Xiluluke

My AI Side Hustle, Half a Year In

2026-11-12T09:29:39.178Z

Today is November 12.

From today through the 14th, Fanqie Novel (Tomato Novel) is adjusting the levels of every author on the platform. Once that's done, for most people, the road of writing novels with AI will have reached its end.

It took me three months to figure out how to write a good AI novel. From figuring it out to today is only a little over two months.

This piece is about those six months.

Getting In

At the start of this year I began using AI constantly, mostly agent products. The newest models then were GPT-5.4 and Claude Opus 4.6. I built a blog with AI, cleaned junk off my computer, wrote articles, and then finally started wondering how to make money with it.

To this day I still think there's one rule at the core of making money with AI: bring AI's capabilities into a field you could already work in yourself.

In early May I decided to go deep on AI-written novels.

The reason was simple. Writing is what I'm good at, and it's what AI is good at. Text is still AI's main interface: you send a model a paragraph, the model and its agents do a series of things behind the scenes, and a paragraph comes back. So text work is the easiest place to start with AI. As for novels, I wrote them for four or five years back in school. My results were nothing to brag about, but I know the industry and the process of writing web fiction inside out.

So I started.

One month earlier, in April, Qidian had published an "Announcement on Further Strengthening the Management of Non-Human Automated Creation."

Paying Tuition

Once I got into it, I found that plenty of people were already doing this. Of course they were. If I could think of it, people who found AI before me could think of it too.

On Bilibili I found a solo creator. His videos were simple: once a month he showed his royalties, which started at 40,000 yuan a month back then. Along with the royalty screenshots he sold a course, really a community, with his tutorials inside, for 299 yuan.

I hesitated for a while, then paid.

As I was about to open the tutorial, I felt a side hustle worth 10,000 yuan a month waving at me, and I was thrilled.

My experience with AI was still thin, and the tutorial's steps were too much for me. I followed the SOP to the letter and started two books. Both fell apart, and both went dark before chapter 100.

The Detour

I stopped and took the two books apart.

The first one failed on genre. I ignored the group owner's instruction to write women's web fiction and started a men's book instead. During its debut every number was zero, so I cut it immediately.

For the second I switched to women's web fiction. But I'd never read any, so I wrote fan fiction for an IP I knew well. That book actually got decent traffic, but around chapter 100 the storyline began to collapse.

There were two problems I simply couldn't control.

First, the main plot moved too fast. AI told a volume's worth of story in half a volume's worth of chapters, and then had nothing left, so it dragged the second volume forward. One volume's length ended up covering two volumes' worth. It couldn't pace itself, and the writing wasn't good either.

Second, it broke its own continuity. AI's context window is finite, and a web novel runs to hundreds of thousands of characters, full of big and small tasks, with butterfly effects between events that change how characters feel and act. AI not only forgets a character's state, it invents things: the protagonist suddenly has a sister, a character who died comes back to life. Smaller things too: a place name wrong, a surname wrong.

To fix this, I decided to take the tutorial I'd bought and rebuild it into something more complete.

My idea was to have AI write me a piece of software that managed a book's progress, with several spreadsheets tracking characters' relationships, states, and possessions. Writing one chapter meant checking a great many things.

I named the project the Book of Truth.

On May 4 I first mentioned it to Liang Mouyin.

From that day until August I didn't start a single book.

I went down a rabbit hole with no end, spending every day figuring out how to make that software better. The only thing that came out of it was this: I sent the beta to Liang Mouyin, he used it to start a book, and he earned 300 yuan in royalties.

Later I fell into a bad spiral. I was addicted to reinventing the wheel and never satisfied with the wheel I built. By late August, the Book of Truth, by then renamed Seedraft, had more or less been dropped.

I spent a fortune on AI subscriptions, burned through over 20 billion tokens, and put in three months of time and energy. In the end I had nothing to show for it.

That's how it goes. Effort alone doesn't produce income. Sometimes you have to stop and think, and look around.

I call those three months my detour. I was set on building my own agent, and I badly underestimated how hard it is to build one well.

That August, Qidian also began taking works down.

Making Money

I stopped building software and went back to basics. I took the prompts I'd accumulated over those three months and put them into agents that already existed.

The AI world was a different place from May.

Claude released Fable 5.1 and Opus 4.8. On September 3, GPT released 6Astra. Behind every version bump was a leap in what models could do. Things that took real effort three months earlier could now be done in one sentence. Codex, Claude Code, Antigravity, all had huge upgrades. Domestically, DeepSeek Harness was about to launch, and Proma, built by Chinese developers, was strong too.

I put my refined prompt system into those big-company agents and let it run.

Suddenly everything was clear.

The problem I'd spent three months trying to solve with software, the new models had solved on their own. Three months of work turned into nothing in an instant.

Because I leaned heavily on Gemini, I ended up choosing Antigravity. It wasn't as mature or as easy to use as the other two, but it could call Gemini directly.

The first book I started with it hit 10,000 reads two days into its trial run.

I began to think that maybe I didn't need to build my own software to make this work.

After that I kept posting my numbers and my technical notes in related communities, and slowly gathered people who wanted to make money from AI novels. They were willing to pay for my system.

Less than half a month after I gave up on the software, I did what three months hadn't: I had a paid AI novel community of my own.

The Industry Shifts

Let's put the numbers on the table.

So far I've received three royalty payments: 98 yuan, 762 yuan, 643 yuan. That's 1,503 yuan in total.

Community membership is 298 yuan. Eighteen people joined, 5,364 yuan.

Together, 6,867 yuan, most of it tuition from students.

In theory, with my feel for fiction, this should have been a business I could run for a long time.

But just as I finally found the technical optimum after three months, the industry started to change.

The AI novel business, put plainly, depends on one platform: Fanqie Novel. Fanqie is famous in the field for low quality. Even before AI, the platform was full of low-quality content, and plenty of hand-written novels couldn't even get a contract. AI-written stuff gets signed without a second look, never mind how much it ends up earning.

Qidian moved first.

On August 18, Qidian publicly took down a large number of works, including Shanhe Jian (Mirror of Mountains and Rivers), which averaged over 30,000 paid subscriptions, and several titles near the top of the monthly ticket rankings. April's announcement was policy. August's removals were action. The biggest name in paid Chinese web fiction had started to crack down on AI's impact on the industry.

On September 7, Fanqie added a "completed-book contract" model and published its "Explanation of Work Contract Standards," which for the first time listed "AI slop with messy formatting, broken structure, and empty padding" as a separate category ineligible for a contract.

At that point I thought it was fine. Even if Fanqie later moved almost entirely to human review, most of the novels my system produced could still land contracts.

October 12.

A devastating day for the AI novel industry. Fanqie announced two things.

First, Author Level 3.0 went live. Eight levels, advanced by accumulating points through publishing, signing contracts, and the like. Levels will be adjusted across the board November 12 to 14.

Second, new works by Lv. 0 and Lv. 1 authors can only use the completed-book contract: write the full 150,000 or 300,000 characters the category requires, finish the whole book, then apply. The whole book is reviewed at once, and each book can be submitted at most three times. Readers can't see the book before it's signed. The old serial contract let you apply at 20,000 characters, with chapters reviewed one by one. The trick of "write the opening yourself for a contract recommendation, then let AI mass-produce the rest" is closed.

Lv. 2 and above can choose between the serial and completed-book models; books already started are unaffected.

Why do these two changes hit AI novels so hard?

Start with the contract model. The biggest advantage of AI novels used to be how fast they paid out. Sign at 20,000 characters, debut at 80,000, and see the numbers the next day. Bad numbers, drop it and start another. That's how I cut my first book.

It was a gacha system. One pull cost only tens of thousands of characters, and AI writers lived by pulling over and over.

Now you have to finish all 150,000 or 300,000 characters before you're even eligible to apply. Even for AI, writing a book from start to finish without it collapsing takes a long time. Readers can't see the book before it's signed, so there's no data to go on. It's writing the whole book blind and only then learning whether it works. And you get three chances.

Review also went from single chapters to the whole book. The place AI novels fail most is the middle and late stretches: the main plot drifts, the continuity breaks. Before, by the time those problems showed up, the book was long signed. Now they're all laid out in front of the reviewer.

Then the author levels. To get around the completed-book contract you have to reach Lv. 2. Right now Lv. 2 takes 3,000 yuan in royalties from one book. Most AI writers, and plenty of ordinary human writers too, can't reach that line.

The cost of one pull went from tens of thousands of characters to a hundred thousand, several hundred thousand. Gacha has been banned outright.

Looking Back

These six months I got some things right and some things wrong. But looking back, the things that really decided the outcome were never in my hands: when models upgrade, when platforms change their rules.

The only thing I can decide is when I step in.

Getting in early matters more than anything.

When I came across that creator, he was already making at least 40,000 a month. Was he much smarter than me? I don't think so. He was just earlier.

I decided to do AI novels in early May, and from May to August I didn't start a single book. By the time I actually got it working in September, Fanqie had changed its contract standards on September 7 and sealed off serial contracts for newcomers on October 12.

If I hadn't gone down the software rabbit hole for those three months, if I'd just started one book after another, even with lousy tools, I'd at least have a few more signed books, and three more months of royalties and experience.

There's a line in the new rules I read over and over: Lv. 2 and above can choose for themselves, and books already started are unaffected. Whenever rules tighten, it's old rules for the old guard, new rules for the newcomers. The people who got in early made a few more months of money and picked up an exemption ticket along the way.

Getting in means actually stepping onto the field: starting a book, publishing, watching the numbers. For three months I was busy with AI novels every day, and the whole time I was standing outside the field. Liang Mouyin took the beta I myself couldn't stand, started a book, and earned 300 yuan. That was the project's only income in three months, and I didn't even earn it.

Combine AI with the hobby you've put the most into.

For the second book I switched to women's web fiction, but I'd never read any, so I went back to a familiar IP and wrote fan fiction, and that's when the traffic came. The farther you get from what you know, the harder it is to keep writing.

After the book fell apart I could see where it broke: the plot ran too fast, the continuity broke. That's a judgment only someone who's written for four or five years has. Someone who hasn't written will just think AI writes badly, can't say where, and certainly can't fix it. Later, my prompt system, the thing people in the community paid for, came out of that judgment.

AI can do the work for you. You still have to judge whether it's any good.

I wrote novels for four or five years in school and never did well. Before AI, that experience was basically wasted. After AI, it became the most valuable thing I own.

Model capability decides product quality.

The two problems I spent three months building software to solve were, plainly, the model's shortcomings at the time: the context wasn't long enough, and it couldn't remember things. What I was doing was patching the model with spreadsheets and checklists.

The problem I was fighting so hard to solve in May was answered by the August model.

Model companies are more anxious about the model's shortcomings than you are, and they have far more people and money. If you go up against it alone, odds are the next generation arrives before you're done.

Those three months weren't all for nothing. What got scrapped was the software, the spreadsheets and workflows. What's left is the prompts and my understanding of why a novel falls apart. Things tied to a model's shortcomings expire. Things tied to the industry don't.

Making money depends on AI. How long you can make it depends on the industry.

The technology didn't fail. The industry changed.

The whole business stood on Fanqie's leniency. The foundation belongs to someone else. They change one rule and the building shakes.

And the platform tightened up precisely because AI was too easy to use. The barrier was so low anyone could walk in, content flooded, the flood hurt the platform, and the platform acted. Qidian announced in April and removed works in August; Fanqie changed contract standards in September and author levels in October, each step tighter than the last. The speed at which AI makes something easy and the speed at which the industry starts guarding against AI are the same speed.

If I size up an AI side hustle now, I ask two questions. Can AI do it? Will the industry let AI do it, and for how long? The person who rushed in after answering only the first question was me in September.

One more thing I have to be honest about: most of my income is tuition; royalties are the small part. Teaching pays better than doing, and that's common in AI side hustles. But tuition is rooted in the industry too. When Fanqie's door closes, fewer people will want to learn.

Price with confidence.

The 299 yuan I paid bought a tutorial that, followed by the SOP, produced two books. Both collapsed. Looking back, most of it was information asymmetry, and the packaging wasn't exactly polished.

I don't regret it. It showed me that someone had made it work, and roughly how. The information gap itself was worth money.

My community was built by constantly posting numbers and notes in the group. I priced it at 298 yuan, one yuan less than the fee I paid.

I didn't set that price. My first customer did. I think that's good, letting the users price it for me. It's worth whatever the people willing to pay say it's worth.

What they buy is the road I already walked. What they save is their own three months.

If your product came out of work you actually did yourself, it's already more solid than plenty of paid products on the market, and you don't have to feel sheepish about the price.

November 12

Today the level adjustment began.

My judgment is that the old model of AI novels no longer works.

My best-performing book makes 500 to 600 yuan a month so far. At that rate it takes nearly half a year to save 3,000 yuan and reach Lv. 2.

Actually, five or six hundred a month from one book is already decent. It covers a month of AI subscriptions, or some odds and ends.

Going forward, I think the future belongs to polished work. And with AI's current ability, it's hard to write a high-level novel with real character.

AI's strength in fiction is that it can tell a story very clearly. With a solid outline it writes smoothly, clear from beginning to end, with no dragging.

That's its strength and its weakness. What Fanqie calls a "stiff style" in its contract standards is exactly this.

I often say AI won't make dumplings for a dish of vinegar. It won't wrap a whole batch just to have something to dip. When it tells a story, it goes by the book.

People are different. People will often go ahead and make the dumplings. Shao Song spends an entire book wrapping dumplings, all for that last poem, Linjiang Xian.

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I Never Thought T1 Could Beat BLG

2026-11-09T03:28:13.216Z

I never thought T1 could beat BLG.

After watching today's four games, two things stood out most:

1. Just as I expected, T1 without ZOFGK is far less competitive. They had no answer for a BLG team this hot.

2. Faker isn't old yet.

I'm not someone who buys into curses. Because of the history, every LPL fan can't help getting nervous whenever an LPL team faces T1 in the Worlds knockouts. But I'd always believed this year's BLG, and especially the BLG of right now, could take T1 down. They could even flat-out stomp them.

But after watching four games, I have to admit that Worlds Faker really is something else. He put enormous pressure on BLG in every single game.

Before the series, I kept telling my friends I was terrified that Peyz would crush Viper in the bot lane, especially if he got a late-game hard carry like Sivir and wasn't behind on gold.

Looking back after the match, Peyz's situation was a bit like GALA's back on JDG. In these games, his impact and threat were nowhere near those of Faker in the mid lane.

Luckily, Viper finally found his form in the knockouts. His Ezreal was absolutely special. Put any other ADC on that Ezreal, and I think that game could have gone either way.

ON's ult at the dragon pit in Game 4 was like that Q-Flash from two years ago. I've always thought this comes down to luck. Two years ago, luck was on T1's side. Two years later, Oner's Wukong decoy showed that luck was on BLG's side this year. If luck had been a little less even-handed, maybe this day would have come two years ago.

When the series ended, along with the joy, I felt a little lost. So that's it. It's happened. But what drifts away with it? The careers of countless brilliant LPL players, and a youth that countless LPL fans can never get back.

This year's final finally brings together the two strongest teams. Maybe this year is the best possible ending.

Either Knight or Chovy will lift the first trophy of his career in New York.

I can't help thinking of the name of this year's theme song, "Know My Name."

The wind rises today, in my name!

My highest respect to Lee Sang-hyeok! He's no longer part of this year's story, but the ending hasn't been written yet!

Even though I was nervous before the series, I'll only ever believe in the players on the stage now!

It's just like what Bin (Chen Zebin) once said:

So-called fate is often just an excuse we make when we feel powerless. The ones who conquer fate are usually those who refuse to stand still and wait, who break its chains themselves.

I think that's the true character of the LPL, and the spirit of the Chinese nation too.

Let's go, BLG! See you at the finals!

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A Low-Energy Day

2026-11-08T11:01:03.855Z

I've caught a cold. Yet again.

It's like October had barely ended when November's cold automatically respawned. I'm honestly getting sick of it. It's only a minor illness, but to avoid it I'd been wearing a mask whenever I went out, and it got me anyway. I was on a work trip to Langzhong, and after one night in the hotel I woke up with a sore throat.

A sore throat is how my colds start. It's practically a required step. Every cold begins there. The next day my throat stops hurting, and then come the runny nose, the sneezing, the stuffy nose, the whole series, one after another.

Today was probably the peak of it, with a wildly stuffy nose and a runny one on top.

So I didn't go to the gym today either. I just spent a low-energy day at home.

How do I spend a low-energy day? It's simple, and it comes down to one word: lying down.

On a normal day, after breakfast I sit at my computer and tinker with something. Around ten I head out to the gym, and I'm home a little after eleven. In the afternoon I'm back at the computer, messing around with AI, writing and so on.

But when my energy is low, I usually choose to lie in bed and play on my phone.

Yesterday was the Start of Winter on the Chinese calendar. Chengdu had a little rain, not much, but enough to bring a chill. On a day like this, I always get out my winter pajamas, the fuzzy ones. I put them on and burrow under the comforter, and before long I'm warm all over, as if the cold has already gone away.

I opened Bilibili and watched The Eight Immortals, a movie that just came out there. I thought it was pretty good. It reminded me of watching season five of Bu Liang Ren, because both have tons of really cool, freeze-frame-style shots.

Overall, I think The Eight Immortals is better than Ne Zha 2. They're both popcorn movies, but this one has better pacing and a deeper story, and it doesn't lean on so many poop and fart jokes, which I liked. If it falls short anywhere, it's that the eight characters aren't fully fleshed out in this film yet.

After lunch I took some cold medicine and got back into bed. I played on my phone for a bit and then slept for a while. When I woke up it was already three in the afternoon, so I picked up my phone again and watched an episode of Reply 1988. It's a Korean drama that's perfect for winter. This is my third time through it, on the day after the Start of Winter in 2026.

At four thirty I got out of bed and sat down at my desk. That morning I'd come across a video on Rednote showing a bookshelf animation. I thought it was really cool, and since my personal site happens to have a bookshelf, I wanted to recreate it.

I sent the video to Claude. After watching it, Claude built a demo in about three minutes. I looked it over and didn't feel anything needed changing. It was almost a 1:1 copy of what I wanted.

I hadn't looked after my personal site in a while. Since moving to this one, I've added things here and there, like an About page and English support across the whole site. The rest has been design polish to make the site nicer to look at.

