Celebrating Double 11 — Happy Birthday to Me

This November 11th, alongside the massive Double 11 sales across major e-commerce platforms, also happens to be my 23rd birthday. I thought I’d take this chance to look back on what I’ve done over the past few years. This is a pretty long and rambling post, pieced together from bits and pieces of my notes and diaries.

A large part of this post is written as a reminder and wake-up call to myself.

Who Am I?

Sometimes, as I get older, I feel like I’m gradually losing myself. Every time I think I’ve found a solid goal, digging deeper just reveals an endless mountain of other things. Even now, I probably still can’t articulate clearly what I actually want to do. But maybe that’s just life—perpetual confusion. That’s why the most important thing right now is: once you decide to do something, don’t back out easily; otherwise, you’re just wasting your life.

Major Labor Issues

This was a project I built for Labor Day. From planning and gathering data in mid-April to the actual implementation, I didn’t actually have that much time since I had to juggle both schoolwork and my job. I even pulled all-nighters during the last two days to finish it.

A big reason was that halfway through, I kept finding more data I wanted to include, and before I knew it, the project had grown massive.

I thought I had given myself plenty of time, but there were still so many topics I couldn’t cover, such as the pension system, occupational hazard statistics, and more.

Why I Wanted to Build This Project

Back in junior high and vocational high school, perhaps due to my vocational background, I rarely paid attention to social issues or current affairs beyond catching snippets of news from newspapers and TV.

Driven by a mix of remorse and curiosity, I began collecting data and historical records on past labor movements in Taiwan. Looking at figures like wage growth, average working hours, and birth rates, only then did I realize how severe the situation really was: working hours among the highest in the world, wages stagnated for nearly a decade, the world’s lowest birth rate, and an imminent transition into a super-aged society.

If there was anything a small, insignificant person like me could do, it was probably taking to the streets on Labor Day to march and listen to the voices of workers. After all, as a soon-to-be full-time worker, I would inevitably face the very same circumstances before long.

And the reality was already this grim even before I fully entered the workforce.

Taiwan’s labor environment still has vast room for improvement, and the benefits future generations enjoy should never be taken for granted.

Past generations fought for a better labor environment with their sweat, their lives, and sometimes even their blood.

As an engineer, there’s only so much I can do; there are countless issues in this society that technology cannot reach. But if I can spark a conversation and make someone realize, “Oh, I had no idea this was happening,” that would be enough.

In fact, while researching the data, I came across many heartbreaking stories.

Like when laid-off factory workers staged a rail sit-in protest, onlookers shouted at the trains to run them over; like seeing the monument at the Taipower Building hidden in the bushes without a single name etched on it; like noticing the Workers’ Memorial at Taipei 101, yet only learning years later why it was erected in the first place.

There is so much in our society that we take for granted: the MRT running smoothly, the high-speed rail safely traveling from Kaohsiung to Taipei, Taipei 101 standing tall in the city, trash cans being emptied, restrooms being cleaned, and convenience stores open 24/7. Because of this, we often forget how much sweat (and blood) went into building it all—not to mention the workers of the past who had zero protections under the Labor Standards Act.

Japanese Yaoya

Learning Japanese

I still vaguely remember when I first started learning Japanese. Every day, I’d order a latte at a café and stay from noon until night. My study method was pretty old-school: read through the textbook lessons a few times, do the grammar exercises, and jot down new vocabulary and concepts in a notebook. I kept this up for about a year until my notebook was completely packed.

During that time, it was genuinely lonely and isolating because there was no one to practice with. Before reaching a decent level of proficiency, people would just dismiss you as an otaku or a loser. Back then, the best platform for me was Lang-8.

Sometimes it’s easy to fall into the programmer’s trap of viewing everything through the filter of “is this related to coding?” While that was a helpful heuristic for me back then, it certainly shouldn’t be an excuse to avoid learning new things.

A few years ago, I wrote a post titled “Novels, My Favorite Drug.” Looking back, both the writing style and the ideas were immature and naive. Still, I’m grateful I used different mediums to document my life back then. Beyond my blog, I have written four journals from junior high until now.

Looking back from where I am today, I can’t help but chuckle at how ridiculous and foolish I used to be, but all of that truly shaped who I am today. I never want to become someone whose eyes lose their spark outside of writing code, incapable of feeling passionate about anything else in the world.

A few months ago, I started preparing an online course. It was a unique experience for me since I had zero prior Japanese teaching experience. But I wanted to seize the opportunity to practice curriculum design and systematically organize my past notes and learning experiences.

The planning phase took 2 to 3 weeks, thinking through the challenges a beginner faces when starting Japanese and pacing the progression through nouns, adjectives, verbs, and polite-to-plain form conversions. I was nervous when submitting it for review, terrified it wouldn’t be approved—while secretly thinking that if it failed, at least I wouldn’t have to prepare the rest XD.

