When I first started this blog, I met one of the earliest people who was also writing online. It has been a little over three years now. Recently he told me something that genuinely surprised me: he had finally seen a bit of me as a "normal person."

He is also the kind of person who uses what I jokingly call a "suspicion management system" on me—a habit of collecting details from conversations, tracking internal contradictions, and building a model out of the questionable parts.

I do not dislike that at all. If anything, I find it funny. But the "price" he pays is that I will sometimes feed that system a little contaminated data in return. So every now and then I have to recalibrate my own sense of being a real, living person in front of others.

I am not someone who especially wants to hide. Most of the time, if I believe someone is worth being honest with, I try to align what I know, what I think, and what I say. Later, the two of us even played a game: he could ask me the three questions he cared about most, and we would both answer truthfully. Of course, those answers might end up becoming part of his "suspicion management system" too, but I do not mind.

What interested me more was why he had suddenly started to feel that I had this "normal-person aliveness" to me. The reason, roughly, was that in The Battle of Oxytocin I wrote about ordinary domestic trivialities, and that made him realize I was, in his words, "also the kind of person who takes off his pants and uses the toilet."

Looking back, I share some responsibility for that impression. When I first appeared, I really did seem like an oddball. In 2022, I was still writing every day. At the time, a lot of people questioned me and assumed I was just repackaging other people’s writing to drive traffic to my blog. Some people tried hard to build blogroll links with me, and I refused in a way that probably did look aloof. If that was the persona people first encountered, then of course I would have seemed like someone with very little "real-person" presence.

The living dead, and the dead who keep living

I do not glorify death, but it is true that after a near-death experience, my personality and the way I think changed drastically.

I joke sometimes that when the ambulance took me away, it happened right around the 5:30 school dismissal hour. The ambulance was parked next to a kindergarten. As I was shoved into it like a slab of dead meat spread open, the little kids nearby were shouting, laughing, and saying, "Haha, that person got dragged away!"

In the face of death, a person is just a lump of meat waiting to rot.

Once you understand that life can be prolonged in a state stripped of all dignity, once you see clearly that death is the end awaiting every person and every thing, fear loosens its grip. And in that moment, you also understand something else: every carefully maintained persona, every hidden secret, every truth that others speculate about recklessly—none of it stays under your control forever.

The saddest part is this: if you tell a lie a thousand times, in the end the only person who truly believes it is yourself. And when truth finally surfaces, a single honest sentence can destroy a thousand lies.

The people pulled by death into this so-called world of truth are what I think of as the dead who keep living. Biologically, or within the web of relationships around them, they are already gone, but as symbols they continue to exist inside gossip, rumor, and other people’s retellings. All the layers of self-packaging they built get peeled away one by one. They lose the right to explain. Everything that happened in the past can be rewritten into another version, interpreted into some uglier, more hateful, more pitiful "truth."

Because I know this is inevitable, I try my best to remain inwardly and outwardly consistent. If gossip comes to tear open the supposed wrapping, then what is inside should still be me. The people around me should already know that this is who I am. No matter how the paper gets ripped, the core stays stable.

After that brush with death, I lost interest in curating a grand social world for myself. I deleted all my Chinese-language social media accounts except for WeChat, where I regularly cut my contacts down and keep only about 100 friends, along with my Moments feed, this blog, a Telegram channel for fragmented notes, and a podcast I make with my wife and friends. Those are the only outward-facing windows I keep, and I try to keep all of them aligned. I do not package myself into different versions depending on the platform.

If someone mocks my voice for sounding unpleasant, for example, I am not going to start using a voice changer in future podcast episodes just to protect my image.

What I am trying to avoid is becoming one of the "living dead"—the kind of people whose social feeds look bright and polished all week, who vanish on weekends, who in person complain only about work, relationships, and children, yet whose posts are forever sunny and serene. Which version is the real one?

They live inside beautifully renovated social feeds, and die in the grind of the same old gears.

The coat you can no longer take off

I am not mocking people who polish their online lives like that. The point is that no one understands the lie better than they do, and yet no one believes it more deeply either. That is where subjectivity comes in.

