A few days ago I had dental surgery and could only eat liquid food, so I made a lot of smoothies with the blender. Once it settled, it turned into a kind of paste — beneath that thick layer on top was a dense, viscous liquid. Drinking it, a cold sensation spread through my whole body. Come to think of it, it had been a long time since I’d paid attention to a sensation like that.

Now that the holiday season has arrived, I suddenly realize I’ve already been a working adult for a full year. The past year of work hasn’t transformed me into an entirely different person living a life of toil, indulgence, and numbness, but there has certainly been change. The most obvious one is the shift in the information I “consume” every day. At lunch, many of my coworkers kindly recommend apartments to me, telling me which areas are a good deal and worth buying into; others recommend insurance, funds, and other ways to manage my finances; still others teach me how to save money… Maybe I just haven’t been socialized to that point yet, but I keep feeling that things like houses, property, and cars — while necessary to have — aren’t things I particularly want or care about. Of course, people who do care about these things are making their own choice, and I have no right to project my own preferences onto judging others. Money is an external thing, but my concern for what’s “internal” to me has also been dwindling by the day.

What, then, counts as “internal”? The body is nothing more than blood, qi, meridians, and the five viscera and six bowels — beyond that, there’s really nothing else. Happiness, joy, delight — these may just be simple chemical reactions in the brain; thought, philosophy, consciousness are likewise nothing more than a smoothie blended from your actions plus your reading and reflection — thick, clumpy, leaving even you a little bewildered. In the end, what a person really has is just solitariness: a single, unique object consisting of a body accompanied by consciousness.

Honestly, life is both small and rarely meaningful — there really are few things worth doing. One’s personal pursuits and preferences are, at best, a sip of sweetness tasted from the smoothie; some people, perhaps, are simply carnivores at heart. In the vast ocean of society, there really are people who are entirely worldly, who go through the motions, who simply repeat whatever everyone else says. It makes you wonder: is the point of socialization to step outside the collective, or to erase one’s own individuality?

The content of my work leaves me muddled — every day I’m endlessly deconstructing protocols that, to my mind, are already falling apart. We’re all supposed to analyze clinical trial results objectively, but in practice everyone is quite subjective. Thinking it over carefully, though, maybe it doesn’t amount to much difference. We’re merely observing the subjective using a method that calls itself objective. Or perhaps the source of it all is, through and through, objective, and it’s people who hysterically “fabricate” all sorts of — “data.” About a hundred years ago, Freud, that madman of psychoanalysis, wrote a short essay, “On Transience.” After criticizing poets who weep over fallen flowers and changing seasons, he generously pointed out that flowers that wither will bloom again, and houses that collapse can be rebuilt. Clearly, this old man, too, had a thoroughly objective eye (of course, the evidence for that goes well beyond this one point — but glimpsing the man through a short essay fits Freud’s own style of “seeing the large in the small”).

Work is, after all, nothing more than a process of trading effort and intelligence for money — even the head of state does the same. There’s not a trace of self-consolation in saying this. I can fully empathize with the mindset of someone who fails, who suffers, who struggles — how could such a person possibly cling to professional pride? What use is so-called “ambition” or “aspiration”? So, speaking from an uneconomical, irrational, purely self-centered point of view, it’s simply that I haven’t gotten my mindset straight yet.

I’ve rambled on without much logic. For 2020, though, I hope to live a bit more consistently, to be someone who keeps things calm and settled. Today I happened to run into that line from the Old Testament — “For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” Even though I’d read it before, even though it’s a famous line, it still gave me a small jolt — dust was once such a solemn thing!