World, am I the reflection of everyone’s wishes? Then how many others are there who have hurt the way I have, who are hurting still.

Really I don’t want to speak at all the sentence I have just said I want the next moment to have never happened the thing I did a second ago the next second I don’t want to do because nothing matters

Everything is fine like this that’s enough I don’t want a position of my own either I don’t want a self either I don’t want to do anything I don’t want to give my opinion either I think it’s quite fine I don’t want thoughts of my own at all I don’t want any action that comes out of this person at all I am not me at least not the me of all that acting how is one to define me I have many sides

Does the next unhurried stretch have to wait for Saturday and Sunday? And yet time feels very slow too.

Next to that, the surroundings still affect me too much. Nobody speaks, there is nothing of interest in it, and it feels like sitting out the hours. This is not the life I hope for, and yet I need capital enough to step into the life I want.

There is a theory that as I take hold of my work, as I grow more and more practised, I will come to like my work. All right — some aspect of the work, it should be. Because the surroundings matter too.

Perhaps because a goal is too far away? The link between that kind of thinking and the action itself is not very strong; it can even work the other way and weaken the action. So the system matters. Follow the system and you can slowly reach the goal you wanted, because the system is a concrete arrangement — you can see what it achieves at the time.

Today I tried to build one whole system for keeping records. It will hold my data, and it will also keep the traces of the tools I use; and of course, using AI has become simpler too.

I have always had this idea of connecting everything together. I suppose it has more or less come true now?

Some of the news lately has not been good. I don’t want to discuss politics or any particular policy. But it is clear that what I care about is not what the people who make the rules care about, and the risks we each carry are separate ones. So I will vote with my actions. If not with my hands, then with my feet.

As for whether there is anything worth recording lately, there isn’t, really. I feel the holiday already said everything I wanted to say.

I have been working on a new website, and I keep wondering how this website becomes something of value. I suppose I still have to make some of the content by hand. I think the layout as it stands is good: a personal page, a private page, and a page that is something like a brand.

Work is all right, but the biggest problem is that I have no ideas of my own. It is as though I am only working along behind the AI — how does that count as learning? For instance, what actually makes GEO or SEO work? At the moment I only know about layout and such things; go any deeper and I don’t really understand it. Perhaps nobody really understands it. But at least this year I want to know what has an effect.

That’s all. See you tomorrow. I won’t break for more than a day again — even if it is only one sentence, I will write it properly.

First, AI grew a brain. From humanity’s vast body of data, from poems and novels, papers and news reports, even online shouting matches, it learned to predict the probability of each word appearing in a sentence. With each iteration it has mastered knowledge that is hard for humans to master, and on that basis it goes on to discover what we have not yet grasped.

Then came hands. In fact, I had wanted to build a website for a long time. In high school I roughly put together a web page of my own with WordPress. I didn’t understand computers or how any of it worked; I just followed guides step by step. Later AI appeared, and whatever I didn’t understand, I could simply ask it. It might not understand what I meant and often went off track, but its knowledge was broad, and I learned a lot about building websites from it.

In 2024 I started using Cursor, and I had hands: a programmer’s hands. It could be imprecise too, and I still didn’t understand how things worked, but I could use it to change the architecture of my website. I gained a great deal of freedom. Before, I could only follow tutorials or make small adjustments to ready-made themes; now I could have it carry out my ideas. It saved me a lot of time as well. At least it does well with whatever it can reach, and whatever it can’t, I handle myself.

Then AI grew legs: agents. They can walk about and connect things freely, like bridges linking different islands so that cotton from island A can be shipped to island B and made into winter clothes. I no longer have to make every connection myself. I only give an instruction, have it build a bridge between websites and platforms, and they can work together across platforms, freeing my hands completely.

Ha, I’ll stop here for now. But AI really is developing quickly, and it’s only natural that all kinds of jobs are being replaced. As the means of production advance, education has to keep up with the times. Becoming an expert certainly matters, but I think in the future there are qualities that will need to be cultivated far more widely.

Let me first fill in the hole I dug yesterday. It is ten o’clock now. I plan to write for at least thirty minutes, wherever my thoughts go, and then meditate, or let my mind wander. I’ll arrange things like this from now on. This is the first step in overcoming the scarcity mindset.