Once that was done, I went out with my mom. A few days ago she went to Ya'an and came back with 40 kg of tangerines, bought at just 0.8 yuan per kg. Over the past few days she's been telling friends and relatives to come by and take some. There was one bag left for her best friend, but my mom couldn't carry it, so I had to go with her.

When I got home I started writing this post, stopping partway through for dinner. I had the leftovers from lunch and made a fresh pot of rice.

My mom has gone out for another walk. I'm sitting by the window, feeling the chill drift in, and finishing this post.

In a little while I'll take a shower, put my warm pajamas back on, crawl into bed and watch a quiet movie before I go to sleep.

I really love this kind of scene: after a hot shower, you get under the covers, wait for the bed to warm up, and put on a movie you can sink into, something deep and still.

Lying there in the dark, I get the feeling that I've left the Earth and am drifting through space. Only when I come back to myself do I realize I'm still in my own room.

If I had to recommend one movie that's perfect for this scene, I wouldn't hesitate to tell you: Interstellar.

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Life Doesn't Have to Be So Complicated

2026-11-06T12:11:57.717Z

A still from Zhang Yimou's film Hero

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.

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A Low-Strain Workout Combo

2026-10-31T07:33:30.471Z

It's nearly the end of the year, and my dad's work has slowed down, so he's been home a lot more lately. I remembered that my mom kept bringing up Guangwu Mountain a while back. She said she wanted to go see the autumn leaves there. Right now is the perfect time for that, and my dad happened to be free, so I wanted to send my parents off on a trip.

But after looking into it, I found that the drive from Chengdu to Guangwu Mountain takes at least six or seven hours. That's way too exhausting. My mom doesn't have the stamina, and she really couldn't handle all that travel.

So I found a stand-in: Mount Wawu. It's in Hongya County, in Meishan. Jiahua and I visited it over Chinese New Year last year, and it really is a wonderful place. It isn't far. You can get to the area in about three hours by car from Chengdu, and there are other sights nearby, like Liujiang Ancient Town and Yanü Lake, that you can see along the way. Two days is enough for an easy, relaxing trip.

My parents left today. By the time I'm writing this, I'd guess they've already seen the Reclining Buddha at Caoyutan and are strolling around Liujiang Ancient Town.

With my parents away, I had the house to myself. It was a little chilly and I had nothing to do, and days like that always drag. In the morning I came up with a bunch of Vibe Coding¹ projects and had Claude build demos for them. But I usually lost interest halfway through.

So I lay in bed and watched a short drama, a lazy bit of "Hongguo time."² At noon I went downstairs for an 18-yuan rice bowl. Back home, I opened the Maoyan app and remembered that Swordsman II, which I'd been keeping an eye on, was back in theaters. So I booked a ticket. I'd wanted to see it in a Dolby Cinema, but it was too far away, so I settled for the giant-screen theater near my place and went by myself.

After that I watched two episodes of Tales of Herding Gods at home, and it was already one o'clock. I checked the time, didn't put it off any longer, changed my clothes and headed to the gym.

Okay, I think I'm finally getting close to the point. I came up with this post while I was working out at the gym. I had the title and the rough content pretty much figured out from the start: I want to share what I do for my low-intensity workouts. A lot of people can do these at home. You won't feel wiped out afterward, but you'll still feel like you actually worked.

And all that stuff up top is really just my way of saying this: Exercise doesn't have to push you to your limit. It can also add a little extra comfort to a lazy day.

Lately my traps and my neck and shoulders have been pretty stiff, and it's been giving me cervicogenic headaches.³ In the morning I gave my traps a good going-over with a massage gun, which hurt in the best way. But when I got to the gym in the afternoon, I could still clearly feel that my rear delts, and my whole neck and shoulder area, were worn out.

Given how my body felt today, I decided that even though it was supposed to be back day, I'd do some low-intensity work to help my body feel better.

The workout is really simple. I'll go through it one move at a time.

The Workout

Lower Body

90/90 Hip Switches

Youtube@The Active Life

The 90/90 hip switch⁴ is a really common hip mobility exercise. A lot of programs put it first. It's very basic: just sit down on the floor anywhere and do it. It's also very effective, because it works your hips' internal and external rotation at the same time. If your hip mobility is limited, you'll really feel it working.

One rep is one switch to each side. Do 3 sets of 12.

Single-Leg Hip Rotations with a Foam Roller Against the Wall

Youtube@Dr. Claire Bowes

In terms of order, the 90/90 hip switch can be thought of as the lead-in or warm-up for this one.

Here's how it goes: stand on one leg, press a foam roller against the wall with the other leg, then open and close by rotating at the hip. The whole time, your standing leg keeps your pelvis steady and resists the wobble from the rotation.

To me, this move is "top of the top tier."⁵

Here's roughly what it does:

It builds strength and endurance in your glute medius and the deep external rotators at the back of the hip;
It improves hip stability when you're on one leg, so your knees are less likely to cave in when you walk, run or squat;
It improves active control and range of motion in hip internal and external rotation.

My physical therapist taught me this one. Once I tried it, I found it's really effective and super easy to get started with. This one move alone works the stability of your whole lower body. I love it.

One thing to watch: Turn your body from your hips. Don't let your lower back take over.

Do 12 reps per set, alternating legs, for 3 sets on each side.

Core: Planks

Youtube@Balance In Motion

After those two moves, grab a yoga mat and do some planks.

I don't need to say much about why planks are good for you. Like push-ups, they're practically a national pastime. Just find a spot, get down and go.

My first set is 1 minute, and the next two go to failure. 3 sets in total.

Here's another interesting idea I came across:

The gist is this: The mild pain and frustration of exercise make your brain stronger. They help you be tougher and stick with things when life gets hard.

The article explains this "switched on" feeling that comes with the discomfort: physical challenges boost the release of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF),⁶ which it calls "fertilizer for the brain."

So when you're close to failure in a plank, every extra second you hold on may be changing more than your core strength. You're also quietly rebuilding your brain.

Upper Body

Strict Press

Youtube@The Pump Club

Just like the single-leg hip rotation with a foam roller, the strict press⁷ is a top-tier move in my book. What they have in common is this: One move trains a lot more.

The strict press works your front delts, side delts and triceps all at once. It also really tests your core stability.

Don't go heavy without thinking. As a rule, the weight should be only 40% to 60% of your working weight on the bench press. Pay special attention to bracing your core and locking in your lower body. Don't let your core wobble, or you could hurt your back.

Do 3 sets of 5 to 10 reps.

Dead Hangs

Youtube@Adam McCubbin

I won't go on about the benefits of dead hangs here. For the details, you can read the post I wrote earlier about grip strength and dead hangs.

In short, hanging doesn't just build grip strength. It also relieves the shoulder tension that comes from sitting all day. A lot of the time, hanging doesn't tire me out at all. My upper body actually feels a lot looser afterward.

One set is 50% of your max hang time. 3 sets is plenty. Retest your max every so often.

Farmer's Walk

Youtube@CrossFit

Just carrying two dumbbells around can work you hard. From the name and the move itself, it's easy to see that a lot of the time, exercise is really about making everyday life easier.

People today live in cities. We don't lift and haul heavy things all the time like farmers in the countryside do. So these everyday movements have become exercises in the gym.

The method is simple too. Pick a weight that feels manageable, hold one in each hand, and walk laps around the gym until you can't hold on anymore.

Generally, a good weight is one you can carry for about 40 seconds.

As for how many laps, that's up to you.

Flexibility

Lately my flexibility work has been entirely the four moves Huberman⁸ recommends, and they've been great.

All four are really simple and easy to get started with, but the results are very noticeable. You can do them at home. I'd suggest everyone do them whenever you have a moment.

I wrote about Huberman's training plan in another post, if you're curious.

The four moves are:

Sumo squat
Bring your knees behind your hips
Reverse tabletop
Founder's pose⁹

Sumo squat Youtube@Andrew Huberman

Bring your knees behind your hips Youtube@Andrew Huberman

Reverse tabletop Youtube@Andrew Huberman

Founder's pose Youtube@Andrew Huberman

I don't think these four need any explaining. Anyone can tell how to do them just from the four screenshots above.

So if you're interested, why not put down your phone and give them a try right now!

That's everything I did in today's workout. The whole thing took about an hour, and the intensity wasn't high at all. Afterward I wasn't tired. If anything, my body felt lighter and I had more energy.

When I got home, I wrote this post in under 50 minutes, all in one go. I wonder if some of that was the boost exercise gives the brain.

Either way, it's a really nice feeling.

Well, that's it for now.

Vibe Coding: a way of programming where you mostly describe what you want to an AI in plain language and let it generate the code. The developer focuses on the "feel" and the result rather than writing code line by line. ↩
Hongguo: short for Hongguo Short Drama, a free short-drama app in China. ↩
Cervicogenic headache: a headache caused by problems in the cervical spine and the muscles and soft tissue around it. It often shows up as pain at the back of the head or the temples, along with stiffness in the neck and shoulders. ↩
90/90: the position of the legs while seated, with the hips and knees of both the front and back leg at roughly 90°. The hip switch means alternating this position from one side to the other. ↩
"Top of the top tier": the Chinese is hang (夯), internet slang from hang bao le. In tier-list memes like "hang / top-tier / elite / NPC / trash," it's the highest rank, meaning "absolutely amazing." ↩
BDNF (Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor): a protein that supports the growth, survival and synaptic plasticity of neurons. Research shows exercise can raise its levels. ↩
Strict press: the standing barbell press (Strict Press / Overhead Press). You don't use your legs at all and press the bar from your shoulders to overhead using only your upper body. ↩
Huberman: Andrew Huberman, a professor of neurobiology at Stanford University and host of the podcast Huberman Lab. He often shares science-based advice on exercise, sleep and more. ↩
Founder's pose: a core move from Foundation Training, created by Eric Goodman. You shift your hips back and lean your torso forward to strengthen the posterior chain and improve posture. ↩

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What It Felt Like to Go Deep into Daliangshan for the First Time

2026-10-28T13:18:54.801Z

1. Yi Script

Yesterday morning at six, I left my home in Chengdu and set off.

Two things stand out most about autumn in Chengdu. One is that it's colder, and you can't wear short sleeves and shorts anymore. The other is that dawn comes later and dusk comes earlier.

I set out at six. In summer, the sky would already be getting light by then. I felt a faint chill in the air, and luckily I'd worn a slightly thicker jacket on purpose.

It suddenly struck me that it was already late autumn. But autumn in Chengdu doesn't seem to leave any especially striking memories. Most of the time the sky is gray and hazy, and that's about it.

Where I was going this time is at the very edge of Sichuan, separated from Yunnan only by the Jinsha River. In a way, I probably can't set foot in a spot closer to the corner of Sichuan than this.

It's Jinyang County, in the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan.

To get to Jinyang County, I first had to take a train to Xichang, then a coach from Xichang to Jinyang's county seat.

I took train C755 from Chengdu South Station to Xichang West Station. Funnily enough, although I've worked in Sichuan for almost three years, I'd never been to the Liangshan Prefecture in southern Sichuan. Probably because geography limits the economy here compared with the area around Chengdu, and our business doesn't reach this far.

To people in Chengdu, Xichang is a tourist city, with the beautiful Qionghai Lake and its famous charcoal-pot barbecue. But from the moment I boarded, I could tell that most people on this train weren't traveling for fun. From their clothes, accents, and language, most were locals from Liangshan. On the train, I didn't yet know that most of them were Yi people.

The ride took three hours to Xichang. As time went on, the scenery outside changed from plains to rolling hills. The railway I rode is the new Chengdu–Kunming line, opened in 2022. The old Chengdu–Kunming line opened in 1970. The old line was called a "geological museum," because the geology along it is extremely complex, with landslides and mudslides common. Back then, some foreign experts even thought this was a forbidden zone for railways.

Only by actually riding it can you appreciate how remarkable this railway is.

When I arrived at Xichang West Station, the scene around me surprised me. Around the high-speed rail station I couldn't see any dense apartment blocks, only detached rural houses with ethnic character.

By rights, Xichang shouldn't look like this. It should have well-developed city blocks. Later, at Xichang East Bus Station, I learned it's true: the West Station is some distance from the urban area, though not too far.

Worth mentioning: after getting off the train, I saw a kind of writing I'd never seen on the platform signs. I asked AI and learned it's Yi script. It was my first time seeing this remarkable script at a high-speed rail station, and it told me that Daliangshan is the home of the Yi people. Most of those traveling the high-speed line between Chengdu and Liangshan were Yi.

Yi script on a platform sign

At Xichang East Bus Station, I believed it even more. Almost everyone I saw was Yi. There were many shops around selling traditional Yi clothing, and lots of people were chatting in the Yi language.

Many motorcycles were parked in front of the bus station. Most of the riders make a living carrying passengers. As I walked past, they said something to me. I could tell it was Sichuanese, but I couldn't understand what they were saying.

Jinyang County, where I was going, is known as the heartland of Daliangshan. Nearby Zhaojue, Meigu, and Butuo are also mostly places where Yi people live together. I think this bus station is where the whole heartland of Daliangshan connects.

2. The Shortcut

Before long after the coach left the station, it got onto the national highway, which really meant the mountain road. It was a true mountain road, winding through nine bends and eighteen turns, climbing steadily. The altitude wasn't that high overall, but I soon felt I was far from the city.

Once in the mountains, I found that the four seasons there are so distinct. Autumn is autumn, and winter is winter.

From a distance, the leaves covering the mountainsides looked like layer upon layer of golden waves. It was gorgeous.

Sometimes a bit of green mixed in, adding a light afterglow to the deep autumn.

Deep blue sky, deep autumn on the land.

I suddenly realized it's in the mountains that you truly get autumn.

The turning of the seasons is really nature breathing in and out, leaves falling, life going round again. In the city, we live in a jungle of steel and concrete, and our view of nature is limited. We can feel the temperature drop, and we can feel dawn and dusk, but it's hard to feel nature's changes in finer detail. Even the fallen leaves are swept away early by the cleaners.

The coach ride to Jinyang County takes over six hours. Along the way we passed Zhaojue, a fairly well-known stop, because tourism is very well developed there. All along the road I saw many tourism projects, like some tastefully built guesthouses. Zhaojue's county seat is also the newest and most modern place on the route. After we left it and went deeper into Daliangshan, the feel of going back to a simpler life grew stronger.

For example, I've seen cattle and sheep wandering onto the road in western Sichuan, but this was my first time seeing villagers let their pigs roam free. Several times I saw a few black pigs strolling along the road, but the moment they heard the car horn, they obediently made way.

Some people in the mountains keep horses too. I was born in the Year of the Horse, so I notice horses especially. Sometimes I saw a few horses grazing at leisure in a wide field with no saddles on them. Other times I saw villagers using horses to carry goods. Honestly, seeing this way of moving things today feels fascinating.

And this way of transport, which looks fun and old-fashioned now, was the only link between Jinyang County and the outside world in the early 1950s. Back then Jinyang had only three horse caravan trails. A horse caravan trail is a mountain path where people drive horses or mules carrying goods. Jinyang relied on these three trails to send grain, salt, and all kinds of goods in and out.

Only in the early 1960s did Jinyang get its first highway. They say the whole county beat gongs and drums on the day it opened. And until a dozen or so years ago, driving from Xichang to Jinyang still took 12 hours, and sometimes you had to spend the night in the mountains.

When I learned it was a 6-hour coach ride to Jinyang, I was shocked, because I hadn't been on a coach that long in ages. I'd sat on that coach for so long and already found it unbearable. But a dozen years ago, this road took twelve hours, and before that there wasn't even a proper road here.

This road that I found so long was, for the people in the mountains, already a shortcut.

There was a small incident on the way. A landslide seemed to have hit one stretch of the road, and we ran into a crew at work. An excavator was clearing and repairing the slope. We waited about 40 minutes before we could pass. In places like this, landslides and all sorts of small accidents are common, which made me feel even more that such roads don't come easily.

So with the delay, I spent nearly seven hours on the coach, and it was seven in the evening when I reached Jinyang's county seat.

3. Liangfen

Jinyang's county seat felt different from what I'd imagined. If you stand on a street in Jinyang, you wouldn't feel you're in the mountains, because tall buildings line both sides of the road. Only at certain intersections, or along the main roads, do you realize you're in a valley.

Most of Jinyang's residents are Yi people, and an outside worker like me is obviously from somewhere else.

Last night I went out to find something to eat and found a local kind of liangfen, cold jelly noodles, that's gray overall. When I walked up to the shop, the woman inside kindly asked if I wanted liangfen. I said yes. Then she asked if I wanted it "thin" or "dry."

I froze, because my research beforehand hadn't turned up this way of ordering. She explained that thin liangfen is hot and dry liangfen is cold, so I chose dry. She filled a bowl for me, and I stood there holding it until she told me you season it yourself.

Just as I was at a loss, a woman standing next to me said, very naturally, on my behalf: "He doesn't know how."

I laughed and said right, I don't, it's my first time here. Then the woman in the shop mixed the seasoning for me, and in the end it tasted pretty good.

Jinyang liangfen

In my two days in the county, another thing surprised me: there are a lot of students in Jinyang. I first noticed it when I walked onto the street at school's end. Groups after groups of students poured out of the schools, carrying backpacks in twos and threes, chatting and laughing as they walked, and the whole street was suddenly lively.

I wondered why a place like this has so many students. The number of students is falling quickly across the country now, and many primary schools in many places are being closed or merged because there aren't enough students. Why is Jinyang like this?

It turns out Jinyang has an especially high share of children. Out of every 100 people, nearly 40 are children, more than double the national share. The reason there are so many students in the county seat is that many of the children's homes were originally up in the mountains and only moved to the county seat in recent years. The children whose homes are still in the mountains live at school and go home on weekends.

Then I thought that among these boarding children, many must have parents working away from home. Jinyang has a registered population of over 200,000, but only about 170,000 live there. The tens of thousands in between mostly make a living elsewhere. So that children can talk to their parents, the boarding schools here have installed "family phones" and video equipment.

The street was so lively at the end of school, but all I saw was liveliness. What those children think about in their dorms every night, I, a passerby, don't actually know.

4. A Hundred Years of Electricity Bills

On the way to Jinyang, I passed several village schools. Most weren't big, built beside the road or in the middle of a village, a few buildings and a playground standing out in a landscape of mountains and farmland. Every time the coach passed the gate of a school like this, I looked twice.

Honestly, seeing these schools moved me a little. In mountains like these, to build a school, someone has to build roads to bring in building materials, teachers have to be willing to come teach, and someone has to go from house to house persuading children back into the classroom. None of that gets done by one person or one village alone.

