Xiluluke's Weekend Letter Vol. 05
- No.
- 151
- Date
- Read
- 9 min
- Words
- 1,990
"We don't buy the thing itself. We buy the self we imagine using it." — Joshua Fields Millburn, Minimalism
It was a great week. I got a lot done.
In last week's letter I replanned the whole thing into two separate columns. One is a weekly column built around breaking down the Selected Works of Mao Zedong. The other is a weekly centered on minimalism and my minimalist way of life, which you could call the relaunched "Xiluluke's Weekend Letter."
Yesterday I published the opening note for Life Lessons from Mao's Selected Works, which felt like a really good start. And today, this letter is the start of the new weekly too.
First, what I bought this week. I ordered two things online.
The first was a divided plate.
Why did I buy that? Honestly, here's what I was thinking before I bought it: with a divided plate, I could keep the eggs, cherry tomatoes and blueberries apart at breakfast. It would look nicer, and more neat and orderly.
Okay, fine. It was purely for looks.
But the morning after it arrived, when I actually used it, I found that it looked nice but was really not convenient.
Take the eggs. I used to put them in a bowl with some cold water. Once they were steamed I'd drop them straight into the cold water and bring the bowl to the table, so by the time I'd made my oats and soy milk, the eggs had cooled down about right.
If I put the eggs on the plate instead, I'd have to cool them in cold water first, then fish them out and put them on the plate. Honestly, that's just a pointless extra step.
Then the blueberries and cherry tomatoes. They've only been in my breakfast for about a week. Before I got the idea to buy this plate, I just mixed them in with the oats, poured in 75°C water and ate it all together.
I still can't figure out what difference it makes whether they sit on a plate or go straight into the oat bowl.
Anyway, I used it once and never again. It wasn't expensive, but I'd call it a failed purchase.
The second thing was a massage gun.
Anyone who knows me knows I work out a lot. But probably very few people know I hate stretching.
I used to think stretching didn't matter much. Now I'm paying dearly for that idea.
The massage gun I got is the JD Jingzao J7 Pro, for ¥151. Not expensive.
This thing is far more useful than the plate. The day it arrived I used it to give every muscle I could reach a thorough loosening.
I think a massage gun has one thing in common with a foam roller: when you use it on yourself and hit a stiff, sore spot, you just can't bring yourself to press hard.
But after a few tries you get used to it. I have to say, the most painful part of working out is actually stretching. Strength training never hurts like that.
I don't think I have a very high pain tolerance, so using the massage gun means I keep having to push that threshold up.
All in all, the divided plate really was a failed purchase. If I can't find a use for it, it'll probably get thrown out.
The massage gun is different. I'd thought about buying one plenty of times before. It's a pure tool, and for someone who works out like me, it's really useful.
Loosening your muscles doesn't just make them less tight. It also helps them grow.
So here's the lesson: when you buy something, be clear about what you're actually paying for? With the plate, I was paying for looks and for a way of using it that only existed in my head. The massage gun has real use value.
Use value is a point well worth paying attention to. The idea comes from Marx's Capital, but these days we can measure it in a pretty simple way.
Obsidian's CEO has a simple formula: on average, how much does each use actually cost you?
The best things get cheaper with every use, until the cost per use approaches zero.
I never used to count how many times I'd used something, because deep down I believed that truly useful things just get used a lot. They become part of your life, and you don't even notice you're using them.
It's only the things you use less than once a year that, when you suddenly use one someday, make you realize: oh my god, I've used this exactly twice since I bought it.
At that point, what should amaze us isn't that the thing is finally useful. It's why we bought something we don't use even once a year. If we'd never bought it, even setting aside that we're using it now, would anything bad have happened?
So try using this lens on your own home. How many things there have you barely used, at a high cost per use?
The cost per use can stand in for an item's use value, and the lower that cost, the better the item.
Since we're on decluttering, let's look back at this week's decluttering.
Strictly speaking, I didn't throw much away this week. But midweek I tidied up my place. It was a beautiful day.
Afterward my home was spotless, and I threw a few things out while I was at it.
Namely, the cardboard I'd never gotten rid of.
Cardboard is such a headache. That day I threw out three big flattened boxes plus one slightly bulky box I hadn't broken down. They were all from past purchases, and for one reason or another I'd never thrown them out. They'd just been sitting around my place.
This time I didn't hesitate. I took them all out, and it felt great. But there's still one huge box I can't decide on. Even now, as I sit at my desk writing this, it's sitting by my front door.
