Personal Reflections on Traveling and Perception Changes

I downloaded the Little Red Book because I heard there were a lot of (gogui) on it, but after searching for a while, I grew tired of the places I wanted to visit. Everyone talks about basically the same thingspraise, criticism, warnings, even the angles for taking pictures. My phone feels like a prison that neatly organizes these things into place, and maybe this organization is actually what the local tourism department wants people to see. That made me lose interest entirely. I used to really look forward to traveling domestically since I hadn’t gone there in four years, but now some places I want to visit seem like the travel resources haven’t been developed sufficiently, resulting in a poorer travel experience.

Thinking back to when I went to Qiongdao in college and was overcharged by the tourism operators, my heart felt uneasy. Maybe it’s just a medium issuehow people perceive the world has changed compared to how they used to see it through different media, leading to cultural water syndrome when encountering new information. In that case, I shouldn’t interact with it at all. I should let the world as it was before remain in my memorya recurring dictum from myself about social trends and their relationship to me. There’s no connectionjust a complex sense of mixed feelings after searching through those memories again many years removed.

In this search process, some part of my memory related to China has returned to haunt me, making the sadness I felt upon waking up disappear completely. Now I experience a complicated real sensea mix of remembering how I used to live in China and anticipate living there in the distant future makes me feel uneasy. A jumble of noise and chaos, with conflicting emotions but also warmth, comes over me. I don’t like places where familiar things are around me. It’s not that I dislike themI’m just reacting to the endless time I’ve spent on familiar ground. In recent years in America, I haven’t left a mark at allwhy is this?

These days, it feels like I’m being teleported to an unfamiliar space and thinking about ordinary things in an unusual way before being sent back to Earth. Everything I thought of has lost its meaning. Life takes me away from familiar places and brings me back again without giving me much to hold onto. I often feel like a prisoner whose time is constantly interrupted. I used to think my mind was relatively stable, but these disruptions still trouble me.

I always felt like I had thought through everything I wanted to think about before, but every time life throws a curveball or something unexpected happens, I stop and ponder for hours, wasting valuable time in the process. I find this unacceptable because I can’t come up with anything worth considering, and I don’t feel bad about it eitherbecause my subconscious tells me that thinking and feeling are important enough to spare me the trouble of dwelling on them. So I end up staying within my comfort zone. I’m anxious whenever I realize there’s so much meaningful stuff I haven’t had a chance to do yet.

The whole day was meant for reading books or writing, but instead, I spent it pondering mindlessly. There’s an endless amount of useless information out there, and in today’s society, many aspects are using this useless information to deprive people of their survival rights.

Lying on my bed still makes me think about these self-defeating actions. But then a moment comes when I remember Jng (Jing is a Chinese cartoon) and Yjn (Yjn, also known as Longmyou), bringing me back to my senses. On one hand, I feel my heart still beats and there’s this vague emotion keeping me going. On the other hand, I realize how self-deprecating I sound these daysbut I do think this shallow layer of support isn’t enough for me. This virtual figure makes it seem like what I’m doing might be worthwhile even if she doesn’t exist, which gives me some solace to know that someone else might see my efforts in a way similar to her own actionsmaking me feel less lonely. I don’t fear loneliness, but on this particular thing, I lack the ability to change it.

In Chinese, the character for “I” is " " (w), and the character for “myself” is " " (j). The difference between them is profound.