An archive of consciousness.https://zhengyangyao.com/en-ushttps://zhengyangyao.com/blog/sandalwood-death/https://zhengyangyao.com/blog/sandalwood-death/Through the twin voices of the Gaomi railway and Maoqiang opera, Mo Yan retells a real historical uprising and its brutal punishment. A cruel age forces people into the roles of executioner, victim, and spectator, yet warmth endures within the contradictions of the human heart.Sun, 30 Aug 2026 21:41:02 GMThttps://zhengyangyao.com/blog/one-day-three-autumns/https://zhengyangyao.com/blog/one-day-three-autumns/Reading Liu Zhenyun's One Day, Three Autumns, I found life reflected in Hua Erniang's red persimmons and pepper soup: we may be victims, yet become those who cause harm; fate's jokes arrive without warning, but humor and optimism can help us catch them. Accepting fate is not surrender, and beyond Yanjin, anywhere can become home.Fri, 21 Aug 2026 19:17:37 GMThttps://zhengyangyao.com/blog/a-foolish-kind-of-persistence/https://zhengyangyao.com/blog/a-foolish-kind-of-persistence/A foolish kind of persistence runs in my family: we don't see how hard something is, we keep going without results, and we don't mind standing apart. Somehow, that very mix is what lets us get things done.Sun, 16 Aug 2026 17:29:57 GMThttps://zhengyangyao.com/blog/life-laughs-at-my-foolishness/https://zhengyangyao.com/blog/life-laughs-at-my-foolishness/Reading Liu Zhenyun's A Salty Joke means watching Du Taibai endure life's absurdity and injustice. The less reasonable life becomes, the more firmly we must hold on to kindness. When winter comes, perhaps we should play dead like wheat: react less, change our perspective, gather our strength, and begin again.Sat, 15 Aug 2026 07:34:39 GMThttps://zhengyangyao.com/blog/inferiority/https://zhengyangyao.com/blog/inferiority/From looking up to the brilliance of others, to briefly believing I was unique, to seeing my own smallness once more, a sense of inferiority has always accompanied growth. In the right measure, it can propel us forward; in excess, it can destroy us. We may spend our lives beneath the dazzling light of others, but our own faint light can still shine alongside theirs.Wed, 12 Aug 2026 09:23:18 GMThttps://zhengyangyao.com/blog/two-goals-of-life/https://zhengyangyao.com/blog/two-goals-of-life/Step into my philosophical universe and the first things you will encounter are two goals for a human life: a healthy body and a tranquil mind. The choices that look so different from one person to another are often simply different means of reaching one of these ends. Once we see that, it becomes easier to understand and respect how others live. What each of us must discover is which means can truly take us there—and which only lead us farther astray.Tue, 11 Aug 2026 08:29:48 GMThttps://zhengyangyao.com/blog/classical-music/https://zhengyangyao.com/blog/classical-music/After more than two hours of classical music failed to cultivate my soul as I had hoped, I began to wonder what music is actually for. Classical music is no nobler than pop, because emotions—and the ways we experience them—have no hierarchy. What matters is whether music gives voice to a listener's feelings and resonates with them. True refinement means refusing to turn our own tastes into a standard for everyone else.Mon, 10 Aug 2026 21:24:10 GMThttps://zhengyangyao.com/blog/how-to-read/https://zhengyangyao.com/blog/how-to-read/Reading should not end with knowing. Identify a book's themes before you begin, watch how they unfold, then bring them back into your own life through reflection and practice. Only internalized knowledge can cross the distance between knowing and doing. And when insight, genes, and effort lead us back to fate, perhaps what remains is to love our fate.Sun, 02 Aug 2026 19:14:20 GMThttps://zhengyangyao.com/blog/dangerous-chasm-between-ideals-and-reality/https://zhengyangyao.com/blog/dangerous-chasm-between-ideals-and-reality/Tolstoy saw deeply into life on the page, yet his own life never reached the same heights. Why is the distance between knowing and doing so immense? The inner life matters, but thought becomes an edifice in the air unless we enter the world of real people, real responsibilities, and imperfect reality.Sun, 02 Aug 2026 08:42:13 