Fast Pace, Slow Life

There is only one month left before Lunar New Year. Time flies, and I have successfully renewed myself for another year. Maybe I can keep renewing for another 51 years until 2077.

It is year-end. In work, everyone’s rhythm has started to slow down just a little. This is the point for looking back at last year and looking ahead to the new one. AllHands, KickOffs, team buildings, and all kinds of meetings and activities arrive one after another, basically throwing the last shovelful of dirt onto the grave of 2025 before we start digging into 2026.

On the day of Major Cold, I saw the heaviest snow Shanghai has had in more than ten years. As a kid who grew up by the southern coast, I only really saw snow while traveling in recent years. This was the first time I saw snow inside everyday life. Walking slowly on the road, feeling the quiet of snowflakes falling, Inner Peace became concrete. Maybe it is like how people who have watched the sea for years can grow tired of it. Sea and snow, these region-bound natural phenomena, never only bring us the question of whether we have seen them before. They interrupt the life we take for granted, using something natural to produce another kind of natural feeling. Maybe in the next 51 version upgrades, I can still see snow and sea countless times. The reality may be only a handful of times, so treasure it while walking.

These days also brought the first team building. A large-scale meetup of internet friends. The human brain simulates and forms a world it believes in. To say it in a fancier way, a world model. Meeting offline creates an interesting phenomenon: many people you thought were like that turn out to be like this. Your view of a person came from simulation and inference between lines of text. But when a person stands in front of you and shows richer information through visual effect, the person you originally knew may no longer be that person. This also changes how you collaborate and connect with that person in the future. That is the meaning of team building, and also one place where WFH or remote work still has a hard time matching offline collaboration at this stage.

Only when writing this did I realize that we did not take a single group photo. Miscalculation. The adult world lacks too much ritual and too many memories. The older we get, the more we pay attention to our own little patch of land, our lover, our family. Fewer people have the chance to become friends. We become calmer about many external things, more composed.

Recently I have also been thinking about 2026. Standing at a point of epochal change, this wave has already been rolling for three years. This year, what should individuals, teams, and companies bet on? If luck is good, maybe we can think through and see part of it clearly. Why does everyone like the word Bet? Because this really is placing bets. Especially when speed is extremely high, every tiny turn of the steering wheel can bring huge change. In this infinite game, the only way to keep yourself and your team at the table is to look as far ahead as possible, prepare early, and adjust the steering wheel in time.

Recently I also have some deeper thoughts about games. In the context of big companies, there are external games and internal games. The internet industry in the previous stage had been quiet for years, with not many external games left. But at this stage, a new external game has appeared. On the other side, internal games exist forever. A company’s rise and fall can never shake them off, only the degree changes. From a morally noble angle, what everyone openly pursues is the external game. It sounds nice. But reality is often not that ideal or binary.

Especially on the platform of a big company, the scale and number of people and teams have already reached the level of a small society. The web of relationships inside it may not even be clear to people at the top of the pyramid. In this context, you need to balance external games and internal games. The internal game I mean here is not internal rat-racing or attacking each other. That is too shallow an understanding. The internal game can be understood like this: you do not necessarily need to kick someone out. You only need to run a tiny bit faster than others, and you win. This applies to individuals and teams alike. It is an abstract expression. In real life, everyone will have their own reading, and that too reflects personal and team capability.

The view extended from here is that your +1 should not be the enemy. Think about these things from a bigger picture: your +1 also has a +1. Individuals work hard to show themselves, only to beat peers and get better performance. There is nothing wrong with that, but it is not a good way to play. A better way is to help your +1 succeed. If you observe carefully, internal games appear in many places. Help the team achieve bigger wins and get a bigger cake, instead of cutting away someone else’s slice from the existing cake. Make no sense. The highest realm of a manager is to achieve others and achieve yourself. Non-managers can also have this realm: achieve your leader and achieve yourself. Or take one step further and generalize it into achieving the team, the company, society, and all humankind. Of course, this previous argument depends on the individual, team, and company all moving in the same direction, on the same frequency, on the Same Page. If staying somewhere already feels uncomfortable, there is no need to expand all this.

Humans are complex animals. This world is never binary. We can have a mainstream narrative, and we can have subcultural circles. We can have a broadly accepted tone, and we can also have sharper, deeper ideas. Treating yourself as someone out here making your way in the world from beginning to end is a mindset responsible to both yourself and others. We are not here just to coast through a job or a title. We hope that under different platforms, different resources, and different team setups, we can produce the best results possible under those conditions, and also use a bigger platform to achieve ourselves. The stars and the sea should not be extinguished inside every daily routine.

For 2026, both personally and professionally, I have started to see some outlines. Beyond that, life can slow down. Try making some things that seem “useless.”

In the past half year or so, we did charity work 17 times.

Starting from small things like donating books, to spending one hour each time talking with young students about their future lives and career planning, giving them advice while also receiving a lot of young energy in return. Interesting conversations and collisions of thought. My girlfriend made several cat beds for stray cats, knitted scarves for primary school students in remote areas, prepared New Year gifts for children in difficult situations, and helped women in new forms of employment take their first proper portrait photos. We had not really done charity work before, but spending a little spare time helping the world become a bit better is a great experience.

Recently on weekends, I go explore a cafe every day, order a cup of coffee, work on projects I find interesting, write something, empty myself out a little, read and think. All of these are excellent experiences.

Every branch of Yi Chi Garden has its own character. The one I visited today felt like walking into my own living room. From a quiet morning, to people gradually streaming in, to night falling and seats slowly emptying, a cafe is a smaller-scale witness to the movement and change of humans inside modern boxes.

Recently I have really liked Fu Hao’s songs. Add this afternoon’s noisy cafe on top, and at night I directly flashed to Huaihai Middle Road and countered with a 1000XM6.

Music really is indispensable in life. A day without music has no soul. I remembered the annual NetEase Cloud report from before: in 12 years, 4,234 days, I listened to 70,403 minutes of music.

I still remember when I first came to Shanghai, I bought a STANMORE III because I simply could not stand a room without music, nor the terrible speakers on computers and phones.

No matter what, I still firmly believe in the way of fast pace, slow life. I honestly accept my own Workaholic side, and I also try to slow myself down. Between fast and slow, with tension and looseness in balance, it slowly internalizes into a way of living. Same old line: what happens is entirely up to yourself.