In recent years, Jinyang has merged many village primary schools that were too small and too scattered, while also building and expanding quite a few schools, adding over 8,000 places and 6,000 beds. In these years, more and more Jinyang Middle School students have been getting into university.

I feel that the more basic the place, the more you can sense the good in the country and society. In Chengdu, schools are right next to residential compounds, and we rarely think about how a school came to be. Here, every school looks like it was forced up out of the mountain. It was in a place like this that I truly grasped the weight of the saying "education changes lives." For a child in the mountains, studying may be another road, one that leads somewhere farther away.

Besides schools, what I saw most on the way was power grid equipment.

The coach wound around the mountain road, and nearly every bend showed steel towers standing on the ridges, with power lines stretching from one mountain to the next and on down to villages in the hollows. At first I didn't think much of it. After seeing so many, I started to wonder how much effort it must take to set these towers up on such tall, steep mountains.

In 2012, more than three million people across China still had no electricity, over 80% of them from ethnic minorities, and Sichuan was one of the key areas. It was only by the end of 2015 that everyone in China had power. And in some remote places, connecting one household cost about 40,000 yuan, which, at a normal household's electricity use, would pay for a hundred years of electricity bills.

A hundred years. That's obviously not a good deal, but in the end, the lines still reached every home.

Another thing struck me as remarkable. Between Jinyang and Yongshan in Yunnan on the opposite bank, the Xiluodu Hydropower Station sits on the Jinsha River, one of the largest hydropower stations in China. The huge power station is right at their doorstep and sends electricity endlessly to faraway places, yet people in the mountains have only had stable power for the past ten or so years.

5. Something to Look Forward To

This evening I stood on a hillside at the edge of the county seat and saw this bridge. It spans a very deep river valley, with several piers rising straight up from the valley floor, holding the deck high in midair. At the other end of the bridge is a stretch of newly built apartment blocks on the opposite slope. The sun was about to set. The valley had already gone dark, and only the far mountaintops were still lit golden by the sunset. On a ridge further off stood a row of wind turbines, probably generating power too.

The bridge

Back where I'm staying, I looked it up and learned it's called the Jinyang River Grand Bridge. The tallest pier is 196 meters, about the height of a 65-story building. The straight-line distance between Jinyang's new and old county seats is only a little over a kilometer, but they're separated by the Jinyang River Valley, several hundred meters deep. To get across, you used to go down to the river on one side and wind up the mountain road to the other, which took over an hour by car. Since the bridge opened in 2022, it takes just a dozen minutes. They say that on opening day, locals from nearby, old and young, brought dry food and water and made a special trip to see it.

I also read a report from a few years ago. While the bridge was still being built, Erku Xiaohong, a villager from Mayizu Township, stood on the riverbank and took a photo of it with her phone. She said that when she was little, it took three or four hours to walk from the village entrance to the county seat. Later, after a road was built, it took forty minutes. Back then everyone was hoping the bridge would be finished soon, so they could sell Sichuan pepper more easily.

A few years ago she stood by the river and photographed this bridge. A few years later I stood on a hillside and photographed it. She photographed something to look forward to. I photographed a view.

In fact, even as I rode the coach down that old road, a new road was nearly finished in the mountains.

That road is the Xi-Zhao Expressway. It starts from Xichang, passes through Zhaojue, Butuo, and Jinyang, crosses the Jinsha River, and runs all the way to Zhaotong in Yunnan on the other bank. Just a week before I set out, on October 20, the longest tunnel on this expressway, the Jinyang Tunnel, over 12,000 meters long, was fully opened through. As planned, the Xi-Zhao Expressway will fully open to traffic by the end of this year, and then it will take only about an hour from Xichang to Zhaojue.

In the news I read about an electric welder working in the Jinyang Tunnel, named Qumu Zhiji. His home is in a township not far from the work site, but he rarely goes back. When someone asked why, he said the villagers are all hoping the tunnel opens soon so they can get out and see the world, and he's embarrassed to go home often while it isn't finished.

I thought of those forty minutes stuck on the road. While I sat in the coach getting a bit impatient, there were many people like him, deep in the mountains, working hard to turn a natural barrier into an open road.

6. Autumn

I'm writing this on my second night in Jinyang. Tomorrow I'll go back the way I came, on the old road. Thinking about it, this trip may have been one of the last few autumns for this old road. Next year, when someone comes from Xichang to Jinyang, they may not have to wind around mountain roads for seven hours, and the golden slopes I saw from the coach window may be hidden by tunnel after tunnel.

But I think autumn will still be in the mountains.

It's always been here, yellow from the foot of the mountain to the summit, year after year. It's just that in the past few people could get in, and people in the mountains found it hard to get out. It was the highway opened over sixty years ago with gongs and drums, the steel towers on the ridges, and the tunnels in the mountains that let someone like me, from Chengdu, see these autumn mountains through a coach window on a late autumn afternoon.

They also mean that one day the children in the mountains can follow these roads out and see the autumn outside the mountains.

Though the autumn outside the mountains may not be as beautiful as here.

Some of the material in this article comes from public reports by Xinhua, China News Service, and other outlets.

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Why I Keep Telling My Mom to Eat More Meat: How Much Protein Really Matters

2026-10-24T12:24:58.653Z

Here's how it started.

Lately, the thing I say to my mom most at meals is: eat more meat.

From what I've seen, my mom likes to fill a bowl with rice, pick at a few dishes, finish the rice quickly, and then say she's full. In fact she's barely touched the dishes or the meat. What she's wolfed down is basically all carbs.

Sometimes when I tell her to eat some meat, she barely moves. Then after the meal, she'll pick up her chopsticks and fish out the leftover ginger and garlic from the serving plates to eat.

So I started wondering: why doesn't she eat meat?

Why My Mom Doesn't Eat Meat

My first thought was habit. On a Chinese dinner table, rice is the star and meat is just one of the dishes. And for a dish, "goes great with rice" is the highest praise there is. That alone shows that for a lot of people, rice is the real main event of a meal.

At dinner I told my mom: if one bowl of rice plus a few bites of the dishes fills you up, you should eat half as much rice and twice as much of the dishes and meat.

She said: if I don't eat rice, I never feel full. Like your grandpa says, eat more rice and you'll stay full longer.

All of this shows that my mom's eating habits revolve around rice.

But when I thought about it more, it's actually a complicated question.

Besides habit, maybe my mom's appetite has gotten smaller, so a few mouthfuls of rice fill her up. Or maybe it's because she's frugal and wants to save the meat for the rest of the family. Picking the leftover ginger and garlic off the plates after the meal is probably for the same reason.

My grandma, when she was alive, was exactly like that. Always thinking about being good to others, never thinking about herself at all. After she passed, we'd often talk about how she always used to put meat into Grandpa's bowl.

I think this happens in a lot of Chinese families.

What Happens When You Don't Eat Enough Meat

So what happens if you don't eat meat, or don't eat enough of it?

I'll use myself as the example. I only started planning my diet in the last couple of years, and my body before I started working out was probably a snapshot of a lot of people's bodies.

The technical name for that body type is "central obesity."¹ The person doesn't look fat. Their arms, legs and torso don't look big. But the moment they take their shirt off, there's a big belly.

Back when I was in school, I'd say the vast majority of my classmates had this body type. The big belly comes from years of refined carbs and sugar-and-fat combos. The skinny arms and legs come from not eating enough protein and not exercising.

Does that sound like you?

But what I want to tell you is this: a diet built on carbs with too little protein brings far more than a belly. It sets off a whole chain reaction.

If you don't get enough protein for a long time, then in the long run your muscle mass will definitely be low, and it will keep trending down.

Worse, after thirty, you start gradually losing muscle. There's no avoiding it. Some studies estimate that after thirty, muscle mass drops by about 3% to 8% every decade, and after sixty it goes even faster.²

That's why a saying has caught on among young people: before thirty, your two most important assets are cash and muscle.

Staying active is the only way to hold on to as much muscle as possible in the long run, and eating enough protein is a non-negotiable part of that.

If you can't do that, low muscle mass over the long term plus aging shows up in lots of direct ways. The simplest is having no strength: you can't move things, lift things, carry things or hold on to things.

You might say: who still lifts and carries heavy stuff all the time these days?

True, maybe you don't carry things much. But what if, when you're old, you need to catch yourself?

Lots of older people end up in the hospital after a fall. They fall because their bodies are too weak, their balance is poor, and when they start to fall, their grip isn't strong enough to grab something to steady themselves.

Surveillance data from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention show that falls are now the leading cause of injury deaths among people over 65 in China.³

More practically, if an older person breaks a bone and ends up in the hospital after a fall, how much protein they eat during recovery is closely tied to how fast and how well they recover.

That's why many doctors, when they talk with patients, still add "eat more meat." What they really mean is: eat more protein.

What's more, older people don't actually need less protein than young people.

As we age, the body responds less to protein. Eat the same serving of protein, and less of it goes into building muscle than in a young person. In nutrition science this is called "anabolic resistance."⁴ So the European Society for Clinical Nutrition and Metabolism (ESPEN) recommends 1.0 to 1.2 g of protein per kg of bodyweight per day for healthy older adults, and even more for older adults who are ill or frail.⁵

But reality is the exact opposite. Lots of older people have smaller appetites and worse teeth, and they're used to being frugal. What they eat least of at the table is usually meat.

That's why I'm always telling my mom at the table to eat more meat.

How Much Protein to Eat

So how much protein should you eat, and how?

Huberman, a professor of neurobiology at Stanford School of Medicine, covers this in detail in his book Protocols.⁶

The core of it is roughly this: eat 30 to 50 g of protein per meal, and your total daily protein should match your bodyweight in pounds, so 1 g of protein per pound of bodyweight. In kilograms, that's 2.2 g of protein per kg of bodyweight.

That's not really surprising. Plenty of people online now encourage everyone to eat protein equal to twice their bodyweight in kg.

But twice your bodyweight in protein isn't that easy for most people.

When I first started working out, it was extremely hard for me too. I think it only becomes easy once your muscle mass has gradually gone up and your training has settled into a steady rhythm.

For most ordinary people, getting protein equal to your bodyweight in kg is already very good.

The Dietary Guidelines for Chinese Residents (2022)⁷ recommend that adults eat 120 to 200 g a day of meat, poultry, seafood and eggs, with moderate amounts of fish, poultry, eggs and lean meat, and less fatty meat. Add the protein from staples, dairy and soy products, and over a day you get pretty close to 1 g per kg of bodyweight. The Chinese Nutrition Society's recommended intake is 65 g a day for adult men and 55 g for women, which also works out to about 1 g per kg.⁸

So it matters to understand what protein does and why it's important, but don't stress if you can't eat enough of it.

One reminder: if you have chronic kidney disease or a similar condition, follow your doctor's advice on how much protein to eat. Don't just push your intake up to match the numbers.

More Important Than How Much: CP:C

Beyond how much you eat, Huberman also writes about something pretty key: while getting enough protein, try to eat protein with a high CP:C.

What's CP:C? Simply put, it's the ratio of complete protein (CP) to calories (C).

And what's complete protein? Among the amino acids the human body needs, there are nine it can't make itself.⁹ Protein that contains all nine is called complete protein. The meat, fish, eggs and dairy we eat every day are basically all complete. Most plant proteins are missing one or two and need to be combined with other foods.

High CP:C means not many calories, but lots of complete protein.

For example, take foods that all have the same 150 kcal.¹⁰

From 150 kcal of scallops you get about 29 g of protein, from chicken about 28 g, and from lean beef about 25 g. These are all high CP:C.

From 150 kcal of tofu or eggs, though, we only get about 15 g of protein, so their CP:C isn't high. But compared with foods like peanut butter, or beans with rice, they already count as medium CP:C.

So CP:C is really a question of value for money. High-protein, low-calorie foods give you more for your calories.

My own protein mostly comes from a few things: eggs, lean pork, beef shank and chicken breast. All of these are medium CP:C or better, and I think that's plenty.

And something like chicken breast works perfectly well in place of pork in everyday home dishes, like stir-fried meat with green peppers or with onions.

I've been adjusting the share of protein in my diet for about two years now. Combined with exercise that isn't frequent but has never stopped, both my energy and my strength are clearly different from two years ago.

On energy, I can throw myself into work with more focus. On strength, I can easily pick up equipment I couldn't lift before. I have to admit, strength makes you freer. Not having strength and having it but not using it are two completely different things.

Back to the Table: Getting Parents to Eat More Meat

Finally, back to my mom: how do you get your parents to eat more meat?

The simplest approach is to make the protein foods at home high-CP:C ones as much as you can. Add eggs and milk to breakfast, and swap fatty meat for fish and shrimp. For parents with smaller appetites, a high-CP:C food gives them more protein per mouthful. If your parents have trouble with their teeth, you can also make softer dishes like steamed egg custard, fish, tofu and minced meat.

And it's not as hard as you might think. For most parents, at 1 g per kg of bodyweight, that's about 50 to 60 g of protein a day, spread over three meals:¹¹

Breakfast: two eggs + a glass of milk (250 ml), about 20 g
Lunch: a serving of lean meat or chicken breast (about 100 g raw), about 20 g
Dinner: a serving of fish or shrimp (about 100 g raw), about 18 to 20 g

You don't even need to count the bits of protein from rice, vegetables and soy products. That's already enough for the day.

As for my mom's "eat more rice and you'll stay full longer," of the three macronutrients, protein is actually the most filling one.¹² For the same calories, meat and eggs keep you from getting hungry longer than rice does. So eating half a bowl less rice and a few more bites of meat won't make you hungry any sooner.

So if you can eat the dishes and meat first at every meal, and the rice last, even better.

And if, on top of that, you can encourage your parents to exercise and do some strength training, that's the best case of all.

By China's national standard, a waist circumference of ≥ 90 cm for adult men and ≥ 85 cm for adult women counts as central obesity. See the national health industry standard Criteria of Weight for Adults (WS/T 428-2013). ↩
Volpi E, Nazemi R, Fujita S. Muscle tissue changes with aging. Current Opinion in Clinical Nutrition and Metabolic Care, 2004. ↩
National Center for Chronic and Noncommunicable Disease Control and Prevention, Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention: cause-of-death surveillance data from the national disease surveillance system. ↩
Anabolic resistance: in older adults, muscle builds less in response to protein intake and strength training, so they need more protein to reach muscle protein synthesis similar to younger people. ↩
Deutz NEP, et al. Protein intake and exercise for optimal muscle function with aging: Recommendations from the ESPEN Expert Group. Clinical Nutrition, 2014. See also Bauer J, et al. Evidence-based recommendations for optimal dietary protein intake in older people: a position paper from the PROT-AGE Study Group. JAMDA, 2013. ↩
Andrew Huberman, Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body. ↩
Chinese Nutrition Society. Dietary Guidelines for Chinese Residents (2022). People's Medical Publishing House, 2022. ↩
Chinese Nutrition Society. Chinese Dietary Reference Intakes (2023 Edition). ↩
The nine essential amino acids are histidine, isoleucine, leucine, lysine, methionine, phenylalanine, threonine, tryptophan and valine. ↩
The figures below are approximate estimates based on the nutrient content of common foods. Actual values vary with the cut, variety and cooking method. ↩
Protein amounts are estimates. Meat is counted by raw weight, eggs at about 6 g each, and milk at about 3 g per 100 ml. 100 g of raw lean meat comes to about 70 g once cooked. ↩
Westerterp-Plantenga MS, et al. Dietary protein, weight loss, and weight maintenance. Annual Review of Nutrition, 2009. ↩

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Why Do Simple Solutions Always Seem Funny?

2026-10-20T13:41:51.286Z

There's a classic line from Huang Baoqiang in the sitcom iPartment: "Want to know the secret to my success? Read more books, read more newspapers, eat fewer snacks, and get more sleep."

Thinking about it now, the line sticks because Zeng Xiaoxian first said it as a joke, and then Huang Baoqiang actually won by following it to the letter.

Underneath the gag is something more serious: people always sneer at simple solutions.

When we face a big problem, a lot of us assume it needs a big method, a Big Idea, to solve it. That assumption is exactly why the audience laughs at Zeng Xiaoxian's advice, and exactly why it's funny that Huang Baoqiang succeeds with it.

But Huang Baoqiang's story is fiction. What happens in real life when someone uses a small method to solve a big problem?

Niklas Luhmann was a famous German sociologist. He started out as a civil servant, and in his spare time he read. After reading, he'd write his thoughts on small index cards and drop them into a box.

He kept up this habit for more than forty years and ended up with roughly 90,000 cards.¹

Later he moved into academia, became a professor at Bielefeld University, and spent thirty years writing his magnum opus, Theory of Society. Over his lifetime he published around 70 books and nearly 400 papers, covering law, economics, art, religion, love, and almost every other field, and the work was consistently excellent.

When someone asked him how he was so productive, he said there was no real secret. He never forced himself to do anything he didn't feel like doing, and when he got stuck on one piece of writing, he switched to another. He owed all of it to that card box.

Image: an example of a card box (not Luhmann's own archive) | Kai Schreiber / Wikimedia Commons | CC BY-SA 2.0

What Luhmann was really saying comes down to one thing: just write what you read and what you think on cards, and you'll become a prolific writer.

When people hear that, they react exactly the way we did when Zeng Xiaoxian handed Huang Baoqiang his secret to winning.

Doesn't everybody already know that?

And that's the point. Everybody knows it, yet most people never succeed the way Luhmann and Huang Baoqiang did. That's what makes such a plain, unglamorous method seem funny.

Luhmann's story is the gentle version, though. Here's another one.

Washing your hands is an everyday habit now. People like me who work in healthcare do it constantly.

In the 19th century, an obstetrician named Ignaz Semmelweis noticed that mothers died far more often in the ward where doctors delivered babies than in the ward run by midwives.

He suspected that the doctors were coming straight from dissecting corpses to deliver babies, carrying something on their hands.

He made the doctors wash their hands, and the ward's death rate fell from over 10% to around 1 to 2%.

Yet the idea that "washing your hands lowers the death rate" was widely rejected by the medical establishment of the time, because the explanation seemed far too simple.²

Back then, people simply couldn't believe that washing your hands could save a life.

Life is precious and handwashing is cheap, and something that cheap didn't seem worthy of something so precious.

In the same way, people don't think writing index cards is worthy of a towering scholar. They'd rather believe it takes a once-in-a-generation genius. And people don't believe Huang Baoqiang could win a million just by reading more books, reading more newspapers, eating fewer snacks, and getting more sleep, because any of us could do those things.

