2023年 年终总结2023 Year in Review

To the ends of the earth — Jason Zhang, "To the Ends of the Earth"

Piece No. 4

Prologue

Sometimes freedom feels like happiness.

A healthy sense of being alive matters.

A journey under the sun.

Eyes that never waver.

Looking Back

Time flies; before I knew it, another year had slipped away.

Once you truly throw yourself into things that matter, you barely notice loneliness at all. The days race by, and the moments worth remembering become simple and concentrated.

It's just that after so long with my ears shut to the world outside, I sometimes snap out of it and feel as though the world I once knew is quietly leaving me behind — a small pang of wistfulness. But mostly I feel happy, because a larger world is on its way.

If I had to pick a word or two for 2023, the phrases in my head would be anxious & confident, decisive & clear-eyed, hopeful & savoring it all. Not just in the body, but in what I lived through.

Confidence

Some say life begins at thirty; some say it begins at fifty. Neither is right. Life begins the day you stop trying to please the onlookers.

Clarity

Whether an outcome is good or bad has to be judged over a long stretch of time. What looks like a bad ending now, you may one day bow in gratitude for. Staying clear-eyed matters, always: knowing who you are, where you stand, and where you mean to go.

Optimism

I belong entirely to myself. Stay strong, stay healthy, keep moving.

As all the various apps rolled out their year-in-review reports again, I went back to look at when I'd first started using each of them — and when I first started using phones and computers at all.

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On the whole, pretty early on all counts. In a sentence: I missed the PC era entirely, but never missed a beat on mobile.

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I've come to think of 2023 as the year everyone turned inward. For me, it mainly showed up in five things I noticed:

1. All of a sudden, as if by prior agreement, nobody posts to their WeChat Moments anymore, nobody likes each other's posts. Everyone went off to lose it and let loose somewhere else: Weibo, Jike, Xiaohongshu, Instagram.

2. Out of nowhere, "the gears of fate began to turn" became one of the phrases of the year.

3. MBTI and being an "I" person practically became words of the year. I can believe three years of the pandemic left everyone broke, but turning the whole nation into introverts is genuinely a little baffling. You can hardly imagine how much MBTI is "all the rage" now. I'd assumed it was just domestic icebreaker chatter, and then the other day a Stanford "friend" in the Bay Area asked me: what's your MBTI? And I was just... what?

To borrow a friend's line: MBTI made an outstanding contribution to "de-stigmatizing introversion" in China. It accomplished what "homebody" and "quietly intense" never could. From childhood, relatives and teachers all taught us that being introverted was a flaw to be corrected. Now a single "I'm an I person" gets you anywhere.

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4. Get married, don't buy a house, but plan an exit. Whether it was to have a dragon baby next year I can't say, but in 2023 my Moments feed was either weddings or people on their way to the marriage registry. Real estate hit bottom — nothing but sellers, no buyers in sight. So many people were chasing residency: Hong Kong's talent schemes; Singapore; Australia, Japan, Canada. The rest I understand, but Hong Kong I don't — if you're not actually going to work and live there, what you're getting is basically a plus-version Shenzhen hukou. An agent can't scrub your customs entry-exit records for you, and if a talent-scheme permit is all it takes to get Hong Kong status, then permanent residency there must be a dime a dozen. People really are just so anxious.

5. Crowds breed contrarians. If there's a case for early-adopting 3C electronics and cars — buy early, use early, enjoy early — then everyone scrambling at once to read Musk's new biography I find a little baffling. Is there prize money for owning it first and finishing it first?

And people whose Moments taglines used to be the Four Sentences of Hengqu ("to establish a heart for heaven and earth; to secure life for the people; to carry on the lost learning of the sages; to open eternal peace for all generations") — this year every last one of them switched to "life is a wilderness."

