Random-Writings-in-2026-Part-Three

February 28, 2026 • 5020 words

Random Writings in 2026 Part Three

20260228 Illusion

The biggest killer for motivation isn't laziness. In fact, if you have motivation, difficult tasks won't stop you. The biggest killer for motivation and drive is illusion.

When I mean by illusion, I mean a scenario where a person isn't looking at themselves anymore. They aren't contented to get just what they deserve. They want something more that they imagine others have.

Here are some examples:

You are in a nerdy environment studying CS. You heard many stories online about how people your age are dating and having parties and seemingly enjoying your lives and you are still a single virgin without any relationships. You may desperately want to date, but you are still hesitant, or the environment doesn't allow it. The illusion kills your drive.
You are studying CS. You heard that your neighbor or someone online is studying liberal arts and having fun everyday. You think it is not fair and your family isn't necessary poorer than them. You think you also like liberal arts and have a big soul. You begin to hate your classes. The illusion kills your drive again.

I am not saying it's only CS or the protagonist may have a perfect mental health in the scenarios above. I am just saying, that even in problematic scenarios, more than often, illusion is not a healthy coping method.

Now, here are some "low-class" joys

Fast food/bulk eating
Sex
Alcohol
TikTok/shorts
Doomscrolling social media
Smoking
(Most) Gaming

Common traits of these activities are

If you never had enough, for example, you were always hungry in your childhood or you never had a mobile phone, it dominates all of your brain.
But if you have enough (hedonism), it becomes incredibly boring and soulless.
So you must eat, but as long as you have food, it becomes a routine task.

There are some other functions we take for default, such as hearing, seeing, walking, literacy, etc. A person with a disability would think this is all that life took away from them, and just how joyful they would be if they have the ability. But actually, a normal person hardly ever feels the privilege.

So let's stop using our brain for illusion and instead use it to find a way out!

20260306 Fatalism and Choice

The greatest problem in American Hollywood pop culture is that the hero possesses a rare skill, extremely talented, or "chosen" to save the world. In real life, you are not Harry Potter or Frodo Baggins, despite any illusions how ordinary a person they might be. You do not go through an adventure, nor do you save the world. Of course, this is just a small, loud subset of American culture that I used to enjoy when I was young, but do not watch anymore, and there are many rich movies of different genres.

Through the lens of late Soviet movies in 60s-80s, I perceived humanism and sincerity. When you look at the romances such as "Irony of Fate", "Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears", "Office Romance", "Could One Imagine", they feature completely normal people, there is no explosions, no enemies to defeat, and no final triumph.

Which, leads me to the question about fatalism and choice.

There are one set of fully external measurement that we are familiar with: Money, Power, Grades (in school), Athleticism/Attractiveness. But what are we without them? And how should we treat them in life?

The first path people choose is pure utilitarianism. You do everything strategically. You study because the major maximizes the money you are going to earn. You suppress your interest to the best arbitrage you can find. You devote yourself purely to external measures. But external measures change, and following this path leads to easy burnout because you don't know what you are fighting for.

Another path some people choose is conformity and stability, commonly found in East Asia. Note this is different from pure utilitarianism in that the former is individualistic and hacker-like. Here people optimize their scores, study because their peers are studying, work late performatively because their peers are working, and obey the authority. But people here are usually very shy, retreat back to their dorms and computer games or social media as the only means of relax, and passive socially.

Another path is hedonism, found in some expat communities or gig workers. You find any job, such as an English teacher, International management, and you work just enough. You party, drink, love, and spend lavishly, living every day of their youth like it's their last day. There are no goals to optimize towards and no long-terms plans, only romance right now. You are street smart and tomorrow somehow things would just work out. But in the long term, is this truly joyful or meaningful? I doubt it.

Another path is monasticism, typical found in the lives of some pure theory PhDs or professors. You suppress nearly all your humanly desire in pursuit of one thing, and you are willing to dedicate your life to it. You ignore the external measurements and focus on the subject itself. But the real world is far too messy and training in a monastry makes you too pure and sincere. When you fail in the external standards, it is often painful to hold your dignity. When you succeed and comply with the external world, are you still focused and calm? You may be very isolated and desperately crave the missed out living experiences of your youth.

Another path is artistic dedication, typical found in the lives of singers, dancers, writers, poets, actors. This is kind of like monasticism but more socially interactive, requiring constant interaction with viewers. What defines art and what is being true to yourself? It isn't what makes more money or attracts more fans. How do you cope with losing to an Instagaram blogger for looks or a TikTok challenge video? If one of your video gets popular and people like it, do you change your style to that? As people read books increasingly less, do you still write books or adapt to the new format? How do you deal with the ugly relationship between art and capital? Art is usually poor and a writer has to feed themselves. An artist is usually at odds with the government or social norm.