Lately a whole set of new buzzwords has taken off online in China, including "lean muscle,"³ "drink loads of water," and "sleep big."

I think that's a good thing, because they're about something that matters to every ordinary person.

Out of ten thousand people, some may not want to become writers or slumdog millionaires. But I'd guess almost nobody would turn down healthy habits and a healthy body.

At heart, "drink loads of water" and "sleep big" just mean drinking more water and sleeping more.

The human body is about 60% water. Drinking enough keeps a long list of basic functions running, including regulating body temperature, supporting metabolism, aiding digestion, and keeping your energy up.

Getting enough sleep matters even more. While we sleep, the body repairs itself, consolidates memories, clears waste from the brain, strengthens the immune system, and much more. Almost every change in the body that we can't perceive happens quietly while we sleep.

For people today, just drinking enough water and getting enough sleep already puts you ahead of most.

The "lean muscle" idea asks for even more. To get that kind of body, you need everything above plus regular exercise and a healthy, consistent diet.

So if you can manage lean muscle, loads of water, and big sleep, you already have pretty healthy habits.

I'm convinced buzzwords like these do more good than harm.

Because they point at the most common thing in ordinary life: the stuff we know perfectly well and still don't do.

Just like washing your hands, reading more and sleeping more, or writing what you see and think on cards: does anyone really not know that drinking enough water, sleeping enough, eating a light high-protein diet, and exercising regularly are good for you?

We've been told all of this over and over since childhood. For one reason or another, most of us just don't do it.

Simple doesn't mean easy. Whether it's writing cards or drinking loads of water and sleeping big, the hard part was never coming up with the idea. The hard part is getting people to keep doing it.

So many people online are rushing to chase lean muscle, loads of water, and big sleep. But when the hype dies down, how many will still be living that way? "Drink loads of water, sleep big" is just how a lifestyle shows up on the surface. Real change in a person ultimately takes a change at the level of culture.

The power of a small method usually isn't in the method itself. It's in someone being willing to take it seriously and keep at it.

I'll end with a line from the poet Lu You:

"What you learn from books always stays shallow. To truly understand a thing, you have to do it yourself!"

This later became widely known as the Zettelkasten method. Its core isn't collecting notes. It's giving every card a number and linking it to existing cards, so scattered notes grow into a network. ↩
Semmelweis never managed to convince his colleagues during his lifetime and later died in a psychiatric asylum. It was decades after his death before the medical world broadly accepted the need for handwashing and disinfection. ↩
"Lean muscle" (薄肌) describes a body with low body fat and clearly defined but not bulky muscles. ↩

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Zhang Juzheng's Ten Years, and Our Own Confusion

2026-10-18T13:40:09.278Z

When the roots are firm, the flowers and fruit will flourish. When the source runs deep, its light and ripples will shine. So the gentleman dwells in substance, not in show, and tends to what is within, not what is without. To carry on the legacy of the great kings, to make clear where virtue leads, to probe the mysteries of nature and fate, and to fathom the depths of the classics: this is truly what I hope of you all.

– Collected Works of Zhang Taiyue, vol. 15, "On Study at the Hanlin Academy"

Zhang Juzheng graduated from the Hanlin Academy as a Hanlin bachelor¹ in the 28th year of the Jiajing reign (1549). After that he stayed on at the Academy as a compiler, a seventh-rank official.

A Hanlin bachelor had no official rank in itself. But in the society of the time, they were seen as the top talent produced by the imperial exams, and some of them were likely to join the Grand Secretariat one day, even become chief minister.

Zhang Juzheng's background wasn't illustrious. His family were hereditary military households in Jingzhou, and his father was a scholar who failed the provincial exam again and again. He made a name for himself young, but compared with the sons of great families, he came from humble stock at best.

And when a jinshi graduate from a humble family entered the Hanlin Academy, it was easy for his narrow horizons and circumstances to lead him astray. Some could think of nothing but getting an official post, put their studies and ideals aside, and only wanted to graduate as soon as possible. Others were even more impatient and started cozying up to powerful officials at court before they'd even graduated, looking for a patron.

Zhang Juzheng was something of a breath of fresh air. I think he at least knew what he wanted more clearly than his peers. In those times, he didn't want to stand aside and retire home early, and he didn't want to bury himself in scholarship all his life either.

More importantly, he looked down on going with the flow at court and flattering the Jiajing Emperor in exchange for wealth and glory.

But he also knew that throwing his life away on a remonstrance to the death was just a moment's impulse. Not long after becoming a compiler, he submitted his "Memorial on Current Affairs," which laid out the ills of the time very bluntly. But that's as far as it went. He didn't gamble his future on making a name for himself.

So I think Zhang Juzheng was a clear-headed person. He knew what he wanted, and he knew what he was up against and how many difficulties lay along the way.

His ten years at the Hanlin Academy weren't smooth sailing either. In the 33rd year of Jiajing (1554), he took sick leave and went home, and only returned to the capital in the 36th year (1557). I imagine his clear-headedness was slowly ground into shape through those advances and retreats.

As the saying goes, the great affairs of the world must be done through the small things. During those years he kept reinforcing his foundations, laying solid ground for what came later. As for what he was thinking at the time, I don't know. I can only guess from what he did.

These days, few people put ten years into one thing, and few have a clear and lofty ambition in their hearts. Look out across a ten-year horizon, and I think most people are lost.

So when I read about the young Zhang Juzheng in Twilight Radiance: Zhang Juzheng and the Politics of the Mid-to-Late Ming,² it really struck a chord with me.

Especially when I put him side by side with the different choices of the other Hanlin bachelors of his time, it felt a bit like the era I'm living in now. Of course, the confusion of the Jiajing years came from political pressure and an emperor who neglected his duties, while today's confusion comes more from too many choices and no clear direction. They're not quite the same. But what they share is this: temptation is close at hand, the future you dream of is far away, and there are obstacle after obstacle in between.

If you can't find your direction in times like these, maybe you can do what Zhang Juzheng did.

When the roots are firm, the flowers and fruit will flourish. When the source runs deep, its light and ripples will shine. So the gentleman dwells in substance, not in show, and tends to what is within, not what is without.

He wrote this later to the scholars of the Hanlin Academy, but when I read it, it also felt like his summing up of his own years there.

For Zhang Juzheng, firm roots and a deep source meant learning, character, and an understanding of the affairs of the world. For us today, I think it means not forgetting who you really are when you're lost, and not just going with the flow.

As Zeng Guofan put it: in company, guard your tongue; alone, guard your heart.

At the same time, keep reinforcing your foundations and building up your abilities. Exercise, for example: a healthy body is a foundation. Or learn English well: good English is a foundation too. Things you earn through hard work may be, in other people's eyes, things that would take them a long time to achieve.

So when you're lost, don't forget to keep building the abilities that truly matter. That's important in any era.

A Hanlin bachelor (shujishi) was a short-term post in the Ming dynasty's Hanlin Academy. The best of the newly passed jinshi graduates were selected for it, studied at the Academy for three years, and then took a final exam before being given a real post. Most Grand Secretaries of the Ming came up this way. ↩
By Wei Qingyuan. The book follows Zhang Juzheng and the politics of the mid-to-late Ming dynasty, and is an important work on late Ming politics. ↩

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Being Alive Is Life's Greatest Gift

2026-10-15T12:26:06.169Z

When life is going smoothly, people like to stockpile things. Money, for example.

Back then I often thought that saving a bit more money was like building a high wall on the wasteland of fate, strong enough to hold off whatever storms might come someday: some upheaval in the world, an unexpected accident, or an illness that comes on hard and fast.

People are always this naive. We think every test fate sets us can be bought off with worldly chips. Only when the real gale blows do we suddenly realize the high wall was just a sheet of paper.

When illness rises over your head like a flood, what can money actually do?

My mother was born in 1982. In 2024 she was diagnosed with a diffuse glioma, graded at the time as grade 2.

Grade 2 counted as a small mercy in a misfortune. Online there are countless grade 2 glioma patients who've lived for decades, and my mother's Ki-67 index was just 2%. Any way you looked at it, it seemed we should stay positive.

Two years have passed, and things haven't turned out as well as we hoped. Over the past year, her follow-up scans haven't looked good. Not only have the existing lesions kept growing, new ones have appeared.

Since September, my mother's body has changed completely. Her legs have grown weak, and she has to rest after a few steps. In the first half of the year she'd still walk a few kilometers on her own to dance with the square-dancing group in the park. Now even going out to buy groceries takes everything she has.

The change came on so fast. People in the middle of a change like this often don't notice it. We always think the future is still far away.

I took my mother to see Dr. Mao Qing, a neurosurgery specialist at West China Hospital.

Dr. Mao took one look at her scans and said: this one, I'm afraid, needs surgery.

Surgery? Actually, it wasn't the first time I'd heard the word this year. My mother's last follow-up was on September 12, 2026, and the results weren't good. Dr. Liao Xiaoling at Sichuan Provincial People's Hospital, who had looked after my mother for two years, also gave her some bad news.

My mother didn't want surgery. She asked: isn't there a way to treat it conservatively?

Dr. Mao answered bluntly: no surgery means giving up on treatment.

He said that in treating gliomas, surgery is the most standard and most effective option. Radiation, chemo, and everything else are only supporting treatments.

He was right. I'd already seen all this in my chats with GPT. Right now, surgery really is the only and most effective treatment for glioma: removing as much tumor tissue as possible without causing new nerve damage.

But it wasn't that simple.

Typical grade 2 gliomas usually have just one lesion. In that case, a complete removal followed by radiation and chemo can almost amount to a recovery.

My mother isn't that "lucky." There are now four lesions in her brain, and two of them sit deep in the thalamus, a place no scalpel can possibly touch.

More importantly, what my mother has is a "diffuse glioma." Diffuse means the tumor has no clear border. It grows by infiltrating. Trying to remove it completely is like dropping ink into clear water and asking someone to take the drop back out.

In other words, even with surgery, this tumor can't be fully removed, which means it will keep growing.

After reviewing my mother's scans and her earlier diagnoses, Dr. Mao concluded that her glioma definitely can't be classified as grade 2 anymore. Even if it isn't the highest, grade 4, it's at least grade 3.

I still wasn't surprised.

Because before going to see Dr. Mao Qing, I'd had an in-depth conversation with ChatGPT. I told it everything I knew about my mother's condition over the past two years, and in that conversation it told me her current condition was most likely not grade 2. It strongly recommended I take her to the hospital to have the tumor regraded.

And then, sure enough, Dr. Mao Qing reached the same conclusion as GPT. Two days later I took my mother back to see Dr. Liao Xiaoling, and this time Dr. Liao also said with confidence that my mother is now most likely grade 4.

Well. Okay.

So that's how it is. What else can we do?

Surgery.

Dr. Liao Xiaoling was different from Dr. Mao Qing. He explained to us in detail which part of my mother's brain could be removed, what removing it could do, and what the risks were.

But like Dr. Mao, he also just asked us to think it over and get in touch if we wanted to go ahead with surgery.

Yes. Suddenly, whether to operate became the family's hard choice.

But the crux of that choice wasn't really whether to operate. It was a question bound up with quality of life.

Because we all know diffuse glioma can't be cured. To this day, the recurrence rate for glioma anywhere in the world is 100%, and every treatment, surgery included, only aims to extend life and improve its quality.

In other words, even if we choose surgery now, if the prognosis is good, how much longer she'd live is still unknown. And if the prognosis is bad, surgery plus the radiation and chemo after it might even shorten her life and lower the quality of life she has now.

On the other hand, I also have to consider my mother's wishes. She understands her illness very clearly. She knows it's a problem the whole world hasn't solved, with no chance of a cure, and that with four lesions in her brain, a complete removal can't bring a good outcome either.

So what I can do is tell her the truth. Tell her what surgery could bring, and what risks it carries too. As for whether to operate, the choice still has to be hers.

Without surgery, in Dr. Mao Qing's words, we'd be choosing to give up on treatment.

But GPT told me that skipping surgery doesn't mean giving up on treatment. It means treating the symptoms, so that my mother can reach the end with as good a quality of life as possible.

By the time we'd thought it through this far, everyone already knew in their hearts.

The die was cast.

It suddenly hit me that even if I were very rich right now, I still couldn't save my mother.

I don't think there's anything in the world more hopeless and helpless than this.

If this were an illness money could cure, I'd spend every last thing I have.

But fate plays tricks. My mother has run into a problem the Creator set for all of humanity, one we haven't solved yet. And my mother may be destined to become a speck of dust in her time.

All at once I understood a lot of things I never had before.

What it means to want to so badly and be powerless.

What it means that money can buy a clock but not time.

What it means that "the world is one great dream, and how many autumns cool a life."

What it means that "the spring red of the forest blossoms has faded, far too soon. Nothing to be done: cold rain in the morning, wind at night. Rouge-stained tears, a plea to stay and drink. When will we meet again? Life is forever full of regret, as water forever flows east."

In the past, walking through county towns all over, I'd see clusters of old people gathered together and feel afraid. I was afraid that someday I'd become an old person with no life in me too, and then die. I was afraid of a life like that.

But now, as I walk out of the hospital doors and think back on those old people sitting in the sun on street corners, I feel an endless envy.

They're old, and maybe they carry all sorts of aches and ailments. But what does that matter?

They can still sit in the sun. They can still breathe. They can still walk slowly through one dusk after another.

So it turns out that in this vast, indifferent world, simply being alive is already life's greatest gift.

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Huberman's Seven-Day Week

2026-10-14T12:32:35.163Z

For dinner, my mom made stir-fried celery with chicken breast, with very little oil and salt. It was delicious, and I really enjoyed it.

I asked my mom: don't you get sick of eating this every day?

She said right away: it doesn't taste good at all. There's no salt in it whatsoever.

I laughed: I'm enjoying it, though.

It seems that since I started working out, my eating habits and my taste have changed a lot. Food I used to find bland and saltless now tastes great to me.

I'm always telling my parents I never get tired of chicken thighs and chicken breast, and they never believed me. Now I think they're starting to.

Working out is an amazing thing. Without you noticing, it changes your habits, especially your eating habits. What you eat, how you cook it, how you eat it: everything gets thought through.

And over time, your taste naturally changes too.

It's the same in daily life. You have to make time to go to the gym, warm up, train and stretch. It's a very orderly process, and it gradually gives your life a sense of order too. I guess that's what "self-discipline" feels like.

But I've always wondered: is exercise a hobby or a habit? Thinking about it now, I'd say the latter. A hobby is for certain people, and if it's not your hobby, you can skip it. But exercise should be something everyone takes part in. It shouldn't be seen as something for a special group.

Take one of my riding buddies. Heart disease runs in his family. Through cycling he's greatly improved his cardiorespiratory health, and that's eased some of his worry about the family history.

I think that's what exercise means for ordinary people. You enjoy exercise and improve your body and your life at the same time. It's a wonderful thing.

So I've been thinking. Exercise should be just like eating, drinking and sleeping, woven into every day of your life, as ordinary as anything.

That raises a question: what should that everyday routine look like? How should people arrange their exercise so it fits naturally into their lives, and is still a healthy, effective plan for their bodies?

Recently I read Andrew Huberman's new book, Protocols. In Chinese it's something like "Practical Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body."

Andrew Huberman is a neuroscience professor at Stanford School of Medicine. He has a podcast called "Huberman Lab," all about health.

This book is basically a big summary of his podcast, covering sleep, mood and energy, focus, physical performance, learning and more. What makes it stand out is that the theory is solid and it also guides practice really well. You can pretty much follow it as is.

So I studied the section on exercise and training and summarized how Huberman lays out a seven-day week of exercise.

1. Walk as much as you can every day

Seven thousand steps a day is a good goal, and ten thousand is even better.

As Huberman sees it, walking at least an hour a day (it can add up over the day, no need to do it all at once) is one of the best ways to protect yourself from disease and improve your overall health.

So how fast do you need to walk to get the health benefits?

The answer: any walking beats no walking, and brisk walking beats slow walking.

I once learned something from Mr. L's content: sitting for long periods makes the activity of LPL (lipoprotein lipase) in your body crash by 90%, and exercise has a hard time making up for that effect.

LPL breaks down fat. When its activity drops, the direct result is higher blood lipids, along with lower insulin sensitivity, which hurts your ability to regulate blood sugar.

The fix is actually very simple: just stand up and move around for a few minutes.

Huberman also strongly suggests that people who sit at a desk for long hours consider a sit-stand desk. He says it's a good investment.

2. Resistance training three times a week

You do resistance training in the gym, and you do resistance training to trigger specific adaptations in your nerves, muscles and connective tissue.

Huberman splits his strength training into three days spread across the week.

He lays out the three days roughly like this:

Day 1: lower body, including quads, hamstrings, calves and glutes

Day 2: chest, back muscles, abs or core

Day 3: shoulders, biceps and triceps, abs and core.

There's a good reason for this layout. Anyone who works out regularly and trains legs knows that after leg day, you're usually sore for several days.

In Huberman's protocol, you only train legs once a week, so by the time you train them again the next week, they're mostly not sore anymore. That's great.

3. Cardio three times a week

In other words, for vitality, health, longevity, aesthetics and all-around fitness, you need to do both resistance training and cardio.

Huberman slots his cardio into the gaps between strength days, so the day after a gym session, you do cardio.

His cardio plan is very sensible too. He sets the three sessions at low, medium and high intensity.

Low-intensity cardio means long and easy: heart rate at 60% to 70% of your max, for 45 to 75 minutes.

Medium-intensity cardio means, after a five-minute warm-up, 25 to 30 minutes with your heart rate in the 75% to 85% range. It's a lot harder than low intensity, but not quite sprinting.

High-intensity cardio means going all out for about 6 to 16 minutes, with your heart rate at about 90% to 95% of max.

4. Short mobility and flexibility work 2 to 4 times a week

They can't guarantee you won't get injured, but they can help enormously.

Huberman takes stretching and flexibility fairly seriously, but in his plan this part only takes a few minutes of a day, 2 to 4 times a week.

I think that's great. I'm someone who doesn't like stretching, but after years of skipping it, some things my body is doing have slowly made me realize I should.

Huberman made stretching feel easy to start. And a few minutes of stretching each time is already far better than no stretching at all.

Professor Huberman also recommends a few moves, roughly like these:

5. One rest day a week

Huberman also leaves one day of the week for rest.

Looking back over it now, three cardio days plus three strength days plus one rest day, and that's a sacred week done.