I always feel a kind of urgency in my life, a sense of scarcity. In the end, every moment of life seems to exist for the sake of the next goal. So as each deadline draws near, the present does not serve the present; it becomes urgent because of the future.

Time is a strange thing, the cornerstone of all human civilization. But if you think about it carefully, you find that time does not exist. It is only an illusion resting on the movement of things through space. Illusion is a powerful weapon. Humanity has come this far largely because we share a belief in all sorts of illusions. But the more we believe, the stronger they grow, and the stronger they grow, the more we believe. Yesterday’s fantasies, once forgotten, slowly became truths, and in the end turned into real lies. And I live under those lies.

“I have to work hard today for my future.” There is nothing wrong with that sentence. But then today there are a great many things I must do to prepare for later, and before I know it, it’s late at night. I want to push everything onto today; today exists entirely for tomorrow, and suddenly I’m full of enormous enthusiasm. That kind of thing is truly frightening. The mirror image of it is wanting to seize every minute of leisure: after work and on days off, I wish I could enjoy myself while also studying or doing something useful.

Neither usually ends well. With the first, never mind whether I can do anything properly along the way; even if I do, I can’t keep it up. I don’t know. Maybe the next day I just don’t want to. Maybe because the starting point was a false future all along, or maybe because yesterday was so tiring, and I realize I gave up the present for the sake of the future. Either way, it doesn’t feel good. As for the second, it’s simpler: rest time and leisure time are never nearly enough. I so wish this moment could stretch on forever. I have become a short-termist through and through.

I want to master time. I want to cram today full. There is no tomorrow in my world, ha. I suppose that is a way of living in the present too. This is what the scarcity mindset does. Because time is scarce, of course I have to do everything I possibly can with it. Because it is scarce, of course I have to give everything today and see the return tomorrow. Because it is scarce, I can’t bear even a moment of boredom, and of course I have to throw myself into something fun right away.

But this isn’t real. I think boredom matters. Having nothing to do matters. Knowing there is a tomorrow matters. Only then, under low pressure, can we slowly try to find our own interests and wishes. Only then can we see ourselves moving toward a goal step by step. Only then can we… Rather than, because of scarcity, passing time unconsciously and then feeling that life is so dull.

Let me leave it here for now. I don’t want a perfect piece. I don’t want a list of things I must do today. This is what I wanted to say. This is what I wanted to write. Put some things off until tomorrow, and live in the present.

From where we stand, isn’t the world eternal? Our lives are not like fruit trees; they have no autumn and spring. So don’t believe it too much.

For example: I have to do a lot of meaningful things, I can’t fall behind, I have to keep going late into the night, I have to make use of every minute. But that isn’t what the problem of time is. I always have some unfinished tasks. Why can’t I live in the present? Why do I have a task, instead of simply living each day?

Why do I stay up so late, as if there were no tomorrow? As if I needed just a little more time. It can wait until tomorrow. I’m going to sleep.

This isn’t the first time I’ve realized this. But as I said before, the key question is how I can keep up a new state of myself and make it last.

Today I’m not going to analyze anything or make any resolutions. I already understand, so I just need to act right away. There’s another reason I don’t feel like writing: I always feel that what I write is terrible, or that it can’t say what I mean. Let me put all that behind me. At least five minutes a day is still a must. Even writing about what I ate or what I watched is fine ^^

Today I changed some settings on the website and finished watching two anime, which I found really interesting. This kind of life is quite nice. Mm. Tomorrow I’ll write out some of my thoughts about scarcity. I’ve been thinking about it yesterday and today and left a few fragments of writing. Let me flesh them out.

For the past few days I have been crying again. On my way home from work, I did not want to ride straight back to where I stay. I wandered around for a while, but there was nowhere to go, so I went back and sat in the bathroom for a bit. And now I cannot stop crying again.

My chest hurts a little. Have I not been sleeping enough these past few days? But I cannot sleep, and I don’t want to sleep. I wish there were no more pain, whether I stay alive or leave.

