What kind of feeling is it, exactly?

It is the dullness of a long afternoon, with the sun quietly baking the earth. It is also the sudden freshness of the air at dusk, when brilliant clouds spread across the horizon. Water pumps rumble through the fields day and night, while insects rustle and chirp in the grass. There are mosquitoes, flies, and other irritating little creatures, of course, but overall, it is still a night worth being happy about.

When I was preparing for exams, I once sat for a long time on the steps outside my old home. The air was clear that day, and the clouds drifted slowly in the same direction. I felt as though I were sitting inside a vast cockpit, piloting the ground beneath my feet as it travelled into the distance.

A large part of my idea of the wild also comes from video games.

The broad stretches of white clouds on the menu screen of Plants vs. Zombies, for example, always remind me of the afternoon when I struggled to choose between the humanities and sciences. Through the window screen, I watched the clouds outside drift continuously across the sky.

There is also the Jiangnan Wilderness map in Fantasy Westward Journey. The watermelon fields, the old woman, and the lush trees and grass all seem perfectly placed.

To me, the wild feels free, clear, expansive, and unhurried.

Ever since I put a small fan on my desk at work, I have found myself turning it on instinctively, even when I am not hot. Moving air always gives me the illusion of being outdoors. When I wipe my face with the purified-water tissues I bought from Hema, I cannot resist holding them close to my nose. For a moment, I almost believe I can smell the fresh sweetness of watermelon—the scent of summer.

“The wild” is such an enchanting phrase.

I am not someone who particularly enjoys going out. Even when I do, there is usually a moment when I begin to feel bored.

A few days ago, I came across a post on Jike. It said that for people who have lived in the mountains and countryside for a long time, the beautiful life we imagine may be outweighed by the heaviness of reality. In other words, some people may have already grown tired of the wild.

But what does that have to do with me?

Do I need to question my own affection for a place simply because someone else has grown weary of it?

I really do love the wild.

Perhaps it is only the kind of love expressed in the story of Lord Ye, who claimed to love dragons until a real one appeared. The wild I love may not be the damp and muddy place of reality, filled with mosquitoes, hard labour, and inconvenience. It has always grown in my dreams, existing in my memories and imagination.

Even so, I still love it.

Because I have grown tired of the city.

I often feel detached. I am always living somewhere else: in the future, in the past, in imagination, in things that have not happened yet, in things I have replayed again and again. It feels like I am watching myself live.

Sometimes I feel as if my organs of perception are not really working.

In a dazed kind of flow, things happen one by one, and I deal with them one by one, but they never really land on me.

I do not know if this counts as one of my ways of feeling and thinking about things. I also do not know how to switch it off.

I do not know when thinking became a fixed voice inside my head. My thoughts are no longer vague, abstract things drifting by like clouds. They have become words, one after another, flowing through my mind.

It feels like I am constantly talking to myself. The question is, is talking to myself really the same as thinking?

I probably used to assume it was. That voice in my head is always speaking, always explaining, always adding subtitles to whatever is happening.

But because of that, many feelings are translated into language before they even have time to become feelings. Language is powerful, but also sly. It helps me understand myself, and at the same time, it places a layer between me and myself. I feel like I am acting out my own life.

And I am not a very decisive person.

I cannot even clearly say what kind of life I like, or what kind of life I want. Most of the time, I only know what I do not like, what annoys me, what bores me, what makes me want to escape. But if you ask me what I actually want, I cannot say.

Just like now. I have written this feeling down, but I do not know what to write next.

Should I write about things like “building a new order for my life”? I would probably be too lazy to follow through.

What I really want to ask may be this: how can I live in the present again?

A life that repeats itself day after day makes me feel tired of everything. But I am not the kind of person who changes life decisively. I want change. I want something new. But when things actually happen, I often step back again and become a bystander.

I have become a bystander to my own happiness.

When I am happy, I am not happy enough. When I am sad, I am not sad enough. Many emotions seem diluted. They become describable, analyzable, something that can be placed into a sentence, and then they stop feeling so real.

