My journal reads differently this year. Instead of recording events, each page captures nuances of emotions and a deepening journey home to myself. January entries make me cringe — “I’m not satisfied with my journal.” “Can I really catch up?” My words read like an anxious parent who never stops critiquing.

March brought the connection course that changed everything. I experienced what’s like to notice my body’s sensations — tightness in my chest, numbness, cone spinning sensation — rather than getting lost in thought. During the most intense session, I felt myself shutting down and uncovered a surprising belief: “deep down people don’t trust and love each other.” When I listened to my resistance, it spoke: “please don't blame me.” I realized how much I had internalized past criticism into self-blame.

My body became my guide. An April emergency room visit nudged me to seek support and confront my past. In therapy, I discovered the weight I carried from not being heard or trusted. “You knew it’s not your fault,” my therapist said. “Your body knows it.” I learned that the real work wasn’t getting others to trust me; it was learning to trust myself.

In June, I joined the master class with newfound spaciousness after a Vajrayana retreat in Colorado mountains. During anger release, I let out primal screams I never knew I had. My body trembled and went numb, then filled with unexpected lightness. I cried often in my room, feeling waves of both grief and joy. I don’t want to manage or blame myself anymore.

In fall, I tried to follow my enjoyment. I gave myself permission to rest, sought meaningful conversations, and tried new experiences. Fear showed up, but I learned that freedom comes not from overcoming fear, but embracing it. This lesson led me to New York, where a workshop invited me to embody my opposite self. It was hard, but also freeing.

When I came home and learned that I wasn't accepted into a year-long program with the community that had shown me unconditional love, my heart broke. Yet soon I recognized my old patterns showing up. I learned to hold the part that felt abandoned while giving myself the love I needed.

Still, something was missing. I oscillated between aliveness and disconnection until winter, when a speaking class awakened my energy and confidence. I found myself moving from freezing — managing impressions, anticipating criticism, searching for “right” words — to authentic expression. Speaking from my heart gave me vitality. My body became a channel for energy. People told me how connected they felt.

I realized I had twisted enjoyment into self-sabotage again, creating helplessness to avoid love and support. My subconscious tried to protect me through isolation — a childhood survival strategy I no longer needed. I began to see the abundance of care in the people around me.

As I recognize who I am, not who I used to be or who I should be, my path grows clearer. I see myself as a protagonist free to make choices without the need to follow a “right” path, instead of a passive character constrained by circumstances.

Now I want to help others find this authentic self-connection. Three things call me forward in 2025:

• Exploring coaching while deepening my understanding of psychology and human experience

• Building deeper connections as I move to San Francisco, including intimate relationship

• Developing trust through consistent practices in writing, publishing, and speaking

I intend to embody connection, genuineness, and passion. This means choosing to connect with an open heart even when scared, letting my natural enthusiasm guide me, and caring for my body.

Thank you for reading my journey. I'd love to hear about your year and what calls you forward.

With love,
Weichen

Thumbnail photo by British Library on Unsplash

Connections, not just collections of knowledge, are what I truly seek. Building meaningful relationships doesn’t require me to be the smartest person in the room.

True connections come from within. They arise from your own state of mind, not the value you offer to others.

Happiness is woven from the threads of connection. The connection with others, ourselves, our passions, our environment, and the natural world.

Trusting oneself is a skill. Deep within your bodily sensations and intuition lies the knowledge of what’s right for you. But you need to develop the skill to discern your inner truth.

Pursuing enjoyment doesn’t mean being hedonistic. Enjoyment can be a powerful source of motivation and fulfillment.

Having desire is not the problem. Attachment is the problem. Learn to connect with your desires and express your wants without getting attached to the outcome.

Intellect is only part of your intelligence. Emotions and feelings are powerful lenses. They can unlock doors that conventional thinking doesn’t recognize.

Follow your curiosity and solve your own problems, instead of believing you must tackle large, abstract, or existential issues. The constant pursuit of doing “important” things can result in overthinking and contrived meaning-making.

Your beliefs and emotional patterns follow you regardless of your external pursuits. If these inner landscapes are holding you back, having the time and space to work through them with patience and self-compassion is crucial.

‌Priorities shift, and that’s okay. Embrace rather than resist these shifts, as change is a natural part of the growth process. Self-doubt and feelings of insecurity are features, not bugs.

Mood fluctuations are normal too. You may sometimes feel deeply sad or anxious without a clear external cause, and that’s okay.

Go exercise. Get hydrated. Rest. Emotional states are physiological, not just mental.

You’re a social animal. Experiencing something through conversation as opposed to reading it in a book can exert completely different effects. While learning may appear to be an individual pursuit, it is more impactful and enjoyable when undertaken with others.

Money is a neutral tool for exchanging value. One person’s gain doesn’t mean another’s loss.

Every idea contains both elements of truth and falsity. When you learn a new theory, you also learn a new misunderstanding. Actively seek out disconfirming evidence and avoid going to extremes. What has been working for you may not be effective in the future.

Embrace iterations over the pursuit of absolute truths. While we can strive to get closer to objective truth, no truth we derive is immutable or beyond questioning. Personal truths are subjective. Rather than seeking definite answers, engage in your own experiments and discover what works for you.

Be careful of reductionist thinking. Complex systems cannot be fully understood by breaking them down into components, and historical trends do not determine future outcomes. Avoid simplistic thinking in both understanding the world and yourself.

What people say or do to you reflect more of themselves than you. External circumstances matter less than how you relate to them mentally.

Like riding a bike, you maintain balance by not trying to. Similarly, the experience of presence arises when the idea of being present is forgotten.

What matters most is whether you are aligning with your authentic self. Progress is not linear; it’s filled with turns and detours that defy quantification. Let your inner sense of alignment, not external affirmation, be your ultimate measure of progress.

Thumbnail photo by Catherine Kay Greenup on Unsplash

About nine years ago when I just arrived in the U.S. for graduate school, I felt like a mess. The desire to study hard and secure a job was there, but I just couldn’t get out of bed each day to do my work. I was overwhelmed by the new environment and my fear of ending up as a loser.

One day, a news story caught my attention: a student was shot and killed in Los Angeles, not far from my location. 

I was waiting in a bus stop under the blazing sun, without anybody around. A scene started to play in my mind’s eye: a black car appeared from the corner, rushing through the street. A man rolled down the window and pointed his gun at me. I was shot. While falling down the street, I saw the black car disappear before anyone noticed.

When I blinked my eyes and came back to the reality of scorching sunlight, I heard the voice in my head :

“I don’t want to die like this when I’m wasting my time doing nothing.”

”If I were to die like this, it would be as if I had never existed.”

”I should do something before I die.”

That was when I started really tackling my problems at hand.

…

Another story was three weeks ago and ended up a bit differently.

It was a quiet evening. I just finished a cup of smoothie with my roommate when I felt some discomfort in my heart. Restlessness took over. I walked back to my room and tested ECG with my Apple Watch. At first it turned out inconclusive. I tried again, and a yellow warning sign jumped at my eyes: atrial fibrillation.

I’ve never seen this result before — tried a couple more times and it was the same alarming outcome. I got more and more anxious, so I asked my roommate to take me to the emergency room. The ride to the hospital was probably the longest sixteen minutes I’ve experienced. My body kept shaking involuntarily, and I feared my heart might stop on our way to the hospital.

…

Fortunately, nothing too serious happened. It got me thinking a lot about death.

First off, it was very different in thinking about “Memento mori” versus when you feel like you’re actually dying.

Last year my grandma died at the age of ninety-two. About a month before, she fell down and was sent to ICU. We were both surprised and happy that she survived the ICU and were able to see her again.

When we arrived, my grandma stared at us for a while, then started sobbing, “look at how good each of you are, yet I’m dying…”

People started to comfort her, “You’re not dying. You’ll be fine.”

On the way out I commented, “If I were her, I would have more gratitude that I got to see my family again and live for at least one more day.”

Now I realize how wrong I was to judge her mental state. Death is anything but gentle. I wished I could have stayed by her side, holding her hands, and told her “I’m with you and love you,” completely allowing her to feel.

…

So what is this difference between thinking of dying and feeling?

It’s about the illusion of control. While we can plan our time and nudge ourselves into doing something meaningful, facing actual death reveals how little control we truly have.

During that sixteen minutes, I realized that I had no control whatsoever on my heart. It could have stopped beating at any moment. It is as scary as that.

Or, as Ajahn Chah said, “Death is as close as the breath.”

…

As I started getting back to my usual life, I didn’t feel the sense of urgency I had nine years ago. The urge to achieve something or to make a dent in the world no longer exists.

Given how little control we have, can we ever be certain of achieving any outcome at all?

If this sounds nihilistic, it might well be. At times, I feel as though I’m in free fall, yet I’m convinced there is no bottom.

Now, it’s spring. I was awestruck by a tree blooming with white flowers outside the building. Was the tree determined to do all of this? No, it simply flourishes when conditions are right. And it’s no denying how beautiful it is.

I sense that there is nothing I should do or stuff I have to achieve to prove my existence or worthiness. I’m simply who I am.

My whole body relaxes when I let these sensations in. I see endless possibilities before me. The only limitations are the choices I make based on what I truly want. Nothing stops me but myself.

And when I lean into that ease—or one might call boundless emptiness—something flows out. Perhaps the feeling of gratitude and connectedness. Like, I want to connect more deeply with others and with myself, a pursuit that always feels scary yet truly genuine to me.

Thumbnail photo by Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa

This week I finished The Art of Accomplishment Connection Course. Wow, it was powerful! I’m excited to share some of the revelations I experienced with you here.

The most signifiant takeaway wasn’t an intellectual understanding but a tangible feeling of my emotions. I realized I had never embraced such intensity. Meditation helped me recognize the raw sensations, but when emotions arose in daily life, I realized there had been resistance.

