There is something harder than never getting what you want.

Sometimes the real pain is getting it, only to watch it disappear. Or realizing you already had it and lost it.

That kind of loss cuts deeper.

When I replied to a post on jeffer.xyz before, what I wrote was close in spirit to a passage I later revisited while reading Those Things in the Ming Dynasty again. It describes Wang Shouren’s long struggle before his awakening, and why suffering can feel so unbearable: not because life gives nothing, but because it gives, then takes away.

Wang Shouren spent years pursuing sagehood. He worked, insisted, spoke up when necessary, and held onto what he believed was right. Yet after all that effort, what remained seemed to be almost nothing. No visible reward, no clear answer, no final proof that the road had been worth it. If everything was stripped away, then what had all that striving been for?

That is the cruel point of the story: if heaven intended to take everything, why give it in the first place?

And the answer the passage offers is severe but beautiful. Things are not taken away only to punish. Sometimes they are taken away so a person can receive something greater. Wealth and comfort let you see the surface of the world. Hardship and humiliation let you understand its temperature. When everything external is removed, the mind is forced to confront what cannot be bought, displayed, or protected.

Wang Shouren searched everywhere for “li” — principle, truth, the thing he thought must be hidden somewhere outside himself. Not in bamboo, not in gardens, not in famous mountains and rivers, not in Nanjing, not in Beijing, not in Hangzhou, not even in Guizhou. He kept wrestling with the old formula: preserve heavenly principle, remove human desire. But if desire is inside the heart, then where exactly is principle?

That question drove him into agony.

Then came the moment that later history would call a sudden awakening. The answer had never been far away. “Li” was not hidden in external things. It was in the heart-mind itself. The way of sages was not something separate from human life, nor something that had to be excavated from the outside world piece by piece. Heaven and humanity were not two different realms. This realization became one of the defining moments in the history of Chinese thought, the birth of the philosophy later known as the School of Mind.

Wang Shouren is Wang Yangming.

I had to look that up myself once.

I was checking ideas like knowing is difficult, doing is easy, knowing is easy, doing is difficult, and especially the unity of knowing and doing, and Wang Yangming kept appearing. Then I paused: why did two different names point to the same philosopher? It turns out plenty of people have had the same confusion.

Wang Shouren was his personal name. Wang Yangming was the name by which later generations commonly referred to him. He was a Ming dynasty thinker, writer, military strategist, educator, and the great synthesizer of the philosophy of mind.

In what feels like history’s leftover time, some people still manage to become decisive figures. Wang Shouren was one of them.

He challenged and revised earlier Neo-Confucian ideas. Zhu Xi’s emphasis on gewu zhizhi — investigating things to extend knowledge — became something Wang Shouren doubted through his famous “bamboo investigation,” often remembered as Shouren ge zhu. That doubt eventually pushed him toward a different path. Instead of treating principle as something to be discovered in external objects, he moved toward the view that heaven and humanity form an integrated whole.

What makes this matter to me is not only philosophy. It is also the way it shines a light on ordinary life.

Most people have their own version of “garbage time.” I definitely do. I have spent a huge amount of time gaming — at least ten thousand hours if I had to estimate. I do not know whether old platforms like Haofang, 11.vs, or QQ Battle Platform still have the records. Maybe Blizzard has backend data somewhere. Steam at least gives part of the picture, and even there the number is already over a thousand hours.

That kind of time is gone.

But maybe the point is not to hate yourself for it. The better approach is to reduce that wasted time little by little, and replace it with interests and habits that can last, that have some value, that leave something behind. Not through dramatic self-denial, but through substitution: use one steady habit to squeeze out another that gives less back.

Lately I started reading a book about how to find what you actually want to do. That feels more useful than just staring at the past and regretting it.

Writing a blog is one of those good habits.

It does not matter that much whether the writing is polished. It does not matter whether anyone reads it. When you are old and look back, those entries may be the clearest proof that you really lived through a stretch of time. And when you read them then, the person who wrote them may feel strangely unfamiliar.

That is natural. The past self and the present self are not the same anyway. Physically, mentally, almost everything has already been replaced. Maybe you upgraded. Maybe you downgraded. Either way, that is life.

Keeping a record does not preserve everything. It cannot stop time, and it cannot restore what is gone. What it can do is leave a contour behind, so that what has drifted away does not vanish into a blur.