You know what defines adulthood? The full weight of managing your own earnings and expenses. Financial reality settles in—a practical, inescapable fact of life you must learn to navigate, or it will become a burden sooner or later.

I don’t often speak about money, but as time transforms a boy into a man—both physically and in place in the world—it becomes harder to ignore. The safety net of family support fades; by choice, I no longer seek it. I make my own living, and while I’ve never faced true scarcity, that doesn’t mean I’m not careful. Studying abroad with ample support once led to a playboy phase—extravagant spending, luxury stores, the whole performance. Yet because of that period, I now place little faith in branded things. Most of what I buy is simple, affordable, quietly designed, and unbranded.

Why dwell on this? Perhaps because true self-awareness means facing practical realities, not just abstract desires. This clicked into place not from a single hospital visit, but from the process. After the annual check-up, the doctor’s list of suggestions sends you on a pilgrimage through different departments: scans here, tests there. Each all-clear brings relief, but each invoice brings its own quiet awakening. The grand totals are always a shock. While social insurance reduces the immediate payment to a manageable sum, the psychology of it lingers. Seeing those large original figures, knowing the deductions come from your own pre-funded medical account, creates a complex, subtle feeling. It’s your money, steadily spent to purchase this ongoing reassurance. In this series of transactions, at the persistent crossroads of care and cost, a profound truth comes into focus. The paperwork offers a moment of stark, almost cinematic clarity: money is the silent guardian of well-being.

How to romanticize the feeling without getting heavy? Maybe it’s this: my pride, scorched through by a handful of coins. A truth I never admitted, until it became my own.

I don’t know exactly when it started, but my relationship with the night has changed. I used to stay up late and relish those quiet hours. Now, when midnight arrives, I find myself lost in thoughts about my life, at least, this has been true lately. I don’t require much sleep. To wake up naturally, I need only about seven hours. Occasionally, I’ll lie still with my eyes closed a little longer, bringing it to seven and a half at most. I never nap, so I’d say my biological need for sleep is certainly less than a third of a day.

In fact, I often sleep even less. On weekdays, for various reasons, I might get only five or six hours. This isn’t due to work demands, but simply because I sometimes don’t feel the need or desire for more. Even then, I still don’t take a noon nap. On the rare nights I get only three or four hours, I can manage. The workday ends, and the night stretches long while the day feels fleeting. In these quiet hours, I find myself returning to thoughts of life, accompanied by the echoes of words—from people I’ve known or voices from the media, past and present. It is a familiar, even cliché, ritual of reflection.

What is it I seek in these long nights? Perhaps just this: to understand that everything I do is life, and everything I want is desire. There is no sense in rejecting who I was, nor in placing burdens on who I will be. It reminds me of the old tale where a young fish asks an older one, “Where is the sea?” only to be told, “You are in the sea right now.” “This?” says the young fish, “This is just water.”

Life is brief, yet we measure it with arbitrary obsessions. In China, the age of thirty-five looms as a turning point—a test of career and a grim marker of life’s halfway point. I have no ultimate answer to these nocturnal questions. But perhaps, for now, it is enough to remain quiet. Any pretense or forced meaning about existence feels unnecessary. It is better to follow a natural response to things, and my nature, it seems, is often silent.

I spent the day in a state of purposeful silliness—speaking off-handedly, acting without plans, and solving problems with intuitive leaps. It may have looked foolish, but it felt light. I find myself caring less about life’s minor details, moving forward with the sense that, as they say, life is a fucking movie.

The silliest moment came when I got off the subway a stop early. I meant to wait for the next train home, but on an impulse, I stepped onto the escalator and emerged above ground. I stood there, breezes brushing past, and gazed at a street so close to my own yet unfamiliar. It was just one stop away, but it felt strangely significant—like connecting scattered puzzle pieces, like Kenshin Himura wandering between towns, or Siddhartha Gautama weaving and re-weaving the net of his desires into the same river.

As I walked and looked, my breath grew heavy and emotion condensed in my chest—a distilled sorrow, dwindling in the wind of late winter. Tears almost came. I’m still not sure why. I suppose you never really learn how precious life is from any single thing, but from that first step taken not away from something, but toward a promise made to your own reflection.