How did I encounter resistance without realizing it? For example, when anger arises during a conversation, I would feel so uncomfortable that I wanted to put a lid on it. I would tell myself I shouldn’t be feeling this, or it’s wrong to feel this.

The course created a safe environment for me to deeply experience emotions with others. The most helpful technique was to reset the body, such as by shaking or moving our feet. I guess the reason it helps is that it allows emotions to move through the body more fluidly; otherwise, they tend to get stuck in the body.

A fascinating thing was that I felt connected to my practice partners even though we just met for ten minutes. This was very different from my usual experience. I suppose the mind perceives others as different from us by default. It creates judgment out of fear and wants to protect us. But through vulnerable feelings we shared with each other, I saw the same struggle and happiness in another human being, which created deep sense of connection.

II.

I mentioned vulnerability. It’s one of the four states of mind called VIEW. Another one is wonder. It’s more of an active state than my usual passive one. If someone is not listening, I would feel offended. With wonder, I ask, “Wow, what is it that just triggered me?” The beautiful thing is that it’s not trying to change how I feel, but sheds a new light. It gets me out of my patterned response.

This is the central theme I learned: the place of resistance and discomfort is also the place I can grow. I always felt bad about judging others, but judgment can be a tool to understand ourselves. I’ll give an example.

One pattern that happens repeatedly is when I’m waiting in a line, I find myself judging people in front of me for taking a lot of time. This might happen in an airport security line where people have a lot of unpack from their bags, or in a checkout line where people have full baskets. Using this judgment as a tool, I notice it actually reflects my fear of being judged by others. For instance, in group conversations, I censor myself because I fear wasting others’ time without any contributions. Deep down, I think I worry that I’m not good enough, smart enough, or kind enough. I fear acting spontaneously will expose my flaws and others will reject me.

I used to get overly intellectual about this. I ask, why do I have such tendency? Why can’t I welcome more love? Why not just trust myself? These are again judgment. They bring out more shame which locks me in the same place. I learned that I could simply ask how I feel: What’s the difference between managing and then blaming myself versus just being the way I want to be? The latter feels less constricted, with more joy and ease.

III.

Often, I hesitate, like when speaking up in a group, fearing it might lead to disaster. I know it’s not true, but my body refuses to try it out. In a sense, I’m actually inviting what I’m afraid to feel.

In one exercise, we repeatedly asked each other, “What’s awesome about that?” There was nothing awesome about being afraid to speaking up and closing myself off, I thought. But as the exercise unfolded, my answer ended up in a place where I actually wanted to be.

I close myself up -> so I don’t need to interact with others -> I feel more safe -> I can be more of myself -> I don’t need to care about what other people think -> I can do what I want -> …

The outcome was like first-order negative and nth-order positive, but my unaware problem was that I always stopped myself before taking the first step, preventing me from being authentic and getting in touch with a deeper truth.

One might think this is about positivity. I see it more about possibility. Stepping out of usual frame of thinking opens up paths that we previously ignored. We don’t have to take the new path, of course, but seeing it gets us out of binary thinking and gives us freedom of choice.

IV.

Impartiality, another state of mind, was also very new to me. Meditation practice has helped me drop many agendas for myself (like now I can be more present), but the exercises opened up another layer of agenda I have for myself and others.

A major aspect is about my relationship with my mother. Through the course, I realized there was a feeling that I was never understood, heard, or trusted by her, and this belief has been self-reinforcing since my childhood. The more I believed that, the more I had an agenda to prove myself and wanted her to be different, so the more I wasn’t listening to her; the less empathetic I was, the more she resisted me; and the vicious cycle continued. It made me realize it was not completely her fault (I had a victim mentality), but I played a part too by not actively listening. Now, I’m not concerned about who is to blame anymore, but more about what I can do to have more empathy and not want me or her to be different.

I think the way the VIEW state of mind works is not by doing. I used to explain my mom’s behavior by her experiences and ignorance, which gave me empathy. It works intellectually, but this neurological pathway is never activated when I’m under threat. In the moment of emotional intensity, the rational brain is just offline. The kind of non-doing is to simply open up awareness and be with the other without trying. This needs practice, which I think is really how the course helped me in integration.

V.

The fourth session was the most intense for me, which was about empathy. I noticed myself letting my negativity out in full force. I used to be very cautious about showing pessimism to others, but that time I let my skepticism in my head all out:

“These all work great in the course, but won’t work in real life.” 
“The world is not like this, where people can show their true authentic self.” 
“We’ll fail miserably if we do these.”

And something magical happened when my practice partner held the space of openness: I got myself back soon.

Expressing my negative emotions used to be devastating because I thought my energy would destroy the other person (which in turn would destroy me), but my parter was full of wonder. This showed an outcome that was completely opposite of my belief. It also showed me that when I felt victimized, it’s more about my own inability to create space to hold the emotions and accept things as they are.

I feel there’s so much more to explore and learn from my feelings. Much of which I can’t fully articulate now. I want the process to unfold itself, rather than rush to answers. And I’d love to continue sharing this journey with you.

If there’s anything you’d like to share, feel free to comment, say hi on X, or leave anonymous feedback here.

Until next time,
Weichen

Deceptions

They argue that in ambitious pursuits, an objective-driven approach is not just useless but harmful.

Embarking on an ambitious endeavor means navigating without a clear map. If we mechanically pursue the objective, we would predict and pick the stepping stones toward that goal. Yet, they rarely resemble the final product. For example, people set out to invent the first computer won’t meticulously study vacuum tube, but the tubes turned out to be critical. Stepping stones or measures of success are often deceptive. If we focus only on them, they can lead us away from the goal.

The logic of discovery

Rather than focus on the final destination, it helps to collect stepping stones for their own sake. They’re interesting, and they can lead us to more.

Why does chasing interestingness get us closer to ambitious goal? How is it different from a random search?

People want to measure their progress because it provides information. But as mentioned, objectives can be deceptive. Interestingness provides no lack of information. It’s just a different kind. It’s based on the past, on what we’ve seen, rather than the unknown future. The past usually provides richer information.1

Another way to look at this is that searching for interestingness results in a certain order. The order is not based on good or bad in light of the objective — again, such judgment can be premature — it’s a relative measure because what was novel doesn’t stay novel. The ordering is from simple to complex.

The evolution from simplicity to complexity entails accumulation of knowledge, as finding something new requires learning about the world. I use the word evolution because it works similarly:

As Stephen Jay Gould has pointed out in evolution, once all the simple ways to live are exhausted, the only way to create a new species or niche is to become more complex. In other words, there are only so many ways of being a bacteria. That’s why increasing complexity is almost inevitable if evolution is to continue. But these increases in complexity are not arbitrary. Rather, they reflect the properties of the world in which evolution takes place: Eyes represent the presence of light in the universe. Ears signify mechanical vibration. Legs are reflections of gravity, and lungs of oxygen.

Personally, following my curiosity makes sense because I end up learning about the world and myself. I don’t need the objective to keep my discovery bounded because the world provides its own constraints.2

One caveat is that this approach doesn’t guarantee success when the goal is too ambitious, just like objective-driven approach. (The authors tested it with their novelty search algorithms.) The bright side though, is that we will find something interesting; we just can’t predict what it is.

Be a treasure hunter

I find the logic of discovery illuminating. It prompts me to be more attuned to my curiosity and follow its lead. It also tells me to focus more on the stepping stones I’ve collected and decide where to go based on where I am, rather than where I should or want to be.3 Successful inventors don’t waste effort on far-off grandiose visions but concentrate on the edge of what’s possible today.

This approach challenges us to let go of the comforting notion of a “right path.”

It’s tempting to think of progress as a set of projects, some of them on the wrong path and some on the right. […] Instead of judging every activity for its potential to succeed, we should judge our projects for their potential to spawn more projects. If we really behave as treasure hunters and stepping stone collectors, then the only important thing about a stepping stone is that it leads to more stepping stones, period. […] The more stepping stones we find, the more opportunities there are to depart to somewhere greater.

Criticisms

How do we decide what’s interesting then? It seems to say nothing more than follow your gut feelings, which is one criticism of the book.

I find the major weakness is that it can explain away any successful objective-driven pursuits as unambitious. The Manhattan project is an example: was it not ambitious enough? This makes the theory irrefutable. I think in practice, the difficulty lies in judging whether something is just one stepping stone away, or so ambitious that we should dismiss objectives completely.

Implications for other areas

The authors explore the problems of objective thinking and how we can do better following a treasure-hunting strategy.

Education

Measures come from an objective-driven mindset. We already know that measurement ceases to work once they’re known — map is not the reality, and people find ways to get away from it or even make things worse.

But still, we were taught to stay away from those who have no concrete goals for the future — we’re supposed to have a plan and a purpose, and pursue it wholeheartedly. 

Education falls under the problem as it heavily relies on assessment. The authors envision an alternative where teachers have more freedom to try different ideas rather than rely on uniform measurement. Progress can be measured in a peer-driven way: schools are assessed based on their own situation. They believe that in societal efforts like education, we might make better progress by exposing each other to potential stepping stones to new ideas.4

Innovation and consensus

The authors discuss how granting agencies for scientific research are often based on consensus, and caution that it works against exploring stepping stones. A different approach might be to reward maximal disagreement (e.g. a project that receives “excellent, excellent, poor, poor” could be more interesting than “excellent, excellent, excellent, excellent.”)

Judgmentalism is the natural habitat of the objective-seeker, always worried about where everyone else will end up. But we are all better off in the end if we end up at different places. Otherwise, everyone would be standing on the same stepping stone. That’s why we need to beware of the seduction of consensus. Of course, if we all want to end up in the same place, the right place, then it makes sense to push towards consensus. But that should be the last thing we want. Disagreement and divergence are virtues that deserve to be protected.