GMThttps://zhengyangyao.com/blog/fill-the-world-with-goodness/https://zhengyangyao.com/blog/fill-the-world-with-goodness/My first reading of Anna Karenina made me rethink what it means to respond to a book, and what judgment, forgiveness, love, happiness, and the meaning of life ask of us. Reading should not end with feeling; it should lead to self-examination. Happiness takes root in ordinary life, responsibility, and kindness—and perhaps the meaning of life lies in continuing to choose the good, so that this imperfect world becomes better because we were here.Fri, 31 Jul 2026 14:26:17 GMThttps://zhengyangyao.com/blog/search-for-meaning/https://zhengyangyao.com/blog/search-for-meaning/In thousands of years, no philosopher has found the world's truth — because objectively there is none, though subjectively there is. Thinking is not a hunt for truth; it is the search for an explanation of the world that makes you more at one with yourself, and helps you face death and the world's absurdity with composure. Good philosophies and religions are beyond counting — find the one that convinces you, then live by it.Wed, 22 Jul 2026 10:07:26 GMThttps://zhengyangyao.com/blog/someone-to-talk-to/https://zhengyangyao.com/blog/someone-to-talk-to/Finished Liu Zhenyun's Someone to Talk to. The world is full of people, yet someone you can truly talk to is a thousand-mile find. Life, in the end, is a road you walk alone — treasure every kindred spirit you meet along the way.Sun, 19 Jul 2026 11:25:43 GMThttps://zhengyangyao.com/blog/doing-the-right-thing/https://zhengyangyao.com/blog/doing-the-right-thing/Good deeds don't guarantee good outcomes, and praying at temples won't buy you luck — only doing the right thing brings the right results. May you and I live out our lives as ordinary people, none of it hinging on money.Fri, 17 Jul 2026 15:52:56 GMThttps://zhengyangyao.com/blog/amplifier-of-human-nature/https://zhengyangyao.com/blog/amplifier-of-human-nature/The stock market is an amplifier of human weakness — a mirror that reflects our ugliness. People mistake luck for skill, until the crash arrives and they discover their rationality was nothing but a pile of temporary profits.Fri, 17 Jul 2026 15:17:57 GMThttps://zhengyangyao.com/blog/cold-finally-gone/https://zhengyangyao.com/blog/cold-finally-gone/The cold is gone and training resumes. Never attach far-fetched expectations to people or things outside yourself — none of them are within your control. The only things you can control are your attitude toward life and the way you treat people, so place most of your expectations on yourself.Thu, 16 Jul 2026 09:08:22 GMThttps://zhengyangyao.com/blog/everyone-is-a-bias/https://zhengyangyao.com/blog/everyone-is-a-bias/A person is a bias — each of us lives inside nothing but our own, and whether we agree or not is merely a matter of biases matching or missing. Turn to the internet for an answer and what you find is never the most objective truth, but the bias you wanted to see, proof that someone out there still stands with you. If the mind stays closed and the heart narrow, no amount of reading will help; it only deepens the affliction. Real lucidity is letting two or more opposing views live in the mind at once — a room with many windows is always better ventilated than one with a single window, or none. Contradiction living side by side is the world's ordinary state: one yin and one yang, that is the Dao. There is no truth in the world and no fixed meaning to life; all we can do is create the meaning that is ours alone.Thu, 02 Jul 2026 13:13:02 GMThttps://zhengyangyao.com/blog/walden/https://zhengyangyao.com/blog/walden/I'd always taken Walden for a soothing little novel; only on opening it did I learn it was Thoreau's true record of two half-solitary years by a pond — with his sharpest criticism stacked at the very front. Mid-nineteenth-century America was racing through an age of technological frenzy: people laid down railroad tracks yet forgot where they belonged, invented the telegraph only to hear that some figure across the ocean had fallen ill. The cure for all that restlessness is to subtract from life, to become once more a child of nature rather than a prisoner of concrete. If the spirit doesn't rise, no progress will save us. The simpler you live, the happier your life.Tue, 30 