I long for change, and change demands courage and a kind of determination I have to gather from within.
But reality stays quiet, obeying its own laws: like an apple dropping to the ground, following nothing except the most basic rules of physics.
We can even write it as an equation, Newton’s F = G * (m₁ * m₂) / r². I’ve made my vow: to change, to live with intention, knowing that transformation takes time and relentless effort.

Truthfully, it’s hard. Change never comes easily. In this sprawling city, long train rides sometimes leave me dizzy, unmoored. I try to pull back, to hide inside the shell of my pride, but something underneath keeps shouting—while music keeps echoing all around me.

我从山中来，带着兰花草。
种在小园中，希望花开早。
一日看三回，看得花时过。
兰花却依然，苞也无一个。

There is a particular bitterness in showing weakness—in giving words to what I’d rather keep unsaid. It stings, like fire against raw skin. Sometimes I’d rather disappear into endless programming tasks than face that exposure. The whole journey feels like a plum’s bitterness: sour, astringent, slow to sweeten. All I can do is keep going, wrapped in helplessness and stubbornness at once.

I spent seven years at my alma mater, and from the first day I set foot on foreign soil I knew its motto: “Naturam Primum Cognoscere Rerum”—first, to learn the nature of things.
Maybe I’m only now beginning to understand it, with the clarity time gives. Even after two degrees, in different colleges within the same university, it’s taken me this long. I used to think I wasn’t smart, only good at little tricks. But perhaps it was never about intelligence. Perhaps it was simply nature playing its own tricks, while I built castles to conceal my real self—knowing the truth all along, yet refusing to admit it.

Still, I’m doing alright. Let me endure—to taste the plum’s sharp, tart edge to the very end. Let the world not tighten around me as the long season passes.

I’ve been feeling unexpectedly relaxed this week. Maybe it’s what they mean by, “The Bodhi is not a tree, the bright mirror is no stand.” I hate to admit it, but I think I’m growing up—and not in that teenage, performative way. I’m in my mid-twenties now, physically settled and mentally adapting after nearly two years of full-time work. So many experiences, even the small ones, have left their mark. But lately, things have started to feel more familiar. I’m finding a rhythm, beginning to understand the nature of my work.

You know what strikes me about Beijing? It has this punk spirit. It’s an intensely high-pressure city, yet it’s also the most punk place in mainland China, the birthplace of Chinese punk and rock. I think the people who come to live here carry a kind of punk attitude, or to put it more plainly, an absorbed, unfiltered way of being. Let me describe a small moment: sometimes when I walk from the subway to the office, I see an old man on an electric wheelchair, bundled in thick clothes that make him look like a Tiger tank from World War II. He moves slowly down the street, just a little faster than walking pace. Once, I saw him stop—and then light a cigarette. He took a drag, held it, and continued steering his chair forward, a wisp of smoke trailing from his fingertips. All around him, electric bikes and people rush past like a gale or a downpour. In that stillness, he reminded me of Guts from Berserk. Weird, I know, but you see what I mean. Those are the kind of sparks you find in everyday life.

There’s no big philosophy here, just sketches of life—less ideological imprint, more pure perspective. It’s like the lyrics say: “I know you desperate for a change, let the pen glide. But the only real change come from inside. But the only real change come from inside.”

At this stage—late twenty-five, nearing twenty-six, time once gentle now cuts like a blade. Tick-tock, tick-tock. It carries away a youth overgrown with weeds, disperses the mist, and leaves me aboard a ship on a silent, vast sea. But am I sailing, or merely drifting? Am I building my own saga, or lost in a beautiful dream woven by others?

I ponder the difference, and why it matters. This isn’t about work. It’s about looking back at my past and setting aside the meaning I’ve clung to but never truly owned. I must recognize it as Bad Faith, the elephant in the room. Simply put, I have not been true to myself, especially in my decisions and intentions. People may never notice, but I’ve built walls in my mind, and my behavior echoes in an endless cycle. I accomplish many things outwardly, yet in my own life, I procrastinate. I deceive myself.

Life is like a strand of spring wind. In the blink of an eye, decades have shaped a person with a full history of mind and body. It feels like a long prologue, scripted with deep secrets and innocent silence. I want to be true. I don’t want to waste or delay any longer. This urge erupts like a volcanom, sky collapsing, earth splitting open—my heart burns like a ruby. All the silent sufferings of late nights rush to my head, make me leap from bed, stand with hands behind my head, breathless.