I’m a little tired, God. Can you hear me? I seem able only to imagine that you cannot, because I don’t think I will see your answer. But I can only speak to you, or to myself. I am so sad. I think telling someone else would only make me cry harder; they would not know what to do, and it would not change anything. So I can only speak to you. I’m sorry that all you can hear is me crying.

Do I really have some task to fulfill? Am I really meant to do something supposedly great? Otherwise, why do I keep being pulled back and forth? Ha. All right.

I don’t think I am very good at keeping my emotions steady, but my capacity to endure is far from ordinary. It has been more than ten years, after all, and I am always struggling with myself. Isn’t death the worst that life can do? Yet I haven’t relaxed. If it were only that I had nothing I wanted to do and nothing I would miss, that might be easier. It is other things that frighten me so much: the fear that I have not fulfilled my responsibilities, that I owe someone something. Fear is stronger than death.

How, then, can I stop being afraid?

One more thought before bed. Am I feeling sorry for myself? Am I letting myself sink? It won’t change anything, but I don’t want to judge myself either. That makes me feel a little better. Am I waiting for God? Am I the person who turns away three boats sent to rescue him and then drowns at sea? Maybe I cannot see them. But if I cannot see them, can I really call them a rescue meant for me?

And yet that is precisely why I am free. So I need to find a way, don’t I? Not to destroy my life, but to find a way of making a living that suits me.

I haven’t had much time to rest these past few days. I can’t fall asleep when I go to bed, and I stay up late. It is already past midnight now. On my day off Saturday, I kept opening a game without thinking and wanting to do several things at once. Am I trying to kill time? I feel as if I don’t have enough of it, yet I consciously force myself to do things I may find meaningless. Perhaps then I don’t have to think about how to use my time. Perhaps I can avoid thinking altogether. A game lets me put my mind somewhere else, so I needn’t face myself or time.

I also suddenly started reading comics again. Things outside don’t seem as exciting as stories, so I spend remarkably little on everyday life. I can hardly imagine what the days before the internet would have been like for someone who lives as I do. And I seem to be growing more dissatisfied with work.

The main reason I was annoyed today was the adjusted work schedule. Time that should have been a day off was taken to make up for the next holiday. A little more work might bring a little more pay. But to me the expected value of working is entirely negative, so adding hours only subtracts more. I would be willing to let my salary change with my hours. I don’t spend much; if I worked a little less, I could accept earning correspondingly less.

Still, working for someone else really doesn’t feel worth it. I think everyone has a way they want to live, or a life they want to experience. Mine doesn’t have to be colorful. I just don’t want to be so tired, and I want enough freedom. Before the Lunar New Year, I want to have a side project that can earn something, whatever it may be. Even if I don’t quit my job next year, I want to have that. I’ve only been working for a month, and life already feels so hard. Well, at least I can say this isn’t my choice. Keep going.

I don’t remember my first impression of death. Perhaps very few people do. At the beginning of life, death is so far away from us, and we cannot understand enough of other people’s lives. By the time we begin to sense it, however dimly, no single moment leaves much of an impression anymore.

I am not satisfied with life. Ever since I began consciously looking at my life and attending to my feelings, I have thought it was truly awful. Sometimes I still think so. Last night and again this morning, a voice inside me kept pleading for everything to end. It has been exactly ten years, if I count it all up.

Ten years ago, I liked to leave the classroom between lessons and look outside, hoping to see farther, toward places beyond this world. That was when a seed was planted and began to sprout. Life felt like an uncertain hell. One side of me was exposed to every sort of “temptation” and tasted its sweetness; on the other side, I had to face an uncertain judgment that would decide the reward or punishment for enjoying myself, and whether I would have another chance.

Do the temptations offered by those hideous demons in religion really drag you into hell? Some say demons disguise themselves as God to deceive you. So people set down punishments as a correction, but those punishments teach people to see God as a devil. I do not think living in a world of fear is something to celebrate or accept as normal. No matter how much I am promised later, I cannot ignore the present. That is why, at least as I see it, suicide is not in itself a bad thing. It is a choice, a way of saying no.

All the ways of living and acting that are refused are, in fact, fitting. Everything in this world is something we build, whether consciously or without knowing it. Who can say that any one thing that happens has nothing to do with us?