Once approved, I plunged into three hectic months. Every day after work, I sat in front of my computer recording audio and writing handouts. Fortunately, the course structure had been well-planned from the start, allowing the course to launch smoothly.

It made me realize firsthand just how difficult online teaching is. While it eliminates the repetitive delivery and physical venue constraints of in-person classes, editing each video took nearly 3 to 4 hours of production and fine-tuning—not to mention subtitles, which were especially tedious with bilingual switching in a language course.

But in the end, it launched successfully. It was an incredibly rewarding milestone for me; watching students enroll and ask questions made every bit of effort worth it.

Japanese Self-Study Articles Round-up

Language Skills

In this day and age, language proficiency is practically a baseline requirement. What’s more, there are unimaginably many people in Taiwan who are better at languages than I am. Almost every university and technical college has an applied foreign languages department where English and Japanese are standard fare. Even if you master both, you are still just a single data point in a vast sample size.

Organizing Experience

Did everyone keep an “error correction notebook” when they were kids? If we record the problems we encounter and document how we solved them at the time, we can resolve similar issues much faster in the future.

When developing software, I jot down problems as they arise, along with related concepts that branch off during the process. At the end of each month, I do a review, flesh out notes that have matured into well-rounded ideas, and publish them as articles.

The only thing that can change you is your own actions.

Your Future Isn’t Tightening Screws on an Assembly Line

Modern Times is one of Charlie Chaplin’s most famous silent films. Influenced by industrialization and the Great Depression, workers were exploited by capitalists while millions lost their jobs. It’s a deeply satirical film.

In today’s era of excess capital, survival is no longer our biggest hurdle.

But if you don’t reflect on your life, you are no different from the worker in the film, spending all day tightening screws in a factory.

More than ruling, I would rather help others. — Charlie Chaplin

Don’t Do Work You Don’t Enjoy

Having passion for something is a tremendous asset. For example, back when I needed to earn money, I worked morning shifts at Burger King and had to rely on studying at night to fill my gaps in programming. Once I started an internship, I realized the intensity was night and day compared to before. Everything is magnified under the pressure of work, and the resulting ripple effect can be terrifying. It was only during my internship that I was exposed to many practices that online courses never taught, yet were already being adopted in the industry.

While others spend 10 hours a day doing what they love, you’re only squeezing in a few spare minutes here and there. Talent gap aside, the sheer difference in time invested already creates a massive divide.

Don’t Compare How Many Credits You’re Taking

Under the current university system, the graduation requirement is usually around 120 to 140 credits. Aside from major electives and required courses, there are nearly 30+ credits of general education requirements.

Honestly, do you actually learn anything from those general education classes, or are they just easy A’s where students and professors mutually cut corners? During my freshman year, I maxed out my credits and hunted for classes that seemed interesting. Although my schedule looked impressively packed on paper, only a handful of courses offered real substance—not to mention that course selection for general ed at NTUST is basically a joke.

Rather than pushing for whatever trendy educational reform is in vogue, finding what you genuinely want to do is what actually matters. Academic pressure might have been slightly lighter in vocational high school, but standard schooling today is almost like a workplace—cramming 8 hours a day, followed by cram school at night. Coming home exhausted at night, who has the energy to deeply ponder the essence of what they’ve learned, care about the world around them, or even cultivate personal hobbies?

That’s why, while pursuing knowledge, getting out to observe the world, reflecting, and making deliberate choices is infinitely more important than comparing credit counts with peers.

Don’t Get Swayed by Buzzwords

Do you genuinely enjoy what you’re doing right now, or are you just riding the current wave? The recent hype around coding education, interdisciplinary curriculums, machine learning, and the like are largely hollow trends if you don’t examine your purpose. Without understanding why you’re learning them, diving into these fields will only drag you into a swamp of misery.

No one can decide your future for you.

If deciding what you want to do is too difficult, you can start by deciding what you don’t want to do.

Don’t Regret Your Choices

Life is a series of choices. Doing an internship is great; studying is great; studying abroad is great; traveling is great; staying in Taiwan is great. As long as it’s what you want, that’s all that matters.

But don’t look back on your life with regret. Once you grow resentful, you are merely squandering your life. Even though I’m still not entirely certain whether continuing down this path is the right choice.

Don’t Chase Superficial Relationships

When I first entered college, I often took part in “social” activities with classmates—having lunch together, hitting the night markets, singing karaoke, and so on. Looking back, maybe I was just terrified of being alone and having to constantly confront questions about myself.

