The Path

For the first time, I have this strong feeling: I want to change industries, to change the way I do things.

It’s been this way for nearly two years — a feeling of being in a comfort zone. Of the things I spend most of my energy on each day, very few can be absorbed into my body as something new.

Hmm, a copy-pasting copywriter — that roughly sums up my work in the years since I came back to Shenzhen. The job is to take copy written by those before me, rearrange the order, re-edit it according to a new client’s preferences, then bind it into a volume and sell it.

Many people who sail along smoothly fall into path dependence at some point — even though each local choice may be optimal, in the end it adds up to ordinariness. This is like the problem with a greedy algorithm: depending on the initial value, optimizing along the gradient can only reach a local optimum. It means the height you can ultimately reach is decided at the very beginning. One of the algorithms that can break this situation is simulated annealing. The idea of simulated annealing is to introduce randomness in the early stages and reduce the random factor as the iterations increase, so that the probability of eventually converging to the global optimum is greater. Thinking about career choice through this idea, I decided to jump out of my existing path — even if the road ahead on this path is bright, right now it is simply to experience different choices.

Of course, I can hardly call myself someone who sails along smoothly — “full of hardships” would be closer. But sinking into hardships that make one comfortable is still path dependence.

Yesterday I watched Garry Marshall’s Pretty Woman (I prefer its other Chinese translation, “Beauty of the Romantic Scene”), and Hirokazu Koreeda’s After the Storm. Two utterly different films, yet in the end they gave me one seamless feeling — new life: Vivian’s new life after recognizing her own potential, and Ryota’s new life after letting go of his ex-wife.

Not everyone can enjoy abundance, full of strength, free and unrestrained. But the world is open to everyone; the efforts we make, the scenery we pass, the experiences we gain are all different, yet we all receive the world’s most truthful feedback — and the duration of that feedback is the same for all.