One such example is to judge projects based on the importance of their predicted impacts. The authors argue that even if we can reliably estimate impact, such “importance” can be deceptive, as important discoveries are often serendipitous. It’s better to pursue interesting projects that lead to further unanticipated experiments, rather than focusing on their own importance.5

Why is objective thinking so alluring? One reason is our fear of risk. But risk-averse objective thinking limits progress.

Consensus, perceived importance, alignment with national interests—these are “objective” parachutes for escaping the great unknown when we should be rocketing further into it.

Natural Selection

People interpret “survival of the fittest” differently, with one view linked to objective thinking: competition leads to fitter organisms. Under this view, evolution is progressive — we’re objectively superior to bacteria. But the authors argue that if evolution has the goal, it was already accomplished because bacteria survived and reproduced. Rather, selection restricts exploration — a Gentle Earth with no selection pressure would produce more creative organisms.

“Survival and reproduction” is more of a constraint than objective, and evolution is more like a treasure hunter than an optimizer. As the authors argue, the main engine behind evolution’s creativity is searching for many ways to solve the same problem, and competition only plays a secondary role.

Why doesn’t competition cause evolution to converge on an optimal solution? One reason is that competition in evolution isn’t global; each organism doesn’t compete with every other organism in the same way. Global competition seeks the best overall, while local competition encourages the founding of new niches to escape competition.

While the book didn’t entirely shift my perspective, as I didn’t subscribe to the all-powerful objective thinking to begin with, I enjoyed reading it and learning about why an objective-less approach works and how it connects to a wide range of things.

I hope you find it helpful. If there’s anything you’d like to share, feel free to say hi on X or leave anonymous feedback here.

Until next time,
Weichen

Hayek argues against the idea that central planning can achieve societal goals more efficiently than a market-based economy. He warns that it can lead to totalitarianism.

Planning

Socialism not only means its ultimate aims of social justice, greater equality and security, but also the particular methods many believe to be the only ways, like abolishing private enterprise and creating a planned economy.

The disagreement between planners and opponents is not whether to plan or not, but what and how.

One view argues that the market economy no longer works due to technological advance erasing competition. But Hayek questions if it’s due to technology, or in fact policies pursued in most countries.

Hayek says improved production efficiency didn't eliminate competition. Confirming events are largely due to the influence of prophecy as such. He warns that we should caution about inevitability, as “in social evolution nothing is inevitable but thinking makes it so.”

Democracy

Some criticize the society lacks a “conscious” direction and its activities are guided by “the whims and fancies of irresponsible individuals.”

Hayek argues that the concept of the “common good” lacks a clear meaning — “The welfare and the happiness of millions cannot be measured on a single scale... [they] depend on a great many things that can be provided in an infinite variety of combinations.”

While individuals have different goals, many have the same ends. Common actions should be limited to common ends. Taking actions beyond these common ends suppresses individual freedom. “It is a superstition to believe that there must be a majority view on everything.”

Under democracy, the majority may not always make sane choices. Democracy is a means to safeguard internal peace and individual freedom. It’s not the will of the majority that prevents arbitrary power, but the limitation of power.

The Rule of Law

Hayek distinguishes between two kinds of rules: 1) rules that set a framework for individuals to freely decide how to use resources; 2) rules that specify how resources should be used for specific purposes. For example, designing a highway code and setting up signposts, versus directing people which road to take.

The first kind of rule can be made in advance without considering specific needs. Economic planning is different — when deciding how many pigs to be raised, it discriminates one group from another.

Totalitarianism

Supporters of economic control claim it can be separate from politics. Hayek believes state planning makes all economic and social questions political, as power decides distribution.

It’s simplistic to say all governments affect the relative position of different people. Measures can be taken without knowing their individual impact. The extent matters: whether anyone gets anything depends on the government, or if the influence is limited to some people in some way at some time.

Planners often face unexpected outcomes after making decisions. They have to create new, sometimes inconsistent rules on the spot to address these issues. 

A common strategy to gain acceptance is to convince people that the new values still align with their existing beliefs. For example, both democracy and socialism share the word “equality.” Democracy seeks it in liberty, while socialism seeks it in restraints and servitude. Socialists and liberals say “freedom,” but Hayek sees it as exploitation as socialists want equal wealth distribution.

Another strategy is to unite people against those they dislike or envy, external forces or those better off, rather than towards positive causes. Individual criticism will be suppressed to maintain loyalty to the system, affecting everyday activities and limiting innovation.

Thanks for reading! If there’s anything you’d like to share, feel free to say hi on X or leave anonymous feedback here.

Until next week,
Weichen

Thumbnail photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash

This is a mistake of reductionism. Some things only emerge when looking at the higher level and can’t be predicted just by analyzing the parts. For example, to understand the future of the solar system, we need to take the emergence of life into consideration.

Events often have emergent qualities that are not directly traceable to past causes. Another issue with reductionism is its attempt to explain outcomes solely based on their earlier causes. For example, some attribute the dominance of European civilization to only geographical causes.

The problem is that, besides the practical inability to know all details of historical events, or to calculate all interactions of constituents of a system, these lower-level facts aren’t always explanatory. For example, even if we can explain why a certain atom ended up on the screen of my laptop, it can’t tell us why this MacBook was created.

Explaining events by their causes is only backward-looking. Explanation of this kind may very well be right. Geographical advantages did contribute greatly to the dominance of European civilization. Our behavior was the result of neuron excitements, hormones, childhood experiences, fetal environments, genes, culture, and so on. But depending on the problem you’re trying to solve, such a way of explaining can be bad.

It cannot explain the future. Simply saying “the future will be determined by its past” explains little. It can lead to a neglect of agency and change if we’re not careful in applying the explanation to an unconditional, open environment.

Accepting this way of thinking does have some merits. I find it well aligned with the Stoics’ attitude of being fatalist about the past. Accepting past events leaves no room for hatred towards ourselves or others. But this does not justify future behavior, by believing that one can’t help but do something, writing off moral responsibility.

On this Week

I revisited the updated version of Working Identity and found the following ideas worth reminding, especially if you're on a similar journey of discovery, connections, and finding life’s work:

1/ We have no “true self”, but many selves; do parallel experiments to test which of those works.

2/ Don’t just focus on the work; Find people who are what we want to be and who can provide support for the transition.

3/ Actively interpret past experiences and retell our stories; over time this leads to clarity.

Question I’m wondering

Are there any non-traditional learning spaces that emphasize curiosity-driven exploration and discussion, without being tied to overly structured curriculums, dogmatic assessments, or future returns?

Thanks for reading! If there’s anything you’d like to share, feel free to say hi on X or leave anonymous feedback here.

Until next week,
Weichen

Thumbnail photo by British Library on Unsplash

My belief began to waver as I dove into complex systems and quantum theory. Although my grasp of these concepts is still in its infancy, I am excited to share my discoveries. I hope you find it as fascinating to read as I did to write.

Chaotic unpredictability

Determinism sounds logical under Newtonian mechanics — if we know the initial conditions of a system (like the positions and velocities of all particles), we can predict its future behavior, and also retrodict its past.

This principle does not hold true in chaotic systems. Here’s an illustration from the book Determined.

Start off with a grid, like the one below, where the first row is your starting condition.

A simple rule to determine the row below: A box in the next row is filled if and only if one of the three of boxes above it is filled in. (For the first and last boxes, just look at the above two.) For example,

Now a challenge: Imagine what the pattern will turn out for each of the four.

Well, yes, we can’t predict by staring at them. Same for computers — the pattern has to be worked out step by step, not calculated with some formula. Interestingly, pattern #1 and #3 will evolve into identical forms after several generations.

This reveals a key insight: knowing the rule and the mature state of a system gives us no predictive power as to what the starting state was — multiple different starting states could lead to the same outcome.

Counterfactuals

Why was that interesting? Because that challenges causation.

For example, if each row represents one year of my life, at row 31 now I look back and tell how the past has shaped me (pattern #1). But a completely different “past” (pattern #3) could also have resulted in the same state. The actual stories could be completely different from the ones I told myself.

Another example: in computer simulations, a flap of a butterfly wing results in a hurricane. What if real hurricanes were not caused by butterflies? To say an event A causes an event B, B needs to happen after A and if A had not happened, B would not have happened (from the works of David Lewis). Because we can’t access alternative realities where A had not happened, it’s hard to establish solid cause-and-effects for historical events.

We can’t be certain about the causes because we can’t observe counterfactual events, but our complex system theories, like chaos theory, are still governed by the deterministic laws of classical physics. This implies that the effects are still determined by underlying causes, even if not apparent or could be mistaken. So to say the world might be indeterministic, we need help from quantum theory and a lot of conjectures.

Quantum indeterminism

Science has only showed quantum effects in the microscopic world. We may conjecture what it would mean for the macroscopic world to obey quantum theory.

The following passage from The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch offers an alternative explanation for the butterfly effects, invoking multiverse theory:

Consider a group of identical universes at an instant at which, in all of them, a particular butterfly's wings have flapped. Consider a second group of universes which at the same instant are identical to the first group, except that in them the butterfly's wings are down. Wait for a few hours. Quantum mechanics predicts that, unless there are exceptional circumstances, […], the two groups of universes, nearly identical at first, are still nearly identical. But each group, within itself, has become greatly differentiated. It includes universes with hurricanes, universes without hurricanes, and even a very tiny number of universes in which the butterfly has spontaneously changed its species through an accidental rearrangement of all its atoms, […] Even so, the two groups still resemble each other very closely. In the universes in which the butterfly raised its wings and hurricanes occurred, those hurricanes were indeed unpredictable; but the butterfly was not causally responsible, for there were near-identical hurricanes in universes where everything else was the same but the wings were lowered. (p. 202)

Instead of attributing weather unpredictability to initial conditions’ sensitivity in chaotic systems, Deutsch proposes an explanation rooted in the multiplicity of parallel universes: “Quantum systems do not have that sensitivity, but are unpredictable because they behave differently in different universes, and so appear random in most universes.”