Only when I am angry do I really feel angry.

Maybe it is because anger is too intense. Unlike other emotions, it cannot be slowly explained away. It rushes out directly. The body reacts first: heartbeat, breath, tense fingers. The voice in my head does not even have time to organize it.

That is strange too.

It means I am not without feelings. It is just that many feelings are digested by language before they have time to appear.

Sometimes, maybe the sense of reality is not in the sentence, but in the moment before the sentence appears. It was originally something very concrete, but I turned it into words too quickly.

Words make me feel safe, and they also make me dull. Of course, being a bystander is not entirely bad.

It allows me to stay calm sometimes, without being completely swallowed by what is happening. It lets me notice details, and observe many emotions from a little distance. In that sense, it is quite suitable for being a recorder. To record what happens with words, to record life, to record the moments I have not yet figured out.

Although I have not really written anything in a long time. The last time I wrote intensely, the last time I had that surging desire to write, was probably back in middle school. Back then, I wrote simply because something wanted to come out.

Now, more often than not, I am wrapped in a sense of loss. It feels like writing has also become something very far away.

But maybe writing itself is a way of thinking. Not the rigid kind of thinking where you raise a question, analyze it, and solve it, but the kind where you first set down whatever has flowed through your mind.

I do not know what question I want to think about, and I do not know what answer I need.

I am just like a worker on a word assembly line, moving with probability, fixing in place the words that pass through my mind. Maybe only after they are fixed can I look back and think, oh, so this is what I have been thinking about lately.

Maybe I still cannot fully live in the present for now. But at least I can try, before the words appear, to pause for a little while.

In the past, I always complained about myself. I treated my blog like a toy, constantly switching themes and frontend styles for the novelty of it, while the actual content was perpetually stuck in labor. I still remember once trying to tweak the style of a tiny page element, only to crash the entire frontend code. I spent ages trying to fix it and couldn’t figure it out — it was genuinely demoralizing. (Now, in the Vibe Coding era, these frontend barriers are practically zero.) Every time, after tinkering for ages, “redecorating” for ages, and finally launching a blog, I would just abandon it. Because I truly didn’t know what to write.

I have a habit of keeping a diary. I record what happens each day. I don’t particularly enjoy writing blow-by-blow accounts — it’s more of an atmosphere diary, mainly capturing the flow of emotions throughout the day. Especially when something bad happens and some dark feelings arise, I go and write them down. Pinning down those drifting emotions. But if you asked me to put these fragmented records on a blog, I’d be afraid. Because they represent the rough, unpolished me — sentences full of grammatical flaws, arguments that can’t withstand scrutiny. It’s hard for me to be willing to put them out in public.

Over and over again, I’ve lost count of how many blog sites I’ve set up, how many domain names I’ve bought only to let them expire. It seems like I’ve never truly built a complete, real personal website. I don’t know if this site will last. Maybe I need to be a little braver and just present my authentic self — there’s nothing wrong with that. (Besides, the traffic on this site is pretty dismal anyway. Barely any SEO traffic, and very few people come to read it.)

I think what I can write mainly falls into three categories. First, what I experience and realize in daily life — the diary part. Then there’s a layer of reflection — conclusions drawn from life — though it’s hard to draw a strict line between these and the stream-of-consciousness diary entries. It’s more like they’re intertwined. Then there’s experiential stuff, like tips and how-tos. This kind of content used to be very popular online, but after AI came along, most Q&A scenarios have basically been swallowed up by AI chat boxes.

But the meaning of writing things down may not necessarily lie in being seen. It’s about letting yourself live more coherently, with more evidence. Knowing that you’ve lived well.

So be it. I’ll stick with this blog and keep updating it with real content. I admit that the content I previously put here was all AI-generated (that is, the posts dated before this one). AI generation or AI polishing gave me a sense of security — tossing my raw, rough content or ideas to AI felt like expressing myself within a safe zone, without worrying about grammatical errors or immature arguments. But in that machine-generated process, the human touch was also lost.