Then there's "the light boat has passed ten thousand mountains." These were pretty lines to begin with; now I want to run the other way the moment I see them. Three hundred Tang and Song poems, three thous-odd common characters — such freedom, endless permutations — so why must everyone become a broken record, working the same line to death? Then again, there's no real need for people to understand each other anyway.

In 2023, after three years bottled up, the National Day holiday saw outbound travel regain its glory. My Moments feed turned into a geography class laid out across the map — a whole "WWII re-enactment":

• Europe: 50% — Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Greece, Austria, Hungary
• Asia: 26% — Russia, Indonesia, Turkey, Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Sri Lanka
• Africa: 20% — Egypt, Kenya, Morocco
• Oceania: 3% — Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Tonga
• Americas: 1% — Ecuador, Mexico (didn't spot anyone going to the US or Canada)

One of the pandemic's biggest changes to people was our sense of time. And this year, after everything reopened, the hunger for being-there-in-person hit its peak. Beyond travel, there were the sold-out, packed-out concerts.

Anyway, here's my 2023 year in review — enjoy:

01 Reading: A person still needs to make something

In 2023, I read fifty books in all.

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I'd developed some focus and priorities in the kinds of books I chose. Compared with 2022, when I had no heart for reading and read at random, this year I returned to the main thread: sociology and history.

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I read a great deal of Republican-era history in particular. It struck me as a period the public routinely overlooks, yet a fascinating one.

The Republic was an era of violent upheaval in Chinese history: the Qing declining, then collapsing; the young Republic in chaos; Yuan Shikai's dictatorship, the warlords at each other's throats, the fires of revolution, Nationalists and Communists contending for supremacy; then eight years of resistance against Japan, three years of civil war... The land never stopped for a moment its churn of old giving way to new, its baptism by blood and fire, and its own poverty and weakness pushed the whole nation into an unprecedented crisis.

And yet it was also an age of extraordinary talents: Cai Yuanpei, Hu Shi, Mei Yiqi, Chen Yinke, Fu Sinian, Li Ji, Liang Sicheng, Liang Siyong, Lin Huiyin, Jiang Menglin, Zeng Zhaolun, Xia Nai, Hua Luogeng — every one of them carrying the grand ambition to establish a heart for heaven and earth, to carry on the lost learning of the sages, to open eternal peace for all generations; writing without losing their founding purpose, seeking a way forward while keeping faith with their mission.

Every step of the way, they faced enemies circling from without, bent on severing the very spine of the Chinese spirit; and from within, a weakened nation, tangled interests, factions grinding against one another, warlords carving up the land. Amid the chaos they never forgot the search for a path to a strong and prosperous country. There was pain, but they never wavered from their original purpose, and in the end there emerged a generation of once-in-three-centuries genius: the exemplars of a new kind of education, the guardians of Tsinghua's soul, the pillars of the Institute of History and Philology, the pioneers who broke open modern Chinese archaeology, the trailblazers of Chinese architectural study.

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We learned it back in middle school: fall behind and you get beaten. An individual's fate is forever bound up with, and tethered to, the country's future.

Tsinghua, Peking University, and Nankai were sacred ground for study; the Four Great Tutors of Tsinghua (Liang Qichao, Wang Guowei, Chen Yinke, Zhao Yuanren) — the mere mention of them makes the heart yearn. But when war came, they fled to Changsha, retreated to Kunming, dodging bombs day after day, fretting over their livelihoods year after year; teachers no better off than stray dogs, students hard-pressed to remain students. Recalling those scenes as a reader, it's hard not to be moved by the sheer resolve of those teachers and students on the march, and by the stubborn persistence of the nation's kindling flame.

We have the Twenty-Four Histories, but no history of the Qing, and no history of the Republic. The lives of the modern intellectuals of the Republic — taken as a window onto the modern era itself — leave you feeling profoundly the richer for it.

The intellectuals of that time were truly elite, and truly the country's backbone. Their study and importing of Western political thought and science and technology, their reflection on the merits and flaws of traditional Chinese culture, decided not only their own fates but shaped deeply the course of history on this land in the years that followed. And yet a society in turmoil made their lofty ambitions and ideals nearly impossible to realize.

