I thought I was outside the race

I don't spend much time on Twitter, but I kept noticing a strange idea in posts about San Francisco. The future is there, and it is moving faster and faster. The window into that future is always closing. And if you are somewhere else... well, probably you are already late.

Then I read George Hotz's post, I love LLMs, I hate hype. He called it "negative valence hype." I read that and thought: okay, I was right about it. I'm not part of that SF bubble, and I don't need to organize my work around its pace. Okay, cool. This particular panic does not bother me.

well... apparently, not really.

China has a word for its own kind of pressure: 卷, juǎn. It is what happens when everyone works harder and harder, but nobody gets ahead because the standard keeps rising. Everyone knows the word. Many people cannot simply escape the competition. They need jobs, and not everyone has enough money or other options to slow down. But even people who do have some choice often seem to accept 卷 as a fact of life.

As a foreigner here, I thought I could watch it from the side. I do not follow exactly the same path as Chinese students, so perhaps I could notice the race without being pulled into it. I would just do what I needed to do and keep my own pace. That sounded reasonable.

Then I went to Shenzhen for a hackathon. Shenzhen felt a little like a Chinese San Francisco to me. I met teammates around my age who were already involved in many tech activities and seemed much closer to the newest things happening in the industry. They had ambitions, but they were also in a place that could answer those ambitions. I remember thinking: there are so many opportunities here. You only have to go outside, and somehow they can find you. I loved that feeling. I would like to work there in the future.

Then Cinderella went home to Zhengzhou. Cinderella was me, yep. Suddenly, the work I was doing there felt less valuable, even though the work itself hadn't changed. I didn't have the same city or circle around me, so I felt I had to work more and move faster to compensate. Nobody in Zhengzhou was directly competing with me. It did not matter. That atmosphere had already followed me home.

That was the strange part I had not noticed before. I saw 卷 as a problem other people had. In the end, I had absorbed it too. Apparently you do not need to be in the same competition for its pressure to affect you. Maybe that is why the race is so easy to miss. We say, "this is 卷," as if naming it explains everything. It becomes something the environment does to us, and we assume we have to keep going because everyone else is already running.

So... don't run this race only because everyone else is running. If you want to run, okay, run it. Just make sure the goal is yours and run it at your own pace. If you can't answer what you're doing it for, well, that's a good reason to stop for a minute and think about it.