13 posts
Four days before my JLPT N2 results, I sat with the anxiety of not knowing, and started questioning what 'effort' really means. A reflection on effort, results, and learning to live in the present.
Every gain hides a quiet loss. A personal essay on hidden costs of development, the paradox of viral success, and what you lose when turning a hobby into income.
Why do friendships quietly fade when we change cities, jobs, or countries? A reflection on distance, regional limits, and the small habits that keep rare, lifelong friendships alive.
Life is like a server — run it long enough and you accumulate tech debt, get tired, and your architecture goes stale. Changing your runtime isn't escape; it's a deliberate architecture upgrade.
The cruelest and fairest thing about the game of life is that it always ends. Because there is a final level, every run is worth taking seriously — not to win, but to make the journey worth it.
Where you're born is fate. Where you put down roots is choice. From Shandong to Beijing, from Beijing to Tokyo — each move wasn't escape, but an active choice to plant myself in new soil.
What limits us was never ability — it's the thought 'I can't' itself. Believe first, then verify. Get that order wrong, and no amount of effort takes you far.
The poor envy the rich's possessions; the rich envy the poor's ease. Happiness comes not from the balance, but from a sense of control over the pace of life — those who can stop and say 'enough' find happiness more easily than those who never stop running.
Stoic philosophy made this clear two thousand years ago — spend energy on what you can change, stay calm about what you can't. Most suffering comes not from the thing itself, but from fighting what cannot be fought.
The AI era won't stop because some people oppose it. Rather than critiquing the current from the shore, step into the water and learn to move with it. What the era leaves behind isn't people who don't use AI — it's people who refuse to understand it.
The scenery others describe is always second-hand — vivid, but filtered through their eyes. The road that's truly yours must be walked in person: stumbling, getting dirt on your clothes. Only the blisters on your feet are proof of a real journey.
Going from hating essays to running a blog — it's not that I suddenly fell in love with writing. It's that I found something more worth writing about than classroom essays: my own real thinking.
A few years ago, I read a book that changed my life — 'The Courage to Be Disliked.' There's a line in it I still remember clearly.