语言/Language
Prologue: Suspension
Ding!
Another push notification on my phone.
A company released a new model. A tool disrupted an industry. Someone used AI to do in three days what used to take three months. 99% of the official accounts I follow, the bloggers I read, the links friends forward—they all say the same thing: Keep up, or fall behind.
I kept up.
I've used many tools, read many reports, written many prompts, built some products, organized my own workflows. As someone working in the AI field, I encountered this wave earlier and deeper than most.
But one day I suddenly realized: I have no fucking idea what I'm anxious about.
Not anxious about falling behind. Not anxious about unemployment. Something deeper—the feeling of a spinning top turning fast but not knowing where it's turning toward. A person suspended in mid-air, feet unable to touch the ground, grasping nothing real.
I later gave this state a name: Suspension.
Not in a bad mood. Not confused. A concrete bodily sensation—like standing between two systems, the Tokyo order失效 ing, the new logic not yet entered, you're suspended there, seeing everything clearly, grasping nothing. Like opening your eyes underwater: you can see everything, but touch nothing.
The previous stop was Tokyo.
Tokyo was fine. Orderly, efficiency to an infuriating degree. Trains on time, convenience stores 24 hours, everyone follows the rules. This certainty is reassuring, but it also slowly shuts down the perceptual system—because nothing requires it to stay alert. You live inside a精密 ly operating machine, but the machine cannot give you weight.
On July 14, 2025, I bought a plane ticket and went to Vietnam.
Not to find answers. I later understood that travel cannot heal you. I just needed to stay somewhere different, to see what would happen to myself after leaving the usual track.
Setting off with a question: What does it mean to live with weight?
Trip Data: 60 days · 45 locations · 6,706 kilometers
Route: Tokyo → Ho Chi Minh City → Da Lat → Nha Trang → Hoi An → Da Nang → Hue → Hanoi → Hong Kong → Shenzhen
This is not a traditional travel book.
I don't want to write "Day 1 I went here, Day 2 I ate that." I want to write about the process of observation, thinking, cognition—starting from concrete scenes, slowly rising to abstract thinking, then falling back, landing in a more real question.
There is one word that runs through the entire book, a feeling I experienced on the first day in Vietnam but took two months to articulate clearly: Suspension.
Suspension is the undertone of these two months. It is not a problem, but a state—a state that makes your perceptual system particularly sharp. Many observations in this book grew out of suspension.
End of Prologue