And finally there is religionism. Let's use the Amish as an example. From a burned out city hustler's view, the Amish do seem to live a happy life. There is nature, there is community, and there are a set of values. But I have seen too much, fundamentally I cannot be religious or willingly submit myself. Besides, my body cannot handle the physical labor. I cannot withstand extended periods without going online. Historically, the religious life is not a fairytale, and it disappeared for a reason. If you fully adopt modern technology and you are well-off, it is just vacation and escapism, not a religious life.

Can we find a "Peach Blossom Land" in the world? It is difficult outside of very wealthy places. Places like Alaska, Svalbard, Iceland exist not outside of our noisy society, but as a core node, usually for resources, military, or tourism, within the interconnected world. Paradoxically, if they stop advertising themselves as an isolated, frontier tourist destination, less tourists would come and they would bring less money. If there are no resources, there would no point in building airports and highways there. Then I thought about the northeast Russia such as Yakutsk or Vorkuta, and I don't seem to like it either for the poverty, conscription, and weather.

Of course, these are typical stereotypes. Some people are a mix, they want to pursue their dreams while not feeling poor, or some combine hedonism with a high baseline of income. Some people are not described so far. As we live in a modern godless society, something else should act as a belief system or guidance.

20260310 Aesthetics

Aesthetics matter the most.

In the end everything disappears. And we are left with romantic fatalism.

We do not need cynicism and resentment. We need melancholy and tragedy.

Misfitting is a symptom of the lack of choices. A lack of choices is usually the symptom of financial poverty. Poverty is a problem to be solved

If you get the aesthetics wrong and you don't vibe with your environment, you're in big trouble.

In the good scenario you keep your external reward and prestige for a short while. But it is not possible to keep going for more than few years. You suffer massively for a negligible, pyrrhic win, desperately needing to exit the environment and arriving right back at the starting point.

In the bad scenario you face a burnout very quickly and lose more than you get.

In both scenarios, you develop cynicism and resentment.

This is not to advocate for retreating from an environment such as school or work, but to act as an ideal direction. The tolerance threshold is up for one to decide based on the basic financial resources and the specific circumstances.

Intentionally misfitting into a toxic environment while having other choices and financial resources is a symptom of mental illness.

External metrics are not a reliable narrator of one's identity.

The Internet is an unreliable external narrator, known for creating illusions.

An aesthetic experience is valuable because it occupied a certain period of our finite lifetime. Thus an aesthetic experience is inherently unique and not replaceable with something that didn't happen, which is an illusion.

There is never an ideal fit.

It is very easy to know by intuition if you are a misfit.

In school, you know the vibes in 3 days.

If you are a misfit for now, you are a misfit in the future. You suffer for the rest of your time there.

To be a romantic, a person needs to be intelligent and cultured.

To be a romantic, a person needs to be vulnerable and empathetic.

To be vulnerable, we need beauty. To have empathy, we need culture. To appreciate beauty, we need to be vulnerable. To appreciate culture, we need empathy.

A romantic is the fusion of intellect and emotions.

People become inevitably more conservative as they age. Conservatism is about trusting one's developed intuition through experiences, not about absolute openness.

Middle aged people can know if they vibe with a stranger within 5 seconds.

Globalists do not vibe with the populists. That is also a form of conservatism.

Artists always create, travel, express strong emotions, or crave new experiences. And that is also a form of conservatism.

Hedonists always live a chaotic life. And that is also a form of conservatism.

Anxiety is about unreliable external metrics.

When anxiety happens, procrastination and avoidance comes to stop the execution of tasks. Thus relaxation is better.

Addictions itself is neutral. Having conventionally terrible addictions does not make the term better or worse.

If the addiction is fueled by bitter avoidance of a misfitting environment, the sin is in the vibe mismatch, not the addiction itself.

If you are naturally addicted to poetry, vintage movies, wandering in nature, blogging, or aesthetic sports, there is nothing wrong with it.

If some people are addicted to gaming, shorts, drinking, or smoking, we do not criticize or attempt to suggest otherwise either.

The addictions which a cultured person falls into reveals their true self. There is no difference between a true addiction and your passion.

There is no point in fighting addictions.

The worst moral failure is a lack of passion and sincerity.

Being sincere does not indicate whether a person is honest externally, vice versa.

If you want something, you should actively pursue it.

If you want something, but do not pursue, it is an illusion of desire. If you pretend to do something but avoid going toward the right direction, it is an illusion of effort.

Passiveness and ego hinders execution.

