For me, 2023 was without doubt a long year. At the end of the year, media outlets and independent creators made their usual year-in-review pieces. Whenever I saw those summaries and happened to read news from early 2023, I was surprised that it had happened in 2023 rather than earlier, in 2022 or 2021. That is unusual for someone about to turn thirty. In my memory, time only felt slow when I was a confused and idle child.

Why Resist the Void

In 2023, I went through many changes in work and relationships. Fortunately, most of them have now been resolved, but new problems keep appearing. I cannot say whether I, or the whole era, are still moving upward. The immense uncertainty of the future keeps pushing me toward nihilism.

I am not someone who wants merely to scrape by. But as time passes, I feel more and more strongly the absurdity of the world and the emptiness of life as part of that absurd world.

On the last working day of 2023, I posted a WeChat Moments update summarizing my year in a few words: “work injury, surgery, moving, buying a car, proposal.” It was like writing a chronicle of someone in another universe who had nothing to do with me. My own experiences were reduced to a handful of plain words.

In the past, I arrogantly treated these insignificant experiences as part of my important personal history, recording them again and again in rough year-end summaries, as if that could resist the meaninglessness of life. Gradually I realized that the void of life does not exist only at the level of narration. It exists solidly. It is larger than our own existence, and older than our own history.

Does that mean we should accept the void? When we make choices that appear important, should we still take them seriously? If the world is absurd and life is empty, why struggle to choose at all?

I thought about this for a long time, especially while lying in a hospital bed after a traffic accident. I still do not have a definite answer, but a vague idea has appeared in my mind: I want to resist the void.

The absurdity of the world may be unshakable, but that does not stop us from resisting the emptiness of life. “The emptiness of life” is a conclusion drawn from outcomes: no matter how hard we struggle, the final result may have no meaning. But perhaps we are not born to pursue a result, nor to create some grand meaning. The process of existing itself should be what we pursue.

Years ago, someone seriously discussed a question with me: if we knew in advance that a relationship would not end well, should we still try to maintain it? At the time, I was unsure and did not understand the deeper meaning. Now I think it perfectly explains why we resist the void.

The meaning of a relationship does not lie in whether it ends well. It lies in whether it gives the people inside it moments of peace and joy. Even if I knew in advance that a relationship would have no result, I should still try to accept it, maintain it, and enjoy it. That is both the process of resisting the void and the reason to resist it.

Even if we are entering a turbulent era, even if great risks are unavoidable, even if I may face more suffering, I still want to struggle with all my strength and enjoy the process of struggling. The purpose of resisting the void is not to eliminate it, but to accept and even enjoy it. I want to pursue inner peace and spiritual freedom before the building collapses, so that when the final judgment comes, I can smile and perish with the world.

How to Resist the Void

If we want to resist the void, we need to find the right way.

I grew up in an era that heavily stigmatized pre-Qin Confucianism. From the official sphere to ordinary public discourse, most people were either distorting and using Confucian thought, or attacking and rejecting it. Confucianism tells us to first cultivate ourselves, then order the family, then govern the state, and finally bring peace to the world. Our textbooks taught the reverse: put others before oneself, put the state before the family, and learn from Comrade Lei Feng.

This overly “modern” approach destroyed the original social structure. It pulled everyone away from their small natural communities and made them submit to a constructed larger community. Absurdity and emptiness became more visible, hovering over everyone and slowly eating away at life.

To resist this modern, imposed sense of emptiness, we need to return to an older place: to the original, more “natural” social structure, and to the thought rooted in that structure. That means early Confucian thought before later fusion and distortion.

To resist the void, we should first cultivate ourselves and then tend to the family. We should make ourselves calm and full, then make the household harmonious and secure, and only then consider those constructed concepts. The same approach applies when facing complex social events. We should first respect and care about the person, the human being, and only then turn to the other things made up of individual people. If everyone were willing to think and act this way, the world would surely become better.

In 2023, I was still struggling on the road of self-cultivation and family-building, and on the road of resisting the void. I tried hard at many things, and I messed up many things. In 2024, this will remain my theme. The most important part for me is self-cultivation. More specifically, it is staying humble.