Here's the whole week in one chart:

Huberman's protocol weaves exercise into daily life in a very low-key way.

Even the longest session is only about an hour.

And with three cardio days and one rest day in the week, for most people those can pretty much count as low-intensity training days.

Add it all up, and you're exercising no more than six hours a week. That's less than a single workday.

Yet those unremarkable bits of time each day, which only cost you an hour less of scrolling short videos, can buy you a better body and a better state of mind.

If you haven't yet learned to keep exercise in your life as a habit,

Protocols is absolutely worth reading. In it you'll also find practical guides and theory on sleep, stress management, learning and more. It's a rare, excellent book.

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Launchpad Tidy

2026-10-14T08:00:00.000Z

A minimal tool for tidying the macOS Launchpad, built with SwiftUI. It puts the usual organizing tasks into one small window.

The core flow is simple: AI Tidy → Review Results → Apply. You can also create folders by hand, move apps in bulk, or change their order. It backs up automatically before every apply, and the preview supports undo and picks up where you left off when you reopen it.

AI tidying works with any compatible API you configure, including DeepSeek and a local Ollama. Basic tidying works offline, and your API key is stored in the macOS Keychain.

It works with the classic Launchpad on macOS 14 and 15. macOS 15 hasn't been tested on real hardware yet, and macOS 26 and later aren't supported for now. For now it's available as source code that you build on your own Mac. There's no Apple-notarized installer yet.

The project is open source under the MIT license: see the source code and build instructions on GitHub.

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Trying to Tell Everyone That Exercise Changes Your Life

2026-10-12T13:24:19.781Z

I'm trying to tell everyone that exercise changes your life.

These past few days I've written several posts about my own training, for no other reason than that I'm training. That's how my writing has always worked: whatever's in my life is what I write about.

My training isn't very intense.

My best bench press is 50 kg for a 5RM. When I started out, even the empty bar would pin me.

My best squat is 100 kg for a 2RM.

My best deadlift is 80 kg for a 5RM.

I can do twenty wide push-ups in a row.

I can't do a pull-up.

My best dead hang is 30 seconds.

From those numbers, you can tell my intensity is low.

I don't train very often either.

It's been just about a year since I started working out. Out of 365 days, I've shown up at the gym on roughly 120.

That works out to training one day and resting two, which isn't exactly high frequency.

On top of that, I also ride.

Last year I rode 5,500 km. This year, because of IT band syndrome, only 1,200 km.

So however you look at it, neither my frequency nor my intensity is high.

But I have to say: exercise has changed my life.

First, stamina. Thanks to exercise, my stamina is much better than before. Whether it's a walk or a short hike in the park, I don't get tired. Even walking 30,000 steps in a day in Hong Kong felt fine.

Better stamina has raised my floor on lots of things, because physical energy is what carries me through everything I do.

Second, energy. The more I exercise, the more energy I have. I can focus better on work or study, and I don't lose concentration or get tired as fast.

Then there's daily life. Since I started working out, lots of things in my life feel better.

Like being able to move things myself. A unit of the equipment at my company weighs about 45 kg. I used to have no chance of moving one by myself. It's heavy and hard to get a grip on. Now, I wouldn't say I can toss them around, but I can calmly move one on my own. I'm no longer helpless just because nobody's around to help.

Carrying things is another. As my grip got stronger, things changed. Going downstairs for a big jug of water, or carrying a case of milk home, used to wear me out after a few steps. Now it feels like nothing in my hands. That real sense of control over small things is very grounding.

Then there's how I look. I haven't built a six-pack yet, but in this year of training, I cut down to the lowest body fat I've ever had and took the best ID photo of my life.

As for my physique, my chest has started to show, and my arms measure 36 cm unpumped. My traps and delts have come along a bit too, so I look a lot more upright and solid overall.

This year I ditched the oversized clothes I always used to wear. I've started wearing more fitted clothes that show my shape, plus cooler stuff like leather jackets and leather shoes.

That's a sign of confidence. Working out has given me a certain amount of confidence.

Just that alone, I'd say, already makes it very worthwhile.

But exercise gives people more than that.

Exercise has something in common with saving money. Its value usually isn't in how much you put in on any given day, but in the cumulative effect that builds up when you stick with it long-term.

That's the "compound interest" of exercise.

As I see it, the compound interest of exercise comes in three forms.

First, compound interest for the body

Say two people are both 25. One exercises thirty minutes a day, the other doesn't.

On day one, their bodies might be no different at all. After a month, the difference is probably still small. But what about after one year, five years, ten years?

As time goes on, the improvements regular exercise brings to cardiorespiratory fitness, muscle strength, bone health and metabolism gradually show.

And the most interesting part is that the training you did in the past helps you do the training of the future.

Today you can only ride 10 km. After a few months of riding, you can ride 30 km or more.

Exercise that used to take a huge effort becomes easy. So now you have the capacity to train more, and you improve even further.

It's a very positive loop:

Exercise improves fitness, better fitness supports exercise, and continued exercise improves fitness further.

Of course, biology means nobody can keep getting stronger forever, and the returns on training slowly level off. So exercise is more like a health asset you build up over the long term and keep maintaining.

Second, compound interest for your time

On the surface, exercise eats up time. An hour a day is 365 hours a year. Keep it up for thirty years and you've put in over ten thousand hours.

But here's the question: does exercise really use up our time?

By the clock, yes. In terms of quality of life, not necessarily.

When we measure the length of a life, we usually only count how many years a person lived. We overlook how many of those years they stayed healthy, free and independent.

Say two people both live to 80.

One starts losing vitality at 65 as their body declines.

The other can still ride a bike, go hiking and live independently at 75.

They live just as long, but the amount of high-quality life they actually get is hugely different.

Regular exercise improves your chances of a healthy life.

We spend some time every day exercising to win more healthy time in the future that we're free to use as we like.

Third, compound interest for your life

Regular exercise can improve your sleep, mood and cognition.

Someone who sleeps well and has plenty of energy is usually in a better position to put themselves into work, study and creative things.

And those can bring new returns of their own.

For example, someone builds a habit of sticking with things through cycling, then carries that habit over into reading and writing.

Exercise starts out just improving your body, but it can end up changing how you live.

That's a kind of indirect compound interest.

It means having more energy and more chances to do the things you truly love.

So in the end, the compound interest of exercise is really compound interest on freedom.

Training your body when you're young isn't just about having a stronger body. It's about still having the freedom to choose how you live when you're old.

You can choose to go somewhere far away, or choose to stay home and read.

You can choose to climb a mountain, or choose to go traveling.

Instead of giving up those choices because of your body.

And the compound interest of exercise has one more very special feature.

When you go out for a ride on a sunny day, feel the wind on your face and see the flowers blooming along both sides of the road, you've already gotten your happiness.

At the same time, your body benefits from the exercise.

You're not sacrificing the present for the future. You're enjoying the present while building up wealth for the future.

That's the most fascinating thing about exercise:

It turns present happiness and future returns into one and the same thing.

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A Crazy Shoulder Day

2026-10-11T12:29:43.284Z

Today was shoulder day. Strictly speaking I only did two exercises, but afterward my shoulders felt more blown up than they ever have.

The whole session was built around supersets: two exercises you can switch between quickly, done back to back, to hit the target muscle as hard as possible. I used to use supersets only for triceps. But when I thought about it, the triceps and the deltoids are both fairly small muscles, so it seemed like the superset approach should work for both.

The first superset was "cable crossover rear-delt fly" + "face pull." The face pull here isn't a real face pull. After the crossover rear-delt flyes, I quickly switch from an overhand grip to an underhand grip and pull.

For rear delts, the cable crossover rear-delt fly is the exercise where I feel the muscle working best right now, and I feel the face pull variation built on it more too.

Fifteen reps each. After the overhand crossover rear-delt flyes, I switch straight to an underhand grip and do face pulls. One round of both is one superset. Five sets in total.

Then came the "dumbbell lateral raise" superset.

But it's just the one exercise, dumbbell lateral raises. Here the superset means alternating between two different weights, heavy first, then light.

I can actually do sets of lateral raises with 10 kg. But with that weight, I end up rounding my chest without meaning to and using my body to heave the weight up and down. For lateral raises, there's really no need for that.

With 7.5 kg, I can keep my body completely still through the whole set, so I feel my side delts much more. After the 7.5 kg set, I switch straight to 5 kg dumbbells and keep going to failure.

Honestly, before supersets I was basically just training at random.

When I finished the fifth lateral-raise superset, I put down the 5 kg dumbbells, turned around and walked a couple of steps back, looked around, and felt completely lost. A few seconds later I finally realized I'd zoned out. I bent down, picked my water bottle up off the floor, unscrewed it, took a small sip, and sat down on the bench.

I'd trained myself dazed.

Seriously dazed. In a year of working out, I'd only ever felt like this after squats, and now I'd found the same feeling in two small shoulder muscles.

Working out is actually very simple, but you also have to learn and try lots of methods to train yourself better.

When it comes to shoulder training, I've finally found a bit of fun.

Training shoulders with supersets gets wild.

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Life Without Leg Day

2026-10-10T12:37:20.292Z

Some people don't like training legs. I can't.

Since I started rehab for my IT band syndrome, I haven't trained my lower body once, and I've stopped long-distance rides too.

Not being able to train legs killed my mood and my drive for the gym. From June on, I didn't set foot in a gym once, and didn't do a single full workout.

But now I've realized that rehabbing IT band syndrome is a long game. I can't wait until it's completely healed to start training again. So after I got back from Shenzhen last month, I decided to start working out again.

No lower body. Upper body only.

I've trained six or seven times in the past two weeks, and right now it all feels really bland.

Life without leg day is so bland!

Every time I go to the gym, it's either chest or shoulders, or arms, back, core and so on. I've always trained on a three-way or four-way split, very organized. But now that I can't train legs, my brain feels scrambled. I keep not knowing what to train before I go to the gym.

I'm genuinely curious: how do people who skip legs plan their training??

But sighing about it won't fix anything. I still need to find the fun in where I am.

One part is pull-ups. I've set myself the goal of conquering the pull-up, so every session I do some dead hangs and assisted pull-ups. The intensity isn't high, and I'm progressing fast. At first I couldn't even hold a dead hang for more than ten-something seconds. Now I can hang steadily for thirty.

With dead hangs, at around thirty seconds, the calluses on my palms hurt a lot, and that pain is basically what makes me let go. So for the first time ever, I bought a pair of training gloves to protect my calluses, and now I can hang for the full thirty seconds.

I don't know what thirty seconds means for unlocking the pull-up, but at least the progress is clear.

The other part is shoulders and chest. I've started focusing on building strength on the bench press. I'll be honest: after a year of training, I can only do sets at 40 kg consistently. That's not much to show for it. Never mind doing sets at 100 kg, I at least want to get to a 100 kg 1RM. By that math, I should be able to toss around 60 kg pretty easily.

Shoulder training is really just a substitute I found once I couldn't train legs.

Building wider shoulders is genuinely worth it. After all, looking good is a big deal these days.

So now I have a separate shoulder day. Shoulder training mostly doesn't use very heavy weights, and weight isn't the top priority anyway. I mainly focus on my rear delts and side delts, and don't care much about the front delts. In practice, though, only the side delts can be trained properly with lateral raises. The rear delts are a bit hard for me to train.

Usually you train rear delts with cable face pulls or bent-over reverse flyes, but I'm not good at either. On face pulls, even with a very light weight, I tend to cheat with my lower back, which is dangerous, so I'm not doing them right now. As for bent-over reverse flyes, I tried a few times and found that maybe because my shoulder abduction is a bit limited, I can't really feel the target muscle working.

So lately I've also been deliberately doing some shoulder abduction and adduction drills, hoping to make some progress on reverse flyes.

There's one more rear-delt exercise I think is good: the cable crossover face pull on the cable tower. When I do it, I can feel my rear delts working clearly, and my lower back doesn't cheat. It's my go-to rear-delt exercise right now.

So those are roughly my main storylines at the moment.

First, unlock the pull-up.

Second, get stronger on the bench press.

Third, put some real work into my shoulders.

I think it's going pretty well. At least that lost feeling of not being able to train legs is slowly fading.

Training is training, whatever you train.

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Trust Is Built Out of Small Things

2026-10-09T13:02:31.579Z

Some people think earning someone's trust is really hard.

To figure that out, you first need to answer another question: how does trust disappear, step by step?

As I see it, there's usually a basic level of trust between people. And trust works like an affection meter in a game. It goes up or down with each thing that happens between two people.

When you do what you said you'd do, people trust you a little more. When your words never count for anything, people slowly stop taking you seriously.

The tricky part is that building trust usually takes a long time, but using it up can happen fast. So earning someone's trust and getting them to believe you again after you've lost it are two very different levels of difficulty.

I work in after-sales service, and a big part of service is earning the customer's trust.

I think earning a customer's trust at work has a lot in common with dealing with people in daily life: you have to make people feel that handing something to you, or believing what you say, is a safe bet.

At work, my judgment and how fast and accurately I solve problems are all part of being professional. On one hand, I need to fix the actual problem as quickly as I can. On the other, I need to keep the customer fully in the loop, so they know where things stand and what happens next.

That process gives them a sense of security, and then I have to back up that security with results. That's how trust builds up.

In everyday relationships, I think the most basic thing is to treat people honestly and kindly. Whether it's family or friends, respect really matters.

In real life, respect includes taking your own words seriously, and taking seriously the plans other people make because they believed you.

Say you arrange to meet someone. They might have turned down other things to keep that time free for you. Something you agreed to offhand might be something the other person has been counting on the whole time.

So whether someone has the follow-through to keep their promises is one of the things I weigh most when judging if they're reliable.

Using up trust is actually simple: just keep going back on what you said or promised. At first, people might make excuses for you, figuring you had your reasons or just forgot once. But after enough times, the next time you say something, there'll be a question mark in their mind.

At work and in life, the thing I'm strictest with myself about is my own promises. If I've agreed to meet a customer on a certain day, I'm usually not the one who changes plans. If I've promised to fix a problem by a certain time, I do everything I can to fix it within that time.

Of course, that also means thinking before I agree to anything about whether I can actually do it. If I'm not sure, but I say yes right away just to keep the other person happy for now, the trust I burn later is still my own.

One thing to keep in mind: keeping a promise isn't only about the result. The other person also needs to clearly see the process.

Especially when things can't be done as planned. What problem have I hit, what have I done so far, how much longer will it take: I should tell the other person all of that promptly. I can't be busy over here for ages while they know nothing and can only keep waiting.

I can't claim I've kept a hundred percent of my commitments in the past either. Of course there were times when special circumstances meant I couldn't follow through.

But I can't decide that it did no harm to someone's trust just because I didn't mean it and really did try. After all, they may already have made plans based on my promise, or taken a loss because I didn't deliver.

At times like that, explaining why is necessary, apologizing when I should, and making up for it where I can. Whether the other person chooses to understand is up to them.

Say you've arranged dinner with friends ahead of time. If something comes up and you can't make it, at the very least tell them as early as you can. Don't let them show up and only then find out you're not coming.

And if it's just that a girl suddenly asked me out to dinner, so I tell the guys: I'd really love to come, but there's nothing I can do!

The guys might understand, but that obviously doesn't count as force majeure. Getting chewed out a bit is only fair.

Haha.

Jokes aside. Your friends are willing to cut you slack because of your friendship. Don't treat their good nature as permission to change your promises whenever you like.

In short, for someone who hasn't been trusted for a long time, winning back people's trust is definitely not easy. But it isn't impossible either.

Because people will judge you by what you've done in the past, and they'll also watch what you do next.

If you've always failed to do what you said, you can't expect one line, "I've really changed," to make people believe you right away. It's normal for them to have doubts. After all, those broken promises were yours.

The key is that you have to get better at keeping your commitments. Don't agree to things you can't do. Once you've agreed, give it everything. When things change, tell people promptly. When something goes wrong, be willing to own it.

As for when people will be willing to trust you again, that's not yours to decide. What you can do is make sure the things you say from now on lead to results, again and again.

Along the way, let people see what you do, and prove your change with results.

That's what I think is the plainest, most unglamorous way to earn trust.

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In the Age of AI Wheelchairs, What Matters Most Is:

2026-10-08T11:38:52.447Z

Last week, my newly registered Claude account got banned again. I'd even splurged on a face verification service from a certain secondhand marketplace, enjoyed a few days of Opus 5.5, and then got cut off.

I'm really annoyed with how A\ handles this, but there's nothing I can do. And I have to admit I really like their models.

That said, if I compare Codex with Claude, I think there's one thing Codex still does better: its computer use, and its ability to control a built-in browser automatically.

What makes those two abilities so powerful is that they put the AI experience in wheelchair mode.

What do I mean by a wheelchair? I first heard the word in games. A "wheelchair" means you can get through without using your legs. In other words, it's easy. In card games, for example, a wheelchair deck is one that lets you breeze through tough matches without any skill.

Not needing any skill is the key to a wheelchair. If it takes skill, there's still a barrier. A real wheelchair means reaching the goal of the game, or getting what you want, with only the simplest moves.

As I see it, built-in browser control and computer use are exactly what put AI agents in wheelchair mode.

In the first half of the year, when I'd just started using AI, I was often anxious. I felt I didn't understand anything about AI, so how could I use it well?

And during vibe coding, I knew nothing about Vercel, GitHub, Cloudflare, or all the platforms and rules that used to be only for programmers. I had no idea how to work them, so you can imagine how much friction there was.

Now none of those problems hold anymore, because I'm in the wheelchair. I don't need to do any of it myself.

All I have to do is log into my accounts on these sites and grant permission when it's needed. Nothing else to worry about.

A while ago, for example, I was tinkering with my personal website. From exporting all my posts from Jant blog to setting up my new site, it took less than three hours in total.

In that time, the site's design, the data import, and the polishing of details all got done. In the end I had a product that was mostly usable and about 80% complete.

Half a year ago that would have been impossible for me. Back then, I still had to follow the AI's text instructions myself, hunting around Cloudflare or Vercel for all sorts of buttons to configure all sorts of things. Anything at all took dozens of minutes.

Now that AI agents' wheelchair kit is built and works well, a lot of things only take a few sentences from me.

For example, if I come across a blog design I like online and it's open source, I can just send the URL to my agent and tell it I want to recreate the site. It's that simple.

I think the biggest mistake I made using AI in the past was always assuming AI couldn't do something.

