About two summers ago, I experienced the failure of my business and the breakup of my girlfriend, and my best friend also left Beijing to go back home.
I remember sitting on my bed in the hotel that day, without the lights on, in the darkness I felt a hollowness and despair that I had never felt before. I’m not sure how I’m going to end it.
But that didn’t work out, because my friend found out that she couldn’t reach me, learned my location by various means, and within 10 minutes of calling the police, the police knocked on my hotel door.
The police uncle listened to my explanation for half a day before he was relieved to leave, and my friend called another local friend to keep an eye on me and make sure I didn’t do anything more aggressive. That’s when I started trying to talk to others about my experience and pain. I rambled on for over an hour with that friend, and even though any problems weren’t substantially resolved, at least I felt less upset.
She reassured me with a quote I once wrote: “Since you’re already in the far north of the world, the future is destined to be south, no matter which direction you go.” She told me to go further and see that although everything seems to be as bad as it can be now, at least it won’t get any worse, and wouldn’t you want to wait a little longer to see what the future might hold?
So when I got back to Beijing, I started to steel myself to do everything I had to do: check how much money I had left on my card that I could use, go house hunting in the hot sun, pack up and move, then finish up the aftermath of what the company left behind, organize the resources I had on hand, and think about what else I could do.
Though I’m still not back on track in a satisfactory way, at least I have more courage to face life, and if you ask me where that courage comes from in the midst of adversity, I’d say it’s called “hope.
I had a typical life of highs and lows, with the first 20 years of my life going smoothly, and at age 24 I had a stroke of luck, a “peak” in a sense. But a life that is too smooth has hidden dangers, and it is easy to become self-satisfied and burned out, to feel that everything is easy to get and not to cherish.
So for a long time, from two years ago until now, I’ve been paying for the mistakes I’ve made, but I’ve embraced each day with the belief that the small, seemingly insignificant but reachable hopes are there to be realized. For example, I will tell myself that there are still some manuscripts in my computer that I haven’t finished writing, and I want to see the day they are published; there is a manuscript fee coming up, and I want to get it and go to a restaurant that I have been longing for; or even the game is getting a version update next month, and I want to see what new heroes and skins I can get my hands on ……
I am not I’m not one of those people who like to pump themselves up and talk big. In fact, after turning 30, “dream” has become a somewhat extravagant and hollow word. In a sense, I’ve already achieved my dreams, but the reason I live on is not to build a bigger, more distant dream, but to gain a sense of worth.
My friends often tell me that as they get older, they feel that life is meaningless, that they go to work from 9 to 5, that they use the money they earn to pay the rent or pay the mortgage, that they complain every day about losing their time doing soulless work, that once they have their time, they don’t know how to spend it, that they tend to spend it lying down and sleeping all day or watching a show on their phone.
This sense of emptiness is frightening, so I often tell people that it’s important to find a sense of value that is just for them. This sense of value is not given to you by society, by your family, or by anyone else, such as getting married, having children, having a successful career, making money, buying a car, buying a house, being a good child, a good parent, a good husband or wife, or even a good leader or employee, and when you have to work hard to get these results, all you get is a sense of oppression and anxiety.
Sense of self-worth is something that really gives you a sense of satisfaction as an individual, and for me, the best source of value is creativity. Perhaps many years later, it will still be seen by others, giving your short life some sense of continuity that is unmatched by any other work.
So the hope of being inconspicuous in the short term and persevering in the long term is what gives me the courage to live, and maybe not in the same way for everyone, but we should all believe that the only way to see change is to live, and that we can definitely see change if we live.
In those days when I was extremely bleak, I listened to a song over and over again, and there was a line in it that said, “Ihatetheendingmyself,butitstartedwithanalrightscene,” which means “Ihatetheendingmyself,butitstartedwithanalrightscene”, thus I don’t want to resign myself to this, to accept the setting and the outcome, as long as I have the ability to rewrite it, as long as I still have the courage, after all, the hymn of humanity is the hymn of courage.
Life is always flowing, and when I look back at each year I’ve lived through it, it may not have gotten better, but it has always brought me encounters and surprises that I hadn’t expected, and I hope that someday in the future I can say out loud to you guys, Look, I finally made it to the day when the clouds opened up, and I’m glad I didn’t give up, and I’m sure you did too. I’m sure you can do it too.