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Eating While Looking at Your Phone
One afternoon, I was installing a custom Rom on my phone. Even though it was a 2024 model, it still only had USB 2.0, so data transfer was painfully slow—and I had a lot to back up and restore. Dinner time rolled around and the job still wasn’t done, but I had to eat, so…
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Falling in Love as a Transformative Experience
Why do we describe the act of loving someone as “falling in love”? It is not entirely clear who first used this expression, but it is said to have originated around the early modern period, around 1500, and some people connect it to Shakespeare. Fall in love has long become a commonplace expression in English,…
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The Substantial Foundation of Work-Life Balance: High-Quality Private Time
The phenomenon of extremely long working hours—more than 40 hours per week—exists in both the United States and China. Yet in the U.S., it is mostly confined to a few “bloodsucking” industries, while in China, it permeates nearly every sector of the workforce. One could say that the U.S. lacks a widespread overtime culture, but…
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How to Escape the Age of Mediocrity: Founding an Entirely New System of Education, Art, and Science Institutions
A “genius” is someone with extraordinarily high creativity. Today, we cannot say there are no geniuses, but they are exceedingly rare. For example, the greatest living philosophers today might be Habermas, Žižek, and Agamben—but compared with Kant, Fichte, and Hegel, who lived in roughly the same historical period, the difference is like night and day.…
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The Rise of Artificial Intelligence and the Great Stagnation of the Human Spirit: How AI Will Destroy Creativity and Genius
Today, major tech companies around the world are engaged in an arms race over AI products, releasing new iterations of their generative AI tools every few months. A few months ago, China’s Deepseek caused a brief panic in Silicon Valley and Washington by achieving performance close to ChatGPT at a significantly lower cost—this only intensified…
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Is China a Collectivist Society or an Atomized One?
Is China a collectivist society or an atomized one? As I was reading through various academic papers, I noticed some scholars still describe China as a collectivist society, while others have already picked up on its growing atomization. On online forums and insightful blogs, it’s rare to find anyone still clinging to the label of…
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Romantic Love and Freedom
There is a rather superficial view that romantic love and freedom are contradictory. Some people even recite Petőfi’s widely known verses: “Life is dear, love is dearer. Both can be given up for freedom.” I used to think this was just a joke, especially when people used it to explain why they were still single.…
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On Loneliness
Loneliness is the destiny of human beings, an unavoidable and fated part of life. Since the 19th century, many philosophers, writers, and psychologists have expressed this attitude from different perspectives, such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Thomas Wolfe, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hannah Arendt, and Irvin Yalom, among others. Regardless, the belief that loneliness is a human destiny seems…
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Correspondence Between China and the World’s Mainstream Social Media: From Both Respectives
From the World’s Perspective: World China Notes Facebook No After Renren’s demise, China no longer has an open, real-name, all-in-one social platform Instagram No X/Twitter Weibo（微博） Weibo’s content is semi-closed loop, while X/Twitter is open Messenger/WhatsApp/Telegram WeChat (only chatting part) YouTube BiliBili（哔哩哔哩） YouTube doesn’t have BiliBili’s signature pop-up feature, and it has ads. Its 4K…
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TikTok is Bad, but REDNote is Even Worse
In response to a possible upcoming on TikTok in the USA, many young Americans are now flocking to REDNote. The saying goes that between two evils, people should choose the lesser one, but now they seem to be choosing the bigger one. Concerns about TikTok are understandable. It does indeed collect people’s data and may…