Therefore

The challenge in forming reliable causal chains from a single historical observation, combined with potential quantum effects on larger-scale events, has prompted me to reconsider the certainty of determinism.

I’m not yet convinced in indeterminism either. I’m just fascinated by how knowing a bit more questions my beliefs about determinism, causation, and reality. I has also led me to reconsider, for instance, our ways of interpreting the past and the narratives we construct about our lives, which has huge effects on our present and the future.

On this Week

Implications of absence of free will

I still don’t believe we have free will though. A nice summary from Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky of what that means:

Karl Popper criticizing essentialism

In everyday language we often say what-is: someone is smart or stupid. That is the danger of unexamined essentialism, as it obstructs change and progress.

Lastly

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place. — George Bernard Shaw

Thanks for reading! 

As I mentioned, I just started learning about complex systems. If I made any mistakes, or anything interesting you’d like to share, please let me know! Feel free to connect on X or leave anonymous feedback here.

Until next week,
Weichen

Thumbnail photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash

I believed traveling would connect me to this bigger world. Unable to travel then, I embarked on a “virtual travel” project, where I planned to experience the world from my home through books and the Internet. I soon realized that I needed more than the intellectual experiences from screens and paper; I wanted direct, hands-on experiences.

When I was finally able to do so, I traveled the world for four months. I made few plans and let things happen to me. It was my first solo travel to completely unfamiliar places.

Halfway through, despite the fun, I began to question: After many random conversations with others, I didn’t feel I understood the world as deeply as I expected. Yes, my guide in Istanbul explained how inflation affected their lives, but my limited macro-economic knowledge left me unsure of what further questions to ask. I was amazed by the intricate beauty of the bas-reliefs in Angkor Wat, yet I couldn’t put the art, history, and religion into perspectives.

Despite my physical travels around the globe, I still felt encased in a bubble. How, then, can I understand the world better?

Reinterpreting reality

Before the trip I thought one needs to do direct, hands-on work to gain real understanding. Later I recognized humans can understand the universe by being stationary on Earth, suggesting it’s not necessarily so.

I had perhaps naively believed that reality was tangible, something I could see or touch, derived from my immediate senses. But in The Fabric of Reality, David Deutsch introduced a different definition: “If something can kick back, it exists.”

‘Kicking back’ here does not necessarily mean that the alleged object is responding to being kicked — to being physically affected as Dr Johnson’s rock was. It is enough that when we ‘kick’ something, the object affects us in ways that require independent explanation. For example, Galileo had no means of affecting planets, but he could affect the light that came from them. His equivalent of kicking the rock was refracting that light through the lenses of his telescopes and eyes. That light responded by ‘kicking’ his retina back. The way it kicked back allowed him to conclude not only that the light was real, but that the heliocentric planetary motions required to explain the patterns in which the light arrived were also real.

I realize it’s not that the “virtual traveling” is detached from reality and thus inferior to actual traveling. It’s that they’re different.

Two modes of learning

Direct, hands-on experience is visceral and emotionally engaging. It provides rich contexts and nuances that may leave a stronger imprint on our memory. But it is confined by our physical presence and time constraints.

In contrast, indirect, observational learning overcomes personal experience limits, key for understanding theoretical concepts, frameworks, and models. The risk here is a detachment from practical realities.

I think the “kick-back” definition of reality helps bridge the dichotomy: one should aim to get feedback. Keeping the door open is a way to stay in touch with reality even when you’re doing indirect learning.

Two kinds of information

If the above is about how to learn, there’s another dimension of what.

Anecdotes, drawn from real experiences, are specific and relatable but may lack generalizability. While theories can apply across various contexts and disciplines, they can be challenging to comprehend and risk over-simplification.

Both are part of reality. Anecdotes provide tangible insights. Theories, as Karl Popper’s “third world” of objective knowledge, offer deeper, often unseen understandings of our world.

Four quadrants of understanding

We can visualize the interplay between the modes of learning and the content in a four-quadrant diagram:

1. Indirect way of learning from theories: study them through textbooks and lectures

2. Direct way of learning from theories: conduct experiments to test them

3. Direct way of learning from examples: try recipes, do practice questions

4. Indirect way of learning from examples: read biographies, case studies, and stories

There seem to be different theories that explore these relationships: experiential learning theory, constructivist learning theory, situated cognition theory, and so on.

We don’t need to delve into academia. Two takeaways:

1. Embrace a dynamic learning approach: Consider combining direct and indirect learning with anecdotal and theoretical knowledge to gain richer understanding.

2. Adapt the strategy based on your specific goals and needs: For general knowledge, indirect learning like books, articles, or lectures often suffice. But if you’re delving into your field of expertise or a subject where detailed practical knowledge is crucial, engaging in all four quadrants becomes necessary.

For more practical application, ’s summary of Tyler Cowen’s approach to leading an intellectually fulfilling life is great.

How do you navigate the balance between direct experiences and theoretical understanding in your own journey of learning?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Feel free to say hi on X or leave anonymous feedback here.

Until next week,
Weichen

Thumbnail photo by Henrik Dønnestad on Unsplash

This process assumes that knowledge comes from observation. By seeing what works, I’ll be more likely to succeed.

But that is flawed. It leads to a cycle: tireless trying new approaches with little process. If one approach doesn’t work, I can’t tell why because I can’t articulate why it would work in the first place.

Instead, I’ve come to learn that ideas come from conjectures. Looking for examples can be one of the ways to come up with ideas, but that’s not necessary. I can just guess based on what I already know — it doesn’t matter if I know little — and then use empirical tests, through trying myself or experiences from others, to improve my guesses.

Great ideas come from bold conjectures. Let’s take a look at early Greek philosophers even though they seem to know nothing compared to us.

To explain earthquakes, Thales of Miletus said the earth floats above water. To which Anaximander questioned, what, then, supports the water? By criticizing this logical problem, Anaximander suggested a counter-observational theory: the earth is floating freely in space, and it can keep its place because of equal distance from other things. He further said the shape of the earth is a drum-like cylinder; some walk on one side of its flat surface, while others walk on the other.

These look like complete myths, but bold conjectures are more valuable than mundane ones, even though they were proven wrong.

Notice how inspiring they are to our modern theories. The idea of the earth floating above water resembles Wegener’s theory of continental drift. And the earth is indeed in a sense “floating freely” in space. Anaximander wrongly believed it was a drum rather than a globe, which may be blamed on his observations (because, starting from his theory, a globe would be better in keeping equal distance from other things).

I realize I’m often reluctant to come up with my own ideas, let alone bold ones. I wonder where such tendency comes from.

Cultural influence and upbringing seems to be a big one. There’s a fear of sticking out and feeling humiliated. A Chinese saying goes, “The shot hits the bird that pokes its head out.” In collectivist culture, a child who does not behave well would get finger-pointed from family and strangers; A student who does not follow what the teacher prescribes would be punished in front of the whole class. 

Not just from social pressure, because even in my private notes and journals I find myself unconfident in coming up with my own thinking, which seems to be strongly influenced by schools in China that emphasize standardized testing.

I was trained and incentivized to arrive at “the correct answer.” When test score is everything, it would be inefficient (and irrational, unfortunately) to think for myself.

I’m still figuring this out. But the thing I want to remind myself is don’t be afraid to guess. 

I’m no longer playing the high-stake once-in-a-lifetime game Gaokao (a.k.a Chinese college entrance exam) where failure is almost fatal (in conventional thinking). I’m playing the long-term game called Life which favors progress through iterations. 

Errors are expected; our ignorance stems not from our stupidity but that truth is hard to come by. It’s through error correction that one makes progress, and only by expressing my ideas, written or spoken, can they be improved for the better.

The examples of Greek Philosophers, and the whole piece actually, were inspired by Karl Popper’s essays from Conjectures and Refutations.

On this Week

Strong Opinions weakly held

This popular phrase, also called “strong opinions loosely held,” seems to align well with Popper’s epistemology. It was attributed to Paul Saffo who wrote a short but clear essay in 2008:

Allow your intuition to guide you to a conclusion, no matter how imperfect — this is the “strong opinion” part. Then —and this is the “weakly held” part— prove yourself wrong. Engage in creative doubt. Look for information that doesn’t fit, or indicators that pointing in an entirely different direction. Eventually your intuition will kick in and a new hypothesis will emerge out of the rubble, ready to be ruthlessly torn apart once again…

… More generally, “strong opinions weakly held” is often a useful default perspective to adopt in the face of any issue fraught with high levels of uncertainty… Try it at a cocktail party the next time a controversial topic comes up; it is an elegant way to discover new insights — and duck that tedious bore who loudly knows nothing but won’t change their mind!

Rice and Collectivism

What makes East Asian culture a collectivist one? Robert Sapolsky writes,

The standard explanation for East Asian collectivism is ecology dictating the means of production—ten millennia of rice farming, which demands massive amounts of collective labor to turn mountains into terraced rice paddies, collective planting and harvesting of each person’s crops in sequence, collective construction and maintenance of massive and ancient irrigation systems.

A fascinating exception that proves the rule concerns parts of northern China where the ecosystem precludes rice growing, producing millennia of the much more individualistic process of wheat farming. Farmers from this region, and even their university student grandchildren, are as individualistic as Westerners. As one finding that is beyond cool, Chinese from rice regions accommodate and avoid obstacles (in this case, walking around two chairs experimentally placed to block the way in Starbucks); people from wheat regions remove obstacles (i.e., moving the chairs apart). — Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will

Steven Pinker on relativism

And ultimately even relativists who deny the possibility of objective truth and insist that all claims are merely the narratives of a culture lack the courage of their convictions. The cultural anthropologists or literary scholars who avow that the truths of science are merely the narratives of one culture will still have their child’s infection treated with antibiotics prescribed by a physician rather than a healing song performed by a shaman. And though relativism is often adorned with a moral halo, the moral convictions of relativists depend on a commitment to objective truth. Was slavery a myth? Was the Holocaust just one of many possible narratives? Is climate change a social construction? Or are the suffering and danger that define these events really real—claims that we know are true because of logic and evidence and objective scholarship? Now relativists stop being so relative. — Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters

Thanks for reading! I’d be happy to hear your thoughts or questions, or say hi on X. You can also leave anonymous feedback here.

