Twenty Years Online, and Now I Grow Weary
I first came into contact with the internet in 1998, after I entered university, and in a flash it has been a full twenty years. Because I love writing, what I have left online over these twenty years is chiefly the various words I have written. A rough tally of my writing in various fields comes to at least several million characters. Through these words, many people came to know me, and I also made many online friends.
The main content of my writing went through several shifts: from my early days as a hot-blooded youth concerned with politics and current abuses, to a later love of various humanistic ideas, and gradually to my present focus on TCM anticancer research. If one were to sketch this change roughly, one can see that the overall trend of my growth has been increasingly from outward to inward.
When I was young, I thought I could accomplish great things and do something to change the world, so I focused on the outside. Later I found that what most needed changing was myself, so I turned inward and loved humanistic thought. Past middle age, I found the rest of my life was running short, and suddenly felt that changing the outside and changing myself were both less important; time was what mattered most, so I preferred to do practical research.
My writing style also gradually evolved from my early pursuit of florid language to my present liking for plainness. In the past, the more people read my articles, the greater my sense of achievement. Now, I actually hope fewer people read them, because the wider an article spreads, the more readers it has, and the more readers there are, the more people want to befriend me. And I now want nothing but fewer branches in my life, saving my limited time and energy to grow deeply in one professional direction.
I am now quite weary of the internet, yet my work cannot do without it. So I can neither erase the traces I have left online nor allow the internet to affect my life and work too much.
More than ten years ago, I was the group owner of a large anticancer QQ group. At that time, because my own mother had cancer and was under treatment, I exchanged views online with many cancer patients and their families. Because I knew a bit more medical knowledge than the average patient's family, many people consulted me.
Among them was a patient's relative who worked as a journalist, who asked me to open up a space online to write out some of my medical insights and views for group members to read; many in the group echoed the proposal. From then on, I embarked on this medical-popularization path that, until now, has never been quite respectable.
In the years after, though I gradually disbanded the various QQ groups I had formed and closed my blog several times, I nevertheless, on and off, kept going with this work that had sprung up from interest.
Later still, the influence of my writing grew wider. Many self-media accounts plagiarized my articles. My long-term patients and readers, seeing some self-media accounts on other platforms—some even well-known in the circle—constantly stealing my articles, felt indignant.
They told me of this and urged me to open my own accounts on the corresponding platforms and publish my own articles, as a way to prevent plagiarism. So I opened more and more accounts on self-media platforms, and my influence grew larger and larger.
Now I am quite tired of this ever-growing influence, because it has brought me many readers. Initially, one could say all my readers were fellow patients I knew or patients I treated. But now, among the readers on the various self-media platforms, a considerable proportion are total strangers to me.
Readers come from all over, and the reasons they seek me are just as varied. As a result, I have inevitably been influenced by readers, and my life's path has sprouted many branches, wasting a great deal of time and energy.
So now I no longer care whether my articles are plagiarized. If people really want to copy them, there is no way to guard against it. Caring too much about copyright is also a tiring thing. So I can no longer be bothered to worry about whether the various article-copying gentlemen plagiarize me.
In The Smiling, Proud Wanderer, when Yue Buqun is accused by his wife of scheming against Linghu Chong, he says a classic line: "The storms of the jianghu can beat on others, but not on Linghu Chong?" This literary world has always been about copying from one another. If the article-copying gentlemen can copy others' articles, why can they not copy mine?
So this article of mine is the last one I will publish on the many self-media platforms. From now on, I will maintain only moderate contact with the outside world.
I may still publish some of my articles on my personal website, which my long-term follow-up patients browse, and on my WeChat official account, which has few followers, to meet the needs of the patients I treat—over half of my patients need to read my articles, and these articles do indeed help their physical and mental recovery to some degree.
But the accounts on the remaining self-media platforms will no longer be updated. The apps that should be uninstalled will be uninstalled, and among my social apps, the strangers who should be deleted will be sorted out and deleted bit by bit.
Having studied medicine and begun treating patients, it is already impossible for life to return to complete quiet. But by cutting off the branches and keeping only the trunk, I can still simplify life and save a good deal of time. For a middle-aged person, time is truly too precious.
For a medical person, the only thing that matters is striving to improve treatment outcomes. Outcome is the root; the deeper the root, the lusher the branches and leaves. Closing down my online spaces saves me the energy of maintaining various self-media accounts, letting me sink more deeply into my research and read and treat patients with fewer distractions.
Many of the articles I wrote in the past now make me laugh when I reread them. Questions I once thought important now seem trivial. The time I once spent pondering society and listening to the voice of my inner world now seems to me a great fuss over nothing. Perhaps this is simply the process of a person's growth!
On the sixth day of the Lunar New Year in 2018, my first day back at work, I treated an auntie with pleural mesothelioma. When she arrived, because the tumor was large and there was much pleural effusion, she came in a wheelchair. After a month of my treatment, she could already walk briskly; half a year later, the lesion had shrunk by eighty to ninety percent, the pleural effusion had completely disappeared, and the tumor markers were normal.
Because her outcome was so remarkable, her relatives and friends all came to me for tumor treatment. A lung-cancer patient she referred to also had the tumor shrink by about half not long ago.
Another patient with a chordoma, whose tumor was pressing on the brainstem so that he could no longer walk, also came to me through her referral. I treated him for several months without obvious effect. I asked the family to give up on me and switch doctors, but they refused and insisted I think of another way. So I reluctantly prepared a new kind of medicine for this patient; after a month, the patient could walk half a kilometer without the wheelchair.
The reason these few patients had some effect is that, a small part may be because my medical skill has indeed improved a little over the past, but the larger reason may be the very solid trust between us. If patients had come to me with suspicion, they would have left on their own when treatment failed, without my having to urge them to change doctors.
This year I closed many of my self-media accounts, keeping only a limited platform for my patients to read my articles and no longer paying attention to the outside world, because through a great deal of this kind of practice I came to understand: studying hard and treating patients matters more than publishing articles online.
So, dear readers, you may no longer read, through many channels, the articles I publish myself. I am growing older by the day, and increasingly dislike bustle; it is time for me to withdraw from the various platforms.
We met by chance and must part eventually; consider this my farewell to you all. In the new year, I hope you take care. I am an introverted person who needs more time to read; too much socializing brings me too much pressure, so please understand.
Over half of my official-account followers are my patients or long-term readers, basically all related to cancer. Henceforth I will focus only on research in my professional field. Readers who followed me for other reasons may well unfollow; from now on we part ways, each going our own road and finding our own joy.
The old me is dead. Friends who read my past articles and wished to befriend me—please let me go. The author you knew is the old me, who is dead. I have lost interest in many of the questions that once interested me. Having eaten an egg, one need not meet the hen that laid it.
As for the frequent commercial-cooperation messages, I have blocked them all. Those who want to cooperate with me, let go of that thought! I have no energy, no time, and—most crucially—not the slightest wish to take part in any wearying socializing or cooperation.