Weekly 13 - Maybe a New Life
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Preface
May and June have gone by again. Summer is here—or has it already passed?
Summer isn't always pleasant. To me, it means graduation season, inevitable partings, and perhaps setting out into a new life myself.
Changsha's summers have never been reasonable. Walking along Lushan South Road in June, you see graduation photos being taken everywhere. These people look more like university students than the ones slogging through finals week, performing some collective farewell ritual, bringing countless goodbyes.
I still find it special. University like this is so lovely, like the happy ending of a film or TV series. But I also wonder: how many summers like this do I have left?
My ideal life is coming true little by little. Only when I look back do I realize how far I've walked.
Maybe a new life has been waiting for me all along.
The Full Apple Set
I spent a fortune in the 618 shopping sale on an iPhone Air and AirPods Pro 3, and used the proceeds from my old phone—sold to Zhuanzhuan's buyback service—to get an Apple Watch too. (This beautiful, useless thing. Mostly, I'd been tempted for ages by its ability to track menstrual cycles using body temperature and other vital signs… Girls really need this kind of tracking!)
Then I was surprised to realize that all I seemed to need for the full Apple set was an iPad. I seem so rich. Was I always this rich? Without asking my parents for a cent, here I am buying the whole set by selling things, scraping money together, and scrimping and saving ( )
…But even after experiencing Apple's excellent products—the iPhone Air, MacBook Air, and Apple Watch that wowed me—I still feel that, apart from the iPad Pro and iPad mini, the iPad lineup is a bunch of last-century 🗑️…
Part of why I think that is that I still haven't seen Apple make an “astonishing iPad.” A product doesn't amaze people by piling on specs. It does it through a design no one else thought of. Unfortunately, I haven't seen that in the iPad. For value, it can't touch Samsung next door.
I genuinely can't convince myself of the iPad's advantages over the Samsung Galaxy Tab S9 I'm using now. For just 2,000 yuan, the latter gives you the Samsung S Pen writing experience, an OLED screen, a 120Hz refresh rate, and even four speakers!
Spend 2,000 yuan on a standard iPad, and you only get a non-laminated LED display, 60Hz, and 128 GB. The pen costs several hundred more, and doesn't even have pressure sensitivity. And it would probably have to be secondhand or not the latest model.
Still, I was wavering over getting an iPad this summer with education pricing and the back-to-school offer, plus any money I might manage to earn. It comes with a pen, after all. Complete that last piece of the puzzle, enjoy the Apple ecosystem. Then, the next day, I saw this notice:
Wonderful. Buy nothing, save 100%. Now I can afford it even less.
Something like the iPad 11 can start at 3,799 yuan, and even the government subsidy plus education pricing won't bring it back to the old price. All I can say is, I'm sitting this year out…
Graduation Season
After switching phones, I uploaded the old phone's photo library to the cloud. Looking through it, I happened across this picture I'd saved in my first year.
“Chinese people, driven all their lives by an imaginary future.” I don't know what newly enrolled first-year me was thinking when I saved it…
The future does exist, objectively. We simply use fantasies to propel ourselves into doing all sorts of things. Without them, after all, how would we dare begin a new life?
Although graduation season happens in the full blaze of summer, it feels more like autumn to me. And I've disliked autumn all my life. Apart from the fact that I always catch a cold then, there's that old line: “Since ancient times, autumn has brought sorrow and loneliness.”
When I think of next year, and the year after, of the people I'm grateful to graduating one after another, of meeting them less and less often—will a lonely creature like me, who doesn't like arranging meals with people and never dares initiate chats or friendships, grow quieter still?
Then again, in a few years, maybe everyone will be keeping company with some physical simulation built around an embedded super-agent or another new AI architecture. Perhaps I don't need to worry too much about the silence. Many of our meetings may be the last.
We'll still keep in touch online, but I won't know what they've become, whether they've really turned into incredibly capable people, things like that… People keep learning, over and over, how to say goodbye.
A New Life
Games
Come play Switch games with me!
The most noteworthy thing this month is that Splatoon 3 has finally taken the top spot in my Switch play-time rankings. I've improved quite a lot too, even if I'm still pretty bad.
Working toward “康佬” and “格佬” level, though I think reaching that standard will require a four-digit hour count…
My Switch 2 has finally become a Splatoon launcher. Tears of the Kingdom? Not playing. Fitness Boxing? Not boxing. Animal Crossing and life on the island? No idea what to do anymore… Splatoon has sent me into a rage more times than I can count. Even a gentle, refined PvP player like me ends up swearing in the dorm because a teammate won't use their special. Terrifying.
At this point, only a new Pokémon game or DLC can pull me away from Splatoon. Probably. (And Rhythm Heaven, which I'm still waiting to find at a good price.)
Get close to Splatoon and you get close to pain. Stay away from Splatoon and you stay away from happiness 🥰. It really is fun.
If you play on Switch too, feel free to add me~
Interviews
The most important thing this month was trying some internship applications, hoping to fill the gaps in my busy summer.
Really, it started when cry shared a 🐧 referral code in the group chat. I heard we'd split the referral bonus and went ahead and applied… Maybe there was also a tiny hope that “an internship at a big tech company could earn me a lot.”
After a long wait in the applicant pool, I updated my résumé and got picked up for an interview for “Tencent Cloud Backend Development.” I nearly fainted when I saw it. I'd never even heard what that job involved.
