Less

Idle today, I pulled out some of the figures I loved in my youth and looked at them again. I still like them, but it all feels like something from the last century.

These two years since I started working, my interests have changed enormously: I read less of literature and history, and more of tools and practical things.

In the past, literature and history could always lift me out of myself, give me strength, nourishment, thought. Now I find it hard to take in anything too conceptual or speculative.

If I hadn’t entered the computer industry, but had gone into the news and media industry as I had longed to in university, it would probably be a very different scene. But would it be better?

Reason, politics, law, history, philosophy, claims, Taiwan, absurdity, opposition…

Algorithms, projects, testing, teams, processes, design, meetings, products, data…

Now I seem to have grown a little weary of it. Are cells and chips really isomorphic?

Someone said: so-called financial freedom means not having to sell your time to meet the needs of life. Whether that is right or wrong, let’s leave aside for now. But I really find it hard to imagine what I would do if I had no work. Would I be more at ease than now? Would there be fewer problems?

I opened my Weibo following list: 426 accounts in total. I batch-unfollowed until only 9 remained. The things that matter don’t seem to be so many after all.

What can be found at any moment, and what takes effort to find — those are the important things. The things on lists are often the least important of all.

The older I grow, the more I start to know what is important, and what the ancients left behind to mislead you.

To live a little more clearly — that would be good.