Here's a very simple example. In the past I tried several times to build my own personal website, but I never kept it up. The main reason was that publishing posts on a personal website felt like too much hassle. Every time, I had to go to the Terminal and push.

But this time, it suddenly clicked. Why couldn't I just have AI make me a UI for a writing dashboard?

As soon as I thought of it, I did it. The result: in under an hour, I had a writing dashboard that's highly practical and looks really nice.

My writing process used to be: finish the post in Obsidian first, then push it to the site. That process was too tedious and it bothered me. Now I don't need to write in Obsidian. I write directly in my personal site's writing dashboard, and it goes up on the site right away. All I have to do is copy the formatting over to my WeChat Official Account.

That made things so much easier. It solved my old problem of maintaining the same posts in three places: my personal site, my Official Account, and Obsidian.

So when you use AI to get things done, you have to emancipate your thinking.

Whatever idea you have, try talking it through with the AI first, and then discuss whether it's feasible.

Tools really can limit the level of production. But how people use their tools can also largely decide the level of productivity.

If the AI didn't make what you wanted, I think it usually means one of two things:

First, you didn't give the AI a good reference.

Second, you didn't communicate your needs to the AI in depth.

By communicating your needs in depth, I don't mean telling it the final result you want. I mean starting from the details: a button, a line, a rounded corner. You have to try every way you can to make the AI understand what exactly you mean.

That tests not only our skill at working with machines, but also whether we really know what we want to make and what we want to change.

Almost every model today is multimodal. Using lots of images to show the effect and needs you have in mind is a very practical approach.

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Eating Like a Normal Person

2026-10-07T13:04:40.201Z

For dinner, my mom turned the leftover rice from lunch and yesterday into two bowls of egg fried rice, boiled a few Chaoshan-style beef balls, and served the lunch leftovers: diced chicken breast stir-fried with carrot and celtuce.

On a normal day, we're honestly a bit lazy about cooking dinner. Most of the time it's lunch leftovers, and if all else fails we can boil some noodles. Convenience comes first.

I told my mom she could buy some chicken breast, chicken thighs and beef shank, pan-fry or braise them, and freeze them. That way, on nights when we don't know what to eat, we can just take some out and heat it up.

I told my mom she eats too little protein. Most of it comes from two eggs at breakfast, and at lunch she has a bit of lean meat at most. All told, she probably gets no more than 40 g of protein a day, which is short of the ideal by around half or more.

I told my mom she should eat more protein. In her situation, she needs at least 1 to 1.2 g per kg of bodyweight a day, or she could easily lose muscle faster.

Take 60 g of protein as an example. How much food does a normal person need to eat to get 60 g of protein?

Two eggs at breakfast. I usually count 7 g per egg, so two eggs give 14 g. For most ordinary people, apart from eggs, the rest of their daily protein can only come from meat.

Pure lean pork or tenderloin has about 20 g of protein per 100 g. That means, on top of two eggs a day, you'd still need about 250 g of pure lean meat, raw weight. With pork belly, you'd need close to 500 g.

Note that this is raw meat. Half a kilo of raw meat doesn't actually amount to much once it's cooked, and most people can eat that in a day.

Then I told my mom how beef, chicken breast and chicken thigh compare with pork.

I treat all of these meats as roughly 20 g of protein per 100 g.

With pork, unless it's pure lean meat, the fat content is a bit higher. But for ordinary people, a bit more fat is fine. What matters is getting the protein.

Chicken breast is the lowest in calories, so it's great for building muscle or cutting. Chicken thigh and beef are about the same in calories, while pork is higher in fat.

Beef is expensive, but it's also rich in iron, zinc, magnesium and B vitamins. It's excellent quality, worth having a few times a month.

Chicken is cheap, most of its fat is unsaturated, it's easy to cook, and it tastes great. The absolute best of the best. No wonder people joke that the whole chicken family are loyal heroes.

When you think about it, if you're not someone who trains, getting 1 g of protein per kg of bodyweight entirely from food really isn't hard.

Most families aren't short of meat on the table. The meat is just often so greasy that you fill up on fat and carbs before you've eaten much of it.

And in a lot of places in Sichuan and Chongqing, people don't eat much pure lean meat. It's mostly fatty-and-lean pork belly, which is extremely high in fat. The same weight makes you just as full, so you end up eating too much fat and too little protein.

So when I say "under half a kilo of meat a day," I mean lean meat.

Most people already eat more fat than they should, so eating less fatty meat is fine.

On top of that, eat as many vegetables as you can.

Wouldn't you call that eating like a normal person?

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Grandma's Love Letters: In the End, the Times Land on People

2026-10-06T13:03:47.070Z

Lots of movies use an era to tell a story, and use a story to write about an era. The storms of the times sweep people up and down, and in the end the weight of history lands, concretely, on the joys and sorrows of one person, one family.

Lots of Chinese movies work this way, and many of them do it well.

Take To Live. It follows Fugui's family from the Republican era into the People's Republic, through the civil war, land reform, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution. One wave of history after another crashes over Fugui's miserable life. Lots of people come away from To Live remembering the births, illnesses, and deaths in Fugui's family, but behind all that is an entire era.

Or take Farewell My Concubine. It starts from the fates of Cheng Dieyi and Duan Xiaolou and runs from the Republican era through the war against Japan and the founding of the People's Republic to the Cultural Revolution. Their relationship rises and falls dramatically as the times change, and every change comes with a turn in history. The times decide who they are, and decide how they have to survive.

Grandma's Love Letters is also a movie that presses an era into people's fates, but compared with To Live and Farewell My Concubine, it's a little different.

The difference comes from the director's restraint in handling the relationship between the era and the characters. When it's over, you've seen an era, and you also feel you've seen a good story.

It's a clean story. You could even say a bit simple.

Zheng Musheng is a poor young man who falls in love with Ye Shurou, a landlord's daughter, and the two of them elope. It's a very old plot. In today's terms, a no-good bad boy runs off with a rich girl and takes her off to a hard life. But set against the backdrop of the era, a story of eloping for love shows how great love can be.

The movie has plenty of other corny moments too, especially the misunderstanding the whole movie rests on: a mailman loses, in a rainstorm, the letter Xie Nanzhi sent to Ye Shurou revealing the truth.

Never mind how corny that is. I even think it's a smear on China Post.

So this movie doesn't win on its story. Where it really succeeds is in using a simple story to build three vivid characters.

One is Ye Shurou. A woman brave enough to elope for love. But in those chaotic times her husband has to flee overseas to make a living, and she raises three children alone and waits for him her whole life.

One is Zheng Musheng. A Chinese man born into the tides of history, forced to flee overseas to make a living. He has no education and can't read, so all he can sell is his labor. But he's loyal, hardworking, and because his love for his family keeps him going, he has a young man's fire in him that won't go out.

When I first found out Zheng Musheng would die, I thought the director would surely give him a death that was both very much of its time and very small. And that's exactly what happened. Out of his sense of loyalty, he steps in to help someone, gets stabbed to death by robbers, and is thrown into the sea. Stepping in was part of who Zheng Musheng was. But in that era, how many Chinese laborers who went overseas were stabbed to death? How many of their bodies sank into the ocean?

And Xie Nanzhi is the movie's best-written character, and also the one who's on screen the most.

She ties the two halves together. Through her we see Zheng Musheng's life overseas, and she carries everything that comes after.

She's truly one of a kind, and the director clearly wants to bring that out, which is why the movie focuses so much on the label "zou zai."

I can't really say whether the term is feudal. "Zou zai" means "the kid who'll leave." Whatever feudal baggage it carries, I can at least say its origins surely have to do with the old preference for sons over daughters. Of course, lots of places have the idea that "a daughter will marry off sooner or later."

The movie shows Xie Nanzhi's independence through her refusal to accept the label "zou zai."

Refusing alone wouldn't be anything special. What matters is that Xie Nanzhi spends her whole life living that refusal out.

If a "zou zai" has to be a kid who leaves, then Xie Nanzhi staying by her father's side her whole life is the best rebuttal there is.

I'm really glad the director didn't force in some open-minded husband for her. I was worried at first, because early on I found out Xie Nanzhi had a son, so I kept hoping it wouldn't go that way. Turns out he's adopted. Honestly, that made my day!

Xie Nanzhi also has some really precious qualities. She always earns her own money through her own work. She stays calm in the face of hardship and gossip, and she sticks to the path she believes is right.

The most moving thing about her is that she never makes that persistence look dramatic.

She stays quiet and unknown, and never tries to prove anything to anyone.

She just lives, one day at a time, doing what she thinks she should do, one day at a time.

People call her a "zou zai," and she won't accept it. People think a woman has to marry out sooner or later, and she stays by her father's side. People think a woman should rely on a husband, on a family, and she supports herself with her own work.

She never seems to set out to rebel against anything, but her whole life is a kind of rebellion.

That's another thing Grandma's Love Letters does well.

It doesn't make the era especially big. There aren't many sweeping historical scenes, and hardly anyone steps forward to tell you what kind of era this is. The era is just hidden inside the characters' lives.

Why does Zheng Musheng leave his wife and children and cross the sea to make a living?

Why does someone who can't read take writing letters so seriously?

Why can one lost letter keep two people apart for so many years?

Why can Ye Shurou do nothing but wait at home?

And why does a woman like Xie Nanzhi seem so unusual just for wanting to live her own way?

The answers to all of these are in the era. The director just doesn't write them on the characters' faces. I really like that approach. A lot of so-called period movies are in too much of a hurry to make the audience realize "this is the tragedy of an era."

As if there has to be a war, there have to be gunshots, there has to be a political campaign, there has to be some huge historical event, to prove the characters are being swept up by the times.

But that's usually not how ordinary people actually feel the times.

The times rarely come knocking on your door in person.

They might just mean someone can't find work, a father has to leave his hometown, a woman never sees her husband come back, a letter can't make it across the strait, and a family as ordinary as can be ends up on a completely different path.

To history, these things are all too small.

When Zheng Musheng dies, history won't bother to record his name.

Ye Shurou waits her whole life, and history won't write on any page how many years she actually waited.

Xie Nanzhi stays by her father's side her whole life, and that won't become an important event in any grand narrative either.

But to them, it's everything.

That's what I meant earlier when I said Grandma's Love Letters is a little different from To Live and Farewell My Concubine.

In To Live, the era is one flood after another. Fugui's family stands in the water, and every time a wave hits, someone is swept away.

In Farewell My Concubine, the era is a giant hand that keeps changing the stage under Cheng Dieyi and Duan Xiaolou's feet. One moment they're stars, the next they might be the ones being denounced.

But the era in Grandma's Love Letters isn't that intense.

It's more like the sea.

Usually it looks calm.

Zheng Musheng goes out to sea, Ye Shurou waits on the shore, and Xie Nanzhi spends her life with her father.

Everyone's fate unfolds around this sea.

The sea never says a word, but it separates two people, separates a family, and separates so many people who could have had a different life.

So when I thought again later about the letter the mailman lost, I suddenly didn't hate that corny plot device so much.

Because it turns something enormous into something very concrete.

The missed chances caused by an era might, in the end, really come down to one letter that never arrived.

History books tell us what happened in a given year, how many people went overseas, how many left their hometowns, how many families were scattered for good.

But a movie doesn't give you numbers.

A movie just tells you that Xie Nanzhi wrote a letter for Zheng Musheng.

Ye Shurou never got it.

So she waited her whole life.

That's what moves me most about this movie.

History's job is to record what happened.

A story's job is to tell us what those things actually meant when they happened to a real person.

So after Grandma's Love Letters, what I remember isn't how many big events happened in that era. What I remember is Zheng Musheng, who couldn't read but never stopped thinking about his wife and kids at home. It's Ye Shurou, waiting from youth to old age. It's Xie Nanzhi, who never in her life became the "kid who'll leave" that people said she was.

These characters are all small, so small that in the sweep of that era you can barely see them.

But precisely because of that, I feel like I actually saw that era. Because an era was never the years, events, and numbers written in history books.

In the end, the times land on people.

They land on why someone left home, on why a woman waited her whole life, on a single label, on a letter that never arrived.

And finally, they land on the long life of one ordinary family.

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Soul and the Human Question of Happiness

2026-10-05T12:33:08.787Z

The unexamined life is not worth living. —Socrates

Movies are a strange and wonderful thing. Watch the same movie at different ages and it does something different for you each time. Take Pixar's movies. As a kid, you might not grasp the deeper meaning, but the visuals can still spark your imagination or just give you some simple joy.

When we grow up and watch them again, we're more likely to understand what the director and the creative team were trying to say.

I think of it as the surface and the substance. A movie's surface is its eye-catching visuals, its subject, its plot. Its substance is what the audience can only feel their way toward through that surface. Of course, a thousand readers have a thousand Hamlets. The surface everyone sees may be roughly the same, but the substance each person reaches, shaped by their own taste and experience, is different.

Soul came out in 2020. That year I'd just started college, and I was something of a movie lover, but for whatever reason, I didn't watch it until six years later.

While watching, I stayed pretty calm. The story isn't all that exciting, and the ending didn't move me much. But I still think it's a good movie.

Because I think it explores a question I've been thinking about for a long time: then what?

"Then what?" is a question without end. I've thought of a good example to describe it. In One Piece, the protagonist, Luffy, says from the very start that he's going to find the treasure the Pirate King left behind, the "ONE PIECE." For years a theory went around online: there is no ONE PIECE at all. When Luffy reaches the final treasure spot, he'll find a note that says you've already found the greatest treasure, the crewmates who sailed and fought by your side, and every story you lived through on the way.

Lots of people online weighed in. Some thought there really should be something you could call treasure waiting at the end. Others thought that ending would be great.

At its root, the question seems to be: what matters more in a story, the journey or the outcome?

The people who want a real ONE PIECE think the outcome matters more. The others think the opposite.

Here we need to make an assumption. Suppose the ONE PIECE really exists. When Luffy and his crew find it, "then what?"

We found the treasure. Then what?

Joe Gardner, the protagonist of Soul, isn't looking for any treasure. His lifelong dream is just to play jazz in a small club. Compared with his other job, as a contract teacher at a school, it doesn't seem like anything worth fighting for, except that he likes it more.

Like I said, Joe's ONE PIECE isn't much to look at on paper, but to Joe himself it means every bit as much as the ONE PIECE.

Once Joe finds his ONE PIECE, he asks himself: then what?

"So, what happens next?"

Unlike the ultimate question of One Piece, someone gives Joe an answer pretty quickly.

Right, Joe. You've made it as the pianist in a band you love, and you get to play the jazz you love, but you're still asking: what happens next?

From the outside, "playing your heart out" is just banging away at a piano red-faced. By the same logic, playing your heart out every day is just banging away at a piano red-faced every day.

But nobody can go at something red-faced like that forever.

Just like Joe. When he learns he'll be playing there again the next day, he seems a little disappointed, though he doesn't know why. It just feels like none of it is any different from before. Nothing has changed.

I once heard a story about a fish:

A young fish says to an old fish: I'm looking for this thing they call the ocean. The old fish says: The ocean? That's what you're in right now. The young fish says: This? This is water. What I want is the ocean.

Think about it. Joe's dream is to play in the band he admires. Fine. But dig deeper: what is he really after?

Is it the band? If it's just the band, why does it have to be this band?

Or is it playing itself? If it's just playing, why does he have to be in a band to play?

I think Joe's dream might be about both the band and the playing. These things can bring real satisfaction and happiness. Joe just hadn't found his anchor in them, and his attention had drifted away from the thing itself.

Let me use an example from real life. Take cycling. Some people love cycling, but bit by bit their attention shifts to gear. They decide their bike isn't good enough, their kit isn't pro enough, and they can't go out and ride.

But what does the joy of cycling have to do with how good your bike is? Whatever you ride, the scenery is the same, and so is what you live through. A better bike doesn't make the wind feel any freer, or what you take from the ride any deeper.

Through Joe, the director wants to tell everyone outside the movie to learn to examine their own lives.

In Soul there's a barber who says he originally wanted to be a veterinarian, but after leaving the Navy he didn't have the money, so he chose to learn barbering.

He doesn't feel defeated about not studying veterinary medicine. If anything, he's content with his job as a barber.

"I'm happy being a barber. Not everybody gets to invent blood transfusions like Charles Drew.¹ I get to meet interesting people like you, make them happy, make them look handsome."

This barber really has examined his life. He knows exactly what choices he made, and he takes joy in them. That's part of what Joe is missing.

Let's make another assumption. Joe becomes the band's pianist and starts asking what comes next. Suppose he keeps building his career, and eventually becomes a world-famous jazz musician.

At that point, ask once more: "Then what?"

I find that question terrifying, because there's a whiff of nihilism in it. If Joe never figures out what happiness and joy he's actually after, then even if he achieves the biggest success the world can offer, it'll all be for nothing, because he can't take joy in it.

It's like with bikes. Lots of people keep upgrading theirs. They've just gotten a nice new frame and now they want a nice wheelset, then a nice power meter, nice cranks, on and on forever.

People's understanding of joy and happiness is a little off. Lots of people think they're a curve that keeps rising: keep chasing and satisfying your desires, and life will just keep getting happier. But in reality, happiness and joy both have a ceiling. The joy I felt when I got my first bike ever was exactly the same as the joy of buying my first bike worth tens of thousands of yuan. The happiness and joy Joe feels the moment he becomes the band's pianist must be the same as when he becomes a world-class jazz musician. Neither is higher or lower than the other.

So the happiness and joy a lot of people chase their whole lives, they already had the moment they were born. Back then we were all babies, and we laughed easily. Now that we're grown up, just to laugh, we have to do a whole pile of things to chase that result.

At the end of the story, Joe has his epiphany in the fish story. He realizes the most important thing in life is to carefully notice and live every moment of it.

So Soul carries a value I've always held to: real happiness only ever lives in ordinary, everyday life, not in a few big moments.

The movie also shows something else: if the universe hadn't suddenly shown mercy, Joe would actually have died in an accident.

And just minutes before he died, he'd gotten the offer he'd always dreamed of, to be the pianist in that band.

Set aside everything that comes after, and there's still a point to take from this: if happiness in life really came down to one moment, how would you know whether the happiness or the accident would come first?

There's an old saying that if you survive a great disaster, good fortune will follow. Maybe what it means is that only when someone truly realizes they'll die one day and leave this world do they start living every moment for real.

This is where I have to bring up someone else: the Russian writer Dostoevsky.

On this subject, he has every right to speak.