It's the box the seller used to ship my new bike frame when I bought a new bike over Chinese New Year.
Boxes like that are really good quality, big and heavy, perfect for packing a bike frame. That's one reason I can't bring myself to toss it.
Because once I shipped a bike from Chongqing to Chengdu. To ship it, I spent ¥100 on a bike box from Taobao, and it turned out to be terrible quality. When I took it to the courier station, the couriers laughed at me for spending ¥100 on that thing.
And when the package arrived in Chengdu, an old lady waiting nearby took that ¥100 box right on the spot.
Since I've swapped out my old bike, I'm planning to sell it too. I figure I'll definitely sell it in person in Chengdu, but I keep worrying: what if I end up needing to ship it and can't find a box?
Ha, I'm so torn. For now I'm leaning toward throwing it out. That leaning just needs to grow a little. Maybe someday I'll work up the nerve and carry it downstairs.
A few days ago, chatting with friends from the "Between the Lines" group, I said: "Everyone should have something that reason says to throw away but feeling won't let go of."
When I said it, I shocked myself. I realized I'd changed.
The old me would never have said something like that. Most of the time I chased pure rationality. One is one and two is two.
But at some point I changed. I got a little less rational and sometimes started letting feelings decide.
I don't know if that's good or bad, but I feel like the change has made me a bit more human.
Speaking of minimalism, I have to mention how I've been eating lately.
On April 1 I officially started this year's fat-loss plan, aiming to go from 80 kg down to about 72.5 kg.
And starting this week, I post my daily food, water, training and sleep on Xiaohongshu, as a log and to keep myself accountable.
Lately my diet has been nothing if not minimal.
Carbs are basically oats, potatoes, rice noodles and bananas, some fast and some slow.
Protein is protein powder, beef balls, chicken breast, chicken thigh and eggs (the whole chicken family is giving their all for me!). All cheap, but mostly good quality.
For vegetables this week it was mainly spinach, bok choy and baby bok choy.
Taking a photo of my food before every meal has become a little habit. I save them in an album I made just for this, called "Fat Loss Eats." I think going through that routine helps keep me focused on losing fat.
If I pull it off, looking back at these months of meals will feel pretty rewarding!
When it comes to eating for fat loss, I'm not big on lots of variety. Enough is enough. Overall I only care about four things: carbs, protein, fat and fiber. On top of that, I take a multivitamin and fish oil every day.
Training is the same. I don't like doing too many exercises in one session. These days I'd rather plan just three or four exercises per session, four or five sets each, and really nail the details. That beats a bunch of sloppy exercises by a mile.
Okay, that's everything for this issue. Compared with the old format, this feels much more settling to me. At least for me, this isn't filler.
A weekly focused on a minimalist way of life also lets me understand and practice minimalism more deeply.
And for my writing right now, this structure fits exactly what I was hoping for.
On one hand, writing Life Lessons from Mao's Selected Works trains my dialectical thinking. On the other hand, practicing minimalism is reshaping my life.
To me, dialectical thinking and minimal living can't be separated. If I want to bring them together, I have to study each in its own field, then combine them in practice in my life.
For me, that's the best path forward.
Below are some good lines and passages I read this week. I spent most of my reading time this week on the Dan Koe column I subscribe to, so everything I copied out is by Dan Koe.
If you work more than 4 hours, you're doing at least something wrong, and there's a lot of room to improve. — Dan Koe
I completely agree. Especially in entry-level jobs, I think you can get 80% of the work done in 20% of the time. I'm a good example myself, and it's given me a lot of time to put into writing.
When you see a view that goes against yours, you feel offended, and you instinctively ignore the other person's perspective because it doesn't fit what you think. You rarely realize your view isn't absolute truth, and neither is theirs. If you're willing to try to understand both sides, your life will have more peace and more creativity. — Dan Koe
I've always believed a viewpoint just represents one possible way something could be, not how it actually is. So I rarely get angry when someone disagrees with me. They're not an idiot, after all. How can I just say they're wrong and I'm right?
The most painful thing in the world is watching your life's goals get replaced by brief, shallow pleasures. — Dan Koe
Confidence is doing the things that make you uncomfortable over and over, until you finally discover they're not that scary after all. — Dan Koe
- When you read a good book and an idea suddenly makes everything click, write it down.
- When you feel satisfied because you're making progress, write it down.
- When you're grateful for everything in your past (mistakes included) for bringing you to this moment, write it down. — Dan Koe
