You’re not growing.
You’re being calibrated. Trimmed to standard dimensions, pressed into standard slots, stamped with standard labels.
Then one day, a machine does in 0.3 seconds what you spent twenty years practicing.
That’s not your failure. That’s the ruler’s failure.
The Ritual of Desperation
At Peking University, students kneel before the bronze statue of a legendary chancellor. Before exams, offerings of fruit pile up at its base.
This isn’t devotion. It’s pain.
When everything you pour into a system returns zero meaning, your body activates a defense mechanism. Psychologists call it “motivational paralysis.” Your brain simply refuses to engage.
You think you’re being lazy.
No. Your soul is refusing to be measured by a ruler that was never made for you.
Aimless effort isn’t discipline. It’s slow self-destruction. And that paralysis? It’s your last line of defense.
Meaning Is a Byproduct of Action
Stop waiting to “figure it out” before you move.
That’s the most common lie we tell ourselves. Meaning isn’t born from reflection. It’s a byproduct of doing.
The mechanism is simple:
You have “initial stats” — innate inclinations you were born with. When you use them, you get positive feedback. Feedback stacks into motivation. Motivation drives deeper action.
Once the loop starts, meaning generates itself.
If you feel unmotivated right now, the problem isn’t that you haven’t thought hard enough. The problem is you’ve had too few chances to use the abilities you were actually built for.
Stop constructing goals in your head. Go do one small thing you’re good at.
Nine Subjects, One Trick
Nine subjects. Six years of grinding. It looks like you studied everything.
Peel back the wrapper and there’s only one thing underneath: memorization.
English — 90% memory. Literature — 90% memory. History and social studies — 90% memory. Math and science split it roughly fifty-fifty between memory and reasoning.
You thought you were training nine abilities. You were polishing the same muscle over and over.
Here’s the brutal analogy: this isn’t education. It’s hard drive training. A 20-gram flash drive could do the job you trained an entire brain for. The warehouse model of education was never about developing you — it was about sorting you.
The Eight Dimensions of You
Throw out the textbook. Look at yourself differently.
Human ability isn’t limited to “memory” and “reasoning.” There are at least eight dimensions:
Foundation: Memory, reasoning, quantitative skills — machines already beat you here.
Intermediate: Expression, perception, physical execution — machines are catching up.
Apex: Obsession and creation — machines can’t touch this.
The line between exceptional and mediocre isn’t drawn at the foundation.
It’s drawn at the apex.
That thing only you care about — unquantifiable, unreplicable, unreasonable — that’s the hardest currency in the age of AI. Exams never test it. Precisely because it can’t be standardized.
”Well-Rounded” Is Code for Mediocre
“Shore up your weaknesses” sounds inspiring.
It’s the biggest cognitive trap there is.
You spent a decade patching math, English, physics. You thought you were building balance. You were actually using different textbooks to train the same memorization muscle. The weakness didn’t improve. The strength went dull.
Chasing the illusion of being well-rounded, you carried weight that was never yours to bear.
Life eventually demands one skill above all others: accepting negative feedback.
That subject you can’t master? Maybe it’s not about effort. Maybe your talent is telling you — this isn’t your battlefield.
Put it down. Accept what you’re bad at. That’s not surrender. That’s making room for what you’re actually built to do.
Don’t Compete with a Hard Drive
A 20-gram drive stores more information than you could memorize in a lifetime.
AI writes poems with perfect meter. It mimics any style, replicates any format. In symbol processing, you will never beat a machine.
But a machine can’t write the chill that ran down your spine at 2 AM when you read that one line of poetry.
That real, embodied perception — fear, ecstasy, epiphany, heartbreak — arising in a specific moment of your specific life. That’s humanity’s last territory.
AI processes symbols. You experience meaning.
Don’t compete on storage. Compete on the thing machines will never do: feel something real in the real world. That lived experience — oracy, deep attention, meaning-making — is your human premium in the age of synthesis.
The Pillar and the Crooked Tree
Society wants to shape you into a “pillar.”
What’s a pillar? Standardized building material. Uniform dimensions. Quality-controlled. Easily replaced.
When everyone’s a pillar, pillars become worthless. Oversupply. Price collapse. That’s basic economics — and it’s the reality you’re living.
Zhuangzi wrote about a tree called the “useless tree.” It was twisted, gnarled, impossible for any carpenter to use.
So it lived a very long time.
In the age of AI, standard parts get replaced. Non-standard parts get needed.
Your weirdness. Your obsessions. Your “useless” hobbies. They’re not defects. They’re moats.
History’s Greatest Dropouts
Li Shizhen. Age 23. Failed the imperial exam three times.
Song Yingxing. Age 45. His exam career collapsed completely.
By their era’s standards, they were losers.
But being filtered out by the mainstream system is exactly what protected their raw perception. Li Shizhen walked the mountains and catalogued every plant himself — and produced the Compendium of Materia Medica. Song Yingxing documented craftsmen’s wisdom firsthand — and left behind The Exploitation of the Works of Nature.
History’s greatest achievements were almost all born outside the evaluation system.
Getting eliminated isn’t the scary part. The scary part is never getting eliminated — and spending your whole life becoming a standard answer.
The Hardest Work Is Looking Inward
“Choosing wisely matters more than working hard” — that phrase is a trap.
It implies choice is easy. Pick the right path and coast.
The truth: making a real choice is harder than any amount of effort.
Because it demands you look inward. Not at which major is hot. Not at starting salary rankings. Not at other people’s paths. At yourself.
What weapons did you ship with? Which dimensions hold your initial stats? What makes you lose track of time? (If you don’t know where to start, the four-billion-year survival algorithm can sharpen your self-awareness.)
This kind of exploration has no answer key, no study guide, no prep course. It requires you to face yourself alone — the thing most people spend their entire lives avoiding.
Normal Is the Trap
An entrepreneur once said:
“In this era, how many people who choose to start a business are normal?”
The “normal” lane is too crowded. Everyone sprinting down the same road, toward a finish line where a machine stands waiting — ten thousand times faster than you.
Allow yourself to be bad at some subjects. That’s not failure. That’s your self-preservation activating.
Protect the obsessions that the exam system labeled “useless.”
They will become your sharpest weapons at a moment you cannot yet foresee.
You Are the Scenery
Walk out of the maze of single-metric evaluation.
The world outside is vast. So vast you’ll forget the scores that once caused you pain.
In the age of AI, you don’t need to be the fastest calculator, the most accurate database, or the most standard component.
You just need to be you.
Guard your initial stats. Guard your non-standard abilities.
That’s your only talisman in the age of algorithms.
