Thinking back to my days working in Shanghai, living in an attic room every day, I would constantly browse the Atour app to see the nearest Atour hotel and wonder when I might stay there, or look at photos of luxury serviced apartments and imagine when I could afford to live in a two-bedroom condo with a study.

Undeniably, it was only during that time in Shanghai that I felt I had my own life. Playing with friends from high school, college, and studying abroad, I realized I had been living the wrong way before. So I finally stopped living in a vacuum and began to perceive the charm and complexity of the real world. Perhaps this was the beginning of my mental maturity.
Hometown is a naturally comforting place. If I study and work there, it’s an even more inherently suppressive feeling—a kind of plain happiness belonging to endorphins, not aligned with the dopamine-driven spirit of explorers. I once thought I would settle down in the tech park of my hometown, get married, and have children. That ancient city’s dating app was full of longing for a stable life.
But then everything changed. I boarded a train, traveled through the stars, explored, suffered, and transformed. I forgot the specific things, reasons, and people. I only remembered how my past experiences shaped my architecture and influence. “What am I,” I increasingly understood through practice; and the inner debate often turned actual experiences into abstractions. When perceptual evidence is insufficient, this abstraction can harm the spirit—this is what Nietzsche called “the use and abuse of history.”
Exploration halted, and I suddenly felt nihilistic. Dopamine corresponds to desire; desire makes people feel alive. Even pain is proof of life.
The will to live is existence, while the will to die is nothingness. Wandering children will eventually return home, only to set out again from their hometown, seeking the meaning of life amid the unknown and uncertainty: exploration itself.