Introduction

This post is for myself. It’s a 2024 summary, but also a record of my thoughts and journey over the past few years. My writing isn’t the most polished, and I have a lot I want to say but don’t quite know how to synthesize it all. So, here it is.

My Journey from 2020 to 2024

Since 2020, I’ve felt time accelerating. Even though I’ve experienced a lot, I haven’t been able to recapture that pre-2020 feeling—the sense that I was living each day intentionally or that time was a vast resource. However, looking at it objectively, I’ve done a lot every year. This year, in particular, was packed.

The volume of events seems to increase every year, yet my subjective feeling remains: “Time is flying, and I haven’t really done anything.” This paradox confuses me.

Theoretical Explanations for Life

Note: These theories are purely personal conjecture, unverified and unanalyzed. Proceed with skepticism.

In the second half of 2023, while I was supposed to be prepping for post-grad exams, I suffered from severe eye pain. I could barely keep my eyes open for more than four hours a day. During that time, drifting in and out of sleep, I developed a theory to explain life. I became obsessed with “explaining” existence.

State Behavior Theory

I even named these ideas. The first was “State Behavior Theory.” I treated all factors influencing human behavior as quantifiable variables (emotions, information access, past experiences, environmental factors). Each variable has a weight. If you could capture enough variables, you could predict a person’s behavior with high accuracy. Extrapolating this: if you knew every variable for every person, life would be deterministic.

The theory didn’t start this way. It began as a few days of daydreaming until I realized it mapped almost perfectly to “State Behaviors” in Unity. That’s where the name came from. After analyzing more situations, it evolved into its current form.

Circle Theory

To help identify specific variables, I came up with “Circle Theory” to describe social influence. This grew from my observations of the internet. As I shifted from deep diving into single topics to a broader exploration of many, I noticed a strange phenomenon: internet populations are divided into “circles” based on interests. Each circle has its own self-consistent logic. Things that are shocking to the outside world are mundane inside the circle, and vice versa. There are also opposing circles—one claims X is good and everything else is bad, while the other claims the exact opposite. Circles aren’t isolated; they can be grouped into sets, where the behavior of the set represents the behavior of its subsets.

It’s similar to the concept of “information cocoons” or “echo chambers,” where people see what they want to see. Because the world is so populated, you can always find people who agree with you, reinforcing your views until you have a perfectly self-contained explanation for everything.

Of course, these are just base conclusions. To explain a complex world, you need derivations and auxiliary theories.

Explaining Famous Quotes

For example, why do famous quotes often feel so profound? Based on State Behavior Theory (or a generalized theory of everything), we can assume things in the world share a “root parent class.” This root evolves into subclasses, which then evolve into abstract classes. When someone experiences something that is essentially an implementation of an abstract class, they summarize it into a quote. When we have a different experience that implements the same abstract class, the quote feels deeply resonant.

More rigorously: human history is so well-recorded that almost every possible choice has been made before (maybe not the exact event, but the abstraction of it). Therefore, you can find support or cautionary tales for literally anything. I don’t believe in absolute rights or wrongs; things are just relatively right or wrong within specific states or contexts.

Trust Interpretation Theory

Another one I’ve been thinking about lately is Trust Interpretation Theory. I believe the world runs on trust. When I cross the street, I trust the driver won’t suddenly hit me. When I walk past a stranger, I trust they won’t pull out a knife. These are common, habitual actions built on a foundation of generalized trust.

I’ve considered many other theories over the last 18 months, but I’ve forgotten most of them.

The Gap Between Theory and Practice

Occasionally, I wonder: if I could just do what I want as freely as a child, would I feel more free? But then I realize that child was buried long ago under the soil of rules.

Even though I could “explain” my life problems, it didn’t help me live through them. In fact, it started having negative effects.

As my explanations grew, I slowly realized I was too immersed in the “why” and forgot that life is the “result.” I was constantly thinking about which choice would produce which output. While planning for every possibility makes for a smoother experience, it also makes life feel like a game where you’re skipping NPC dialogue. You’re just waiting for people to say the lines you’ve already anticipated so you can pick the response you’ve already analyzed. Life becomes boring.

I tried to distract myself with entertainment: walking, shopping, running, traveling, gaming. But despite having the freedom to choose, I felt chained. Even leisure felt like a task—a way to achieve “numerical balance” in my psyche rather than actual joy. My life became a simulation game. When stressed, I followed the “rule” of “schedule entertainment to lower stress.” I quantified my life: this event caused X stress, so I need Y activity to reduce it. These activities weren’t things I truly enjoyed; they were just “stress relief” protocols that are generally considered effective. I felt like a child who is “scheduled” to play—they are going through the motions, but their heart isn’t in it.

I am the designer and the executor of my own life. I’m following a script I wrote myself just to finish the task, but I’ve lost the emotional connection.

I felt like I was living under a set of invisible chains. I had to follow specific rules; anything else was “bad” or “wrong.” Or perhaps I was seeking validation—if I do X, I’ll be accepted; if I do Y, I won’t.

Is this just another “Circle Theory” trap? Is my explanation of the world just part of another explanation? It’s like I see the world as points on an axis, and I’ve drawn the axis to explain them, but I myself am still trapped within the 2D coordinate system.