I am desperate to be true to myself. To finish what was left undone. To heal scars that have lingered for decades. I’ll tell no one, my pride and fragile self-esteem echo too loudly. I will take it slow and silent, gradual, step by step, like fitting together pieces of a puzzle. I know it isn’t impossibly difficult. It just takes courage.

Life is so short. In this vast world, many never have the chance to live to my age.
Oh, be true, my dear only self.
Be silent. This is a redemption no one will witness.
Don’t cry, just exhale the stale air that has lingered too long in your chest.

It seems okay, probably. Even though many people are leaving, which makes the workstation feel empty. I don’t pretend to like them all. I thought it would be terrible to handle things with fewer people—well, turns out it is fine. People are resilient enough to manage. I was thinking it was just about me, but now I think it’s the same for everyone who remains.

It seems easier, recently. With more spare time and more empty workstations, I mostly sit and learn things about programming—frameworks or languages. Winter has come. Snow remains on the street, but it’s not cold. For some reason, I prefer to sit and learn alone during lunch, whereas before, when people were around, I took a walk every noon.

It seems quieter, personally. I don’t speak much when I sit and handle my things—I guess because no one sits nearby. But I have plenty of conversations when work requires it. Most of the time, my headphones are on. I’m learning, and sometimes I message colleagues when they reach out to me. It reminds me of my postgraduate life, during breaks or vacations, when I would sit in the law school library—a very old and quiet place, even though it was the tiniest of all the libraries.

I feel as though we are constantly swept up in storms of change. Social transformation is dissolving grand narratives, while also compelling us to create personal meaning. In this historical moment, nothing is guaranteed.

I do not pretend to have no understanding, nor do I submit to the idea that one must clearly comprehend the suffering of existence. It simply happens, and the only thing I can do is accept it and move forward—striving to find, from my own perspective, a point of balance.

It seems inevitable to live in a state of constant change and, at times, profound solitude. Yet perhaps this is not entirely a bad thing: it allows us to see more clearly and know ourselves more deeply. The task, then, is to build an inner order and find a way to live within it.

It is a little sad, recently.
I suppose for many reasons.

Some companies have already moved on, and many teams are downsizing. Outsourced colleagues are the first to go. People are leaving, some lucky enough to transfer to other projects, even if far away; others now practicing LeetCode, memorizing problems, preparing for interviews they never expected to take.

It’s hard to stay light.
I’ve worked closely with many of them. As a new graduate, some guided me through those early days, how to be a programmer, how to grow, through all the conflicts and frustrations. I’ve noticed something: as a backend engineer, most were willing to help, to teach, to guide. In contrast, others—project managers, product managers, frontend developers, QA, often seemed less devoted. Especially the product managers.
Yet backends are generally diligent, hardworking. And yet, ironically, many of the outsourced backend and frontend developers are now leaving, while some of those product managers will stay.

As what they call “self-owned R&D,” I don’t feel better than them. I just happen to be a formal employee here. There’s no pride in that, only a quiet sadness.
They gave me a complete lesson in career, not just in code, but in what work really means.

I appreciate them.
But now there is much I must handle alone, and that is frightening. I hope I am ready. I am willing to step forward.

The economy is hard. Life is unkind. Downsizing is everywhere.
All I can keep is patience, and hope.
Good luck, everyone, in this drifting wind.

I’m writing this post to capture a feeling — though I can’t quite define what it is, nor come up with a proper title. So, let’s just call it Snapshot, like those untitled Chinese poems of the past (wuti, 无题). I don’t know if anyone will ever read this and feel like they’ve gotten to know me, but I hold on to the faint hope that somewhere out there, someone might stumble upon this — and realize that, once, a person tried to document a fleeting moment of his life.

By the way, I’m writing this in IntelliJ IDEA. I assume if you’re reading this, you probably found it through GitHub or a similar site — which means you’ve already figured out I’m a programmer. So yeah, no surprise there. Speaking of IDEA, the AI code completion tool keeps suggesting words while I type. I didn’t disable it — it’s actually kind of amusing to see what the AI thinks I’m about to say. At the very least, it makes writing a bit less boring. Haha.