Jun 2026 20:46:15 GMThttps://zhengyangyao.com/blog/point-of-criticism/https://zhengyangyao.com/blog/point-of-criticism/When you point one finger at someone, four more are pointing back at you. Criticism is easy — we sit in judgment of other people's imperfect, half-rational lives with our coldest, clearest minds, and that in itself is unfair. The values we broadcast to the world are usually the ones we most lack; solitude frightens us because it's where our truest self is standing. The finest minds have never stopped criticizing, yet society grows more restless all the same. So what is criticism actually for — is it only to prove that we're among the few who stayed clear-headed?Mon, 29 Jun 2026 12:21:35 GMThttps://zhengyangyao.com/blog/words-dont-teach/https://zhengyangyao.com/blog/words-dont-teach/On its surface, To Live is just the story of a man who buries his whole family and ends his days with nothing but an old ox for company. But the unready reader takes away only that people died, and misses what those deaths point to — the caprice of fate, the absurdity of the world. You can read a thousand hours, a hundred tragedies, yet if each is just a movie you watched and a plot you can recount, you're merely someone who knows, not someone who has made the knowledge their own and lives by it. What truly changes a person is rarely an argument; it's an experience. What makes an obese man finally resolve to lose weight isn't ten thousand lectures on its benefits — it's one trip to the emergency room.Sat, 27 Jun 2026 08:18:37 GMThttps://zhengyangyao.com/blog/person-or-fame/https://zhengyangyao.com/blog/person-or-fame/If you didn't know someone was famous, meeting them would stir nothing in you. But the moment you learn they're a star, you want the autograph, the photo, a glance back your way — so is it the person you love, or the fame they carry, and the bare fact that everyone else loves them too? Fame is wind: it blows through and is gone, and it can turn on you. A celebrity is just a commodity, dressed up by capital and a manufactured persona. What's worth pursuing is the eternal — the things that cleanse the soul.Fri, 26 Jun 2026 21:03:29 GMThttps://zhengyangyao.com/blog/work-of-fate/https://zhengyangyao.com/blog/work-of-fate/Insight, drive — even these may be written into our genes. When we chalk up whatever we can't explain to luck, are we just being lazy, just dodging responsibility? If a supercomputer could simulate every atom in the universe, could fate itself be explained — even reverse-engineered and rewritten? Or is life simply a script we never chose: a comfort, or the quiet death of free will?Wed, 24 Jun 2026 10:00:42 GMThttps://zhengyangyao.com/blog/between-ideal-and-real/https://zhengyangyao.com/blog/between-ideal-and-real/A person can't live wholly in the ideal, nor wholly in the real. Rewatching idol dramas rekindled my longing for a pure kind of love — but any value taken to the extreme is a mistake. This world was built imperfect, yet that never stops us from picturing a perfect one in our minds and nudging reality ever closer to it. The more disappointment you've seen, the more you should keep the ideal alive — because without evil, there is no good.Tue, 23 Jun 2026 18:40:59 GMThttps://zhengyangyao.com/blog/human-nature-and-chains/https://zhengyangyao.com/blog/human-nature-and-chains/Dostoevsky pours hundreds of thousands of words into the barely-a-week of Raskolnikov's crime and punishment. He can't cross the abyss between the “ordinary” and the “extraordinary” — because, in the end, he is a man with a conscience: he blames himself, he repents. Society needs the law, those chains that still carry warmth, to hold one another in check — but what truly saves someone stranded at the cliff's edge is repentance, and love. Live boldly, repent boldly, love boldly.Tue, 23 Jun 2026 17:13:04 GMThttps://zhengyangyao.com/blog/no-one-wants-the-truth/https://zhengyangyao.com/blog/no-one-wants-the-truth/If everyone saw the world clearly, the economy would grind to a halt — so most people would rather float in an ocean of anesthesia, looking as if they're still trying. And those well-worn words of comfort spread so far for one reason: the truth is too sharp, and no one wants to hear it.Fri, 19 Jun 2026 11:40:21 