Since Bilibili’s embedding is poor, I’ve linked the YouTube version. Kano has an official account. Bilibili ID: BV1zr4y1n7sM

I suspected I was depressed. I even planned how I might end it. Writing this, I’m reminded of a lyric from Boku ga Shinou to Omotta no wa (I Thought About Ending It All): “The reason I think about death so much is because I’m probably too serious about living.” Exactly. Was I taking life too seriously?

Other parts of that song resonate too. “Today is just like yesterday.” Even if the events are different, my logic for processing them remains the same. The theory doesn’t change, so life doesn’t feel like it changes.

“Fighting an invisible enemy.” Who am I fighting? It seems I’m fighting the negative side of the rules I created—my own uncertainty and my stubbornness regarding sadness.

“If you want to change tomorrow, you have to change today. I know. I know. But…” But what can I change? Based on my theoretical framework, even if I talk to others and they give me advice that moves me, I still fall back into the same patterns of sadness.

“I thought about ending it all because I was told I was a cold person.” But I was just responding in a way I thought would be interesting to others.

“Crying because I want to be loved is because I’ve learned the warmth of people.” Their concern is based on respect or social etiquette, not true care for me. I respond with polite, mechanical replies, void of emotion.

“I thought about ending it all because I hadn’t met you yet… because someone like you was born, I like the world a little more. Because someone like you exists, I have a little hope for the world.” But even when I seek help or get advice, I process it through my theory. It feels like a deterministic output. I call an API, input data, and get a result. If I do this, I get that. It’s too certain.

But life is inherently uncertain. I began to fear that uncertainty. To combat that fear, I tried to “patch” my theories, adding more sub-theories to explain away the unknown. It worked temporarily, but humans aren’t perfectly rational. Our first instinct is emotional. My theory acknowledged this—rationality told me the emotion was temporary and that time would eventually heal the wound.

Shifting from Explanation to Action

Time flows like a river. I was standing on the bank calculating the volume of water, but I forgot to feel its temperature.

I built a rational framework but became its prisoner. Even with total freedom, I felt restricted. The biggest flaw in my theory was that it over-emphasized logic and ignored experience and emotion. I was acting like an algorithm, following rules, only to realize I needed to actually express how I felt. It’s a slow transition. Changing a theory is instant, but changing a mindset or behavior is hard. It’s difficult to stop looking at everything through the lens of its “root cause.”

I first realized my reliance on theory was becoming toxic. Even that realization could be explained by the theory itself (it explains everything, including its own failure). But people can change. Variables accumulate, weights shift, and eventually, they force a pivot.

Meeting more people helped. Isolation protects you from social pain, but it limits your scope. I actually have my theory to thank for my first steps. While my introverted side thought talking to people was “inefficient,” the logical side told me it wasn’t illegal or against any rules, so it was a valid choice. Starting with one person with a great personality, I slowly began to change.

Broadening my social circle allowed for deeper thinking, which refined the theory. This refined theory gave me more options (and more fears, since high risk equals high reward), but it also forced me to pay more attention to how things felt. This focus on feeling pulled me back from pure quantification.

Quantification wasn’t enough anyway. Last month, I heard a dialogue while practicing my listening skills:

A: Which of these two is better? B: A is pretty good. A: Wouldn’t B be better? (Explains why) B: If you already have a conclusion, why are you asking me?

This simple dialogue stuck with me. Often, I know what I want to do, but I don’t act. I just keep checking possibilities, trying to find every branch to maintain “certainty.” I wasn’t even looking for the “optimal” solution. That dialogue sparked something in me—the idea that the point of making a choice is to get the result you actually want.

Or perhaps I just didn’t have a real goal. I wasn’t setting goals based on my own emotions or needs; I was setting goals based on “possibilities.” I didn’t actually like the goals I was creating.

I started increasing the weight of the “feelings” variable. I need to prioritize the things I like. Theories are tools for understanding the world; they shouldn’t be the master. I shouldn’t be governed by them. I should use them to reach the goals I want and the life I love!

Current State

I can express myself freely. I can act freely (within the law). Writing this post is proof that I’m breaking the chains. I used to think this was embarrassing—I didn’t even want to record my theories, which is why I forgot some of them.

I realize that living is a process. That’s an unchangeable fact. As I once told a friend, “If you can’t change it, you have to adapt.” Life is full of people—the wonderful and the unfortunate. When we are sad, it’s usually because the unfortunate things have piled up and blinded us to the good things we still have.

As it says on my About Page , “Show up in style no matter when; put your whole heart into every experience.” To the world, I’m just an individual, a number. But to myself, I am the whole world!

“ Everything is a cloud, as long as you have a good mood ,” activate your Atopes , do what you love, buy what you like, and go where you want to go. Don’t overthink it. Express yourself.

I’m thinking of RimoChan ’s avatar right now. Truly love your life. You can spend a day in happiness or a day in pain—there’s no need for internal friction.

Conclusion

What will next year bring? I’ll end with the tagline from my blog:

Let’s program this imperfect world into the way I want it to be!