I’ll try. I’ll try, from now on, to manually arrange every word on this little blog. Writing is a skill that atrophies with disuse. You really can’t rely too heavily on AI.

It’s just a little figurine, so I wasn’t expecting much when I opened the box. But the moment I set it on the table, I couldn’t help but smile. It’s more refined than I imagined — 13.5 cm tall, a round little pot, colors that are unmistakably Nintendo. The parts don’t move, but when it comes to nailing the details and materials, Nintendo never disappoints.

When I played Super Mario Bros. Wonder, the Talking Flower was my favorite character. It doesn’t really do anything — it just talks. Says something out of nowhere when you walk by. Sometimes a reminder, sometimes nonsense, sometimes oddly profound.

The flower in the game made me realize that companionship doesn’t have to be useful. It’s just there, saying a thing or two, and you hear it, smile a little, then keep running your level.

So when Nintendo announced a real-life version, I barely hesitated.

I pre-ordered it on 2000Fun — HK$209 for the item, plus HK$37 in fees, HK$246 total. Not exactly cheap, but not outrageous either. About the price of one Switch game cartridge, except this one talks back.

The flower does more than I expected. It starts talking on its own — randomly, without any input from you. You can also press a button to trigger a conversation, and pressing it multiple times might unlock something special.

It has an alarm, tells the time, and can even sense the room temperature. Every now and then it plays the Wonder background music and shouts “Wonder!” The voice lines are faithful to the game, it supports 10 languages including Chinese, and there’s a handy mute button.

It runs on two AA batteries. The ones my Xbox controller drained — just enough juice left for a second life in a flower pot.

I was going to keep it in my room, but then I changed my mind and moved it to the living room.

When you live alone, your room is the most private space — but also the quietest. The living room is different. You see it when you walk in. You hear it while you’re cooking. You’re zoning out on the couch and it suddenly says something, and for a second, it feels like someone’s there.

The trade-off, of course, is the occasional jump scare. Late at night, curled up in bed scrolling my phone, and it suddenly starts talking from the living room. My heart genuinely skips a beat.

But you know what — getting scared by a flower is, in itself, pretty funny.

I think we’re always looking for that kind of companionship that’s just right. The kind that doesn’t need a response. The kind that doesn’t need maintenance. The Chatting Flower is probably that sort of thing — it doesn’t care whether you’re there or not. It just sits there, talking to itself.

And every once in a while, you catch what it says, and you think: this moment is nice.

HK$246 can buy you a reason to smile every now and then. I’d say that’s worth it.

Not enjoying—enduring. Link was scaling some cliff on the plains of Hyrule, one turn of the camera away from a sweeping vista, and my thumb was going through mechanical motions on the joystick, my mind occupied with: how many more shrines after this one. The feeling wasn’t boredom—boredom is at least a stance. It was closer to sitting in a dentist’s waiting room. You know the thing will eventually be over. You’re just waiting for it to be over.

So I pressed the HOME button, quit the game, and stared at the Switch’s main screen for a few seconds.

A few seconds is enough time to do a lot of things. Like confirming you don’t want to tap on a single icon in the list. Like registering a diffuse, low-grade nausea, as if someone gently wrung something inside your stomach and then let go. I closed the console and set it aside. The motion was calm—like a man who has already accepted his sentence straightening his tie.

I bought Sartre’s Being and Nothingness a few months ago. I’ve read forty-seven pages, thirty of which were the same chapter opened and closed again on different afternoons. He said man is thrown into freedom. Fine, but he didn’t say what to do after you’ve been thrown and discover that the open field of freedom has nothing growing in it. (To be fair, he might have addressed that later. I haven’t gotten that far.) The bookmark has stayed in the same spot so long it’s left a crease—like a permanent scar. A very small scar. The kind not worth noticing.

