghai

In 2021, I made a fairly major decision: to move from Beijing to Shanghai. I clearly remember I arrived in Shanghai on March 25, on a high-speed train car that departed at 20:09. The first sentence I heard entering the subway was: "Shanghai is the birthplace of the Communist Party of China." My feeling at the time was: seriously? I just left Beijing, and now I've stepped into the "wolf's den" again?

Let me talk about life and impressions after coming to Shanghai. Before I came, I was in a state of "having nothing." What do I mean?

First, I came to Shanghai with just two suitcases, straight over. It was only after arriving that I started looking at job opportunities.

Second, I also had no house. Luckily I could crash at a friend's place. Back then I spent six days looking at 18 neighborhoods and 25 apartments — at the peak I saw five in one day. On April 2, I signed and moved in on the spot. In that stretch, I unlocked 10 Shanghai subway lines in three days.

Third, I've adapted to and gotten used to Shanghai pretty well so far. In April, a friend told me: you should get a dryer, and prep a lot of underwear and socks. I said, what's this about? He said, during the plum-rain season, Shanghai rains nonstop (his exact words: it rains the entire time you're awake), and clothes never dry. In May and June I didn't actually hit the plum rains — maybe that was Shanghai's way of welcoming me.

But the early-August "rainy season" truly beat me into submission: it rained almost every day, once every 15 minutes, for nearly two weeks straight. As an outdoor-sports lover, it was genuinely hard to bear and hard to accept.

Beijing and Shanghai have very different cultural atmospheres. Although overall Shanghai is very livable, culturally — especially in cultural diversity and inclusiveness — Beijing is in a class of its own domestically.

Shanghai still leans more toward Haipai culture and a consumer vibe — after all, it's the heart of capitalism, with the world's number-one count of cafés. Whether trendy or not, they open batch after batch and fold batch after batch.

City people are bored on weekends, so they need selfies to kill time. A girl shoots selfies all afternoon, takes 500, picks 100, posts 5 to Moments. There's not a single good bookstore to buy books in either — though Beijing only has SDX Joint Publishing and All Sages Bookstore.

After coming to Shanghai I felt incredibly unrefined, and to "resist" Shanghai's excessive refinement, I swapped my whole wardrobe to a monochrome palette. If I really had to pick one of Beijing and Shanghai, Beijing actually suits me better.

Shanghai's commercial atmosphere is too thick, its calculation strong, and it cares far more about taste than spiritual value — consumer taste, niche music, niche film, and other cultural tastes. That's why All Sages Bookstore couldn't open in Shanghai.

But Shanghai has one notable advantage over Beijing: in Shanghai the traces of power are much fainter. And of course Shenzhen and Guangzhou have even less. For personal-character reasons, I'd rather choose a place with a lighter air of power, without too many big slogans and with fewer cameras. In many parts of Beijing, the cameras have grown into a whole tree.

Beijing is a city, and also a vast ocean. Each person's time, and the encounters between people, aren't arranged in orderly rings like the Second, Third, and Fourth Ring Roads — they're the crisscrossing of waves smashing cliffs and rippling water. Being carried along against your will is perhaps the deepest feeling of living in Beijing.

After going to Shanghai, I also unlocked a new achievement: lived in 3 of the 4 municipalities, lived in 3 of the 4 first-tier cities. My sense of the vibe and feel of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen: Shanghai is good too obviously, Guangzhou is good more subtly, Beijing is good with difficulty, Shenzhen is good in an unknown way.

After coming to Shanghai, two things left a deep impression on me.

• Shanghai has two social hard currencies — coffee and alcohol, coffee by day and alcohol by night, seamlessly connected. In Shanghai, almost no one will arrange to meet you at Starbucks; in Beijing everyone generally meets at Starbucks. These two years, with the expansion of coffee startups, people in Beijing now have some other options too. Shanghai's coffee culture is so thick, its café count so high and dense, that the whole world can only look up to it.
• Walking Shanghai's streets, the proportion of girls really is high (so the proportion of good-looking girls is correspondingly high); the proportion of elderly people is high too. I later looked at the Seventh Census data — Shanghai's aging far exceeds Beijing's. The share of people 60+ and 65+ is nearly 5% higher than Beijing's; 23.38% aging ranks second nationally, with Liaoning first at 25%, followed by the three northeastern provinces and Jiangsu. So this actually reflects a side point: Shanghai's infrastructure is more accessible, or there wouldn't be so many elderly people going out alone, crossing the road, going to convenience stores.

Everywhere around me, I see and hear discussions of whether Beijing or Shanghai is better. Honestly, this question feels almost beyond doubt: except in job opportunities (tech, financial primary market), where Shanghai is fewer than Beijing, in every other respect it wins hands down.