Put simply, most of the time we live inside relationships and personas because social life demands a certain social self from us. Under those identities, there are indeed many things we are not allowed to say or do. That identity becomes like a coat wrapped around the core of subjectivity—the objective self.

As more and more positive feedback comes from the persona or from the version of us that exists in other people’s eyes, the imagined self gradually starts to overpower the real subject. In order to earn more approval, people become less and less willing to take off that coat. They begin to suppress their actual thoughts and persuade themselves to comply with the image others seem to prefer.

Then one day they get tired and want to take the coat off, only to realize it has grown into the flesh. To remove it cleanly would mean tearing themselves open. So instead they decide to keep wearing it and convince themselves that this must be who they really are. Then they continue chasing all the rewards that this imagined self can bring.

But public opinion is frightening. No one can be liked forever. Sooner or later criticism appears—doubt, rejection, contempt. To keep that gorgeous coat from being laughed at, people start altering themselves according to outside judgment, trying to perfect the role, until they have completely forgotten the self underneath.

And at that point, there is always a perfect external justification available: This is what they want. If I want to be a good father, I have to make sacrifices like this...

Realizing that it is a coat in the first place is already difficult. Trying to take it off and expose what is underneath is even harder.

For influencers, for example, that coat has already brought them status, resources, and income. Asking them now to simply "be themselves" is not some easy moral gesture. Doing that would expose them to even more abuse, and people love the spectacle of dragging an idol off the pedestal.

Take Papi Jiang. When people discovered that her child had taken the father’s surname, the image of "independent womanhood" that others had attached to her became a weapon used against her. But that is her life, and that is her choice. The public only wanted to judge the version of her wearing the coat. Fortunately, she has remained someone whose inside and outside are fundamentally aligned. The persona was not her only ability, not the only thing she could profit from, and it is a blessing that she can still continue being herself.

But how many people are really willing to take that coat off?

The real self is often tangled up with inferiority, shame, unspeakable secrets, and desires that cannot be shaken off. It can look ugly, as if the skin were being pulled open by hooks. But who truly cares? Other people’s judgment swings forever between worship and destruction. Whatever you do eventually becomes a blade someone can turn against you.

So you may as well tell them where it hurts most when they stab you.

Because if you really make that choice, then you also understand exactly how to hurt them in return.

What I call "standing in the sun" is taking off the coat, laughing at yourself, turning shame into a story. Once you do that, other people lose the chance to weaponize it against you, because you have already dissolved the feeling closest to death: shame itself.

Hell is other people

If other people hold absolute power to judge, then whether something is true or false hardly matters. In their eyes, it can all be called hypocrisy.

That is what happened with my friend calling me a "normal person." Maybe when we first met, he saw me as someone distant and above it all, someone who should not speak so directly about the plainly human parts of life. But in fact, that was me before putting on the coat.

No matter what we do, it is hard to rewrite the role we are first assigned inside someone else’s evaluation system, or the role they hope we will play. So we might as well focus on being ourselves. Once you are inside other people’s hell, any sentence, any action, can become evidence at trial.

If hell has multiple levels, why shouldn’t one of them be for you?

It is actually hard to say what concrete benefit comes from preserving this sense of being a real, living person. Outside judgment is not under our control. But if you return to those concentric circles of subjectivity, the more stable the core becomes, the stronger your capacity to withstand external evaluation becomes too. And that saves a tremendous amount of internal friction.

Still, there is no universal standard for what "real-person aliveness" even is. Most people continue to use fitting in as the benchmark. Take the Chinese-language blogging world as an example: some people actively trade links everywhere, actively interact with everyone, and appear highly social and very alive by that standard. There is nothing necessarily wrong with that. But the standard is still located in other people.

And it does not follow that someone who is less social, less eager to blend in, has any less of that aliveness.

If fitting in matters that much to you, then I sincerely wish you and your friends can be deep-fried together when your turn comes.

I really do mean it as a blessing.