Under such harsh conditions, our forebears still faced it all with equanimity; at the nation's moment of life or death, even as they grieved for country and people, they never forgot the responsibility on their own shoulders. Under flying shells and constant air raids, teachers and students taught on without pause; lacking financial backing or material comforts, scholars carried on their research, and even their fieldwork.

From these masters you can feel not only a thirst for knowledge but a love for country and nation, a concern for the country's future. However hard the times, they held firm.

Why could a chaotic Republic produce so many masters? The answer, really, is right there in the question.

Because it was chaotic, no one was minding it; because it was tolerant and open, there could be "an independent spirit and a free mind." So the various currents of thought, scholarship, and doctrine could take root, sprout, and grow on a cultural soil that was barren and yet fertile.

Think back over the great cultural eruptions in Chinese history, and they break down roughly into three:

The first: the Spring and Autumn and Warring States period. It was the golden age for the intellectual, offering high, middle, and low roads to choose from: at best, you could become one of the Hundred Schools of Thought; in the middle, a commoner could rise by his talk to the rank of a minister; at worst, you could go be a retainer in the household of a Lord Mengchang. The feudal lords vied for supremacy while the thinkers wrote and expounded their doctrines. The two reinforced and depended on each other. So new ideas and new theories were not suppressed and controlled but encouraged. And thus came the contention of a hundred schools, a hundred flowers in bloom.

The second: the Song dynasty. The Song inherited the legacy of the Han and Tang, opened the way to the Ming and Qing, rose in the Northern Song and flourished in the Southern, spanning more than three hundred years — the most brilliant period of ancient Chinese civilization. Though the Song had the smallest territory of any Han-Chinese central dynasty in Chinese history, its material and spiritual civilization were both highly developed, far surpassing the Han and Tang and beyond the reach of the later Yuan, Ming, and Qing — the strongest performer in China's feudal economy.

• Industrial civilization: mid-Northern-Song annual iron output stood at roughly 150,000 tons, about 2.5 to 5 times the output of Britain at the time of its Industrial Revolution in 1640, and roughly on par with the total iron output of all of Europe (including the European part of Russia) at the start of the eighteenth century.
• Currency and credit relations: the West's earliest paper money, the Bank of England note, appeared six or seven hundred years later than the Song's.
• Highly developed foreign trade: more than sixty countries and regions established trade ties with the Song, overseas trade made up a fifth of GDP — unprecedented and unrepeated in China's feudal history. Those sixty-odd countries and regions ultimately formed a tightly knit international market, one of the two great hubs of the world trade circle of the era alongside West Asia. The millions of strings of copper coins the Song minted came close to being an "international currency."
• Fiscal revenue first in the world: annual fiscal revenue peaked at 120 million strings; even after the Southern Song lost half the realm, its regular fiscal revenue still reached 100 million strings. The Yuan, Ming, and Qing could not hold a candle to it.

On the spiritual side it was no less impressive: philosophy, historiography, literature (the Eight Great Masters of the Tang and Song), calligraphy and painting, music, dance, opera, and science and technology (the Four Great Inventions) all reached unprecedented heights, and left an immensely far-reaching and momentous influence on the development of Chinese culture ever after.

The third was the Republic. Foreign powers invading from without, warlords carving up the land within — and the rigid old ways of thinking were clearly no longer suited to the new tide sweeping the world after the Industrial Revolution. A society in turmoil, paradoxically, forced people to keep turning inward and learning outward, and so many disciplines and ideas could go from zero to one, built up on a field of ruins.

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Perhaps it was precisely because of this zero-to-one leap that in each new field there emerged these intellectuals of deep thought, patriotic feeling, and national responsibility — one after another, brilliant stars in that dark age.

So perhaps non-intervention — whether by choice or by circumstance — is an important reason an age produces masters.