The market is neutral. It may discriminate aganist your features but it does not discriminate against you.

Standing in the middle of a market and complaining about its rules is futile. You either adapt to it, find another market, or give up completely.

If you hate something that is out of your direct personal life for a long period, you usually convert to liking it. Unless necessary, you ignore the things you actually dislike.

Reaching a high level in a field requires focus, concentration, and peace, not panic, terror, or anxiety.

Intentionally trying hard is a myth outside of necessary bureaucracy. Mastery is not the result of efforts, it is the result of passion.

If you are passionate, you are not tired of doing it for hours.

If you dislike something, usually you will not maintain the discomfort for long.

20260319 Agency, Advocacy, and Aggression

The modern world rewards self-advocacy, polite aggression and proactiveness, emotional detachment from failure, and direct, personalized contacting. Mathematically, as long as you are respectful and polite. If you stand up for youself, others are going to respect you.

In university applications: Emailing, calling and applying to better universities get you a much better chance. You must advocate for yourself in the SOP and not let an agency write it. If you have a below 3.0 GPA and want to apply to MS, you can directly call medium-level R1 schools, and many of them would tell you that you are not automatically denied, and you would get offers.
In finding a PhD lab: By cold emailing professors from top schools you are interested in, asking for zoom calls, asking for a summer research, and filtering out the unsuitable labs, your chance of getting into a PhD and graduating increases massively.
On social media: If you put yourself in front of a camera and start a YouTube or TikTok channel, you can gain some fans and likes. No one is going to punish you so you lose nothing.
In dating: If you ask and DM attractive people, accept rejections cooly, you can generate many dates, and your chance of finding the right, attractive partner drastically increases. Successful men might have a fetish for a specific type, be emotionally unavailable, and simply attraction is not based on objective stats.
In finding a job: similarly. In almost anything, it works in your favor. You generate massive oppurtunities such as getting into an exchange program or internship.
We see American politicians in a campaign, salesman generating hundred of leads, lawyers fighting for a case, or an influencer trying to gain fans, etc

Here are the lies

"I deserve something": The world is not a strict meritocracy, or, your objective stats are only half of the actual "merit".
"Passively keep your head down and work quietly, and everything will be good." Nothing will be good, nothing gets automatically fixed, and no one fights for you except yourself
Performative Effort: Rote memorizing textbooks, doing what's told without thinking all day, harming physical and mental health to pretend you're working hard
Embarrassment and losing: actually, as long as you respect the other party, you lose nothing. Embarrassment comes from flashing the spotlight on yourself; if someone does that, you are actually more lucky than not

Here is a nuance: the aggression and fearless does not mean you can be externally aggressive. In fact, externally you should be polite and respectful in a business-like fashion. You must still play within the hard rules. You can't insult people or only extract from others without mutuality.

20260321 How to Define My Identity

There are actually 2 answers. One is how I view myself. The second is how the world describes me.

And I just view myself as a mundane, flat line.

You get used to yourself very quickly. If you learned a skill 1 year ago, you already do not consider it anything remarkable. It becomes a fact that you can code or you are bilingual or something that you simply register as utilitarian as "able to walk", not a clickbait video title.

Actually, if you are to constantly remember and remind yourself of every achievement they had in life with a long list of titles and awards, you will struggle to do almost anything new. If you aim to shock people with your achievements, you are not loyal to yourself anymore, and nothing kills motivation faster than that. All these pop science channels are permanently stuck in a very low level. Doing and moving forward requires dropping the ego. You are rarely "surprised" at yourself. For me, a healthy state for an individual is normalizing your skills or achievements and focusing on the current or the future.

If you try to find your achievements that you can boast to the world, it is usually different from what your actually consider special in your life. For example, having a TikTok channel can be very special, but it is a terrible thing to boast professionally (and even casually, most of the time). Also, you may consider getting a 65 on one very objectively very easy exam to be more impressive than getting a 95 on an objectively very difficult exam. For neurodivergent individuals, tying the shoelace may be more difficult than linear algebra, and not being sincere can be more difficult than speaking 4 languages.

You are always not objective about yourself. That's a highly unreliable narrator.

What about the world? As for the world, it's usually down to just dozens to 100 something people physically around me, or close family members and friends who regularly text and call me. The "reality" is merely perhaps less than 100 people. The rest is an illusion on the Internet.

This is a terribly unreliable narrator as well. First, what crowd are you in? If you are in a crowd with 90% extremely nerdy male, or 90% high earners, or 90% provincial people, the environment itself becomes heavily biased.

Furthermore, the environment gives very polarizing, changing feedback to neurodivergent individuals. This is inherently very unreliable as well.