Have I gone off on a tangent? In any case, much of the time I simply do not want to stay. The world feels too chaotic. One moment I am on this side, then on that one. I resent and I love; I complain and I feel pity. I am so tired of it. I am tired of the conflict among the different selves within me, tired of the world’s endless confusion. I have little to hold on to. Even now, what do I have to hold on to? Responsibility keeps me here like a little rain falling on parched ground, but my skin has long since cracked. Please, just give me an end to it.

I do not want to spend another second in this body, in this time, in this world of cause and effect where everything seems fixed. Someone says, “I love this world. I love this changeable sea: one moment calm and peaceful, the next a surge of wind and waves.” I just want to say, fuck that. Whoever says it—of course you can say it; if you can talk with me, then we are here together. But I still want to swear, whether at how terribly wrong that claim feels or at the part of me that will not accept change. Fuck that.

I think I am still holding on to too much reason. Midnight has not come yet, so I will quote something I said earlier today. Otherwise it feels as if only half of me is writing.

I am so tired, so tired, so tired. Living feels exhausting, like being half alive and half dead. I have tried changing my life, changing my profile, making every new decision I can think of. I used to imagine my life might change because of it. Now I cannot even be bothered to imagine that. My life is so dull, so boring, so empty of energy. Those are the only words I have, though they are not enough. I do not like it at all. Yet I just go on this way, until one day I leave the world, and that will be that.

I am at a loss. I want to destroy everything. Why? Why is life so muddled? Why do I go here and there, meet this person and that person, begin things and end them, only for my life to remain like this, always like this? Why do films and other people get turning points? Why does God speak to other people? Why give me an answer at all, and still leave me guessing through the confusion every day? I am so, so tired. Sometimes I fall apart, then suddenly feel better, and then a phone call brings it all down again. I am so tired. It feels like suffocating. Do you know that feeling? That suffocating feeling. I cannot see an end or a way through.

There was a time when, faced with questions life would not answer, I could comfort myself by thinking that leaving this world would make everything end. I no longer even have that thought to comfort me, because I know I will not leave. I cannot. I don’t quite know what to say now. Ah.

Perhaps I should not think this way, but I cannot stop myself. I feel as though my soul is not in my body. I cannot feel anything. There is nothing, when I am in my world, looking at it from where I stand. In fact, I have thought about dying. There was a time when I even intended to act on it. So why am I still here? I think certain responsibilities have kept me here. Well, I am too embarrassed to say more about that, even knowing nobody will see this. I do not want to speak of it.

Perhaps I have the ability to change things, but I simply do not want to change, or make the effort. Instead I find myself wishing the whole world would be destroyed. It is painful, and I don’t know why. I don’t know how to put the rest into words either. Dying seems as though it would be ugly. If life had a button that made people simply disappear, I think the world would suddenly have far fewer people. Death is an enormous thing, and people do not want to change either. So they carry on half alive, half dead. There does not seem to be a good way to die.

It is hard to imagine that not even a whole day has passed. While walking this evening, I thought of a sentence I want to put on the wall: I must stand by the life I choose. More precisely, I must firmly choose the life I want to experience. There is no other way. The options before me are not simply one right and the other wrong, one slightly better and the other slightly worse. This force is stronger than ruling out what is wrong, stronger than any negation. And I have to choose.

I must never answer my own choice with “anything is fine.” I will clearly, knowingly choose one of the possibilities I want. Then I will bear the consequences and find the answer I am looking for. That is the truth of my life, my real life. Yes, that is enough. That is enough. Even if it feels empty, even if there is only nothingness, even if I remain despondent, I will do it.

In the afternoon I spent over an hour on the subway to visit the zoo. I saw pandas, penguins, brown bears, and more. Animals are most interesting when they can move around. I don’t support forcing them to perform; I just find it hard to feel much enthusiasm watching an animal listless in a small enclosure. Places where they are active, with someone explaining and engaging with visitors, make me want to linger. I can feel a kind of vitality there. My happiest moment was seeing several people dancing beside the square. Why? Perhaps because they had freely chosen to dance that day. Still, I have to say that spending the afternoon lying indoors would have been quite nice too.