Maybe we shouldn't ask whether this age has masters, but whether this age needs masters.

When amusing ourselves to death becomes the mainstream of a culture; when consumerism invades daily life; when most people fix their attention on houses, cars, and money while neglecting the mind; when our "small goal" is to make a hundred million rather than to read one more book; when many people's dream is no longer to be scientists or thinkers but influencers and celebrities — it seems we don't really need masters at all.

Every age has the standard-bearers and the moral fiber it deserves. Some fight for the nation's fate, some strive for their own future — as long as it's toward the good, the upward, the beautiful, every pursuit is beyond reproach.

It's just — those of us in this age, what can we leave behind for this age? Having come all this way, what can we leave behind?

02 Film: There is nothing new under the sun

As of this writing, I've watched sixty films in all.

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Ones I loved: A Little Red Flower, August Rush, Mission: Impossible 7, and Al Pacino's Heat.

I've long had a soft spot for Indian and Korean films. The two share some things and differ in others. But one thing I felt this year — beyond the aesthetic fatigue of domestic cinema — is that Korean film is no longer the force it was.

Just how dire was Korean cinema in 2023? Let the numbers speak: only nine productions got underway in the first half of the year, far below the usual annual average of two hundred; admissions halved outright; box office hit a twenty-year low; only two of the top ten films at the box office were domestic; only one film turned a profit in the whole half-year — The Roundup: No Way Out.

If your impression of Korean cinema is still stuck on Parasite, then today its prospects have grown murkier and murkier. And the root cause is that Netflix demolished the quota system Korean film once relied on.

Not just China — Korea has a quota system too: an official protection scheme for domestic films, mandating that cinemas screen domestic films no fewer than 146 days a year, and that TV stations devote no less than 40% of their airtime to domestic dramas. Under such policies, the domestic market share was protected, while Hollywood blockbusters, once let into Korea, played the role of a catfish stirring up the local film ecosystem. Backed by policy and driven by their own grit, Korean film took off fast, with quality works pouring out.

But the only constant is change: in 2015 Netflix formally entered Korea, and audiences shifted from the big screen to the small one. This mode of viewing let Netflix bypass the quota policy entirely and form a new production model: Netflix puts up the money, Korean filmmakers shoot.

Unlike traditional film and TV, web-films and web-dramas are essentially internet products. But Korea had no domestic streaming giants like China's iQiyi, Youku, and Tencent Video, so the streaming market was quickly monopolized by Netflix alone:

• For audiences, what's not to love: cheaper prices, more flexible viewing — why not? Consumers are all price-sensitive.
• For producers, it seemed the upside outweighed the downside too: more money, less hassle, closer to home, and global distribution to boot, their market value rising — so they flocked to Netflix's camp.

Against this backdrop, Kingdom, Squid Game, and The Glory were, for a time, unrivaled. They dealt a devastating blow to traditional Korean production: market share eroded, and on top of that they had to pay higher fees.

But was it really so rosy? Netflix's platform nature means it will never hand the marketing, distribution, and merchandising of a film or show over to the content producer, and production teams signed one-and-done deals with Netflix, demoted outright from brand owner to "contract factory."

Squid Game became a phenomenon; Netflix's net profit was nearly 900 million, but what it paid the Korean production side was only 21.4 million. The enormous scissors gap of the classic internet profit model.

And yet Korean producers were happy to accept the status quo. Making Kingdom, screenwriter Kim Eun-hee had a famous line: "Netflix gave us unlimited creative freedom; on content and on technique, they never once told us how to do it." Even with Netflix buying them out, the production side chose to accept, because the risk was lowest that way.

But now, with "cutting costs and boosting efficiency" the backdrop, Netflix's investment keeps shrinking — and only when the tide goes out do you see who's been swimming naked:

• Audiences' tastes and appetites have been "Netflix-ified," disdaining anything of small or medium scale.
• The once-complete industry ecosystem for producing and marketing Korea's distinctive local films has been punched through, and struggles to attract meaningful investment. So what you see this year is a lot of industrial garbage.

