(Translated from the Chinese version by ChatGPT.)

The dust of the times, when it settles on any single person, becomes a mountain. Over the course of a life, one will most likely live through many great, era-defining changes. My own social circle is small, and I hardly know anyone from other generations, so I can’t say whether, somewhere in their lives, there was a historical stretch that could rival the hurricane AI has stirred up over these past two or three years. Every generation, meeting the great upheaval of its own time, probably laments the misfortune of being the generation it is. And yet, seen along the timeline of modern human history, even if a single life is only a tiny segment of that long river, it seems no generation ever passed through a plain, uneventful life without living through some great historical upheaval.

Times of great upheaval: the shifting of thought, the reshaping of values, always come with pain. We were raised inside a system that reveres knowledge (the law-abiding, by-the-book traditional Chinese education system), taught from the very beginning to study hard, to become knowledge workers, to have “a respectable job” and a stable life. And so, along a path already laid out and validated by many, our life choices were shaped for us: go to college, earn a master’s, earn a PhD, then become a professor or a research scientist — the stable, relatively well-paid job. It was the predictability of this path that gave us our sense of safety. And then one day, the path collapsed. Because it was so stable: we had been walking it from the moment we were born, we had long taken its existence for granted, and had never once imagined what our Plan B would be if it ever gave way. To survive, to feel safe, people keep a Plan B for all sorts of things; but in this one thing, for most of us, our past trajectory was never enough to instill any sense of crisis, until, at a certain point, it did.

Value has always been the product of a particular historical moment, not a constant law of how the world runs. But life is short; our experience lets us witness only a single stretch of history, and then we take that stretch to be the world’s constant law. This makes sense, too: across a short enough span between two points, even a curve can be approximated as a straight line — how much more so across the whole long river of time.

In the age of agriculture, safety came from land; in the industrial age, from physical strength; in the modern world before AI, from knowledge. For many of us, our sense of self-worth is built on “difficulty.” Things are prized for their scarcity: the harder something is, the fewer the people who can do it, and the more it grants us the safety of being “not easily replaced.” AI has made knowledge suddenly cheap, and “knowledge changes your destiny”, once engraved in our minds, is no longer a truth.

Over these past few months, I’ve spent a great deal of time studying and cultivating myself, stealing a few moments of calm from an anxious age. I’ve kept up with much of the latest technical progress in my field. I’ve convinced myself that the joy learning brings me comes from my appreciation of beauty: the beauty of algorithms, of mathematics, of scheduling and optimization, of logic. And the other things, the ones not technical or logical enough, strike me as not beautiful enough. Until now, the skills that earned my living, the things I spent my time on, and the things that made me happy were all aligned; I didn’t have to think, to weigh trade-offs, to analyze. Now a rift has opened. What others value, the thing that keeps me in a decent living, and what actually makes me happy are no longer aligned, and I have to decide where my time should go, how to balance spiritual needs against material ones, or else change my own perceptions and the way I see certain things, so that all of it can be made consistent again.

Uprooting something deeply rooted always hurts. I keep tracing back to find where my reverence for technical skill comes from. If I can find its source, and alter it, and through that alter the way I understand things, then perhaps I can complete this remaking of my mind more quickly and more easily.