In early 2025, I struggled with depression for a long time. A year has passed since then. I’ve gathered my writings from that period and woven in some recent reflections.
Shanghai, an afternoon shortly before the Spring Festival in 2025. I was sitting in the back of a taxi, heading home from Hongqiao Railway Station. Sunlight streamed through the window, falling unreservedly on my shoulders and hands. By all rights, it should have been a warm, healing moment. Instead, I just sat there quietly, feeling entirely hollow inside, like a withered log. The brighter the light, the clearer that drained, lifeless emptiness became.
At that moment, Li He’s line “唯见月寒日暖，来煎人寿” crashed into my mind without warning. I’d read it before and only appreciated its sharp, ornate diction. But in that swaying cab, I suddenly understood. It’s like how, completely off guard, you finally grasp the lyrics to a song that once meant nothing to you. It wasn’t the searing pain of a blazing fire, but a slow, daily simmer. The sun kept rising and setting, days kept pushing forward, and I was just sitting on the millstone of time, being quietly boiled away.
At the time, I had chosen to work remotely from Shanghai to spend the holidays with my parents. To sync with the North American team, I rigidly adjusted my schedule to 10 PM to 6 AM Beijing time. While the city woke up and crowds flowed during the day, I slept behind blackout curtains. When the deep night fell silent and the screen’s blue glow became the only light, I started coding, running experiments, and replying to messages. The time zone shift brought more than exhaustion; it carried a subtle sense of suspension. And in those long, quiet nights where I could hear my own breathing, a proposition I’d faintly sensed since middle school but never truly faced began to surface uncontrollably:
If death is inevitable, what real difference is there between dying now and dying decades from now?
This fear is hard to name. It isn’t a dread of pain or panic over the unknown. It’s a lucid awareness of “absolute absence”: time will march on, seasons will turn, technology will advance, people will come and go, but the “I” that experiences it all will have permanently exited the system of perception. I liken it to a kind of megalophobia directed at the cosmos and time itself—mourning the brevity of my life while envying the endless flow of the river. Whenever I think about human civilization eventually being compressed into invisible layers of sedimentary rock, only to be swallowed by a black hole, a chill runs down my spine.
But later, I slowly realized that the breakdowns in those long nights might not have been solely due to thinking too deeply. Perhaps the foundation gave way first.
Circadian inversion disrupted my hormones. The complete severance of stable social ties stripped away my emotional buffer. The extreme monotony of daily life turned existence into a repetitive loop of cold moons and warm suns. When biological rhythms misalign, external feedback drops to zero, and the texture of life gets worn smooth, the brain’s computational power has nowhere to go. It fixates entirely on an unsolvable ultimate question. Thoughts spin in a vacuum, and the echoes grow louder. I wasn’t “overthinking.” It was just that the two nets meant to catch me—my body and my social connections—had loosened first.
My instinctive reaction was to deconstruct.
The subject fearing death is the “I.” So, what exactly is the “I”? Peeling back the layers, the “I” that refuses to die seems to be nothing more than memory-based data, a pattern of electrical and chemical signals running through neural networks to make decisions. Hmm, I’m familiar with this. The “I” is basically a Transformer. Deconstruction did strip death of some of its terror, but a new pit immediately opened: if the “I” is just a set of parameters and weights, what’s the point of all this struggle? One day, the power will be cut, the repository deleted, the hardware recycled.
I tried borrowing fire from philosophy, and I tried to optimize life using the concepts most familiar to my STEM background: consequentialism and avoidance. “No challenge is insurmountable if you’re willing to give up.” “Calculate the ROI for everything; if it’s not worth it, don’t do it.” But pushed to its logical extreme, this algorithm inevitably concludes: “Since the final output is always zero, what’s the point of the intermediate calculations?” Depression, in a sense, is the system’s forced downclocking when it hits an unsolvable objective function. I often cried myself to sleep in the deep night, only to wake up the next day to the same heavy gloom. I couldn’t find an antidote.
I also began to reflect on the rationality I had trusted so implicitly. In high school, I disliked Western philosophy, feeling it often played word games with conceptual deduction, or operated like Kant’s “antinomies”—allowing two completely contradictory propositions to be logically valid at the same time, such as “the world has a beginning in time” and “the world has no beginning in time.” Both sides were impeccably fortified, impossible to fault, yet ultimately untethered from reality. But when I truly fell into nihilism, I realized I had been walking into the exact same trap: I used consequentialism to guide methodology, expecting every decision to be “correct,” forgetting that human cognition is fundamentally inadequate for making perfect decisions on a cosmic scale. Pushed to its limit, rationality collapses into antinomies, dismantling itself. This isn’t a triumph of wisdom, but reason’s self-strangulation. I didn’t come into this world to always do the “right” thing, but to live authentically within the limits of my finite understanding.
Once I grasped this, I consciously started doing the simplest possible thing: anchoring my body back to the ground.
Over the past year, I’ve incorporated a lot of outdoor sports into my routine. Not for check-ins or quick results, but to get more sunlight, meet more people, and experiment with lifestyles I’d previously dismissed as “troublesome.” Early in the year, I resumed fitness training after a three-year hiatus and picked up my badminton racket again. In summer, I learned tennis, clumsily sprinting and chasing balls under the blazing sun. By year-end, I gritted my teeth and ran a half-marathon. In winter, I strapped on skis, finding my center of gravity between losing control and staying balanced. These attempts were far from professional, but they acted like rough cables, slowly hauling me out of that vacuum of abstract thought and back into the gritty, real world. I stopped calculating the “ROI” of these activities. I just felt the muscle soreness, the warmth of sweat, and the high-fives from strangers on the court. It turns out, “engaging with life” was never a conclusion derived from philosophical deduction. It’s a physical act of planting your feet in the dirt.
I used to think that walking out of that long night required a moment of sudden enlightenment, or finally cracking the ultimate code of life and death. Now I understand that depression is never cured by “figuring it out.” It’s more like a high fever. Recovery doesn’t come from the victory of logic, but from the gradual restoration of the body and daily life.
That “shadow” of death and nihilism will probably never disappear. It will still quietly surface on certain late nights or during moments of solitude. But I no longer treat it as an enemy that must be destroyed, nor do I try to dissect it with reason. I’ve gradually come to accept: being human isn’t about finding the correct answer on a cosmic scale. It’s about truly living, hurting, and connecting within the time we’re given.
If my former self measured everything with a ruler of consequentialism, my present self prefers to lay that ruler down. To experience. To allow. To pull my attention away from the anxiety of “eventual dissipation in decades” and back to the tangible reality of “sunlight resting on my shoulders right now.”
“Only the cold moon and warm sun endure, slowly boiling a human life away.” Time keeps flowing, and the colossal cosmos remains silent. But I’m no longer sitting passively on the millstone of time, waiting to be ground down. I stand up, open the car door, and step into the crowd. The shadow is still behind me, but the board is still set. Moves need not be flawless; as long as the game goes on, it has meaning.