In 1849, Dostoevsky was sentenced to death for taking part in the Petrashevsky Circle.² On the day of the execution, he and the other prisoners were marched to the execution ground. The sentence had been read, and the first group of prisoners had already been led up to the scaffold. Dostoevsky was in that first group. At that moment he was sure he had only minutes left to live.

And at the very last moment, the Tsar's pardon was announced.³

It hit him enormously. After he was saved, Dostoevsky wrote to his brother: he had wasted too much time in the past and never truly valued life. Now that life had been given back to him, every minute could become happiness.

For Dostoevsky, it was a "rebirth."

And his later novels, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Brothers Karamazov, keep exploring one question:

If a person truly knew they were going to die, would they still live the way they live now?

Back to Soul. At the start, the movie introduces the idea of the "spark," and the audience naturally links it to "passion," assuming that everyone born into the world must have some passion or talent.

But later, the universe says:

I think that must have hit a lot of viewers hard. But what looks like a punch from nihilism actually carries a lot of real-world strength.

Do you really have to accomplish something, or have some talent or achievement, for your life to mean something?

If someone likes to go for walks and look at the sky, can't they find happiness in that?

Happiness is a skill, not something that's out there to find. People who can be happy will be happy no matter what, and the reverse is true too.

Back to the ONE PIECE question from the beginning. I used to take sides on it. I insisted there had to be a real ONE PIECE. That was years ago.

Now I have my answer: whether there's a final ONE PIECE or not doesn't matter to me anymore.

Because it was never supposed to decide anyone's happiness. For me, seeing the Going Merry's farewell, seeing Dr. Hiriluk's story, seeing the Summit War.

Seeing those things that have already settled into my youth is enough.

Charles R. Drew (1904–1950) was an American surgeon whose research on blood banking and plasma storage helped drive the development of modern transfusion medicine. ↩
The Petrashevsky Circle was a group of intellectuals in St. Petersburg, Russia, in the 1840s. They advocated utopian socialism and opposed serfdom, and were later crushed by the Tsarist government. ↩
See J. Hillis Miller, Dostoevsky: Convict and Convert. This was actually a staged mock execution arranged in advance. The Tsar meant to use the terror of the moment to break the prisoners psychologically, and the pardon had been issued before the execution began. ↩

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Caught a Cold After the Gym, Yet Again

2026-10-04T11:55:37.049Z

This is my third cold this year.

I don't know why, but ever since I started working out, I seem to catch colds more easily. The day before each of those three colds, I'd almost always been to the gym. Then the next day, if I wasn't a little careful, my throat would start hurting the day after.

I've figured out the rhythm of my colds by now. Day one is a sore throat, without fail. On day two, either the sore throat goes away or it keeps hurting. If it goes away, the sneezing and runny nose are guaranteed to start, followed by several days of being all stuffed up.

I have chronic rhinitis, so I get medicine every time I catch a cold. But I never get it on the first day.

After getting medicine so many times, I've noticed that if I go on the first day of the sore throat, the two days' worth of medicine usually doesn't fix it. By the time my nose starts running, the medicine is gone and I have to go get another round.

So now I usually wait until my nose starts running before I get medicine. That's the best time. After two days of it, especially the compound pseudoephedrine hydrochloride extended-release capsules I take morning and night, I'm basically more than half better.

Usually I'm not completely recovered at that point. My immune system still needs a few days to do its own work, and I'm fully over it in about 3 to 5 days.

Honestly, I really hate colds. Even though it's the most common illness there is, I hate how a cold feels. I can't breathe properly, I'm in bad shape overall, and a lot of what I do suffers.

Working out, for example. Whenever I have a cold, I either stop training or lower the intensity, and my training plan gets thrown off.

In the long run, working out does improve your immunity. It's just that the process is a little too bumpy.

After every workout, your pores open up, and for a while after training you're in what's called the "open window" effect for your immune system. If you get chilled during that window, it's easy to catch a cold.

I think all three of my colds this year came from getting chilled the day after a workout. Take a couple of days ago: the day before I went to a comic convention, I worked out, and the next day I wore a base layer and a leather jacket to the con.

And this is what happened. With the leather jacket on, I'd walk for a bit and feel hot. With it off, I'd walk for a bit and feel cold. So I kept taking it off and putting it back on, and the next morning I woke up and, sure enough, scored myself a sore throat. Ha. I really am out of ideas.

Today I've officially entered the runny-nose-and-sneezing stage. I went to the gym this morning and picked up the medicine afterward.

I really wish humanity would hurry up and invent a vaccine for the common cold!

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Silence Is a Kind of Mood

2026-10-03T13:02:35.919Z

A few days ago I moved back to my mom's place, and I set up a new workspace on the balcony, which used to be cluttered.

To the left of the desk is a window screen, and outside is a tree and a path through the housing complex.

Every morning after I get up and have breakfast, I sit down at this desk. The air is cool and fresh, there are a few lingering bird calls, and the moment is perfectly silent.

I think silence is a kind of mood. It doesn't have to mean total quiet, with everything gone still. Sometimes a few sounds at just the right moment add a little decoration to the silence.

Like the birdsong I can hear from my balcony. It gives a cool morning a certain mood, and without it, the whole scene would feel dull.

At times like this, childhood memories always flash through my mind, from when I still lived with my grandmother. I slept in a room crammed with stuff. There were two big grain bins, one full of unhusked rice and the other also full of unhusked rice. Besides those there was a big wardrobe, a big cabinet full of who knows what, and my grandfather's tools tucked into every gap in the room. He was a carpenter.

My bed sat among all of this, taking up the top right corner of the room. It was a very old-fashioned wooden bed, laid with straw, then a brown mat made of some material I never figured out, and then a cotton quilt.

The room had just one narrow aisle down the middle. Every time I went to bed, I had to pass the grain bins and the cabinets, and looking out from my bed, all I could see was the aisle and the window.

At night, moonlight came in through the window, and outside there were so many sounds: frogs croaking, crickets chirping, and lots of others I couldn't name, rising and falling one after another.

I grew up surrounded by those sounds. In summer, at harvest time, I'd sometimes join in the work. But while everyone was busy, these night-shift musicians were usually nowhere to be seen.

I'd walk through the lush rice paddies and along gravel paths so hot the stones hurt my feet. Now and then I'd spot a frog or a cricket, but at those times I never thought about the nights. I thought frogs were kind of ugly, and a cricket, I might just stomp on.

At night I'd climb into my bed. When I closed the door, the whole room felt as safe as a Tall-nut from Plants vs. Zombies. Especially in winter, when my grandmother gave me two quilts. I'd lay one along the edge of the bed, shut myself into the little bit of space against the wall, burrow under the other, wrap left, wrap right, and roll myself up like a sushi roll.

Even if a TV was still playing outside, the moment felt perfectly silent.

The frogs and crickets didn't work every day, either. Once the season passed, or when it thundered and rained, they didn't come in for their shift.

But nature had other sounds.

When the wind blew and the rain came, there was a huge bamboo grove right next to my grandmother's house, and the wind through it made a special sound.

Shhh, shhh, whoosh, whoosh

If there was thunder, you could see the shadows of the bamboo leaves cast across the room.

Or there were the firecrackers at Spring Festival, now and then a dog barking at some faraway house, someone calling out, or the sound of someone riding an e-bike down the road in front of the house.

Really, none of these sounds were noisy. They all blended into the silence.

I've always felt that silence like this was especially easy to find as a kid, and easy to feel.

Now silence is a rare experience.

Or rather, in the city, the sounds of nature are a luxury in themselves.

The sound of running water comes from the tap. The sound of mountain streams is gone. Birdsong is something you have to go to the park to find, and the sound of wind and rain has become white noise promoted by apps.

A lot of people listen to white noise to fall asleep or to study. Maybe that just proves that people need to be immersed in nature. And the people who make these white noise apps know full well that for city dwellers, white noise is a luxury.

When I think back on my childhood, I always wonder: if you could fall asleep somewhere silent every night, could you live a silent life?

What is a silent life? It isn't necessarily one without sound. It's one where every sound in it carries you toward a fuller kind of silence.

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My Thoughts on Avengers: Endgame

2026-10-01T10:34:38.957Z

Avengers: Endgame came out in 2019, when I was a junior in high school. I saw it twice, once with each of two groups of friends. After the first time, I don't think it had fully sunk in that Iron Man was dead. The second time, when I watched him snap his fingers, I bawled my eyes out.

In the blink of an eye, seven years have gone by. I've graduated from college and been working for a few years, and right before Avengers 5 comes out, I never expected Endgame to be re-released.

For someone like me who's been watching Marvel since 2008, Endgame is a true milestone, so there was no way I wasn't going.

Seven years ago I had no idea how much the theater affects the experience. Seven years later I bought the dead-center seat in the best theater in Chengdu, at full price. For me, it was something like a pilgrimage.

Why? Because I really wanted to know what it would feel like, seven years on, to watch a movie I loved as a teenager. Biologically speaking, supposedly seven years is enough time for every cell in your body to be replaced.¹ In other words, the me from seven years ago and the me now aren't the same person, but Endgame is still the same Endgame it was seven years ago. Wouldn't that collision be interesting?

I actually wrote a review of Endgame seven years ago. I'll upload it to my personal website, so anyone interested can go read it. In this post I just want to talk about what this viewing made me feel.

Crying

If I had to pick a few keywords for my youth, Marvel would definitely be one of them.

I still remember crying for Iron Man in the theater seven years ago. It was the first time a movie ever made me cry.

This time, I knew every scene and every plot point. I even remembered a lot of the shots clearly. So I knew exactly what I was going to see, and I was curious: would I cry again this time?

As it turned out, over the course of the movie my eyes welled up twice, and then at the end I sobbed my heart out.

What I Didn't Get Seven Years Ago

The first time.

Thor and Rocket travel back to Asgard to get the Reality Stone.

The why and the outcome don't matter. What matters is what happens in between. Along the way, Thor sees his mother.

What state is Thor in at this point?

He's the son of Odin, once Asgard's proudest, most dashing prince. But he's lost his mother, lost his father, lost his brother, lost his sister, and lost half the people of Asgard.

For him, that's without a doubt a crushing blow. So when he sees his mother, I immediately felt a lump in my throat. Thor at this point has a big belly, and I thought he must have so much pain inside and no one to tell.

The me of seven years ago couldn't have thought of any of that, and didn't get what the director was going for.

Just as I was thinking all this, I saw his mother, Frigga, say:

Seriously, I lost it right then. She knows instantly that the Thor in front of her isn't her son from this time. She knows he's come from the future. And just from the way he looks, as a mother she knows at once that the future Thor must have suffered a lot.

He hasn't said a word yet, and she understands all of it.

The second time.

In the final battle, all the Avengers return, and in the chaos, Spider-Man and Iron Man are reunited.

Peter is chattering away nonstop, a classic Peter Parker motormouth, and Tony looks at him for a long time. In the end he doesn't say a word. He shows how he feels with a single gesture.

Seven years ago, all I felt here was hyped and happy: Spider-Man's back, everyone's back. Back then I was about Peter's age, and I saw everything from his side.

This time, my eyes stayed on Tony.

Tony carries enormous guilt over losing Peter. He really likes and admires this young Avenger, was looking forward to seeing him grow, and gave a lot for him.

Think about it. Why would Tony go back in time to save everyone? Pepper and his daughter are alive in the present. Rationally, he hasn't lost anything. If there's one thing that pushed Tony to do it, I think Peter has a lot to do with it.

So that hug holds five years of guilt, and the relief of getting back what he'd lost.

The me of seven years ago only saw a reunion. This time I finally understood: it's a grown man pulling back into his arms the kid he couldn't protect back then.

Sometimes a simple hug says more than a thousand words.

Knowing How It Ends

The third time is Tony's iconic shot.

Unlike seven years ago, this time I completely lost control the moment Thanos snaps his fingers, sees that nothing happens, and turns his head.

I knew what was coming. I knew exactly what was coming. I really wanted to keep it together, but I couldn't.

I cried hard, but I didn't actually know why I was crying.

Maybe because I love Iron Man so much. Maybe because, in this whole movie, almost everyone is running around for someone they can't let go of: Thor goes back to see his mother, Hawkeye wants his family back, Cap finally goes back to Peggy.

And Tony gives his life for it.

While I cried, one question kept going through my head: why does it have to be Iron Man?

Why does it have to be Iron Man who snaps his fingers? Why does he have to be the one to bear all of it?

In 2008, Tony was just an arms dealer. He built weapons and never thought about whose hands they'd end up in. That same year, I stepped into the Marvel world for the first time.

In 2012, Cap told Tony, "You only care about yourself. You're not the guy to make the sacrifice play."²

By 2019, he had Pepper and he had Morgan. By any measure, he had no reason to take this gamble. But he went anyway.

It took Tony eleven years to go from a selfish man to a man who saves the world.

Eleven years earlier, at a press conference, he said, "I am Iron Man."³

Eleven years later, right before he snaps his fingers, he says the same thing: "And I... am... Iron Man."

He opened it, and he closed it.

It was the first meeting, and the final ritual.

Walking out of the theater afterward, I think I figured something out. Seven years ago I was about Peter Parker's age, the chattering kid someone else was protecting. Watching it again seven years later, I finally understood Frigga's look and Tony's unspoken hug. The movie hasn't changed a single frame. What's changed is where I'm standing.

Walking back into a theater after seven years was a look back, and a goodbye. The cells in my body have probably been replaced once over, but the tears still fall in the same place.

Seven years isn't long. But it's long enough for us to grow up, and for heroes to grow old.

"Every cell in the human body is replaced every seven years" is a widely repeated claim. In reality, different cells renew at very different rates, and some neurons and the cells of the eye's lens are almost never replaced. I'm using it here as an image. ↩
From The Avengers (2012), in the scene where everyone argues in the lab on the Helicarrier. The original line is: "You're not the guy to make the sacrifice play, to lay down on a wire and let the other guy crawl over you." ↩
From the press conference at the end of Iron Man (2008). In release order, it's the first film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and this is the last line of the film itself. ↩

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This National Day Holiday, I'm Not Going Anywhere

2026-09-30T13:11:24.964Z

Rumor has it that Sichuan "A" license plates are a mysterious force: every time a short holiday comes around, you can spot a Chengdu car anywhere in the world.

Sichuan people's love of having fun seems to be famous across the country. This year it's especially over the top. Lots of people went for the "take 3 days off, get 14" plan, so they're going to party like crazy.

I took nearly a week off last week, then worked the past three days. I only got back to Chengdu from a work trip at six this evening, so my National Day holiday has officially begun.

I don't have any special plans for the holiday. At most I'll go cycling and see some friends. I won't make a point of going anywhere, and I won't travel.

I usually don't travel over the holidays, because it feels like everywhere is packed with people, and I don't really like that.

My dislike of crowds probably goes back to Ciqikou. When I went to Ciqikou before, it was wall-to-wall people. Chongqing's streets aren't wide to begin with, let alone in an old town. People were shoulder to shoulder, and after walking around a while I felt like I couldn't breathe. And the worst part was I didn't get to enjoy anything. Last time, I went to the Ruins of St. Paul's in Macau on a Monday, and it was so crowded I thought I was back in Ciqikou.

So now I either don't go out at all, or I go when there aren't so many people. A while ago I went to Guangdong for three days while it was quiet. This holiday I'm not planning to go anywhere. In fact, I only plan one trip a year, and most of the rest of the time I'm at home.

Traveling like that is really tiring, though. While you're doing it, the dopamine makes you feel happy, but when it's over, it takes days to recover. In terms of happiness, a trip like that doesn't necessarily bring much. It's more the instant pleasure of getting lost in the bright lights, quick to come and quick to go.

I think holidays are never long enough. Back in school, holidays were mostly for being with family, going home to see them while we had time off. After growing up and starting work, being together isn't such a big deal anymore. Maybe because once we have money and time, we all want to go out and see the world.

I live with my mom now, so day to day we're already together. But when a holiday comes, I don't know how to have fun.

Maybe it's because after all these years of work, I've traveled almost all over China on the job, so I don't feel much urge to go out and play on holidays.

In the end, maybe it's because I still have a job and have to do my duties at set times, so there's something tying me down. If I could go off for a couple of weeks and not come back, I'm sure it would feel a lot easier.

I've always believed that happiness only exists in the most ordinary everyday life. Looking at it now, the happiness I feel really does come from ordinary days. Even just getting to sleep in as long as I want every day makes me happy.

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Short Circuit

2026-09-29T13:20:41.407Z

Today, while fixing an instrument, I discovered a problem.

When I came to diagnose it a couple of days ago, I thought it was just a simple short that had burned out the circuit board. But today, after I swapped in a new board, less than 10 seconds after powering on, the power chip blew again.

That's when I knew something was wrong. I measured the main supply voltage the power supply should be putting out, and it was indeed off: it should have been 24V, but I measured only 18V. In theory 18V shouldn't blow the power chip, but I had no choice, so I swapped the power supply too. To my surprise, even with a new supply putting out a steady 24V, the board still burned out. I was completely baffled.

After some troubleshooting, I found that the 5V plug, where the board's power chip converts 24V to 5V, was shorted. Following that shorted connector down the line, I found that another circuit board in the instrument had also shorted and burned out. I was really shocked.

It also meant this repair had basically failed for good. There was basically no way to finish it today. In the end, I handled this hospital's problem another way.

When I got back, I thought it over carefully and felt there was a real lesson in it.

In my day-to-day work, I never run into repair cases this serious. This was the most badly damaged and most complex (or you could say highest-level) piece of equipment I've dealt with since I started working.

It made me think: when work and life are in a mild, normal state, most people simply can't catch a problem when it first shows signs. Often only when we try to deal with it ourselves and truly realize how serious it is do we think about responding, and by then we've usually already paid a heavy price.

Take health. Many people ignore it when they first start feeling unwell. They think they're just tired from staying up late, or caught a chill with the change of seasons, and they'll tough it out. Occasional chest tightness, constant stomach pain, unexplained fatigue all get treated as minor ailments and casually suppressed with some medicine. The symptoms go away for a while and people relax, without realizing that the medicine only suppresses the surface "burnout." The real "short circuit" causing the problem is still hidden in the body, slowly spreading. Then one day, when they really can't tough it out and go to the hospital for a checkup, they find the problem is no longer as simple as one organ or one spot. Pull one thread and the whole body moves, and the difficulty and cost of treatment multiply.

How similar that is to the instrument I dealt with today.