Korean cinema's crucial foundation is realist subject matter; such films aren't expensive to make and have no real need for a theatrical run — and Netflix used precisely the small screen to tear that foundation out by the roots.

Why was it Korea that Netflix broke through? Netflix's earliest entry into the Asian market was actually Japan, but Japan has always kept a firm grip on the core issue: copyright.

As is well known, what Japan's film and TV industry does best, and holds the widest influence with, worldwide, is animation. Netflix originally poured big money into Japanese animation too, hoping to achieve a global effect like Korean drama, but the results fell short. Because no price, however high, can pry loose the core copyright interests bound up in Japanese animation.

At the same time, Japan has an excellent paid environment and a strong sense of copyright protection, with several profitable homegrown streaming platforms. So Japan's streaming market sits in a state of warlord division and self-sufficiency, leaving Netflix little room to wedge in.

If Korea wants out of this prisoner's dilemma, its only option is to build a firewall — but the problem is: can you really build a wall against your "daddy"?

03 Life: The eternal is made of moments

This year I feel I understand better and better what it means that "a person lives for a handful of moments." When you look back on the past, the things you always remember come down to just a few moments, just a few people, just a few feelings.

• The moment at a concert, adrift in a sea of people, voices from every direction singing the same song — that "half-real, half-dream" instant;
• The moment fireworks burst open;
• The moment of reunion with a friend not seen in ages;
• The moment of catching the first scent of osmanthus in autumn;
• The moment of resolving to leave;
• The moment of meeting eyes with the person you've come to the station to pick up;
• Every moment of breaking through a physical limit, collapsed on the track, dripping sweat;
• The moment of looking up at a beautiful sunset out the window.

Countless moments like these tell me: hold on to this instant, live in this instant. The days go by unhurried, and there are always some moments, bright as pearls, that we catch. As long as you're willing to string them together, they become a pearl necklace that belongs to you alone — like the empty establishing shot that ends an episode of a series, the closing line of a chapter in a novel, laying a long thread of foreshadowing for what comes next. In that instant there's a powerful premonition: this very moment will be one I look back on fondly for a long time to come.

Many, many moments make up the romance of living, and even a little is enough to make me love this rotten world.

I believe in the moment of a moment; I don't believe in the forever of year upon year. Life is too short — now is forever.

Hold on to a single instant and call it eternity; there are always some moments that make you unwilling to die: to go wild, to love, to squander.

04 On People: Man is the measure of all things

1. The pandemic stripped away much of the sense of presence. There was a time when meeting offline was people's default and remote communication was the "odd one out"; now online exchange is the default, and meeting offline grows ever more "precious" and "rare." But the one constant is that we always favor that latter fraction more.

2. People can be sorted broadly into three types: takers, givers, and matchers.

• Takers live by extracting benefit from others.
• Givers are creators or contributors — in love, the "pure-love warrior." Sometimes they'll pour out love with no return.
• Matchers are sometimes takers, sometimes givers, but on the whole believe in even exchange.

Many assume takers do best, but the fact is: stretch out the timeline, and givers actually fare far better than the other two. This is a truth at odds with popular intuition.

Because givers keep creating value. They may run a deficit for a while, may be harvested for a while, but over the long run there's bound to be a mean reversion of value.

For a country, a nation, a society, a company, an organization — you don't need any deep reading or forecasting; just one simple point: whether it has vitality, whether it has a future, depends on the number of givers. It's like judging a university: forget all the rankings and rhetoric — just one simple metric: how many Nobel laureates it has.

Once a person chooses to be a taker, real accomplishment will always elude them. Adapt too well to society's rules, and society will bite back in the end.

Sometimes a person wants to be a giver but is surrounded by takers, and it gets very hard. Like being in love: if you can resist being swayed by those around you, and the two of you are pure about it, each thinking about doing a little more for the other, it actually works out.