In job opportunities, tech is fewer than Beijing, but broken down, 2B is not bad. In heavy industry, manufacturing, consumer goods, and pharma it crushes Beijing. Finance is a draw, and professional services also hold an advantage.

In terms of living, my own feeling is: Shanghai has expensive food & lots of choices, and cheap renting and buying; Beijing has cheap food and expensive renting and buying. For culture, entertainment, media — nearly everything Beijing has, Shanghai has too.

On comparing the happiness of different cities, I actually have two general, universal dimensions:

• On the streets, do ordinary people and those at the bottom have smiles on their faces — more smiles, natural ones, not the smiles struck for a photo.
• For the middle class and above, or the upper tier, do they really need to be close to politics — and can they get things done without being close to it.

For me, what I like most about Shanghai is that there are many parks to run in, each district has its own library, and there are plenty of places and venues suitable for exercise. There are lots of places to stroll and walk, which I'll detail in the next section. Also, the architecture has more character, and the city is more colorful. Compared with Beijing, it's rather more monotone.

That said, there's one thing about Shanghai I'm not so used to or fond of: if you go out or talk with several people, and the others are all Shanghainese, they often switch on their own to speaking Shanghainese, without caring whether you're right there beside them, whether you can understand.

07 On Intimacy: A Walk Is a Special Kind of Romance

If I had to pick a special way of being intimate, I'd pick: grocery shopping and walking. Both are a special kind of romance.

Shanghai has many places to walk and stroll, call them sidewalks and little lanes. Whereas Beijing has only highways and thoroughfares.

Walking alone is a ritualized way of thinking. And walking as a pair is a private, ambiguous way of communicating between two people. When you walk, you're relaxed and loose; the street wraps you in solitude, making you more sensitive. Bathed in solitude, you turn calm, distant, sharp of sense; and out of that solitude come intense songs and piercing words that break the quiet.

Walking appears everywhere in Pride and Prejudice. The heroine walks at every possible chance and place, and many of the book's important meetings and conversations happen while two people walk together. Walking is an extremely important part of the daily life of Austen's elegant characters.

In 18th- and 19th-century Britain, walking was a kind of feminine pursuit. Eroticism wasn't focused on the bodily intimacy of the bed but diffused across the city; nighttime walking was their way of bathing in eros.

Chinese and Japanese poets, sages, and hermits loved to praise landscapes — and rather than climbing mountains and crossing waters, it was more about placing oneself within the landscape. While being grateful for technology, we should also be grateful for the city's development: we've gained many buildings and gardens, shops and resting places, and so people gained the freedom to walk. Two hundred years ago, people even needed a formal reason to take a walk.

Frankly, I think I'm someone who's not very good at love — at least, before this year, a lot of my mindset was very old-school and academic. Just recently I learned: in today's society, by the fourth time you meet, you can confess and hold hands. And I also simply can't date multiple people at once, nor instantly switch moods the moment I fall out of love and start a new relationship right away.

I've always felt: a person only has so much passion and true-heartedness in a lifetime — whoever uses theirs up first leaves first. Passion has to be used and deployed reasonably too. If I'm not interested in a woman, I absolutely won't eat with her many times; if I don't have at least 30% liking and approval of her, I absolutely won't go for a walk with her.

Being the one who initiates is perhaps the purest word in love — you can be the one who initiates a confession, or the one who initiates a refusal. Because think about it carefully: no one holds a lifelong grudge against someone who initiates. To initiate stands for a true heart, a true love, a true feeling — so this feeling deserves to be cherished.

My philosophy has always been: my time and my true heart are both precious. If I can't confirm you're "one of my own," then I can't give my true heart; if I've confirmed it, then I can go all in.

Many people say: actually, being the one who actively loves and actively gives doesn't lose out much; it's the one who's loved who loses out. Because when they break up, the one who actively loved loses only a person who didn't love them, while the one who was loved loses a person who loved them.

That's both true and not. Really, there's no such thing as "the ability to love" — it's just "not being afraid of getting hurt." The worst outcome is getting hurt, so treat it as a once-in-a-lifetime meeting.

I think the essence of "once-in-a-lifetime meeting" is this: "the chance we treat as a treasure is, to another, just one pearl among the many lovely memories they collect through life. They got this pearl, happily stored it as a precious memory, and we can only be grateful that we fulfilled each other, that we got to encounter it once — and be happy about that too."

People today seem to give up on love too easily after a single wound: please don't. Don't lightly conclude you've lost the ability to love — you're still young, full of impulse and romance. You can't shut out any intimacy just because you've supposedly seen through some ugliness, or even rein in your own affection. Life is still full of beauty; we're just too tense. You have to believe this world, and you, are both worth it.