I was very nervous in the first round. They said it involved databases, and I shyly admitted that all I knew was clicking around in SaaS tools. Somehow, I passed. The second round was much more relaxed. Nothing particularly difficult came up. But the interviewer was late and there was a lot of background noise; I figured they weren't especially interested in me. We talked quite a bit, though, and it was a relaxed chat. And then the interview process stopped short.
I'm still a kid in the end, full of fire, still caring about so many things. Two forces keep colliding inside me. Failed interviews and plummeting rankings seem to announce, “You won't earn much this summer,” “You won't get a scholarship next semester.” The other force keeps telling me none of it matters. The job wasn't even in my field of interest; I was always just seeing what happened. Pass or fail, it could only benefit me. As for my GPA and ranking, the semester when I was depressed had already dragged them so far down that I couldn't pull them back up anyway. Even less reason to care.
I realized I couldn't process those feelings, or the waiting. I began desperately wanting to live in the moment, wishing the things I wanted to buy would arrive in my hands the very next second. I didn't want to think so much.
Then I couldn't sleep again. I started thinking helplessly that “I can't afford what I want to buy, and I'm not qualified for what I want to have.” Such hopeless hopelessness.
Then I couldn't control my tear ducts. A second kind of crying began, one that wasn't about family or loneliness.
It seemed my brain was in too much pain. My “consciousness” couldn't perceive it, so my body split off and started telling me instead.
Only after I made AI write some stories about raising cute cats did my emotions gradually settle.
Maybe it's just a kind of perfectionism. I wanted so badly to do it, then reality told me I hadn't, and I cried. So cry. Get tired from crying, and it'll be all right.
I posted a few interview write-ups on Xiaohongshu to build up some luck, then wrote down a rough impression:
The biggest thing I learned was that interviews aren't so frightening. I felt that it's a process of choosing each other. Personally, I'd rather intern in a big coastal city. I've never been to Shenzhen or Shanghai in my whole life… I still need to keep building my abilities.
I don't want to go job-hunting so soon either. Who willingly interviews for a role they aren't interested in? It's all for the money 💰. I still want to chase my happiness, freedom, dreams, mountains, and seas 👇
Back to interviews, though: interestingly, what I gained wasn't just a new experience. I see them more as a chance to consult people who actually work “in the industry,” instead of listening to unbearably dull talks. Finding out what people at big tech companies want to do in the future helps me work out “what I actually want to do.”
Influenced by people like airing writing about AI's rapid development—for example, “After AI Takes Everything”—I asked my interviewer, in the questions section of round two, where software development careers should go with AI moving so quickly. The answer was: “The core advantage in the future will shift toward thinking ability. Technical development needs both depth and breadth. Breadth means developers need technical judgment and sensitivity to new things. But as for depth, developers who really dig deep will always be scarce in this era.”
Even while listening, I felt the interviewer was mostly repeating the mainstream view. I didn't hear anything especially distinctive. But at least it told me what kind of technical people are generally valued now, and gave me something to think about.
Still, my first interview attempt had a decent result. At least I passed round one and reached round two. That means I'm not completely hopeless…
If that's the case, everything has worked out for the best. I can finally stop grinding those lousy algorithm questions and rote interview answers and focus on preparing for my trip!
Travel
A relative invited me to travel abroad this summer, taking my dear younger sister, who's a huge K-pop fan! I got my passport and submitted my visa application on my own, then started looking into hotels and flights.
Honestly, I'm still terrified of going to a country with an unfamiliar language.
First, there's the language I can't read at all. With Japanese and English, I can at least guess the general meaning. Looking at Korean, a purely phonetic script, I'm no different from someone who can't read… All I have is the experience of listening to K-pop and following girl groups—limited to watching behind-the-scenes recording videos—to help me listen to all those “seumnida” endings.
Second, there's the unknown of going abroad: how to get online, whether Mastercard and Apple Pay will be enough, how much cash to exchange, how to develop a feel for spending in an unfamiliar currency…
And I'll be traveling with a minor. Am I already considered a completely trustworthy big sister? I've barely traveled a few times myself 😭…
But I'm excited too. Let's buy a few albums for the collection. Buying them where they're released, with the exchange rate and tax refund, should be much cheaper than using a reseller in China and paying shipping too. Maybe I can even find brand-new copies of albums by groups like BIGBANG. (I really want GD's “Coup d'Etat.”)
But as a P type, I haven't made detailed plans. I haven't even booked a hotel or flights, or decided exactly when to go, how long to stay, or what to do. I'll think it through once the visa comes back.
I suppose I'll write a travelogue?
Maybe a New Life
I used to float, now I just fall down.
I used to know, but I'm not sure now.
What I was made for ?
Looking back again, maybe my “exploration” has never been what I imagined: carving out a path of my own. Maybe it's been walking, for myself, a path others mapped and confirmed long ago.
I'm just beginning to accept that this consciousness I'm so proud of is also part of my ordinariness, and that I don't need to be so hard on my body.
I've already started drinking sugar-free Coke, and discovered that growing up means starting to do things against your subjective wishes for the sake of your objective self.
But as I wrote before, all I want in the end is still “for consciousness to exist.” A new life won't necessarily be an ideal one. But it will come.