Ten Years of Blogging

If it weren’t for the news that NetEase Blog was about to shut down, I never would have remembered my own long-forgotten blog. I logged in and found a bunch of diary entries from 2008 and 2009 — backups transferred from Baidu Space before it closed, things I’d completely forgotten about. I thought all that content had been wiped out during several data migrations, so everything I could previously find only went back to 2010. Now I have hard proof that I’ve been blogging since 2008. It doesn’t really mean anything, but it feels as if my life has somehow just gained two extra years out of thin air.

Re-reading those two years’ worth of posts, my memory flooded back instantly. The joys and sorrows of that time, long-forgotten events, emotions that had faded away — they all returned. I remember the panic of buying a secondhand computer with my roommate when an earthquake hit, and the boredom and frustration of sitting through calculus lectures. Those fleeting dreams, pointless obsessions, ramblings with no logic whatsoever — they all rose clearly before my eyes. There was a period when I was lonely and needed to vent, so I wrote voraciously.

Over these ten years, I’ve written 310 articles, totaling 300,000 Chinese characters. These words haven’t formed any systematic philosophy, body of knowledge, or worldview — but they plainly reveal my perspective on the outside world and my approach to life. These views haven’t been set in stone. After a decade of growth, I started out with the grand ambition to “beat the railings and compose bold essays,” but gradually found myself more drawn to the quiet pleasures of “mountain-and-water vignettes.” Rather than demanding equality and universal love from society, it’s much easier to cultivate inner peace. “In me the tiger sniffs the rose” — that’s roughly the idea.

My posting frequency has slowed down a lot these days, but I’ve never thought about stopping. Preserving my inner voice is important to me. By 2028, I’ll still be publishing an article to commemorate twenty years of blogging. What kind of perspective will I have then, looking back at the gains and losses of those twenty years? No way to calculate it. But in any case — “let’s kindle a fresh fire to try the new tea; while youth lasts, let’s make the most of poetry and wine.”