Until next week,
Weichen

Thumbnail photo by Catherine Kay Greenup on Unsplash

When I sit down to work, I focus on “the next and most necessary thing”. This comes from Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks, where he quoted a letter from Carl Jung. If I’m drawn to a topic, I would spend time reading and writing about it. It usually comes from one of my three main goals (learning, connection, and finding life’s work).

The upside is I’m always engaged in what interests me the most. The downside, as I realized recently, is that I started on too many things.

I try to attribute the problem to my system rather than my weakness. When I follow my curiosity, starting something new almost always feels more exciting than continuing, say, a multi-weeks-long MOOC course.

The problem isn’t really about not finishing things. If something is not worth finishing, it’s better left undone. The problem is that it’s too easy to leave things undone without deliberate reasoning in my system. And I was too quick to pick up a new thing without asking whether it was best for my goals.

It's similar to learning an instrument where my focus is solely on daily practice — they’re hard and should take up most of my time — but consciously deciding on what I should be practicing is also important. Regular feedback from a teacher would also be of great help. Occasional recital opportunities would push me to advance faster.

I designed my system that way to allow exploration and serendipity. I tried to avoid rigid project plans. In fact I hated the word “project” because that smelled bureaucracy (thanks to my past job). I felt my open-ended pursuit was incompatible with the concept of project which was supposed to have have measurable outcomes.

But I’ve realized making plans doesn’t conflict with open-ended work because plans can be short-term. Outcomes don’t have to be measured quantitatively either. I could reflect, for example, whether doing this project or experiment gets me closer to my goals. A project can also be time-oriented rather than result-oriented. When I clearly define these projects, it becomes easier to see if I’m taking on too much at once and how well I’ve been doing them.

This is another learning and unlearning for me. It’s not important if something is called a habit or a project. What matters is the problem at hand and how we go about solving it.

On this Week

💡Satisfaction and progress in open-ended work

I often revisit this Andy Matuschak’s post, where he shared his approach of combining “butt-in-chair” action-oriented goals with regular reflections on achievement-oriented goals.

I also found Scott Young’s thinking on habits vs projects helpful: 

Habits are plenty for some goals, but others will need projects. I might set a goal of exercising daily—if I stick to it for long enough, it can eventually become an automatic behavior. But if I decide to run a marathon for the first time, it will likely require more than just my daily jog. If I want to win the marathon, I will need a lot more than just a habit.

📜 Karl Popper’s three worlds

Popper’s definition of three worlds is super interesting:

• World 1 is the physical world

• World 2 our conscious experience

• World 3 contains our theories and guesses, including genetic code. It’s this “World 3” that he defines as “objective knowledge.”

In Objective Knowledge, he contrasts different modes of error correction and highlights the value of the scientific method:

I see in science one of the greatest creations of the human mind… a comparable to the emergence of descriptive and argumentative language, or to the invention of writing…

… Language allows the creation and mutation of explanatory myths, and this is further helped by written language. But it is only science which replaces the elimination of error in the violent struggle for life by non-violent rational criticism, and which allows us to replace killing (world 1) and intimidation (world 2) by the impersonal arguments of world 3.

🎁 A lesson in possibility

Always inspired by Benjamin Zander’s masterclass, I was excited to watch his new TED talk: Life Lessons from Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. This brings to mind a quote from his book The Art of Possibility (which I plan to reread):

Let us suppose, now, that a universe of possibility stretches beyond the world of measurement to include all worlds: infinite, generative, and abundant. Unimpeded on a daily basis by the concern for survival, free from the generalized assumption of scarcity, a person stands in the great space of possibility in a posture of openness, with an unfettered imagination for what can be.

（Which also reminds me of Everything Everywhere All at Once.)

I hope you find this helpful! I’d be thrilled to hear your thoughts or questions, or say hi on X.

Until next week,
Weichen

Thumbnail photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash

1. Clarity

2. Engagement

3. There is no third thing

For me, writing is for learning. I seek knowledge. Clarity is important because clear writing is clear thinking. But I struggle with engagement. I concern myself more with the correctness of my writing than telling good stories. I find myself reluctant to improve my storytelling simply to boost engagement.

This goes against Morgan Housel’s idea that “best story wins.” I get that — I watched the movie Lincoln (2012) and noticed that Abraham Lincoln always convinced others not by arguments but by stories. Indeed, humans are deeply influenced by stories. If I’m only reading “dry” information without many examples, I internalize them poorly.

But somehow I’m still not convinced that I should spend more time on telling better stories. This puzzles me.

A second question is how much to publish.

I admire people like Seth Godin who can publish every day. I also appreciate Andy Matuschak who works with his garage door up. Visa has a catchphrase “Be so prolific so you don’t recognize yourself.”

On the other end is Paul Graham. He suggests you don’t have to publish every essay you write. Derek Sivers also mentioned he tried writing daily and decided it was not for him.

I’m often encouraged by the first camp of people and feel I should do more, yet I find myself more like the second camp.

I thought about the value of writing privately. “If you start writing for the public, external rewards can inadvertently shift your focus. Instead of taking time to think better, you bother yourself with numbers that don’t matter.”

But if my goal is to grow knowledge, feedback and criticism are important. Putting my work out there puts my ideas to the test. Richard Hamming said in his famous speech, “...although people who work with doors closed often work harder... Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing...” For me, it also serves as an act of invitation to build connections with others.

This is another puzzle: post more or not?

I don’t have good answers. Here are a few thoughts:

1. The last rule from Daniel Gilbert was “Don’t try. The only style worth having is your natural speaking voice.” Maybe the way I’m writing now is my style. I don’t have to be like Morgan Housel.

2. My psychological hurdle towards engagement might come from people trying to “engineer” hooks to increase click rate. That’s probably too extreme. A healthy engagement is probably not about fooling people, but about making it more interesting and memorable. I’m sure Morgan Housel writes that way because it’s fun for himself, instead of forcing it.

3. Posting weekly seems to work well for me — a balance between posting too much or too little. I’m also experimenting with writing more tweets. We’ll see how that goes.

If you have any thoughts, happy to discuss!

On this Week

From this issue I’ll start experimenting with sharing tidbits from the week that might be interesting. I hope you like them.

📖 Die with Zero by Bill Perkins

The book Your Money or Your Life changed my perception of the time I spent at work: you’re spending your finite life energy to earn money. Die with Zero applies a similar idea on the other side: you should spend money to increase your life experience.

I’m heavily influenced by Mr. Money Mustache and probably discount the value of money too much. Even before I quit my job I would hesitate to buy “unnecessary” things. This idea from the book hit me: “It makes no sense to let opportunities pass us by for fear of squandering our money. Squandering our lives should be a much greater worry.”

Check out my book notes for more.

📜 Karl Popper on history not resembling the past

Society is changing, developing. This development is not, in the main, repetitive. True, in so far as it is repetitive, we may perhaps make certain prophecies. For example, there is undoubtedly some repetitiveness in the manner in which new religions arise, or new tyrannies… But this application of the method of conditional prediction does not take us very far. For the most striking aspects of historical development are non-repetitive. Conditions are changing, and situations arise (for example, in consequence of new scientific discoveries) which are very different from anything that ever happened before. — Conjectures and Refutations

🧘‍♂️ A mindful reminder

I was (again) reminded this week how important it is to remain invested in mindfulness practice and learning. It’s so easy for me to go to the extreme and get totally absorbed by my thoughts and ambitions. If I’m too much in my head, I become less empathetic for myself and others.

Sometimes releasing the grip on our quest for meanings can be liberating. Oliver Burkeman calls this “Cosmic Insignificance Therapy”:

Drop down from chasing this god-like fantasy that you have to matter in some cosmic sense, into a life that can truly matter in a human sense. (source)

Share

I hope you find this helpful! I’d be thrilled to hear your thoughts or questions, or say hi on X.

Until next week,
Weichen

Thumbnail photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash

I used to assume the discoverer of a theory knows it best: If I have a question about relativity, I’d consider myself lucky if I could ask Einstein. But following him, I might believe that black holes cannot exist. Einstein proved that using his general theory of relativity in 1939. A few months later, Oppenheimer and Snyder proved the opposite, using, unsurprisingly, Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

Unlike decision-making, sources don’t matter in the growth of knowledge. People can understand and explain theories better than their predecessors.

This isn’t saying Naval’s advice is wrong when we consider his rationale:

There are actually things you can read, especially early on, that will program your brain a certain way, and then later things that you read, you will decide whether those things are true or false based on the earlier things.

So, it is important that you read foundational things. And foundational things, I would say, are the original books in a given field that are very scientific in their nature.

I think what he wanted to stress was more about “foundational” rather than “original”.

Indeed, we understand better when we can connect new learnings to prior knowledge.

But seeking to build knowledge on a secure foundation is not necessary.

This is like aiming to construct an axiomatized deductive system in science, like Euclidean geometry, so we can start from axioms and build the entire edifice securely. But a foundation is secure until it’s challenged by future better theories.

We can build knowledge on any source, as long as we keep questioning and seeking better explanations. As Karl Popper wrote in Objective Knowledge, “Our starting-point is common sense, and that our great instrument for progress is criticism.”

Reading better books is still practically preferred, but for efficiency, not security.

I hope you find this helpful! Feel free to share thoughts or questions, or connect with me on X.

I wish you a very Happy New Year!

See you next week,
Weichen

I believed the world was full of opportunities when I left my job. I feel the optimism waning. Sure there are many, but any opportunity for me?