Music doesn’t work anymore either. R&B used to do something for me—those humid, reverb-softened voices once set off a kind of resonance in my chest. Now I put on my headphones, the playlist scrolls on its own, singers take turns crooning about love, loss, late nights, and what I hear is sound waves. To be precise: air vibrating in regular patterns.

At times like these, psychology offers a word: anhedonia. It sounds very professional, very weighty, as though your suffering has been given a Latin name and thereby granted a kind of legitimacy. But I’m clearly not depressed. I can eat and sleep (though sleep quality is mediocre), I show up to work on time, submit my weekly reports on schedule, and when I reply “Got it, thanks” on WeChat I even bother to add a period for the sake of propriety. A person with depression wouldn’t care about the period. Probably.

So what is this, exactly.

I spent some time trying to figure out what I was anxious about. It’s like opening the fridge, certain you’re hungry, only to stand before a full fridge unable to name a single thing you want to eat. It’s not that nothing tastes good. It’s that your hunger itself is broken. It doesn’t point toward the lack of any specific thing—it just is lack. Buddhism calls this saṅkhāra-dukkha: the suffering of formations, the idea that existence itself carries a baseline hum of dissatisfaction. The description is precise—so precise it’s infuriating, because it amounts to telling you: yes, that’s how it is, and no, there’s nothing to be done.

Sometimes I’ve thought about killing myself.

But the thought always shows up in such a half-hearted way. Not the dramatic standing-on-the-rooftop-hair-whipping-in-the-wind kind. More like you’re sitting on the toilet scrolling your phone and the words “maybe just call it quits” drift through, and then a push notification pops up about a food delivery discount, and the thought dissolves. It’s too light. So light you can’t be sure whether it counts as a thought at all, or just a random firing of nerve endings.

More than dying, I lean toward a gentler and far more impossible option: never having come at all. Not disappearing—disappearing implies first existing and then being erased, a process, traces to clean up, the question of what to do about your social media accounts. Rather, there simply never having been such a person to begin with. One fewer variable in the world’s equation, no effect on the computation. Very clean.

But this too is just a thought.

Because while you’re thinking these things, your stomach growls. Or a delivery arrives. Or the toilet tank lets out an enigmatic gurgle. The body and the everyday possess a kind of blunt-force hegemony; they don’t allow you to see nihilism through to its conclusion. You can believe everything is meaningless and still agonize over which restaurant to pick on the delivery app. This is the most undignified part of the human condition: your existential crisis can never beat your stomach.

So I wait. Not for anything specific—not for a person, a job, an opportunity. For a kind of moment. It happens occasionally, without cause: the texture of reality suddenly shifts. Maybe it’s the shape of a cloud at dusk, maybe a certain vocal run in a song that pierces through the membrane, maybe waking at midnight to find moonlight pooled on the floor. You can’t say why, but for that one second you feel that being alive is acceptable.

Just that one second. Then it leaves, and the world reverts to normal.

I don’t know what to call it. Grace—the word is too grand. Satori—too Buddhist. Channeling—too charlatan. Probably just the brain secreting a little something now and then, rewarding you for not giving up. A very physiological affair.

But I am, in fact, holding on for that one second.

Saying this out loud is neither heroic nor poignant—it’s even a little absurd. Like a man walking through a desert, not because he believes there’s an oasis ahead, but because last time he was walking, a drop of dew happened to land on his lips.

That’s all.

He keeps walking. Not brave, not strong. Just still walking.

My mouth was full of foam. The person in the mirror didn’t look very presentable. But presentability wasn’t exactly my top concern at the moment.

I have a secret.

What it is doesn’t matter. What matters is that it’s there, like an object, taking up space. I can feel its weight. Not weight in the literary sense — a very physical sensation, like wearing too many layers in winter. Everything feels off, but you can’t quite tell which layer you should take off.

I watch people a lot.

