Unexamined life is not worth living.
Weekly Report Plan Begins!#
I have been wanting to try recording my life in the form of a weekly report for some time now, and I thought it would be a good idea to start this plan on the occasion of the new year. This article will be a summary of January 1, 2023, to January 7, 2023.
Why write a weekly report?
- An unexamined life is not worth living. I hope to reflect more on my life and my surroundings, and a week is a good scale for that.
- Recording life itself is a beautiful thing, and compared to video or audio formats, I am better at writing and would like to have more writing practice.
- Perhaps most importantly, I want to leave something for my future self to look back on.
What will the weekly report include?
The plan for now is to include: observations and insights about the world; records and reflections on life; moments of love and inspiration; the beauty I want to share with the world...
Scenes#
I recently read this passage from a blogger:
Actually, I'm not very good at writing stories or dialogues. I prefer, and seem to be more suited to, writing scenes. I often design a novel through several scenes, rather than the other way around. I know there are quite a few writers of this type in popular culture. Makoto Shinkai is definitely one (in a broad sense of writing). Many of his early works start with impressive scenes, but his storytelling always feels forced. After finishing them, what I remember are actually those scenes, and I believe those images are his starting point.
It made me realize that I am probably also someone who likes and is more suited to writing scenes, and who has a deeper impression of scenes. Therefore, I plan to record the memorable scenes of each week in the first chapter of each weekly report. It is both a record and a writing exercise.
Scene One
"The chef simply couldn't be invited."
Scene Two
"On the left side of the road, a row of people wearing mourning clothes and armbands walked towards me. The fields in the countryside stretched as far as the eye could see, and I drove the car while listening to the podcast 润学与最后一代 without understanding it."
Scene Three
"Fireworks were constantly blooming in the night sky on the left, while the full moon hung high on the right. In the midst of the intermittent sound of gunfire, I rushed past on the highway."
It's a bit sad that all three scenes are directly or indirectly related to death. Scene One doesn't really seem like a scene, but more like a micro-story that provokes contemplation. The actual context of Scene One is: an elderly person passed away, and their children decided not to hold a funeral in their hometown because it would be impossible to invite a chef.
In Scene Two, I was driving on a rural road, listening to the podcast episode from December 31 that I didn't understand - it was actually a replay of an episode from June of the same year as a year-end review. It happened to play the part where one of the guests said that in this land, she wouldn't think about whether she wanted offspring or not. The funeral procession came towards me from the left front. The sky is about to have another star.
Scene Three happened on January 7. Since December 31, fireworks have been going off every night, and I can even hear the sound of gunfire starting in the morning. Behind all the fireworks in the night sky, I seem to hear someone desperately, even despairingly, shouting that the coming year must be better. Although... the current world doesn't seem to make this wish look possible at all. The price of ventilators has doubled, hospitals have no beds, and there is a shortage of human albumin. Only reveling in sulfur dioxide and PM2.5 is a kind of tacit approval. Despite the full moon in the sky, I feel like there are stars everywhere.
Life#
After returning to Xi'an, life gradually returned to order, and my body, after recovering, gradually regained its strength. I started cooking more for myself, gradually resumed simple exercises, and spent more time with old friends. But the bad thing is that I haven't been sleeping well these days, and I haven't been in the sun much.
Some random thoughts:
- After "Yangkang," it is not suitable for pregnancy in the short term, so China's birth rate will inevitably reach a historic low in 10 months. I feel a strong sense of the times.
- The saying "distance creates beauty" means that distance allows us to observe and summarize abstractly, but we still need to love specific people. If the reality observed from different distances is different, it is not only because of different perspectives, but also because of the difference between abstraction and concreteness.
- I can't see anyone selling fireworks on the streets or in the markets. Where do you buy fireworks? Can fireworks be delivered by express?
Information#
I didn't read any books this week, and it's hard to explain why there is suddenly a fatigue of not knowing which book to read among the many books on the bookshelf, and also a strange fear of opening a new book.
One recommended article this week: How to Share a Decent Shopping Link
In 2011, Jeff Hammerbacher, an early employee of Facebook, said in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." Ten years have passed, smart people have become smarter, and bad things have become worse. We may not be able to stop it, but what we can do is fight smart with stupid and resist bad with stubbornness.
I used to be often deceived by the aesthetic appeal of short links, but after reading this article, I deeply realized that short links are a layer of hypocritical packaging. Although the ?=xxx format is not elegant enough in form, it is the cleanest.