GMThttps://zhengyangyao.com/blog/speculation-is-gambling/https://zhengyangyao.com/blog/speculation-is-gambling/Win once and you can't stop; the bets only grow, and the end is always ruin — that's human nature, and it has nothing to do with how smart you are. Newton could chart the orbits of the heavens, but never the greed of the human heart.Tue, 16 Jun 2026 09:30:45 GMThttps://zhengyangyao.com/blog/everyone-family/https://zhengyangyao.com/blog/everyone-family/Everyone in the world is our family — it's only our limited energy that makes us reserve the word for those closest by blood. The more love you have to give, the more people you can reach in a lifetime. So first learn to love yourself, fill yourself with love, then love others as far as you're able; beyond that, do no harm, and love where you can.Sun, 07 Jun 2026 22:35:34 GMThttps://zhengyangyao.com/blog/love-humanity/https://zhengyangyao.com/blog/love-humanity/To love humanity means loving all of it — even those who hurt me, betrayed me, deceived me. Not for anything they brought into my life, but for who they are, just as they are. Love without conditions is the greatest force in the universe.Fri, 05 Jun 2026 13:35:31 GMThttps://zhengyangyao.com/blog/chosen-script/https://zhengyangyao.com/blog/chosen-script/The soul doesn't die; the scripts change. We picked this one ourselves before we came down — so however bad it gets, we keep performing. There's no good or bad, only the attitude you bring to a life.Tue, 02 Jun 2026 13:02:10 GMThttps://zhengyangyao.com/blog/avoiding-pain/https://zhengyangyao.com/blog/avoiding-pain/Pain is real and can ruin a person; pleasure is illusion that fades the moment it arrives. Happiness isn't found by chasing — it's found by avoiding what destroys.Tue, 02 Jun 2026 01:59:08 GMThttps://zhengyangyao.com/blog/life-chaos-equality/https://zhengyangyao.com/blog/life-chaos-equality/When life grows too calm, I find myself craving cracks. The world is fair after all — happiness has a ceiling, and it sits within reach.Wed, 27 May 2026 11:59:57 GMThttps://zhengyangyao.com/blog/beyond-reading/https://zhengyangyao.com/blog/beyond-reading/In Buffett and Munger's era, books were nearly the only path to knowledge. Today, instead of calling it reading, we should generalize it to learning.Sun, 10 May 2026 23:03:57 GMThttps://zhengyangyao.com/blog/the-great-game/https://zhengyangyao.com/blog/the-great-game/Finally finished my first nonfiction book in 2026. History never changes — because human nature never loses its flaws.Sat, 04 Apr 2026 07:38:25 GMThttps://zhengyangyao.com/blog/drawing-the-line/https://zhengyangyao.com/blog/drawing-the-line/Severing ties with your former self is the only path to perpetual growth. Reshape your identity, and the past loses its grip on you.Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:23:02 GMThttps://zhengyangyao.com/blog/letting-go/https://zhengyangyao.com/blog/letting-go/The harder you chase something, the further it slips away. True possession is non-possession. Let go of attachment, and what you seek will find its way to you.Sat, 14 Feb 2026 12:46:41 GMThttps://zhengyangyao.com/blog/cherish-the-present/https://zhengyangyao.com/blog/cherish-the-present/Distance creates beauty; not possessing is the truest form of having. Cherish the present and live each day well.Wed, 11 Feb 2026 04:42:38 GMThttps://zhengyangyao.com/blog/twenty-one/https://zhengyangyao.com/blog/twenty-one/The only way to face life's uncertainty is to cultivate your inner world.Tue, 09 Sep 2025 01:51:09 GMThttps://zhengyangyao.com/blog/independence/https://zhengyangyao.com/blog/independence/Independence is a personality forged by necessity. Only when you no longer need to ask the world for anything can you truly give love to it.Wed, 23 Apr 2025 08:33:05 GMThttps://zhengyangyao.com/blog/sensitivity/https://zhengyangyao.com/blog/sensitivity/Sensitivity is like a multiplier that amplifies both happiness and pain in equal measure. Its best antidote may simply be becoming a person who is at peace — easygoing, yet never careless.Sun, 20 Oct 2024 08:38:50 GMThttps://zhengyangyao.com/blog/idealism/https://zhengyangyao.com/blog/idealism/Let go of perfectionism, embrace idealism. The harder life gets, the more we should tend the garden of idealism in our hearts.Sat, 19 Oct 2024 08:48:51 GMT