A colleague of mine, last week at lunch, told us he’d failed four classes in college and nearly didn’t graduate. He was laughing when he said it. Everyone else was laughing too. The air was still air. The chopsticks were still chopsticks. Nothing changed. I sat there chewing my scrambled eggs with tomato, thinking: some people just have it easier. Their secrets come out as jokes. Mine would come out as an incident.

That’s probably not fair. Everyone thinks their own secret is the heaviest one. Psychology probably has a name for this tendency — some bias, some effect. But knowing the name doesn’t help. It’s like learning you have “influenza” instead of “sore throat plus feeling like shit.” You don’t feel any less like shit.

Sometimes I imagine saying it out loud.

The scene usually goes like this: I’m sitting somewhere, one person or many people across from me, and I open my mouth. My voice is steady, like I’m reading from a script I’ve prepared. Then — then nothing. My imagination breaks off right there. It’s not that I can’t picture the consequences. Quite the opposite. I can picture them too clearly. Everyone’s eyes would gain an extra layer. I’d go from being “a normal person” to being “that person.” A permanent parenthetical trailing after my name.

You know the kind.

But there are moments — usually at three in the morning, or on some particularly ordinary afternoon, like right now — when I feel an almost irrepressible urge to just say it, out loud, to everyone. Not out of bravery. Out of exhaustion. Keeping a secret is physical labor. Constant, highly repetitive, no-overtime-pay physical labor. I’ve mentally submitted three hundred resignation letters. Not one has been approved.

On second thought, that urge lasts about seven seconds. Roughly the same duration as a sneeze.

Then it passes.

So I took the third path — doing nothing. Not choosing is itself a choice; that sentence belongs on the cover of a bestselling self-help book, paired with a blurry ocean sunset. But in practice it doesn’t feel like that. It’s standing in the middle of the road, both directions open, and you look down at your shoes and start wondering if it’s time to replace them. Not numbness. A remarkably precise attention to things that don’t matter.

Life goes on as usual.

Alarm. Get up. Brush teeth. Leave the house. On the subway a kid keeps kicking the back of my seat; his mother is on her phone. Get to the office, turn on the computer, answer emails. A colleague asks what I’m doing this weekend. I say I haven’t decided. Lunch is a braised chicken rice bowl; the rice is a bit hard. An unnecessary meeting in the afternoon. Clock out. Go home. Sit on the couch.

The bomb is still there.

It hasn’t gone off. It hasn’t gotten smaller. It’s just there.

A package arrives. A pair of slippers I ordered three days ago. Gray. I open the box, try them on. They fit.

I think, well. At least one thing went right today.

To read, please visit the original link.

It never “lived” in the physical world; it merely wandered as a “ghost” within the internet.

I. Forgotten Cassettes and Corrupted MP3 Files

It does exist.

This unique cultural genre was born in internet communities like Tumblr and Reddit in the early 2010s. Its name borrows from the computer term “Vaporware,” referring to software or hardware that is heavily advertised but never actually released. This name serves as a direct metaphor for the genre’s core themes of unfulfilled promises and essential “emptiness.”

Although the genre was not created by a single person, three key figures established its basic paradigms. In 2010, Daniel Lopatin released Eccojams Vol.1, laying the auditory foundation of “slowing down, looping, and aging”; the following year, James Ferraro established the satirical core regarding consumerism and cheap technology with Far Side Virtual; finally, Macintosh Plus’s Floral Shoppe established the visual totem with its classic pink bust of Helios (David), formally pushing this style to the masses.

In terms of creative logic, this is a typical form of “textual poaching,” essentially an “autopsy and reassembly” of past sounds. Producers dive into the cultural ruins of the 80s and 90s, excavating functional musical materials like Muzak, weather channel background music, or City Pop, and recreating them like stitching together a Frankenstein monster. Through extreme slowing, pitch-shifting, and reverb processing, they create an auditory effect akin to an old Walkman running out of battery or a cassette tape jamming, stripping the original tracks of their vitality and rendering them into a hazy state of “near-death” or “sleepwalking.”