I have nothing to say
I myself have nothing left to say.
I no longer have the energy to comment on the world as it is. Academic pressure, work, and the demands I place on myself have left me utterly exhausted. I want to rest.
Lacan revealed long ago that the Other will neither hear your words nor see your being. And yet, people insist on following the Other, revering the Other, flattering and fawning over the Other, stepping on some to elevate others… People exhaust every means available just to be seen by the Other. If they are not seen, they wander this world like the walking dead, as though their very soul has been drained from them.
Of all things in this world, nothing matters more than nature; of all people in this world, none matter more than family and loved ones. Don't forget yourself — taking care of yourself is the most important thing of all.
Relentless work has broken the body and depleted the spirit; and so, biological viruses flood the body while informational viruses flood the mind. The body falls ill; the psyche is torn apart by mania, or swept up in irrationality. Under the siege of junk information and noise, people grow melancholic, desperately searching for substitutes for joy — forming a new epidemic neurosis.
My path in counseling follows the way of the Bodhisattva. All beings suffer, and I once sought to rescue the world from fire and flood. But the spirit is willing while the flesh is weak — this is not something that can be accomplished overnight. I must slow down, recalibrate my priorities, in order to keep going. Otherwise, in the long run, I will lose myself entirely.
We are not saints, after all. Who among us is without fault, and who among us can truly save anyone? Take care of yourself first.
In the age of AI, desire is a bottomless pit. People's desires reek. Social media amplifies and spreads this stench of desire. The arrogant always wish to do more — just as Qin Shi Huang once fantasized about immortality, they fantasize about "mechanical ascension," "eternal life," even cloning themselves… In this process, they unconsciously annihilate the self. AI could have improved your efficiency, helping you resolve the problems right here, right now, in the present — rather than dragging the future into the present and squeezing every last drop of your time.
The time AI saves — wouldn't it be better spent taking care of yourself, being with your partner, your family, your children, going out to play, traveling together?
I truly cannot understand why people choose to trap themselves in "tomorrow" rather than "today." If you were to die tomorrow, what would you do today?
These people are utterly laughable; I sincerely hope I never encounter them in my life. We need the virtual world, and we need the real world; the virtual world is created to escape reality, to satisfy fantasies and fill in what is lacking; the real world, in turn, is an escape from the coldness of the virtual world and the mountains of algorithmic garbage. There are miserable things and miserable people everywhere. If society is to improve, it cannot do without educating people. Yet educating people requires the accumulation of time — it runs counter to the rapid pace of technological development. Many criticize the slowness of education, not realizing that it is technology that has advanced too fast, outpacing people's actual needs, and then using words like "outdated" to judge those who cannot keep up with the technological "trend." Practitioners carry an unconscious arrogance; in their minds, there is no general public — only "user bases" that generate profit. Young people will one day grow old, and their capacity to learn will decline.
There are many things we need not concern ourselves with at all, because they have nothing to do with us — it is only that others tell us something seems relevant to us, and that if we don't seize that relevance in time, we will "die." If you are a corner-shop owner, what does AI have to do with you? If you are a security guard, what does AI have to do with you?
AI has become the new Other. In image generation, the quality of female images surpasses that of male images.
It devours women, and it excretes women. Women-as-commodities are unaware; even if they are aware, they are powerless — left to be carved up at will. People can conjure, with just a few words, the female image of their fantasies, tailored to their fetishes, posing and positioning them like puppets.
The first to be commodified, to become data, to put themselves on display, to be spectacles, to become a business methodology — it was women, and only women.
In truth, women have always been exploited without knowing it. In the age of AI, the exploitation is worse. Feminists' critiques of the Other (which they persistently misidentify as "patriarchy") have not shifted their gaze from rigid, outdated cinematic and televisual images to AI-generated images. This is both tragic and foolish.
In our world, women exist through a multitude of identities. The Earth is a mother, the homeland is a mother, the land is a mother; voices are feminine — subway and bus announcements, Japanese elevator broadcasts, phone voice assistants (Xiao Bu, Xiao Ai, Red Magic Girl…); AI avatars are female (Doubao, Grok). Salespeople and restaurant servers are women; now even men are required to become feminine — celebrities must be gentle, low-key, humble, never proud, not even permitted a moment of passionate emotion.
Whether in voice or image, the feminine is something the public has demanded into existence, elevated into being. People who were never adequately nurtured by their mothers go out into society and, like children, throw tantrums, demanding "meticulous" care from everyone around them. At the slightest dissatisfaction, just as they would at home, they bully the mother and fear the father. Women seem forever to be the ones bullied — bullied by men — and it only stops when the father (regulators, police, authoritative media) intervenes. Didn't the rose boy die precisely because of this femininity? And yet, the only thing people learn from history is that they learn nothing at all.
Now, men have invaded the feminine world. Men who disguise themselves through other feminine identity-symbols have, visually, become women, and begun competing with other women on video platforms. Butler said gender is a performance. These people have exploited a loophole — men have once again seized women's visual capital, or what one might call the "attention economy." This threatens not only the women who depend on these advantages for a living, but also the Other's "marriage rates." I do not wish to analyze at length the intentions behind men enjoying watching men who perform as women. But put simply, they derive pleasure from this process without having to bear the moral censure produced by the superego. Moreover, compared to taking medication to transition to female (aside from those with genuine internal conflict) for economic gain, this route is far more cost-effective. How could the Other possibly allow such a loophole to persist? It will inevitably be shut down. Popular figures on Douyin have already been banned or warned in succession.
Where is feminism now, at this moment?
Regarding the exploitation and oppression women endure, as well as the encouragement of and inquiry into women's conditions — male and female sociologists, psychoanalysts, and feminists have all provided detailed analyses and advocacy in their writings. As a feminist, this kind of interrogation of social phenomena — like what I am doing here — is necessary.
The female body is being dismembered and dissolved, from the inside out. On the symbolic level, modern women have already lost their standing.
Now, the elders have all but stopped speaking on public platforms. Everyone is either selling courses on Bilibili or selling courses on Dedao. Even in the public sphere, certain things cannot be said. When one is compelled to speak, it can only be done obliquely, in roundabout ways. Speakers cannot speak plainly; listeners cannot understand. And so the humanities slowly dissolve into a muddle.