Yet that solitary time is often the most critical. No one is suddenly going to become your confidant just because you grabbed a meal or shared a few casual chats together—let alone treating that kind of socializing as “networking.”

So if you genuinely want to find close friends in college, perhaps start with student clubs or taking on leadership roles. When a group of people rallies around a shared goal, it’s far easier to build meaningful connections beyond lunchtime small talk.

Youth Isn’t an Asset

Many people say that youth is your greatest asset. Currently, I’m fortunate enough to work on teams where the average age is under 30.

But in this society, many people don’t actually care about your experience or abilities. For instance, even though I have over two years of work experience, society still views me as just a fresh college graduate, using pretty rhetoric merely to lowball my salary.

They usually don’t care about what you’ve actually built or done; instead, they focus on blunt metrics like your degree, whether you worked at a publicly traded company, or your TOEIC score—metrics that tell you almost nothing. Of course, capable people often meet those criteria anyway, but true talent doesn’t care about labels like credentials or age. After all, “senior” sometimes just means you’ve stayed around longer.

Facebook

Recently, I unfollowed and removed many distracting fan pages and content farms on Facebook—dashcam clip pages, Apple Daily, breaking tabloid news, and so on. I tried my best to prevent my feed from being assaulted by things I despise.

What’s disheartening is that viral YouTube drama, leaked celebrity photos, or “Top Things You Must Do Before You Die” lists always draw overwhelming engagement in the comments.

They seem harmless on the surface, but they quietly corrode your mind. Especially for someone like me who is easily hooked by the next suggested video: once I click on the first one, I keep watching.

Ultimately, to avoid annoying notifications, I deleted the Facebook app altogether. Aside from feeling slightly unnatural at first, life didn’t change much—in fact, it freed up a lot of time. I stopped subconsciously opening the app. If I really want to browse, I use the mobile web version. That clunky, barebones user experience actually helps cut down the hours I’d otherwise waste on Facebook.

Thinking Matters Most

Taiwan’s education system funnels students into strict vocational or academic tracks right after junior high. Those with poorer grades get shuttled off to second-rate vocational schools. Schedules are crammed to the brim with 8-hour school days just like a full-time job, followed by cram schools. There is simply no time left to reflect on life or pay attention to the world around you; it only conditions people to be submissive.

For an average person who isn’t hopelessly dim and comes from a decent financial background, cruising smoothly through college is the standard statistical norm. Yet mysteriously, after graduation, many end up in dead-end, bottom-of-the-barrel jobs. And they believe they worked really hard.

But “hard work” is a rather ironic phrase. In this day and age, working hard is merely a baseline expectation, not a noteworthy virtue to brag about. In college, students scramble frantically for credits, taking obscure courses just to boost their GPA, and when effort alone won’t guarantee a passing grade, they try to curry favor or coast through on shortcuts.

In the end, four years go by, and none of it helps when searching for a job. Growing up, we never learned to truly reflect on what we want. As a result, after graduating from university, people gradually lose the capacity for independent thought, turning into passive islanders drifting with the tide.

“Don’t ask questions, just work hard”; “Legal reforms? There’s nothing we can do”; “Underpaid? Well, life goes on even if you’re unhappy.” And so, society cultivates a herd of aimless citizens who have no goals in life and do nothing but complain each day.

Not only do they despise those higher up the ladder, but whenever someone dares to resist and speak up for society—especially someone who doesn’t seem to have it as rough as they do—they band together to tear that person down. It becomes a vicious cycle of the powerless preying on the powerless, terrified that someone else might end up with a slightly better life than their own.

These people do work hard, but when fed a flawed education coupled with intellectual laziness, this is often the inevitable outcome.

That is why learning how to think is of paramount importance—it is a lifelong pursuit. People often quote “Life has a limit, but knowledge has none,” while conveniently omitting the next line: “To chase the limitless with the limited is perilous; and to continue striving for knowledge thinking one is wise is peril itself.” Spending a finite life chasing infinite knowledge (and awareness) without reflection is dangerous. Believing you are brilliant while doing so is even more dangerous.

A deficit in knowledge can be compensated for by deep thinking. But knowing just a little while refusing to think, ending up incapable of doing anything well—that is what’s truly terrifying. And sadly, many Taiwanese university students today seem to be heading down this exact path.

As for how to practice thinking, reading might be the best place to start.

Goals for 2018

In the blink of an eye, four or five years have passed. I’ve taken quite a few detours. Every year when my birthday comes around, I feel a pang of anxiety about getting older without much to show for it, unsure whether I’m on the right track. Looking back at what happened, I can’t help feeling that I squandered a good portion of that time. Yet even so, it’s undeniably a part of who I am.

There is still so much I want to do. But if I had to define a single overarching goal, it would probably be: “I want to be a useful person.”

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