Many factors shape whether a person is a taker or a giver: institutions, environment, education. But in the end, it's still your own choice.

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3. The older I get, the more I feel that choices matter more than effort — but really, what matters most is character and luck.

4. One thing I came to accept this year: friends, so called, change and leave. Every high expectation you place on human nature is a bill life will hand you. Munger said: I'm not surprised by human nature. Nor will I spend much time feeling betrayed. I always put my head down and adjust myself to fit these things. I don't like any feeling of being a victim. I'm not a victim; I'm a survivor.

When you get little surprises as a result of human nature, don't spend much time feeling betrayed. I always want to just put my head down and adjust. I don't like any feeling of being victimized, and I am not a victim — I am a survivor.

5. I hope people won't assume that just because they're on the same wavelength chatting with someone, they truly "resonate" with that person. If you were the one to float the view first, well — we all wrote assigned-topic essays back in middle school.

6. As people age, they often come to feel the following:

• Harder and harder to feel happy
• Harder and harder to feel hope
• Always drained and exhausted
• Too listless to move, no passion for anything
• A loneliness that won't lift

Aging brings not just the loss of physical function but effects on a person's thoughts, character, words, and deeds. In 2020 I wrote:

I'd suggest making friends, at work and outside it, without being too utilitarian, and as diverse and multidimensional as possible. One interesting friend who knows how to savor life will lift your quality of life far more noticeably than one clever friend who earns a lot. Keeping your eyes fixed only on your peers will only pile on the frustration. Comparison is the thief of joy, and this world is far richer than what you imagine, and beyond what you imagine. At the same time, I'd encourage everyone to find one source of happiness that depends on no one else, that you can achieve on your own, with no glaring side effects, a low barrier to entry, a relatively high frequency of occurrence, able to fill a certain span of time, and steadily supplying a moderate dose of joy. Our hobbies outside of work are how we fight the world.

You really do need a pursuit in life, or at least a hobby to enjoy for a lifetime: when you're older, with no goals, no hobbies, drifting numbly through day after day, that feeling is like a Dementor drawing out your soul.

05 Perception: Even idle thoughts yield something

1. Discussing this with a friend: by thirty, the gaps between people in physical and mental quality become apparent. Physical quality is whether you have the stamina — can you sprint, can you take fatigue, can you command a disciplined body like an athlete's. Mental quality is daring to bet, daring to want and to bear pressure, holding steady, having patience and staying power. Some fall short on the mental traits; some can't keep up physically. Fail to hone both, and you basically end up lying flat.

Emotion, sleep, diet, exercise — the four pillars of a happy life. On all four I'm doing well, so I'm not dispirited, not anxious, not caught in inner turmoil; I have inner peace.

While I'm at it, let me ask you all: the people around you who seem to live happily — what traits do they have?

2. Another of my biggest takeaways these past couple of years: you really don't need "chat groups." When there's something to discuss, talk one-on-one; if you can meet in person, don't call; if you can call, don't WeChat. WeChat groups are both fragmentary and incapable of carrying real information. They're full of finance gossip, romance play-by-plays, emotional venting. In any group over ten people, everyone's talking past everyone else. Life really needs you to focus on the big things and let the small ones go, to put your attention on what you ought to be doing.

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3. Everything an individual does is an expression of their underlying operating system: how you choose a career; your attitude and approach toward others; your investment logic and risk appetite; your choices and methods in building a business, and so on. You have to keep iterating on the underlying system, so that your own understanding and behavioral patterns evolve and update along with it.

4. Finance, most of the time, has nothing to do with numbers or valuation models. It's more of an art — bound up with human nature, social science, and communication.

5. Socializing looks like a dialogue with others, but in the end it's still with yourself: communication is only a means, relationships only a route. The endgame is still knowing yourself.

