(Translated from the Chinese version by ChatGPT.)

Although I have not officially graduated yet, my internship at Meta should be the last internship I ever need to do that involves research. I have also cleaned up all the things I worked on before into preprints or blog posts. It feels as though I have cleared out all my old clutter, and my heart has become unbelievably light. Every time I clean my room and let go of a pile of things, I feel this same kind of relief.

It has been more than seven years since I first came into contact with research. Research certainly brought me many things: it let me break out of the circle I originally lived in. Even if the junior-year version of me had exhausted every bit of her imagination, she could never have imagined that I would make it here.

But everything has two sides. The negative effect research had on me was that I began to feel very tired. Gradually, I could no longer feel the joy of learning new knowledge. Many people can handle multi-objective optimization: they do research while learning new things, and optimize both very well. But I find it difficult to balance both at the same time. Research is about solving a problem, but very often, under time constraints, it is possible to solve a problem without learning anything. The two are not always consistent. This happens if I set the wrong reward for myself. For example, suppose that, during an exam, my optimization objective is the final score, and I clearly cannot finish the entire test. When I get to the true-or-false section, randomly guessing an answer might be more cost-efficient than completely understanding each question and working out the correct answer bit by bit. I can use that time on other questions and end up with a higher overall score.

For me, research is exactly this kind of exam. And just like a test that cannot be finished, in research I do not know what standard I am supposed to reach. I can always write more papers and do more projects. So I can only use the people around me as my baseline and hope that I am roughly on par with them. Perhaps part of the exhaustion of doing research comes from this. Under the previous system of evaluation by grades, because the maximum total score was only 100, even if my peers were very strong, the most they could do was score 100; there was no higher score. I could set my own standard at 90, so there was no peer pressure. I might not be the best person in an environment, but I would not be eliminated by that environment either. A person’s first instinct is survival, and after that comes dignity. I do not want to be the very best person in an environment; it is lonely at the top. If scoring 60 is enough to satisfy the need for survival, scoring 90 is enough to satisfy the need for dignity, and the very best people score 100, then I feel that scoring 90 is enough for me. This was roughly how exams used to feel. And because I genuinely enjoyed the process of learning, I could occasionally score even higher, which formed a positive feedback loop.

Research, however, is very different. The greatest difference is that research has no verifiable reward, and there is no upper bound on the total score. I do not know the minimum score I need in order to satisfy both my need for survival and my need for dignity. I do not even know what score range I am currently in. Am I on the verge of being eliminated? Or am I at the critical point between survival and dignity? The fear brought by this uncertainty means that I do not know when I am allowed to stop. This time, I am still doing constrained optimization: both the objective and the constraints are clear, but I do not know when to break the loop: if eps < 1e-7: break. In this problem, I do not know how to measure eps.

This week I spent some time learning things, and finally felt again the “joy of learning” and the peace that I used to feel before I encountered research. For so many years, it has been such a long, long time since I had this sense of peace. During undergrad, at the end of each semester, I would temporarily throw research aside completely for two weeks in order to review for exams. In those short final-exam weeks, I would feel this kind of peace too.

Over the past month or two, I have begun to change my mindset completely and gradually shift my focus onto learning rather than doing research. But at the time, I still had a few unfinished projects, so I did not yet have the lightness that comes from having thrown away all the things and burdens I was carrying. Before, I knew almost nothing about coding or many fundamental technical concepts. This was entirely because my base model was not very good to begin with, and on top of that I did not handle reward and optimization very well, so I completely trained myself into collapse, lol. The other people I observe around me can do research, coding, technical skills, and engineering all very well. This month or two of review has brought a great improvement in my technical and coding skills. At last I no longer feel insecure about them. With competence, I have become much more confident too. These things were never difficult in the first place, but before, because I did not know when research would ever end, I had no way to rationally balance out time for learning them.

I had never before considered that my anxiety and unhappiness might have been brought by research. It is like how, when people are suffering in a toxic intimate relationship, it may be hard for them to realize that the relationship is causing their pain. Only one day, after going back and forth many times, do they finally make up their mind to end the relationship; only after truly leaving it can they discover that the relationship may have been the source of their pain. Actually, this reminds me of many experiences of being PUAed during undergrad. Although several years later I would ask why my younger self could have been PUAed, I also know that without those experiences, I could never have understood that the people who PUAed me were wrong, or grown into the person I am now, completely unruffled by PUA. In the same way, although doing research really did make me unhappy, without these seven years of research experience, I would not be who I am now. Perhaps by now I would already be a civil servant in China, or a primary, middle, or high school teacher, urged by my parents to get married, trapped in the trivialities of daily life, and turned into exactly the kind of person I least want to become.

Update: May 25, 2026

After discussing with a friend the impact that AI coding has had on him, I suddenly realized that I did not dislike research from the beginning. Although research brought me a great deal of uncertainty and anxiety, sometimes I was also able to find peace in the process of doing it, such as when I was working on theory before. But just as AI coding has affected software engineers, once most of what goes into research is no longer my contribution, but the agent’s contribution, I can no longer find any joy in research. This feeling only started in 2025.