Today is my twenty-first birthday, so let me start by wishing myself a happy birthday. Time moves fast. I still remember last September 9th — waking up that morning still weighed down by the same sense of defeat, the residue of a setback in my work that I couldn’t seem to shake.
That day I woke as I always did, hoping something unexpected might pull me out of the fog. What happened next felt almost fated: I went out with my parents, wandered into a newly opened mall, sat down in a coffee shop, and opened a video site.
I played a video of Steve Jobs’ final reflections. The gist was this: Jobs stood at the pinnacle of the business world. He redefined the smartphone — by any measure, the highest honor imaginable. Yet in the face of death, that honor means nothing. In the face of death, all the fame and fortune the world admires become utterly meaningless. What Jobs was telling me was that we should pursue not just money, but the things that have nothing to do with wealth.
Those things are obvious, of course: a healthy body, a happy family, and a life lived with purpose.
Then I watched a lecture by Professor Luo Xiang. He said something I will never forget: True success is not how magnificent you appear in your finest hour. What truly matters is whether, in your moments of failure — in your lowest depths — you still have the courage to keep going.
Once again, Luo Xiang did not let me down. Once again, when I fell, he was the hand reaching toward me. That hand didn’t just pull me out of the valley — it guided me through the fog, pushed me forward, and led me toward a road with sunlight.
A year has passed since then. Over the past year I read more books, and gradually, I began to shape the crude inner world I’d been carrying — giving it form, giving it structure.
When I need refuge, I step inside it. It is shelter, but never escape. The problems of the real world demand that we face them with clarity and optimism. If we can’t even get our minds right, how can we expect to solve anything? I open a book and walk into a fiction alongside its characters. There, I witness the full spectrum of human experience — its warmth and its cruelty. I see what shines in people and what festers. By the end of a single book, I feel as though I’ve lived many lives, and I come away understanding something new about my own.
I’ve come to believe that the only way to face life’s uncertainty is by cultivating an inner world. And the only way to make that world grow is through reading. I read, I reflect, I share. I never realized my sharing could help anyone — I was only ever patching up the walls of my shabby inner world while offering whatever little I’d learned along the way.
Thank you, stranger. It turns out the light I carry can reach the people around me, too.
…
I wake up. My mind seems to hold nothing of the worldly kind. I don’t know what money is, or fame, and I follow no predetermined rules. I wake in a small house in the middle of an oasis. The house is small — modest, but not bare. Simple, but not grand. Everything I need, it provides. Sunlight drifts in through the window like a fine rain, but where it lands on my skin there is no chill — only warmth. I look outside and see a rainbow. I push open the door and step out, and it feels as though I’ve entered another world. My friends are walking toward me, one after another — a great many of them. I see them, and I recognize them: Fugui from To Live, Ye Wenjie from The Three-Body Problem, Ximen Nao from Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out…
Zhengyang Yao
September 9, 2025