On the last day of 2024, I opened WeChat Reading and watched the final number settle at 365 hours. The app told me I had averaged one hour a day, up 151% from the previous year. I let out a quiet breath of relief.
It seems ridiculous that a number like that could trigger my compulsiveness and competitive streak, the same way I had to avoid stepping on the seams between floor tiles as a child. I still cannot explain why it felt important.
Honestly, my brain has been getting less reliable. Some people equate a good memory with intelligence; by that measure, I am now impressively stupid. My memory can hold, at best, the most recently read book, and even that only about five hours. At dinner I will share some newly acquired proctology fact - did you know the saying that nine out of ten men get hemorrhoids? - and my companions look at me as if I have lost my mind. Then I open the app again to check what the previous book was. Ah, right. Only then does it come back.
So why spend 365 hours reading books I cannot remember?
I have made peace with the forgetting. What I care about is the feeling I have while reading a particular book, the abstract, hard-to-express sensation that becomes a star buried somewhere inside me. I know I will not retain much, but when some prompt triggers it, those stars connect into lines, and a new idea is born. Too many people have told me I sound like GPT. Fine. Maybe I am.
And I am too curious about what is happening in the world. Countless mysteries only release their fragrance when chewed slowly.
- Where did Islam in Xinjiang originate?
- What is the difference between Uyghur and Hui people?
- What was the beginning of the conflicts in the Middle East?
- Why do people get bored?
- What is the meaning of work?
- What is the meaning of my life?
- Why am I happy? Why am I unhappy?
- What does a long-lived company look like?
- Why does the world keep staging absurd dramas?
- What is a root canal?
- What is the difference between a dental bridge and an implant?
- Who is Li Juan?
- Why do I have so many why questions?
Eventually, I threw up. Not physically - mentally. In November alone I read for 55 hours, and I could not take it anymore. The overdose of knowledge churned my mind until it turned on me. For two weeks afterward I did not open a single book. Fortunately, things returned to normal, and there have been no new cases of intellectual rumination.
Language is the dwelling place of wisdom. I gnaw through piles of human writing to understand this peculiar species that possesses language, and I keep adding new stars to my inner sky. As new stars arrive, old ones are either lit up or abandoned. This year I read quite a few interesting books, and several times I felt my inner sky light up; dopamine hit a high point.
Maybe because I find it difficult to communicate with people, I read several books about communication this year - from how to be a good salesperson to how to listen sincerely. While reading, everything seemed clear; when I put the book down, I felt lost again. Language is a strange thing. A word can mean entirely different things in different contexts, moods, and levels of understanding. Then I came across an unusual book:
Everything About Speaking
On WeChat Reading it has only a 70% recommendation rate, so it is clearly not for everyone, but for me it is a masterpiece. Many comments call it pretentious and mystifying. What I saw was the author Tang Zhi's pure heart. He opened up his brain and showed it to me - the blood vessels crisscrossing beneath the arachnoid membrane, the pink, fragile brain trembling slightly in front of me.
The title makes it sound like a bestseller teaching speaking tricks, but it is actually a deeply speculative book that digs to the bottom of what language is. If you like thinking and have read some philosophy, I strongly recommend it. Even setting aside the actual people it discusses, it looks to me like a golden key for having efficient conversations with AI.
A person is the sum of all their past experience. In other words, any recommendation from outside that experiential world is meaningless. And yet I enjoy this futile pleasure all the time.
I hope that in the new year you can find childlike joy exploring your own inner world. Passion!!!