My main purpose of starting this newsletter was to connect with like-minded people. I feel I’m not making much progress. I know making friends is about reaching out, but I always feel I’m not worth their attention. The more I spend time looking what they’re are doing, the more I feel I’ll never be able to do those cool things — there is so much I don’t know, and I don’t even know what problems I want to work on.

A conversation with a friend calmed me down.

He helped me realize problems are signals. I worry about these specific problems because they matter to me. Many others are perfectly satisfied working for a big company — there is nothing wrong with this — but this became my problem and my solution was to quit.

I knew I would face new problems like financial challenges and goal-setting, so I got myself prepared. But I didn’t prepare for the unforeseen.

Do I really want no problems to solve? Likely not, because then life becomes boring.1 There are always problems to solve. Solving the right ones is how we make progress.2

So the first step to solving a problem is to face it. You won’t do anything if you unconsciously push it away. Doing something is usually the antidote to anxiety.

Then it’s easy to fall into another trap: When I can’t blame the job for robbing my time, shouldn’t I solve the problem now?

This is perhaps a bad habit from my old job because if a problem takes more than a week to solve, managers get impatient and we often ignore it.

Some problems take time. Herminia Ibarra calls career transition an “open-ended, tentative, exploratory, hypothetical, problematic, devious, changeable, and only partially unified” process.

I’m not used to this. I was used to making linear, predictable progress.

Andrew Conner calls this stuckness — “a distinct embodied feeling: tightness in the head, feeling pushed physically and emotionally […] certainly a cognitive narrative, but the feeling was primarily felt.”

He continues:

Over time, I learned to associate that exact feeling of stuckness as the feeling that occurs when I'm pushing myself: when something is indeed stretching my capacity, but will open new doors and realizations.

I learned to love this feeling...

I need to learn to love that feeling.3

I’ve been in school for most of my life. Preparing for the Chinese college entrance exam Gaokao was hard; I still have bad dreams about it. But it was only recently that I noticed how inefficient my learning had been.

As we get busier after school, effective learning becomes even more important. People often resort to quick-bite information due to FOMO, but this approach isn’t enough for a deep understanding.

If there is one takeaway, it’s this: Learning requires effort. It doesn’t come easy. You have to do the work for knowledge to accrue.

Learning takes effort

People say knowledge is food for the brain. The process is different.

We don’t simply gain knowledge as our bodies gain weight. It’s more like gaining muscle, which is an active, effortful process.

Learning itself requires deliberate practice, and I mean actual learning that helps us to increase our understanding of the world, not just the learning that makes us pass a test. And deliberate practice is demanding; it requires effort. […] “The one who does the work does the learning,” writes Doyle. “It is hard to believe, but in education that is still a revolutionary idea. [1]

Cramming is not effective

Many regret forgetting most of their reading, often due to cramming for exams, where they quickly absorb vast information.

It works, but only for a short time. It’s easy to notice the rapid gains, but not the rapid forgetting that follows.

This also explains why we default to rereading.

Rereading the chapter right after you’ve first read it can provide a deceptive familiarity. The words become more familiar, but you’re not truly grappling with the material—the so-called fluency fallacy. [2]

Durable learning requires time to transform short-term memory into long-term memory. Retrieval practice is at the heart of the process.

To learn is to retrieve

Retrieval practice involves actively recalling information from memory, not just reviewing the material.

Oddly enough, the best way to put information into your long-term memory is to try to retrieve it from your own long-term memory. [2]

To understand why, we need to step back and understand a bit of how learning works.

Consolidation is key

Learning involves at least three steps:

1. Encoding: Making sense of the information held in short-term working memory.

2. Consolidation: Connecting to prior knowledge and experience in long-term memory.

3. Retrieval: Updating the connections and enable you to apply it when you need it.

It means:

• Learning is making connections to what we already know.

Prior knowledge is a prerequisite for making sense of new learning, and forming those connections is an important task of consolidation. [3]

• Learning often starts as confusing, but consolidation helps organize and solidify learning. Retrieval not only strengthens the existing learning but modifies it.

• Retrieval also provides feedback on how well we learn. A sense of familiarity does not mean mastery. You learn when you can retrieve, not when you think you know.

• Learning capacity is unlimited, but retrieval capacity is limited. What we forget is less the memory itself but the cues to call it up easily.

Knowledge is more durable if it’s deeply entrenched, meaning that you have firmly and thoroughly comprehended a concept, it has practical importance or keen emotional weight in your life, and it is connected with other knowledge that you hold in memory. [3]

To learn something deeply, the process works more like a loop rather than a one-way process, as we’ll see in the following.

Applying the theory

Retrieval practice should feel hard

Thinking you’re doing something wrong when learning feels hard is a mistake. The greater the effort to successfully retrieve learning, the more this learning is strengthened. Conversely, the easier knowledge or skill is for you to retrieve, the less retrieval practice will benefit your retention of it.

Examples

1. After reading a page or a chapter, look away and summarize the key ideas. You can think out loud or write them down. You can even do this before reading: note down what you know on a blank sheet of paper and keep adding to it after each reading session.

2. Make flashcards to do spaced repetition practice (e.g. Anki).

Space out, interleave, and vary your practice

Spacing

Spacing out practice sessions makes them more effortful, but more effective. It also allows consolidation to kick in if you sleep on it.

Studies find that it’s more effective to delay subsequent retrieval practice after the initial test. And we should repeat the practice if we want knowledge to stick.

Interleaving

Interleaving not only creates spacing but also helps you understand the differences between different kinds of problems and know which tool to use.

Examples

1. Mix questions and notes about different topics and disciplines. For example, use a single deck in Anki, and be conscious about organizing notes by topics or tags.

2. Alternate topics. Instead of using two hours to read the same book each day, switch to another one for the second hour. (But also know that excessive context switching can lead to cognitive overload.)

Varied practice

Employ different ways of practicing the same skill: different sequences, different representations, or in different situations.

• People who learn instruments are familiar with this: you can change the tempo, the rhythm, or even play with a different hand.

• Use memory tricks, or mnemonics, such as acronyms and vivid images. For example, when learning mental models, you can create an image for each model.

• Read actively:

  • Annotate as you read, instead of highlighting:

    • Key ideas rephrased in a way as simply as you can

    • Relationships between key ideas

    • Examples or stories from your experience

    • Potential test questions

    • What you don’t understand or need further research

  • Elaborate out loud or discuss with others

Build structures

Structure-building is the ability to discern key points, knowing whether it’s relevant to the main ideas (fit or doesn’t), and how (whether it adds nuances, capacity, and meaning, or it obscures.) It helps consolidation as new learning can connect to some structure of things that we already understand.

For example, preview the material before diving into details. Even if you may not feel you learn much, it’s easier to put together a jigsaw puzzle when you’ve already seen the complete picture.

But not too hard

We should aim for an appropriate level of difficulty. Pressing through a book is not only painful but ineffective. Your effort pays off when you manage to overcome difficulties with increased effort.

If it’s too difficult, make it easier. If you’re struggling with a book, put it down and find a simpler one. ‌Get an introductory book, or watch YouTube videos. Start with the simplest questions and work your way through harder ones. It’s like building a structure. Remember that we learn when we can connect the learning to prior knowledge.

Other important stuff

Learning doesn’t happen only when we sit down and learn. Sleep and rest are often overlooked. For example, taking short breaks after a session allows us to transfer what we’ve just learned to long-term memory, but we tend to skip it because we can’t feel the process taking place.

Nutrition and exercise also enhance learning. BDNF produced after exercise makes it easier to create new neural connections.

Further questions

Most of our learnings are declarative — we engage our working memory to consciously learn something. But there is another learning system called procedural, like how to ride a bike becomes automatic when we’ve learned it.

What’s surprising is that the procedural system involves in non-motor skills too, including writing, language, and math. It’s about developing intuition that enables us to make quick judgments.

I thought intuition only came by chance, but it seems there can be ways to train it, such as by internalizing key, exemplar questions. I’ll explore this more after I gain more understanding.

I’d also like to experiment with mnemonics and give more attention to building structures in my learning journey.

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End Notes

I hope this is helpful! What learning strategies have worked for you? Feel free to share thoughts or questions, or connect on X.

Until next time,
Weichen

References

1. How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking

2. Learn Like a Pro: Science-Based Tools to Become Better at Anything

3. Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

Thumbnail photo by Lysander Yuen on Unsplash

A year ago I listened to Sam Harris discussing free will on the Waking Up app. Since then I’ve been thinking a lot about it. I tried to investigate his claims through my own experience, especially during the meditation retreat two months ago.

I find understanding the illusion of free will has changed so much about how I see myself and others. And it’s surprisingly liberating.

In this post, I’d like to share some learnings. But before that let me briefly clarify the terminology.

II

I think it’s easier to start talking about free will by talking about determinism. 

Determinism, in philosophy and science, the thesis that all events in the universe, including human decisions and actions, are causally inevitable. Determinism entails that, in a situation in which a person makes a certain decision or performs a certain action, it is impossible that he or she could have made any other decision or performed any other action. In other words, it is never true that people could have decided or acted otherwise than they actually did.

It’s easy to see that determinism is incompatible with our usual sense of free will, that we have the capacity to make decisions independently of any prior or outside event.

Others argue that quantum theory suggests the universe involves randomness, not just determinism. This however is incompatible with free will as well, for if our decisions or actions are in part determined by randomness, it’s not the free will we want either.

So if we agree on determinism, or determinism plus randomness, we don’t have the kind of free will we think we have.

Why do I think so? One could study what science tells us.1 I believe this by looking closely at how thoughts arise in my mind: Thoughts and feelings arise on their own; I do not know what is my next thought until it arises from my consciousness.

