Life swings like a pendulum

Title

Schopenhauer said this. Is it true?

Recent weeks are the least stressful days since I started graduate school, and I have started to feel bored. My laziness has contributed to this a lot, since there are plenty of things to do yet I haven’t taken any action. I could improve myself in almost every aspect of my life, but I just didn’t.

Then I came across this sentence while reading The Story of Philosophy: “Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom.” Last semester I was more on the pain side, but now that the pain has faded, boredom has taken its place. Once I start to work on something again, it will swing back to the pain side. It seems there’s no time to rest, or I’ll be crushed beneath the wheel of the society. So cruel!

One thing I really want to improve is my writing, but I rarely practice. Every time I finish a paragraph, I just throw it to ChatGPT and ask it to “help me fix my grammar”. (I did the same when writing this.) It provides good results, but I don’t get the chance to practice. Growing up, I was never a good writer in my class, and writing in a second language makes it even harder.

So I think I should start this week. Embrace the pain.

Mandarin

I’ve been thinking about writing blogs in Mandarin as well. However, I haven’t come up with a way to integrate Mandarin content into this blog. The blog framework supports multiple languages, but I’m not satisfy with the layout. Maybe putting them on a seperate page is a good idea?

Think

After watching how DeepSeek “thinks” by adding <think> during its reasoning process, I found myself starting to think the same way – speaking to myself before I talk. We were supposed to teach large language models how to think, but now it seems like they are teaching us.