In which case I found it meaningless to tie my identity to a real world thing. It doesn't really matter what you do. My identity is: active, sincere, passionate.

And there are only 2 things left, bureaucracy and my curiosity.

20260403 How to Define My Identity 2

1

What did I realize? I realized that the subjectivity of my perception is different from the external assessment of me. In fact, me subjectively almost never changes. I am the same person when I was 10, 11, 15, 17, 19, and 21. My identity has so far stayed mostly the same. So you can't base yourself on external rewards or failures, nor can you base yourself on the illusion of other people's success. You should base yourself on yourself if you are doing some planning. I am not a better person if I win dramatically, nor am I a worse person if I lose hopelessly.

However, externally, it is very difficult to communicate your subjective feelings about yourself to someone else. When you are communicating to someone else, you must step out of your immediate mental space and use empathy to communicate your thoughts from their perspectives. You must compartmentalize yourself, at least to the vast majority of acquaintances. Otherwise, others will simply not understand. If I say I did something easily and dismiss the difficulty, it comes off as snobbery. If I convinced myself to quit a hobby or chose a major, while the other person likes doing it, the immediate instinct is to deny it. This comes off as rudeness or lack of empathy. It does not mean to be insincere and stop expressing your personal opinions, but rather to express it so that the other person can understand you with their living experiences.

2

What is in my identity? I believe the ultimate identity is not based on a list of awards or diplomas. The ultimate identity is what a person is going to do when the basic living expenses are covered and there are no objective rewards for doing anything. In such situations, sincerity and passion come through. If you base yourself exclusively on your job title or your income, it is an illusion of identity. If someone's basic needs on Maslow's hierarchy are satisfied, and they still have nothing else to do but scrolling shorts or gaming, we say the person's identity is not fully formed, or they are devoid of an identity. Hedonism is usually an reaction, not the destination.

To truly understand what it is, we can separate activities into 2 categories. One category is "ephemeral", the other category is "permanent". Here are some simple analogies. A captain stands with their ship. A general stands with their fortress. An artist creates in exile. A lifelong adventurer is always on the move. A brilliant athlete's entire life might always be around the sport, such as coaching, commenting, and shows.

You do it because it is part of your core identity, regardless of external rewards. External rewards matter, but most of the motivation are internal.This does not mean you should be dogmatic, the field might evolve and you should adapt. It is just about dedication. I believe that to be good at something, it have to be "permanent". There can only be very few things truly "permanent" for a person.

3

Can't you be "spontaneous" when you are free? Of course you can. You can suddenly decide to travel somewhere, learn a new skill, or do "eat, pray, love". Having a core identity does not erase spontaneity or adaptability. It does not mean you have to be a nerd or erase your personality.

However, you have to be very careful if you want to merge spontaneous things into your core identity. From my experience, usually you can't merge them. A summer camp ends, a flight returns home from a trip, and old contacts in different cities on different paths fade away. We call this "fleeting beauty". It is beautiful because it is fleeting.

There are situations where we want to live in a small city by the sea and read literature. But if you actually have the financial freedom to live there, it becomes empty in several days.

4

Getting old mentally is when you do not have an identity at all and you lose the ability for spontaneity. In this sense, someone can be old at 20, while someone can be young at 95 with a purpose, till the day they pass away.

Getting old mentally is not when your identity solidifies. In fact, if you base your identity on external measurements and conditions, which does sometimes solidify as you age, you may actually lose part of your identity.

5

A person's identity is not necessarily related to their external moral righteousness. Objective morality does not exist, and morality is usually a social construct. A conventionally immoral person can still have an intact identity, as the argument goes that the identity exists largely outside of social judgments.

However, a person's identity is moral subjectively.

6

A part of maintaining your identity is to forgive yourself. Instead of focusing on other people, focus on the internal. Forgive yourself when you fail and do not obsess endlessly on external measures you cannot control, actually move past them. It is entirely justified to fail if your identity is threatened. Ultimately, to keep your identity intact, you need to forgive yourself and calmly accept the external reality.

7

The pop narratives of the modern world are frequently hypocritic and misleading. Getting a diploma isn't the same as having a solid foundation. Climbing the corporate ladder isn't the same as making your product better. When bureaucracy becomes meaningless, you must know what you are loyal to.

Bureaucracies are means to an end, whether it's basic financial security, immigration, or an advantaged position where you can wield power to actually make a difference. But in those moments, you always have an internal compass as the ultimate source of truth when the world is judgemental. Betraying that sense of purpose is the worst moral action subjectively for the individual.