For example, I indeed chose to write this post, but I can’t explain why this thought came to me, or why I’m writing now instead of going for a walk. I can offer explanations, but I can’t be sure they are true.2

Getting back to the free will debate: Many scientists and philosophers agree on determinism, but they argue free will is compatible with it. As I see it, they seem to argue that we still have free will by presenting another definition: We’re free as long as we’re in control of our actions. Although they may appear out of mystery, they’re still our thoughts and actions. To which Sam Harris replies, it’s like saying “A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings.”

Encyclopedia Britannica summarizes the disagreement well:

In the end, the important question may be not whether the universe is deterministic or indeterministic but whether one is willing to accept a definition of free will that is much weaker than intuition demands.

III

So let’s not bother about the semantics of free will. I think what matters most is realizing that determinism (or determinism plus randomness) is true, the idea that we could not have chosen to do what we did not in fact do.

One might think such an idea is depressing, that it means we don’t have any agency, since what we’re doing now is determined. But I find it the opposite.

It allows me to better accept myself and my past. For example, I could have blamed myself for procrastinating this post until the end of the week. But accepting that I could not have done otherwise suggests it’s wiser for me to let go of the blame and instead focus on what I can do next.3

Understanding the past has nothing to do with our free will creates room for real self-acceptance.

(One of my favorite movie scenes is Sean telling Will that it’s not his fault.)

IV

Determinism doesn’t mean fatalism. The actions we take still matter, because what we decide to do become the prior causes that affect future behaviors. I can’t decide whether I’ll eat healthier or go to the gym five times a week. If humans have such ability then Atomic Habits won’t stay on the best-sellers list. I can, however, surround myself with friends who live a healthy lifestyle so I’m more likely to be like them.

I think the choices we make matter more than we normally think. For example, not long after I learned about the illusion of free will, I went to watch the new Top Gun movie. I saw good reviews weeks before, and my friend asked whether I wanted to do something fun that day. So I suggested we go watch the Top Gun. Had I not paid attention to the reviews weeks ago, we probably wouldn’t have watched it. And I cannot explain why that movie appeared in my mind when my friend asked me.

This suggests that my current focus will be part of the causal chain that can influence my future actions, shaping decisions I’ll make today, or even weeks and years from now. I cannot know when, or whether they will ever exert any real power on me. From a neuroscience perspective, our brain is indeed changed by each and every experience.

V

It also helps me to accept and be more empathetic with others by the same logic. Sometimes my parents quarrel fiercely over small things. I once discussed with my mom that, when that happened, my dad was seized by emotions — he really was not in the driver’s seat. It’s not that he chose to harm people or say bad words, but he was simply a victim of his emotions, which were shaped by his past experiences and genes.

We know what it’s like to be taken away by thoughts or emotions, but the fact is in every moment we are controlled by the “wilderness” of thoughts and feelings that arise in our consciousness.

This does not diminish any moral responsibility that we believe we have. We should still hold people accountable, not to punish them for the sake of making them miserable, but to prevent harm and deter others. Because if we exchange all the genes and past experiences with them, we would do the same. We’re luckier than them to have a saner mind. This creates grounds for compassion.

VI

How about love? If hatred doesn’t make sense, is love still valuable?

Sam Harris calls this “one of the more beautiful asymmetries to be found anywhere.” He writes,

Seeing through the illusion of free will does not undercut the reality of love, for example—because loving other people is not a matter of fixating on the underlying causes of their behavior. Rather, it is a matter of caring about them as people and enjoying their company. […]

Hatred, however, is powerfully governed by the illusion that those we hate could (and should) behave differently. We don’t hate storms, avalanches, mosquitoes, or flu. We might use the term “hatred” to describe our aversion to the suffering these things cause us—but we are prone to hate other human beings in a very different sense. True hatred requires that we view our enemy as the ultimate author of his thoughts and actions.

The realization of free will as an illusion has been far from disempowering. Instead, it has allowed me to better engage with life and deepen my understanding of our human experience:

1. Our choices and surroundings exert a greater influence than we might initially believe.

2. True transformation isn’t just a matter of willpower. It’s about creating conducive conditions that nurture positive change.

3. Deep and meaningful change is rooted in a genuine acceptance of ourselves, realizing that our past actions were shaped by factors beyond our conscious control.

4. Recognizing our reactions are not of our own choosing creates a more empathetic perspective toward ourselves and others.

5. In a world where free will is questioned, love and compassion retain their significance.

End Notes

I hope you find this helpful. Feel free to share thoughts or questions, or connect with me on X.

Have a great weekend,
Weichen

We’re often told, whether in school or at work, that there are no bad questions. How could a genuine question be bad? Questions challenge one’s perspectives and demand us to think critically. Coming up with an answer—good or bad—usually teaches us something.

One question that seems especially good and important: What is the source of our knowledge? If we can find the correct answer, we’ll be able to employ the best approach to attain knowledge.

Philosophers have long debated this question. Some, including Bacon and Locke, argue that we gain knowledge through observing the world around us, treating nature as an open book. Others like Descartes believe knowledge comes from our intellectual intuition, formed by clear and distinct ideas.

Karl Popper disagreed. He believed both answers were wrong, for the problem of the source of knowledge is not a good question to begin with.

In his book Conjectures and Refutations, Popper pointed out that focusing on the origin of ideas doesn’t necessarily validate their truthfulness. And the question implies knowledge has an authority, whether it’s the authority of nature or the authority of human intellect.

That is similar to asking “Who should rule?”, which begs for an authoritarian answer such as “the best”, “the wisest”, “the people”, or “the majority.” Popper argues it should be replaced by a completely different question, “How can we organize our political institutions so that bad or incompetent rulers cannot do too much damage?”

Instead of asking “What are the best sources of our knowledge”, it’s better to ask “How can we hope to detect and eliminate error?” Because all sources are prone to mislead.

* * *

So what’s the problem here?

A question is flawed if its underlying assumption is wrong.

For example, when someone asks me “Which company are you working for now?” I can only say “I’m working for none.” To the question of the source of knowledge, Popper answers “There are all kinds of sources of our knowledge; but none has authority.”

* * *

The obvious takeaway is, before trying to answer a question, question the question.

I remember Shane Parrish calling this “owning the frame”: be careful how we frame a problem, and don’t let others frame it for us. For example, instead of asking “Should I quit my job”, it’s better to ask “What is the best place to invest in my career to reach my goals?” The Framing Effect tells us that not only should we question the content of the question, but also how it’s framed.

The way we frame solutions matters too. We often get stuck choosing between two options. A more effective approach could be to create a third.

End Notes

Alright, thanks for reading this short musing. This topic certainly deserves a deeper understanding that I hope to share in the future.

Any thoughts on the topic? Happy to discuss more!

Have a great week,
Weichen

Thanks DALL·E 3 for creating the thumbnail of this post.

I often think about how to learn more effectively. Two tools are crucial for my learning: Anki, for spaced repetition (thanks to Michael Nielsen’s Augmenting long-term memory), and more importantly, writing. I’m increasingly convinced that I don’t understand things well unless I write about them.

But writing becomes a struggle as I delve into new disciplines. I’m comfortable writing about topics close to my life, like work and self-improvement, but how do I approach something like an economics course I’ve just completed? Sharing my notes seems useless to others, and I’m hesitant to analyze the economy with limited knowledge.

II

I stumbled upon a book Writing to Learn by William Zinsser, the author of On Writing Well. He distinguished two types of writing (although he said he generalized “outrageously”):

• Type A, which transmits existing ideas, and

• Type B, which allows us to find out what we want to say.

I was in the mindset of type A writing, that I should write what I already know. But he said both types “are equally valid and useful.” He describes type A as mostly a technical skill, while type B is “a voyage of discovery into the self”:

Only by going into uncharted territory […] can a writer find his potential and his voice and his meaning. Meaning, in fact, doesn’t exist until a writer goes looking for it.

Exploratory writing has led me to unexpected insights. Last week when I wrote about culture and memes, I thought I was writing something grand, but in the end it led to personal reflections on my investing behavior.

III

I think my fear of being wrong also makes it difficult to write about complex things.

If I share my personal opinions and experiences, there’s not much you can argue with me. But if I write about economy and science, it feels like I’m exposing my ignorance and open for attack. What goes by the name of “I want to write what’s true” may be “I’m scared of looking stupid.”

But that is how we learn. As Karl Popper writes,

The way in which knowledge progresses […] is by unjustified (and unjustifiable) anticipations, by guesses, by tentative solutions to our problems, by conjectures. These conjectures are controlled by criticism; that is, by attempted refutations. — Conjectures and Refutations

So, I’m not exposing my ignorance; I’m inviting criticism to improve my ideas.

IV

With psychological hurdles cleared up, two tactics I find useful:

1. Imitate.

In his typically whimsical style, Zinsser said,

Writing is learned by imitation. I learned to write mainly by reading writers who were doing the kind of writing I wanted to do and by trying to figure out how they did it. S. J. Perelman told me that when he was starting out he could have been arrested for imitating Ring Lardner. Woody Allen could have been arrested for imitating S. J. Perelman. And who hasn’t tried to imitate Woody Allen?

Instead of asking “How to write about X?”, ask “What examples can I find about X and imitate them?”

I found that Ben Kuhn wrote a few pieces about effective altruism when he started to understand it. He later called them “uninteresting.” But even those writings are worth publishing, as he argues, not in a sense of going viral, but something “your friends enjoy reading, makes acquaintances feel more positively towards you, etc.”

2. Write for yourself.

Though writing online has many benefits, the ultimate goal (and the path) is to write for yourself.

When Zinsser became the editor of Yale Alumni Magazine,

I never stopped to ask, “Who is the typical Yale alumnus? Who am I editing for?” One of my principles is that there is no typical anybody; every reader is different. I edit for myself and I write for myself. I assume that if I consider something interesting or funny, a certain number of other people will too.

It’s much less stressful when I freely explore my own interests, rather than aiming for instructing others.

