Reorganizing Myself, Setting Out on a New Journey

Four to five o'clock in the afternoon on October 3, 2019 is a memorable time for me. I spent about an hour clearing out my WeChat Moments completely and then closed them. Originally I only intended to close Moments, but before closing I thought it over: better not leave myself a way back, so I simply cleared out all the information I had posted on Moments over the years, never looking back.

Once Moments was closed, I had basically said goodbye to social media. I stopped using QQ long ago; Weibo has been closed for nearly a year, Toutiao for nearly a year, Douban for three or four years, and Sina Blog for a few months. I never used Zhihu, and now Moments is closed too. All that remains running is a WeChat official account, whose comments function I have also basically closed.

I spent a little under ten years writing nearly a thousand original articles. The total word count is about two to three million. If these articles were collected and published, they would amount to ten or twenty books.

Over ten years, while engaging in clinical practice, continuing to study medicine, and writing tirelessly, these are all the fruits of my labor. Cherishing even one's own broom, as I cleared away these article links from my Moments, my heart felt a certain amount of regret and melancholy.

But I still gritted my teeth and made a clean break with all of this. This move may lead to a decline in my income, but for me, income is no longer that important. I need to change myself once more and embark on a new journey of life. If in the past I had to work for a living, from now on I hope to live for an ideal. I want to settle down and engage more down-to-earth in medical research and teaching!

Socializing has never been the theme of my life, and online socializing even less so. Now forty, looking back, the only thing I regret is that I did not, in my twenties, make as clean a decision as I have today to retake the college entrance examination and devote myself wholeheartedly to medical research and education. I do not want to regret again in the future, so today I made a warrior's clean break.

Of course, this break was actually gradual. A year ago, an elder of mine, valuing my talent, urged me to plan out the academic career of my latter half of life well and retake the college entrance examination. I had been somewhat hesitant, because my child was too young and I still had unfinished tasks.

But since then I have also cherished my time more, step by step moving away from this noisy online world and away from the ubiquitous noise of the era we live in.

Over these years, as I have influenced the outside world, I have also been influenced by it. The peace of my inner heart has inevitably been destroyed to a certain degree, and now I want to reduce this destruction to a minimum. I want to spend more time on reading and research. I voluntarily accept the reality that the vast majority of my life will be spent at a desk, freeing myself from outside attraction and distraction and concentrating my attention on scholarship.

At forty, I should be mature; I should know what is most important to me, and I should also remove those unimportant things from my life.

I have always considered myself a lucky child of fate; I have obtained things that many people do not. And the reason I have these gains has a great deal to do with my own diligence. I do not want to lose this fine quality that my parents trained in me from childhood.

I will not hypocritically modestly claim that I am not diligent. Of all the people I have met in my life, there are many smarter than I, but those as diligent as I are as rare as phoenix feathers and unicorn horns. I am a clumsy person, but heaven rewards the diligent; I use diligence to make up for my clumsiness, and heaven has bestowed much upon me for my diligence.

I have already solved the vast majority of problems in my own life; the remaining problems are not hard to solve, and I have also earned the respect of many people. So I hope to direct my surplus energy toward things that are more meaningful to others and to society.

The economist Alfred Marshall once said that, usually, people are first self-interested, and when they have surplus energy they turn to the path of altruism. Mencius put it more directly: "When in straitened circumstances, one cultivates one's own virtue alone; when successful, one extends it to the whole world."

I stand between the straitened and the successful: I no longer lack food and clothing, but I have not yet risen to great eminence. So I will take a middle way between "cultivating myself alone" and "extending aid to the world," using as much of my energy and accumulated knowledge as I can in medical research that may perhaps benefit the people.