If the external requirements align with the identity, then it's fine. But we must assume that there are times where the external requirements do not. We live in an abundance world, and in those times work can no longer be fulfilling, thus it's only means to an end. The end usually lies in the play, not the work.

8

We are left with 3 things on the micro level: Bureaucracy, Identity, and Humanity.

Humanity is socializing, communicating, reading, traveling, and interacting with the physical world.

20250425 Attention, the Most Important Currency

Attention is the most important currency in the modern world. We live in an abundant world.

People usually think about others and be like "how would they think of me? Do they hate me?" And the most common scenario for a normal person, they don't hate you, they don't like you, they just forgot about you. In the modern world, attention is like oil, and it's very expensive.

If you think being popular and cool is just silly and only fundamental hard power matters, that is a huge misconception. Some of the biggest companies in the world, Meta, Google, ByteDance, Tencent, or even partially Amazon, are ad companies. The tech required for a basic functional platform without the ads algorithms matured years ago. The core "functional" tech, not the add-ons, frontend, ads, do not need tens of thousands of programmers - Telegram and WhatsApp had around 20. Today, a developer can easily take that exact source code with the help of LLMs to build a CRUD platform with file/video functions for a million users. The only purpose of big companies is to grab people's attention. Even Apple as a hardware company aggressively uses App Store to force other developers to pay them.

In the modern world, almost anything that grabs attention, whether it's rage, anxiety, cringe, humor, being silly, soothing people's egos, can be converted into money and social leverage. If you do not show your face on social media, people perceive you as a troll and forget you. If you are cringy but people give you their attention oil, you are already halfway to being attractive.

Of course, there are many jobs, such as lawyers, doctors, being in academia, or the military that can require very strict "professional conduct" and operate based on rigorous hierarchies. However, it's not just "competence" and "hard work" that wins here, it's another form of bureaucratic grind. Fortunate or unfortunate, I am not in any of these jobs. These jobs require merging your identity with the bureaucratic title, and hoping to enjoy your life after 55. I am permanently done with "perpetual delayed gratification", and it's not like I can endure them anyway.

Previously I thought the 1–9–90 rule was supposed to be mean for 100 videos you watched, you leave a comment on 10 videos, and you upload one video of yourself (or for every 100 minutes you consume you upload 1 minute). I have the mindset that if a platform denies me my voice, I am not going to love the platform, or at least they won't have my support. I was used to public speaking or debating competitions, where if you don't speak, you get defeated by someone else. If you aren't aggressive, others grab the microphone and you don't get a point delivered. Some people claim, "I am not good enough and I do not deserve it." This is highly self-defeating - you don't "deserve" it, you fight and claim it. With that grinding mindset, if people are opting out and not posting anything, obviously I am taking up my space. I want to have a voice and show people who I am.

In Eastern Europe, clowns had serious respect. In Soviet times, the clowns criticized the government and their performance had highly sophisicated sarcasm and profound meanings. Being a clown, as long as you can grab people's attention, is a massive achievement.

Many people are good singers. So I think it is a very good idea to post yourself singing on TikTok, even without instruments, without microphones, in your bedroom. Again, the greatest bad of today's world is not hate or cringe, it is apathy.

Many popular, mega influencers who started from close to nothing operate with extreme ruthlessness and go to great length to promote themselves. Lex Fridman affliated himself with MIT by being a "research scientist" there, uploaded videos of himself teaching a non-credit course, and aggressively defended celebrities to get famous. Karolina Protsenko gained massive views by filming her violin performance on the streets and starting multiple channels for music, life, family. Valya Karnaval started by uploading dozens of videos on TikTok a day. Channels such as Like Nastya and Kids Diana literally put their kids playing with toys with dramatic expressions, dubbed into a dozen languages. Young influencers go to a dozen TV shows and interviews to cross-promote themselves. To be a loud dissident or a propagandist, whether it's Navalny, TV Rain, or RT, require being highly aggressive, confrontational, and tending to people's grievances. The "grindset" is highly visible, and that is only what the public knows. Not only do Eastern Europeans do this, but western bloggers all do this as well. Influencers from both sides of the political spectrum, the left (Robert Reich, Brian Tyler Cohen, David Pakman), or the right (Tucker Carlson, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro) do almost the exact same thing, endless attention hijacking. The takeaway is there is simply no room for "modesty" or being "undeserving" allowed here.

Finally, there are those "attention black holes" - gaming. Someone makes an online game, they don't have to perform, write long scripts, edit videos, or even show their face, and people just drop in an "arena" to fight endlessly. Gaming captures the attention of millions of people, especially those anxious people finding an escape, obviously, their time and money. Gaming is just genius in today's attention driven world.

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