The first time I diagnosed it a couple of days ago, all I saw was a burned circuit board, so I naturally assumed swapping in a new one would fix it. That judgment wasn't wrong in itself. What was wrong was that I only saw the "result" and never asked about the "cause."

Why did the board burn? Was it a quality problem with the board itself, or was something outside it constantly damaging it? If I'd asked one more question back then, taken one more measurement, I might have found that shorted 5V connector early and avoided burning through new boards one after another today. But in reality, I settled on a seemingly reasonable explanation and stopped thinking too soon.

Looking back over the whole troubleshooting process, the problem had left clues from the very beginning: a supply voltage of only 18V was itself an abnormal signal. But my first reaction was "18V won't blow the chip," so I turned my attention to swapping the power supply instead of digging further into that abnormality. The wrong voltage might only have been a symptom. Why was it wrong? Was the power supply aging, or was a short on the load side dragging the voltage down? Thinking about it now, the second was actually more likely.

A lot of the time, it's not that we don't see the problem. It's that once we see it, we use our experience to label it "not serious," and then let it go with a clear conscience.

So much in life is like this. Small frictions in a relationship get brushed aside again and again with "forget it, it's not worth it." A small gap in a process at work drags on because nothing has gone wrong yet. Little overspends in your personal finances go unnoticed, because you figure you'll make it up next month.

Each small problem on its own isn't fatal. But they're like that shorted connector in the circuit, quietly passing pressure somewhere else, until one day "the whole board burns out" and we suddenly realize the problem has spread beyond anything we can control.

So even though this repair failed, it taught me an important lesson.

First, don't settle for fixing the fault you can see right in front of you. Ask about the root cause behind it. Swapping a circuit board is easy. Finding out why it burned is the real repair.

Second, stay sensitive to abnormal signals, and don't comfort yourself too easily with "it's probably fine." Any data that strays from normal deserves to be taken seriously.

Third, the earlier you find a problem, the smaller the cost. If you wait until it fully blows up, you've usually missed the best time to act, and you pay far more than time and money.

That goes for equipment, and it goes for health, work, and life too.

Rather than scrambling to patch things up after a problem fully blows up, it's better to stay a little more alert when everything seems calm, do one more check, and ask "why" one more time. The small early signs we ignore in normal times are often what really decides the outcome.

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Why Train Grip Strength to Unlock the Pull-Up?

2026-09-28T13:20:58.399Z

What do pull-ups have to do with grip strength? Before I looked into it properly, I always thought the two had nothing to do with each other.

I used to have zero interest in unlocking the pull-up. First, I was genuinely too weak. All my life, pull-ups were just not a thing for someone heavy like me with weak upper-body strength. Second, once I started working out, there was so much room to improve elsewhere: bench press, squat and deadlift all had a long way to go. At first I couldn't even do a push-up, so pull-ups were nowhere on my mind.

A while ago, my friend Yuehui posted that he'd unlocked the pull-up. I was happy for him, but at the same time a weird competitive streak shot up in me.

I'm going to unlock the pull-up too!!!

No time like the present. My big three lifts have all hit a plateau anyway, so why not train something else?

So I researched the movement specifically and found it isn't that complicated. The only thing I didn't expect was how closely pull-ups are tied to grip strength.

Once I understood it, it made sense. I once wrote a post about an exercise called the "dead hang," which is the starting position of a pull-up: hanging from a bar and doing nothing.

But even doing nothing, a dead hang isn't easy. Last year I could hang for 30 seconds. This year I've slipped to under 20. I badly need to train it!

How long you can hang from the bar directly decides how many pull-ups you can do. Even if your lats, teres major and teres minor have plenty left, once you can't hang on, none of it matters.

That's where grip strength is crucial: the stronger your grip, the longer you can hang, and the longer you can hang, the better your pull-ups.

That's why, if you want to train pull-ups, the first thing to train is grip.

If your grip can't hold you on the bar for ten seconds, you'll run out of steam fast even on assisted pull-ups, because your grip gives out.

So I'm doing dedicated grip training.

How do you train grip?

I mainly use two exercises.

1. Dead hang

Dead hangs don't just build a solid base for pull-ups. They also relax and stretch your shoulders and back. They're a rare, excellent exercise.

To train it, first test your max hold time.

Say my max is 20 seconds. Then I take 50% of that, so three sets of 10 seconds.

2. Farmers carry

This is one of the stations in Hyrox.¹ Simply put, you carry kettlebells or dumbbells and walk. It's a serious test of grip strength and core.

Pick a dumbbell or kettlebell you can hold for at least 40 seconds, walk until failure, and repeat for three sets.

Of course, besides grip, practicing assisted pull-ups and building up your lats, teres major and teres minor matters too. But what I want to stress here is that grip strength plays a crucial role in the pull-up.

In all pulling work, grip matters. Any time you lift something from below, you're using your grip.

Dr. Peter Attia also stresses how important grip strength is for ordinary people in Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity.

Grip strength is a "proxy marker" for overall strength and longevity. He cites several large studies showing that grip strength is significantly associated with all-cause mortality: the weaker your grip, the higher your risk of death. He doesn't think grip itself is necessarily the cause, but it reflects a person's overall muscle strength and physical function very well.
Grip strength is about staying independent in old age. He links grip to daily function: carrying grocery bags, opening jars, holding the handrail on the stairs, and especially grabbing something to steady yourself when you're about to fall. For older people, falls are a major cause of disability and death, and grip strength is a key link in keeping a fall from turning into something serious.
Build a reserve for your older self ahead of time. He stresses again and again that muscle strength keeps declining with age, so in midlife you should train your strength far above "good enough." That way, by your seventies and eighties, even after the decline, you still have enough margin to keep your quality of life.

He gives a standard for grip and the two exercises above:

His specific standards (targets for people around 40)

Dead hang: about 2 minutes for men, about 90 seconds for women.
Farmers carry: for men, a total load in both hands equal to your bodyweight; for women, about 75% of bodyweight. Walk for 1 minute.

Just looking at those standards makes my hands go weak. There's a chasm between me and them.

But whatever.

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Sleep on brushwood, taste the gall, and three thousand armored men of Yue can swallow Wu.

Just train!!

Hyrox is an indoor fitness race that combines running with functional training. Competitors work through a series of stations back to back, including the SkiErg, sled push and farmers carry. ↩

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Instead of Asking "What If I Need It?", Ask "How Long Has It Been Taking Up My Space?"

2026-09-27T13:09:42.861Z

I meant to write my thoughts on Avengers: Endgame today, but I spent the whole day moving. I hauled another four or five suitcases home, and looking at the crowded mess of stuff everywhere, I felt completely overwhelmed.

On top of that, I left for work at six this morning and didn't really get enough sleep last night. Since finishing the move I've felt exhausted. The good news is that everything's been moved now.

In the evening, my mom came back to Chengdu from our hometown of Rongchang, and I picked her up at the subway station. Since it was late and the house was such a mess, we ate at a restaurant tonight.

We ordered twice-cooked pork and tomato with scrambled eggs, just right for two.

While we ate, I said to my mom: Isn't there a rice cooker under that cabinet at home that hasn't been used in ages?

Mom said: Yes.

I said: Then when we get back, you can throw it out, because I brought another rice cooker home.

Why throw it out? I'll keep it there and take it back to our hometown to use later.

That rice cooker was too big. My mom and my younger brother didn't need one that size, so they switched to a small one, and it's been sitting unused ever since.

A few years ago, when I was living in Chongqing, I bought myself a rice cooker too, but I've hardly used it (a few times a year, still). So I figured mine could replace the old one.

I knew long ago that my mom would say that.

I said to her: Don't you find it annoying having so much stuff in the house?

My mom was quiet for a long while, then finally said: But what if we need it later and don't have it?

I smiled: You just answered the question a different way.

We didn't take the topic any further. I'd love for my mom to live a bit more minimally, but I know that most minimalists go through a painful stretch when they first start letting things go. Faced with so many kinds of things and so many of them, you always end up thinking: what if I need it someday?

I have to admit, a lot of things probably stay in our homes for years for exactly that reason. But think about it: by the time we're ready to throw something out, how long has it gone unused?

Take my mom saying she wants to bring the old rice cooker back to our hometown. She forgets every single time. That tells me the scenario she imagined for it is flimsy. If it really mattered that much back home, it would have been in the hometown kitchen long ago.

This time I've moved back home to live with my mom, the first time since I started working four years ago. Living alone, I never felt I had that much stuff. But once I came back to the family and put my things together with theirs, I realized how suffocating it was.

The good thing is that after a year of minimalism, even though I'm not truly minimal yet in how much I own, I've become sensitive to piles of cluttered stuff.

When I'm somewhere messy and crowded with things, I feel a little suffocated and don't know what to do with myself.

Especially when I found the wardrobe at home couldn't fit my clothes, I felt helpless, because I didn't know where else my clothes could go.

I threw out a lot of things during this move too, mostly odds and ends: a hot water bottle, a cycling water bottle, two pairs of cycling glasses I hadn't worn in ages, the five pairs of shoes I mentioned yesterday, and so on. It was all jumbled together, and it took me several trips downstairs to get rid of it.

Afterward, I didn't really feel lighter, because I still thought I had too much.

For example, a mirror, a small clothes rack, a desk lamp I hadn't used in ages, a printer, a water dispenser, two monitor stands, a helmet, the boxes for my phone and other electronics (I've already thrown out the ones for things no longer in use), and so on. All of these things are here, and every one of them is useful.

So it's hard for me to minimalize them.

When throwing things out, I roughly follow two rules:

1. Anything worth less than 50 yuan goes straight in the trash. 2. Anything I haven't used in over a year goes straight in the trash.

So with this move, I threw out quite a lot, and there were also some things I couldn't bring myself to throw out for other reasons.

Some I kept because they're worth a lot. Take a pair of shoes I don't want to wear anymore. I'm going to see if they fit my dad, and if not, I'll think about throwing them out or selling them.

Other things, like the desk lamp, a really good phone and tablet stand, a camera tripod, and a fan, I'm planning to sell on Xianyu.

I think worrying that "I might need it someday" makes life exhausting.

Life does call for "defensive driving,"¹ but from the standpoint of long-termism, what we should keep our eyes on over time is our physical and mental health, our energy, and our assets, not the things we already own, some of which we should have gotten rid of long ago.

Instead of asking: what if I need it?

Ask: how long has this thing been taking up my space for nothing?

Defensive driving means driving in a way that anticipates other people's mistakes and avoids risks ahead of time. Here it stands for leaving room in life for uncertainty. ↩

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Moving House Is the Test of a Minimalist

2026-09-26T13:11:37.899Z

It's only when I move that I find out how much stuff I really have.

I'm moving again these days. I still remember the day I moved in last year, I was watching AL play T1. In the blink of an eye, a new Worlds is about to start.

I've always considered myself a minimalist, and my home is usually pretty bare. But every time I have to move, I get a headache, and I think maybe I'm not a minimalist after all.

It seems like a true, hardcore minimalist only needs one suitcase to move out. To put a number on it, I've been hauling my things to my mom's place one suitcase at a time. So far I've hauled eight suitcases, and I'm still not done.

I've long since lost track of what exactly I've hauled over. My shoes alone took a whole suitcase, and that's after I threw out five pairs myself. Otherwise they wouldn't have fit in one.

Right now I have two pairs of leather shoes, two pairs of casual shoes that double as sneakers, and one pair of boots. I think that's a pretty reasonable setup, though it doesn't seem very minimalist. If I cut one pair each from the leather shoes and the casual shoes, I'd only have three pairs, which seems more reasonable still. But I always feel like I need a pair to swap between, so I keep two of each.

Then there are the clothes. Over the past year I refreshed my wardrobe and threw out a lot of clothes I'd been wearing since high school. Still, I have to say, there's still a lot. Counting inner and outer layers, I have a few dozen pieces. Fall and winter clothes take up a lot of space, so the clothes alone took me two or three suitcases.

The rest is all kinds of odds and ends: helmets, keyboards, basically small bits and pieces. Stuff all that random stuff into suitcases and it fills another two or three.

So honestly, I think people who can move with one suitcase are amazing. They're the real minimalists. Someone like me is at best a broke loser who just doesn't buy much.

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Why Build a Personal Website?

2026-09-24T12:44:33.252Z

The first time I tinkered with a blog was around March or April this year. With Gemini guiding me, I built it step by step.

Back then I thought that was already easy: I don't know tech, and with AI's help I still got it done. But just half a year later, setting up a blog has become dramatically easier again.

My first blog, built on GitHub and Hugo,¹ did work, but there was too little room to customize it. I could basically only copy someone else's theme.

Publishing wasn't convenient either. Most of the time I had to push changes from a local terminal, which I didn't like, and inserting images was a hassle. All that friction left me pretty unenthusiastic about blogging.

Later I tried some third-party hosted blogging platforms, like Bear Blog and Jant Blog. They have proper management, and publishing is super easy, like posting to your WeChat Moments.

They solved publishing, but they couldn't meet many personal needs. Once I wanted something designed a certain way, and it got too detailed, it just couldn't be done.

So it became a case of not being able to have your cake and eat it too.

The more I tinker with blogging, the more I actually like it.

I think a blog is a big business card: visitors can get to know the blogger from every angle. I can post not just articles but projects, photos, and the books and records I love. If I want, I can record all my tastes and my whole life on my blog.

Here's how I see blogging now: it's a vehicle mainly for presenting yourself. It's highly private, and it's nowhere near as public as a WeChat Official Account.

Before this, I'd been using Jant Blog the whole time. It has a few things going for it.

1. A clean design and sensible interactions. 2. Publishing is effortless, like posting on Weibo. 3. It's easy to manage, and the maintainer replies to messages and fixes problems quickly.

I used Jant Blog for a few months. During that time I thought about building my own blog, but I always ended up back on Jant.

There were roughly two reasons:

1. I couldn't find a good-looking theme. I didn't have a complete design concept, and the designs I got from AI mostly looked the same: soulless, not good-looking. 2. Maintenance was a pain. Publishing and managing posts wasn't easy, and there was a lot of friction.

But in the past couple of days, Liang Mouyin recommended a blog theme to me. I thought it was great, really cool, and the author had open-sourced it on GitHub, so I forked it without a second thought.

It's live now. If you're interested, tap "Read the original" to visit.

This time, I combined the theme with the way hosted platforms handle management. I didn't just have AI build the blog. I also had it write a whole admin system along the way, so I can quickly publish and manage every part of the blog from the back end.

All at once, every problem seemed solved.

1. I can change any design detail of my blog myself. 2. Publishing is easy, with no friction.

Suddenly it felt perfect. I'd never thought of having AI write an admin panel before. I always assumed that was something only platforms could do.

Not so. For a personal blog, writing a back end just for yourself is actually simpler.

I suddenly felt like I'd found the ultimate answer.

If all goes well, this blog could keep running from here on.

My requirements for a blog theme are actually simple.

The overall feel has to be minimal. A blog can be rich in content, but good design that makes complex information feel simple is what matters.

The utmost complexity returns to the utmost simplicity. Only a design that feels simple and orderly can stand the test of time.

From a writing point of view, the blog is now mostly a gathering place. It syncs what I've written on my Official Account or elsewhere: after I publish something, I put a copy on the blog too.

Being a collection like this is one of the things that makes a blog special. More private things that I wouldn't post on social media, I often write up and put on the blog.

I may not always write for my Official Account. But even if I stop, the blog should keep getting updated.

Because even if I don't write articles, my photos will still go up on the blog. And even if I give up on both articles and photos, the occasional thought or life update can still go there.

That's what I hope my blog will be.

GitHub is a code hosting platform and Hugo is a static site generator. Together they can be used to build a free, customizable blog. ↩

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Three Things I Want to Do in the Last Three Months of the Year

2026-09-23T11:02:22.000Z

I haven't set foot in a gym for four or five months, and I'm 10 kg heavier than I was at my leanest last year.

Yep, 10 kg. I've barely dared to step on the scale lately, in case my inner pig has struck again and I'm another kilo or so heavier. Then I'd see stars and collapse onto the bed.

When I think about why I stopped training these past few months, the main reason is IT band syndrome.¹

It's been almost ten months now. For people who don't exercise, an injury like this is no big deal. For someone like me who loves exercise, it's miserable.

I love cycling, and at the gym I love leg day. IT band syndrome means I can't ride freely, and I can't train legs without worrying.

Not being able to exercise properly affects every part of life. My energy is down, and I'm not as patient as I used to be.

This year I've ridden and trained exponentially less than last year, and my weight has gone up in proportion.

Luckily, I see the problem clearly. What I need to do now is rehab it properly.

So I finally went to a fairly well-known rehab center in Chengdu.

I spent 3,500 yuan on a rehab package.

I've done four sessions so far, and the results are pretty noticeable. My rehab therapist has taught me a lot of systematic, professional knowledge, and it's given me confidence I can recover completely.

People are like that sometimes. Even a little bit of hope makes your whole state of mind much better.

So I'm back at the gym.

Looking at the date is sobering. Somehow three quarters of 2026 are already gone, and from an exercise point of view, I've wasted most of the year.

But rather than regret the past, better to fight for what's ahead.

Three months is neither long nor short. It's enough time to do a lot.

So today I'm setting a few goals for 2026.

1. Fully heal my IT band syndrome.

Once I paid money to a rehab clinic, the nature of this changed. I used to think I could heal myself by looking things up online and doing my own rehab, but it didn't work well, and it took a toll on me physically and mentally. So I have to recover completely!

2. Get my weight back under 75 kg.

I'm 83 kg now. I don't know how much of that is water that will come off on low carb. But my goal is to be back under 75 kg by New Year's Day.

3. Unlock a strict pull-up.

This might be the easiest one. On the assisted pull-up machine, I can do sets with 60 kg of assistance. I remember when I started working out last year, even kneeling push-ups were a real struggle. With steady practice, I can now do twenty strict push-ups in a row.

For gym veterans, 20 push-ups is nothing. For me, it's huge progress.

So I believe that as long as I keep practicing specifically for it, unlocking the pull-up is only a matter of time.

Those three are the fitness goals I'll be working toward this year. Readers are welcome to hold me to them.

Last year my goal was to get abs, and I seem to have underestimated how hard that is. So I won't be so quick to promise it again.

First I'll get these three done. The rest I'll leave as room for the future.

Iliotibial band syndrome (ITBS) is inflammation caused by the iliotibial band on the outside of the thigh repeatedly rubbing against the lateral femoral condyle. It's common in sports with repeated knee bending, like running and cycling, and the main symptom is pain on the outside of the knee. ↩

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