After dinner I watched an interesting film recap. The protagonist attends a kind of self-help meeting and is encouraged to change: to replace the “no” on his lips with “yes.” His life really does seem to change afterward, moving more and more in a better direction. I don’t quite know what I think of stories like this, but I do like them, including Groundhog Day. And there is that film about a man who, in a parallel world, finds that he did not pursue a career but built a life with the person he loves.

I don’t know whether to believe in any of it. Perhaps I judge things too much by their outcomes. I worry that I am clinging to the hope that life might change and, in changing, change me. What if nothing changes? It reminds me of another line by Dazai that I once shared on social media: if there is no fierce joy, grief will not come rushing in either. Schopenhauer thought along similar lines. And watching the recap brought back some of Nietzsche’s thoughts on the Greeks’ turn from tragedy toward comedy.

Later I watched What Dreams May Come. One shot was beautiful; the whole film felt full of meaning. I too believe that death is not the end. Perhaps one of the things I have to learn in this life is to understand that while I am here, and to remember it.

One more thing: that last thought came to me before I fell asleep yesterday. I am trying to arrive at a conclusion, or at least make the words more concrete, and move toward what I hope for. This is not about hypnotizing myself or lying to myself. It is about refusing to let vague thoughts go unattended, letting them become a way to escape, to miss something, or to lose sight of what I am choosing. It is like observing a particle. I know that if I leave it unobserved, there are limitless possibilities. Yet we need the finite; only then is there the infinite. So I want to hold it in place and look at it: toward the place I want to go, toward love, toward wholeness.

And yet the question itself implies something: that I must endure the present, that this time is not mine, that this is the human world and heaven comes afterward. So the rain must have its own days too, and even the long night can be dear. Putting the two side by side is not meant to prove one better than the other. If I favor one, how can I embrace the other?

I wonder whether I really have a preference. No. Cloudy days and sunny days, today and tomorrow: every day feels the same. Indoors or outdoors, here or there: everywhere feels alike. That is why I get bored. There really seems to be no difference. When something does feel different, it is because I choose, because something outside me acts upon me and I respond.

A few days ago I saw a work whose main character liked to quote Osamu Dazai to express how they felt. When I was in middle school, No Longer Human was so popular that I bought a copy too. I remember posting one of its lines on social media: “Only a day apart, and I am a different person.”

That describes how I feel about socializing rather well. Sometimes I want to talk with people, whether by short messages or letters. But the next day, or some time after that, I want to disappear for a few days, perhaps forever. I simply have no energy. It isn’t weariness either; I just have no energy, and I don’t want to. Maybe it is because I am genuinely in a bad mood. Maybe it is something else. Perhaps I shouldn’t have too many close relationships. It would cause trouble, and I don’t like the feeling of disappearing on someone without warning either.

What do I mean by “forever”? When I say I want to be together forever, do I mean with that perfect other side of myself in my head? Life seems to circle between apparent extremes. So many contradictory things can exist at once, and each can make sense. If I can calmly accept someone else’s departure, can I also calmly leave? Is that an exercise of my own will to power, or am I being self-centered? Then again, being calm is difficult. Like everything else, none of it is clean.

I worked on the website again. Building it was a little frustrating, perhaps because I haven’t been in a very good mood these past few days.

All right. I’ve become more forgiving now. Though “forgiving” isn’t quite the word, because there is no one who can really hurt me, nothing that can leave me dissatisfied. I see a wholeness in life. Everything is in motion, and I am here to watch that motion unfold.

I am still looking for somewhere to place my heart. I have realized that I am not my body, that I am not any particular person. I need an object that can house my soul, the way a body does.

I think this is a great moment, because I have the chance to feel something true about life. Yet precisely because this feeling is unusual, I will still be capable of forgetting it. So I can choose my life while in this extraordinary state.

It is now eleven at night on September 9, and the evening wind has turned a little cool. The middle of this entry was written today; the beginning and end were written yesterday. I think both should stay. They will come together well enough.

I once heard someone say that if you want to go somewhere, there is only one way to get there: you must not already be there. It sounds roundabout. But life seems to consist of these two states, being there and not being there, and our hazy awareness somewhere between them. You think you are not there, so you keep searching. You hope to be there, but the very hope of arriving assumes that you are not there now. If the only time we live in is the present, then that hope will never arrive.