It works for both the writer and the reader. As Morgan Housel says, “Writing for yourself is fun, and it shows. Writing for others is work, and it shows.”

End Notes

I hope you find this helpful! If you have any thoughts, questions, or simply want to connect (I love making friends), reply to this or DM me on X.

Until next time,
Weichen

This week I read David Deutsch’s ideas about the evolution of culture (in his book The Beginning of Infinity). I’d like to share some of his ideas as they help me understand world events from a bigger context.

He argues that the Enlightenment is far from complete. Some areas (physical sciences, Western economic and political institutions) are more advanced than others (e.g. education, social theories). We’re in an unstable transition period where rational and anti-rational ideas are clashing. They evolve towards the opposite sides instead of reconciling with each other.

II.

To understand his conclusions, let’s start with this: What makes culture influences a society over a long period? If we see culture as a collection of ideas, or “memes” (ideas that are replicators), why do some memes last for generations while others fade away quickly?

Memes reflect the society they live in. Examining pre-Enlightenment societies reveals a static landscape. Personal lifestyles, moral values, technology, and means of economic production hardly change in a lifetime. What memes thrive in such a society?

People must have come up with some ideas that may improve their lives, and some of those ideas could have become widespread to catalyze cascading changes. What prevented these from happening?

Traditional memes suppressing new ideas isn’t enough, because we can imagine that new memes could evolve to break free.

The source of new ideas has to be suppressed. Static societies harbor memes that promote conformity, obedience, and devotion to duty. They disable people’s critical thinking. Deutsch calls them anti-rational memes.

III.

We now live in a dynamic society (the West). What sort of memes can stay relevant for long periods in a rapidly changing environment?

In such an environment, people have different preferences based on their individual situations. Preferences can change unpredictably. For a meme to transmit widely, it has to work not just for one person or group, but for everyone. What features do those memes need to have?

One explanation is that those memes are “useful”. They’re useful because they’re true, or at least closer to the truth. Here Deutsch defines “useful” in the broadest sense: “factually true if it is an assertion of fact, beautiful if it is an artistic value or behavior, objectively right if it is a moral value, funny if it is a joke.”

For example, Newton’s laws proved useful not only for building better churches, but also for improving bridges and weapons. Such true ideas persist even when people resist.

Deutsch calls them rational memes, as they’re created not from conformity, but through conjectures and criticism.

IV.

What’s interesting is the opposing nature of rational and anti-rational memes: For a meme to survive over a long period, it must win over alternatives.

For rational memes, it means they should withstand criticism, and be either modified or replaced with more rational ones.

For anti-rational, it depends on how well they suppress people’s critical faculties. Anti-rational memes evolve to be less rational and away from deep truths.

V.

The idea that rational and anti-rational memes coexist and evolve in opposite directions gives me perspectives on what’s happening in the world.

It explains why people from the opposing side find it increasingly hard to understand each other.

It also explains why people can seem so rational in some areas while irrational in others. Deutsch gives an example by depicting a vivid picture: “We live in a society in which people can spend their days conscientiously using laser technology to count cells in blood samples, and their evenings sitting cross-legged and chanting to draw supernatural energy of the Earth.”

But my question is, can science and rationality, through means of conjecture and criticism, solve all our problems, including morality and values?

Maybe there are already people who believe it can, such as Sam Harris who has written the book The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (I have yet to read it). And if we don’t know the answers now, it doesn’t mean we can’t think of them in the future. I think this is the optimism I’m trying to learn and cultivate.

VI.

From societal level to personal, Deutsch offered some advice at the end of the chapter.

He suggests us to be suspicious when…

1. we follow a defined behavior that has been accurately repeated;

2. our behaviors go against our personal objectives, or continued after the justification disappears;

3. we find ourselves explaining our behaviors with bad explanations;

4. conditions for anti-rational memes are present, such as deference to authority, static subculture… Anything that says “because I say so” or “it never did me any harm” or “let us suppress criticism of our ideas because it is true” suggests static-society thinking.

I find it valuable to reflect on these points. Take investing as an example, I used to make decisions not based on sound rationale, but by blindly following others (e.g. buying stocks that have good recent returns). Continuing to hold after the underlying justification disappeared is not rational either.

End Notes

Thanks for reading! If you have any thoughts or book recommendations, please reply or DM me on X.

Until next time,
Weichen

After traveling for four months, I came back home in Seattle! I have much to reflect on. The most notable part was the 10-day silent meditation retreat last month that I’ll discuss in this post.

It’s an ongoing process to absorb and integrate what I learned during the ten days. I see the lessons that follow as the start of my journey rather than the conclusion :)

(I’ll dive right in, but if you need more context about the retreat, check out the Suan Mokkh retreat website.)

It’s surprising how much I talk to myself.

We all know what it’s like to speak inside our heads — we rehearse what to say before meeting others; we chew on the words we have spoken, sometimes proudly, sometimes regretfully.

Although it feels like I’m having real conversations, when I repetitively go through the same dialogues, I realize I’m truly just talking to myself. 

Does constant self-talk bring happiness and fulfillment, or does it just induce suffering and distractions from more important tasks?

(Before the retreat officially kicked off, I stumbled someone sitting still in the woods. Just as I thought things couldn't get more peaceful, a mischievous monkey darted through the scene.)

Being in the present is not thinking about being in the present.

I try to remind myself to be in the present moment in daily life. Often I did feel I was living in the present, and telling myself “how mindful I am right now.”

There was a moment during the retreat when I let go of that thought and simply experienced the present. No thoughts arose. Then it hit me: this is what it means to be truly present.

True presence means fully experiencing here and now. If I’m thinking how mindful I’m, then I’m probably not.

Suffering follows a process.

Food was my biggest craving. My mind constantly wondered when and what the next meal would be. I was kept reminded of all the food and restaurants with which I’m familiar at home — my mind would literally iterate all the restaurants I know in Seattle!

One teaching in the retreat was “dependent origination”, which explains how suffering emerges: Ignorance gives rise to contact; Contact gives rise to feeling; Feeling gives rise to craving; Craving gives rise to attachment; Attachment gives rise to suffering, which leads back to ignorance (simplified version).

Then it dawned on me that thoughts about food surfacing in my mind don’t necessarily lead to suffering; they merely start with “contact”.

The next time I noticed these thoughts, I returned my attention to my breath, instead of adding more judgement. This halted the cycle and the thoughts eventually faded.

With timely and strong enough mindfulness, we can interrupt the cycle before it leads to suffering.

Living in the present requires continual effort.

We often talk about living in the moment lightly. It may be easy to achieve that for a few transitory moments, but to sustain it we have to make efforts.

When I tried to clearly see what was going on in my mind, I noticed my attention was constantly bombarded by thoughts about the past and projections for the future. I had to make continual effort to return to my breath or to whatever task that I originally intended to do.

Craving proliferates to more cravings.

In the retreat we ate two formal meals, breakfast and lunch. At dinner time, the schedule says “herbal tea” would be served.

On the first night there was hot chocolate. “This is much better than bland, zero-calorie herbal tea,” I thought. The following nights other sweet drinks were served, but I found myself thinking every day “It would be nice if they served hot chocolate again tonight!” I thought I would be satisfied when they did.

One night, I sighted the deep, inviting brown liquid. “Wow, it’s finally here.” But I was probably satisfied for one second before the next thought rushed in: “It would be nice too if they serve soy milk!” When I noticed this thought, I laughed at my never-satisfied mind.

“Life is just one damn thing after another.”

When I rest my awareness and notice what’s happening in my mind, I notice the ceaseless sounds from insects and birds, and also the incessant thoughts, sights and feelings. They never stop and are always changing.

I tend to think the sounds are from the outside while the thoughts are from within, but from the matter of subjective experience, they're all from my consciousness, or otherwise I wouldn’t be able to notice them.

I’ve tried to cultivate a peaceful mind free of all problems, but turned out it’s not feasible (also, that state of mind can actually be quite boring).

Given that thoughts and sensations are always occurring in our minds, understanding their nature becomes crucial. Fortunately we have some control over it.

It seems there are two actions we can take 1) cultivating a mental state that allows more wholesome thoughts to enter our consciousness, and 2) releasing unwholesome thoughts when they arise.

For the first, what determines the content of consciousness? The more I observed, the more I realized these thoughts were connected to past experiences. Because I decided to come to the retreat, I was able to hear those sounds in nature. Thoughts are determined by prior causes too. Even my thoughts about the future (e.g., all the food I plan to eat and sites I aim to visit) stem from some contact with these concepts in the past. Now, out of boredom, these thoughts surface to distract me.

Since there are always appearances in our consciousness (thoughts, problems, ideas, sounds, sights), and those appearances are influenced by prior causes, it might be wise to think about how to create a condition so better things appear in our minds. We can make better choices, for example. And the consequences of those choices become the seed for future state of mind.

The idea that we’re affected by prior events may not seemed profound, but what if every choice we make becomes part of the casual chain?

If every choice matters, mindfulness can be a useful tool to cut through the unconscious choices, and we can ask ourselves whether what we’re doing aligns with what we intend to do or not.

Similarly, letting go of unwholesome thoughts also demands mindfulness. Following the above logic, unwholesome thoughts also arise due to earlier influences, not solely our actions but also genetic traits and upbringing. We can’t change the past. We can, however, decide in each present moment not to repeat them. Mindfulness needs to be constantly practiced and strong enough to prevent us from falling into habitual patterns. Meditation is the way to develop such ability.

The retreat seemed to turn my theoretical knowledge about meditation and mindfulness into personal understanding. I’m more convinced of how important it is to set aside time each day to practice. I now see mindfulness as both the method and goal towards living a good and examined life.

End Notes

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed it, I’d really appreciate it if you share it with a friend or two.

Should you have any thoughts or questions, reply to this email or DM me on X.

Cheers,
Weichen