6. Everyone has their own idea of a good job. What my past experience has taught me is that a good job needs these three things:

• Soil where you "can achieve your goals"
• A culture that "lets you be yourself"
• Role models you "genuinely admire"

7. The path of growth in life is, in a sense: to question the rules, to understand the rules, to use the rules, to become the rules.

8. In the phrase "young and hot-blooded," people tend to chase the "young," assuming youth is what matters — when in fact it's the "hot-blooded" that is the core value and spiritual mainstay. Without fire in the belly, you're not a young person. When the spirit disperses, that's the real aging.

9. "Bursting with vitality" is a devastating compliment; to be full of life is one of the highest hymns to a human being.

10. What people of formidable follow-through feel most deeply is that you must "rely on yourself," and not place too many expectations on others.

06 Work

1. Ambition is not a bad thing. But the point is: if you're truly hungry, and you truly want to go all out — truly — then go have your fill of the game.

2. Friends at the big tech firms feel no less anxious than anyone else: everyone's caught in the same narrative, individual worth quantified by rank and total-comp figures; soul and personality bundled up in the small package shaped by the appraisal system and the boss's preferences; those saddled with non-competes don't even get to keep their own names. The frequency and timing of switching bosses may run more reliably than a woman's period.

There are still so many choices and possibilities in the world, and the big firms use salary to buy out the individual's time and energy for discovering more games, and stamp onto everyone's mind, like a brain chip forcibly welded in, the seal that anyone is replaceable.

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3. Now, when I have to make a decision, I ask myself: how do I make my younger self proud, my older self approve, and my present self feel at peace. If a decision can satisfy all three questions at once, I can be pretty sure I haven't chosen wrong.

4. Many people think: influencers don't have much education or many skills, so why do they earn so much? I'd say if you think that way, you've been shaped too deeply by education supremacy. Whether a person succeeds actually has little to do with how well they did in school.

I've written before: the role of education is to set a floor. Reading and studying raise a person's lower bound — with more education, your social value is higher and life won't be so squalid and pinched — but education's marginal effect on a person's upper bound diminishes.

The upper bound rests on opportunity, exposure, and courage. Opportunity, an individual can't control; all you can control is study. Make sure you won't be too bad off, then wait for opportunity, and make yourself better.

07 Closing

If you give something your all, it's bound to bring change, and your fractured, contradictory self will grow whole.

First, stay optimistic; look for the positive factors. The macro environment may be hard to feel good about, but in one specific company and company person after another, you can always find something positive. This may be the choice, and the nourishment, everyone needs these days.

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For instance, even in 2020 when the pandemic raged hardest, not a single industry chose to give up entirely and lie flat: not tourism, dealt a fatal blow; not dining, sports, and entertainment, most dependent of all on gatherings of people. Liang Jianzhang livestreamed on the front line every day; the Tokyo Olympics weren't canceled.

Second, hold to the right things, especially those that are hard and right — for individuals and for the collective alike. Like reading, like fitness, like emotional steadiness.

Third, attend to the real problems. The harm the pandemic brought can easily blur the focus on the issues. But many problems actually existed before the pandemic. Take the protection of personal information — a social consensus that had been gradually forming. Or the workplace difficulties women face. Neglecting the improvement of other structural problems because of the pandemic is not the way to go either.

Finally, don't forget those who lost their health and their lives to the pandemic. To forget is the true dying. You're still healthy and alive — you're stronger than you think.

Sun and moon shine on; the seasons turn. Snow is both an ending and a beginning.

May you:

In spring days, listen to the rain from a painted boat;

In high summer, sleep pillowed on lotus;

In autumn wind, fallen leaves embracing their roots;

On winter days, snow melting as the pear blossoms open.

In 2024, may every one of you who comes home find someone who loves you to brush the snow off gently, and treat you with tenderness;

And may every journey you set out on find you full of spirit and firm in purpose.

A small drink, cup after cup, sends off the long night; a wide, open laugh sees out the dying year.

"Thank you for the glory you've given me — I bow to you, deeply."