Translated by Hinh
The holiday is a fake concept—something that has never truly appeared in my memory. Why do I say that? Today I officially entered the Chinese New Year break, and yet I don’t feel even a fraction of joy. Instead there’s a kind of—unexpected emotion. I move from one goal I’m chasing to the next, with no room in between to rest. But external conditions are always limited: when the lab closes, what else can I do to keep the experiment going? Do I become anxious and restless, like water without roots, not knowing where I’ll flow? Yes. Exactly. I don’t know where I’ll flow.
“Going home” is such a distant phrase. I don’t understand it. If I leave the bunk bed and the two-square-meter space, do I suddenly have a vast world? Going home just means food is easier to get, and there’s a piano. I’ve lost the strength to fight. I can’t be bothered to open a dazzling game world. Can’t be bothered to watch, to think, to use my brain. My prefrontal cortex has stalled.
Maybe you’d say: I should travel, find some hobbies.
I think my hobby is bantering with an agent—until I hit the token limit, right? It’s hard to imagine what my life was filled with before AI. If I force myself to name it: I’m an anxious person. I run an experiment today and want results tomorrow; I want a paper the day after. If I can’t get to the end, I stay anxious the whole time. That’s normal… Behind me there’s a frozen Fenrir, howling like a starving wolf. It wants to swallow me.
Anxiety wants to swallow me. Many things want to swallow me: survival, death, meaning, pets, birdcages, the world. Past past, future future.
I let my thoughts drift again to some… corner. Some space, some threshold. I don’t know what I’m thinking. The world is usually a weave of suffering and chaos, and here, in this beautiful new chapter celebrating the New Year, what am I talking about? Maybe I should say something narrative. There was an experiment—after about three days of turmoil, I successfully extracted the sample I needed. Then I got a probe from a kind senior student.
But the probe was expired. The sample was still partly left, but it might as well be useless. I have to repeat three days of turmoil.
I calculated everything, but I didn’t calculate that the probe would be expired. Is that fair?
Alright… asking that has no meaning. The experiment failed completely; the data is unusable. Three days of effort, and the last three days before the break—gone. What can I even say? Facing a task I don’t fully understand, how long can I keep going? This doesn’t feel like a real “holiday.” It’s just that everyone else is resting, so my process is forced to slow down.
How do I enjoy this rest? Usually, I can’t. Rest makes me suffer—I interrogate myself about what I’m doing. “Enjoyment” is a distant noun. My life is stuck in the eternal second before the first second. There’s a small fable: a robin tries to peck open a mountain of diamonds. A thousand years pass, and the mountain is only chipped a little. So the first second of eternity has only just begun.
I try to rest, and in its place there is endless fatigue. I collapse where I am, and every interaction looks difficult. I stop belaboring myself, stop describing myself, stop looking toward myself—as if my existence would melt slowly under a distant gaze. I stop existing.
new year new goal: learn to stop. Try stopping.