Of course, the premise of mutual rushing-toward-each-other is that someone has to break the ice, moving the other with sincerity and warmth. After you get a response, then consider whether to keep rushing forward; with no response, cut your losses in time and withdraw completely. If you like someone, go win them; a true heart doesn't fear being wasted — as Eileen Chang said, you ask me whether loving you is worth it, but you should know: love is not asking whether it's worth it.

In 2019 I wrote: I really want a love out of the 1980s, where communication is letters, phone calls, meals, playing music, reading, outings. The heart-stretching wait for each letter; the tender gazes when you meet.

Smartphones don't deserve sweet love. People today love with a full load of testing, tug-of-war, hot and cold, and, after breaking up, the wish to prove they've done better than the other.

The end of a relationship may come with a thousand kinds of "losing," but the greatest loss of all is still measuring yourself by the other's reactions and by your expectations of them. There are a thousand kinds of "winning" in working to improve yourself, and the winning state should be: I believe I can keep upgrading, so I don't need to prove myself to anyone.

If you really can't let it go and insist on proving yourself — I don't know how girls think, but I can offer a boy's-version line of thinking: girls come in two kinds. Some girls, after leaving you, leave you with a bitter, ambitious drive — or call it an ideal — to strive upward until the day you're rich and glorious and make her see you differently, until she rues what she did.

And some girls — the moment she leaves you, you know that no matter how successful, rich, brilliant, or great you become in this life, no matter how hard you try to change yourself or stay exactly the same, you'll never again attract that bit of attention she once gave you. Yes, the second kind is the good girl — but also the more despair-inducing one.

What a man needs is a like-minded partner, not a woman like some "trophy." Who we become matters, but how we treat different people matters more.

Finally, let me close this section with a passage from Jike that I love:

"I actually hate losing many firsts before I meet my 'final partner' — losing so many chances to experience the first thrill with you. But your absence can't stop me from exploring the world. The longing comes from my eyes, the longing comes from my feet, the longing comes from my heart, the longing comes from the curiosity I was born with, wailing into the world. Staying hungry for everything drives me to see and understand more of humanity's stories and the world's truths. And then, on some ordinary day, to expect to meet you. I can proudly tell you that waiting for you, finding myself, and exploring the world — I've lived them as one and the same road."

08 Wish List

Sometimes I suddenly feel that "keeping myself company as I grow up" is so romantic. Or put another way: though I'm lonely, I'm not alone. Put more romantically: I'm completely free.

Last year I wrote it this way: plenty of people wish you a happy birthday, but few care whether you're actually happy that day. And what I want is true happiness.

I hope I can be someone who finds light in the dark. A person doesn't have to radiate heat and warmth at every moment; this world allows the occasional negativity and low. Any emotion is part of our core — don't deliberately hide your fragility. Negative emotions were never a mistake; there's nothing to blame yourself for. You have to accept every side of yourself.

I hope that when I'm sad or wrapped in negativity there's someone to confide in, when I'm nervous, anxious, and unsure there's someone to cheer me on, when I'm torn, hesitant, and lost there's someone to help me sort it out, and that the things piled up in my heart get truly heard and answered. I hope I'm lucky enough to live within someone's favor, and always have the backing that comes with it. Wishing this for you — and for me.

The gentleness and happiness others bring you are all temporary; anyone you meet in this moment will return to their own timeline. So only by learning to produce your own happiness will you earn a solid, grounded steadiness, and keep from being anxious over every gain and loss.

The world is actually simple; much of the time it's we who complicate it. What matters most: a healthy body, a happy life, and dreams of your own.

The wish list is as follows — still: not divided by year; cross it off when it's done, add to it when there's something new.

1: In my lifetime, praying the mainland won't go to war.

2: Running (updated-on-schedule series): BQ, Boston, New York, Chicago; 5K sub-20; 10K sub-40; full marathon: 2:55.

3: Travel: international — the remaining continents; domestic — Xinjiang, Tibet, Yunnan.

4: Catch their concerts: Bon Jovi; Yoga Lin; Jeff Chang.

5: Learn interior design.

Finally, a passage from Teacher Luo Xiang, to hold in common: honestly I'd love to wish everyone smooth sailing, but I don't think that's realistic. So may we truly: store up, at every moment, memories good enough to withstand the sufferings of life that arrive unannounced. And may we, in our memories, store up enough of the good and the kind to stand against evil without joining it. May we, even more, have more of the beautiful in our memories, so that we walk calmly and composedly toward life's end. I sincerely wish that each of you can find the quiet within.

May you and I both keep moving forward in our own time zones, never lightly giving up, and live out our own one-of-a-kind sample of a life.