Life Doesn't Have to Be So Complicated

There was a time when I was a very "well-informed" person. Maybe it came from spending so much time online, but I knew a little about a lot of things. I could chat with just about anyone on just about anything.

I liked doing a lot of things, too. In my first two years out of college, I was into modern Chinese history and Mao's Selected Works. I wanted to keep up a writing habit (I didn't, actually). I also loved movies, cycling, mountain climbing, hiking, photography, anime, art exhibitions and more.

These things brought me a lot of friends, and they took up a lot of my time.

They all look simple. But once you actually do them, each one drags a bunch of other things along with it.

Take cycling. Besides the time spent out riding, I had to pick gear, find routes and learn how to tune a bike. I even had to relearn how to ride.

Take mountain climbing. Besides the climb itself, I had to buy gear, find trails, pick dates and learn how to handle whatever might go wrong along the way.

Then there's photography, which is even scarier. I had to choose a camera, and then learn how to use it and how to shoot. Every outing meant deciding where to go and what to shoot, and afterward I still had to sort through the photos and edit them. There was so much to do and so much to learn.

And for me, these were all things I could enjoy alone, no friends required.

Sometimes people only miss their friends when they're broke. Once you have money, life fills up with options.

But no matter how much money you have, and no matter how many fun things there are in the world, one thing never changes: your time and energy. We're always facing an endlessly dazzling world, and all its temptations, with a limited supply of both.

Then one day I felt tired, and I started thinking: I need to give some things up.

Why give them up? Because everything comes with a lot of sunk costs. When you want to do too many things, those costs can add up to more time than you actually spend enjoying them.

I had to think about it from the perspective of my whole life. Over the long years ahead, which things will stay with me? Drop the secondary ones, find the ones that truly matter, and then go do those.

My answer now is: reading, writing and exercise.

And work, of course. But work is still walled off from the rest of my life. I can't blend it in yet. I hope that someday I'll be able to work within my life.

In fact, my life for the past two years has pretty much revolved around those three things.

Reading and writing are fairly still activities. You can do them without leaving your seat. But they matter a lot. They're food for my inner world. I can't imagine what I'd be thinking if one day I stopped reading. Would I have become a slave to life by then?

I don't climb or hike anymore. I've taken up strength training, and I've kept cycling. Those two are plenty for my life, and I don't need any other sports.

I gave up photography years ago, too. Looking back this year, most of the editing skills I learned have been replaced by Pixcake, an AI photo-editing app. Luckily, the shooting skills are still in my head. Now and then I take a few photos on my phone and post them for friends, and that's enough.

So this is roughly what my life looks like now: when I have time I read, I think about what I could write, and when that's done I go lift at the gym or meet up with friends for a ride.

Beyond that, of course, I still have a lot of free time. The difference is that I no longer pour sunk costs into a long list of things. I do just one thing: rest.

Yes, apart from reading, writing and exercise, I'm pretty much always resting.

Maybe I watch a trashy, overheated short drama. Maybe I take a long nap. I think that's great. When I'm resting, nothing in me is desperately demanding a result. And that's fine by me.

I think the most important thing is to understand what you're ultimately after in this life.

A century of fame, a thousand years of empire, a name that lives forever: none of it really amounts to much next to one thing. That one thing is to live your life the way you like. — Those Things in the Ming Dynasty

If someone is always chasing a result that doesn't matter, their life is going to be exhausting. Only when you understand that your life wouldn't really change without that result can you truly feel relaxed and happy.

It's like how I used to feel about climbing a mountain. A few days before leaving, I'd start to get anxious. What if I can't make it to the top? What if something suddenly comes up and I can't go? Looking back now, none of that mattered at all, because the mountain just wasn't that important to me. I wasn't at the point where I couldn't live without it.

I've also known people who really love the mountains. My friend Asen, who I've written about before, is one of them. We haven't been in touch for the past two years, and I don't know how he's doing. Chinese New Year is coming around again, and I wonder if I'll get to see him this year.

When I saw him a couple of years ago, he said he was saving up to climb Muztagh Ata.

One person's poison is another's honey. That's exactly what this is.

But if you told me right now that I could never ride again, I think I'd be miserable. In fact, that's more or less where I am now. Ever since I got IT band syndrome, I haven't had one really satisfying ride, and it often gets me down.

That also shows that exercise isn't just about staying fit for me. I genuinely draw joy from the process.

So in the end, it comes down to cultivating your own passion. Note that I said cultivating, not finding, because passion for something simply doesn't come from "finding" it.

"Finding" it is a bit like shopping. You see something cool, you like it, you order it on the spot. But most of what we buy ends up sitting around at home, because it was never something our life actually needed.

Real passion is "cultivated." Reading, writing and cycling aren't things I just started. I've been doing them for ten years.

Over those ten years, I kept doing these three things, building experience and deepening my understanding. That's where today's passion comes from.

So the point is really this: When you know what kind of life you want, you'll know for sure whether something is essential to it.

If it isn't, drop it. If it is, don't overthink it. Put your head down and start doing it.