The Ten-Year Questionnaire
We are closer to 2050 than to 1990.
I came across this ten-year questionnaire on 椒盐鸵鸟’s blog and found it interesting enough to fill out myself. Back in the QQ Zone and Renren days, there was a popular chain game where tagged friends had to answer a set of questions. The last time I played was in 2014 on WeChat Moments — seven years ago already. Whether people have genuinely stopped playing or I’ve simply aged out of it, I can’t tell. Either way, let this old man indulge in a moment of youthful impulse.
Describe your current life in three sentences.
Product work by day. Writing by night. Skiing on weekends.
Share the most memorable moment from the past decade.
The night of February 7, 2020, when Dr. Li Wenliang died. I was home — everyone was home then. The shape of the virus was still unclear. But even through my screen, I could feel the weight of countless hearts reaching out, a tidal force, something resonating with enormous intensity.
Two years on, COVID-19 has reshaped the world profoundly, and I’m struck by how quickly people adapt and how thoroughly they forget. Or perhaps they haven’t truly forgotten — his Weibo page is still there, with new comments appearing every minute, a kind of modern-day Wailing Wall.
And yet in the public sphere, the conversation has gone completely silent. The system managed the crisis effectively, and with the Western “beacon” offering such a stark counterexample, the public has only grown more fervent in fueling the machine, pressing the accelerator, faster and faster.
I forgot most of what I learned in my college major the moment I started working, but I still remember something from a philosophy elective: knowledge is equivalent to justified true belief. Mere true belief may be nothing more than epistemic luck.
Do you feel you’ve changed much compared to a decade ago?
An entirely different person. The me of ten years ago would probably be frightened by who I am now.
Perhaps because my childhood was so sheltered, pre-adolescent me was deeply introverted, passive, even timid — unable to articulate needs, incapable of initiating friendships. I still wouldn’t call myself extroverted, but if I put on the Sorting Hat today, it would place me in Gryffindor without hesitation.
Are you still in regular contact with the people who were around you ten years ago? Can you still have deep conversations with old friends?
Forget ten years — I’m still in touch with friends from elementary school. We don’t talk often, but the connections endure.
Has your career path changed from what you originally planned? What led you to your current field? What do hobbies mean to you?
Career: internet industry, product management, startup. During college I interned across different sectors. High-status finance and consulting didn’t suit me. The scrappy internet scene — the then-unglamorous Toutiao (ByteDance) — was much more my speed. I still remember walking into their low-rise building at Zhonghang Plaza for the first time: the soaring ceilings and natural light made me accept the offer on the spot. Before that I’d been interning at CICC, squeezing into the subway before dawn to reach the towers at Guomao, taking a taxi home past ten, never seeing daylight. My family got a computer in 1998 and I started using it early, but I was limited to two hours per week. It wasn’t until college, when I had my own laptop, that I truly felt the superpower computers could grant. Joining the internet industry? Working in software? Building apps? I can’t think of a word that precisely describes what we do. It all happened naturally — I drifted into this field as though it were inevitable.
Hobbies: skiing and science fiction. I was a frail kid, bad at sports, while my cousins all excelled athletically. The constant comparison crushed any confidence I had in physical activities. The first time I tried skiing was after college graduation. The sensation of gliding was intoxicating. I started from absolute zero — learning from friends, watching tutorial videos (shoutout to 黄加蓝) — progressing from crashing pathetically to snowplowing, to carving turns. Now I can ride any run at Chongli top to bottom in a single take. At the risk of sentimentality: I managed to inspire myself. I’ve always had strange ideas — predictions about technology, fantasies about the future. (I didn’t realize they were strange at first; it took other people telling me repeatedly before I understood that most people don’t think that way.) I work in tech and love literature — perhaps I, too, can stand at that “intersection of technology and the humanities.” I write for fun in my spare time, though my prose is still far too weak.
How has your relationship with your parents changed compared to ten years ago?
Like a kite that has flown very far.
Do you plan to have children? (What are your thoughts on family?)
Zero or many. When everyone stops having children, those who do will reap enormous dividends. The one-child policy effectively prevented the formation of aristocratic politics in China — but now that it’s been lifted, does anyone fancy playing Sima Yi?
Would you want to go back to ten years ago?
No.
In 2011, my access to information was extremely limited, and Nanchang was a closed-off, relatively underdeveloped city. But the world is so vast.
Are you afraid of getting old?
No. I used to be deeply anxious about age, having encountered too many people who achieved remarkable things while still very young.
Zuckerberg took his company public at 28 — I’ll never catch up to that. But then I thought: even the impressive young people around me are nowhere near Zuckerberg’s level. We’re all in the same boat, just arguing over degrees of distance. What’s there to be anxious about?
A while back I had dinner with a mentor-slash-friend. When the topic of age came up, he told me that 50 is the peak of human capability — that it should be. What does a 25-year-old have? Passion and stamina, nothing more. At 50, you have experience, resources, and the judgment to know what the right thing to do is. The body slows down? Who says you have to do everything yourself? With the leverage of management, you can mobilize ten times as many young people.
In early 2018, I saw an improvised big band performance at Blue Note Beijing. The musicians took turns stepping into the spotlight — sometimes the saxophone, sometimes the drums, sometimes the piano. No sheet music. They competed and collaborated in equal measure, co-creating something extraordinary. No one was the center forever, and no one was permanently in the background. It’s all about timing.
What do you think is the most essential thing (or problem to solve) in a lifetime?
Throughout human history, there have been many simple inventions that produced enormous consequences. The one that impresses me most is the stirrup.
Before the stirrup, horses were merely transportation. Cavalry fought primarily with bows — limited in lethality — so nomadic raiders would ride in, plunder, and flee. Try using a sword or lance? Newton’s third law: the impact would unseat the rider first. Agricultural civilizations could still compensate for their lack of mobility by assembling massive infantry formations, using sheer population to offset local defeats, pushing the Xiongnu all the way to Mount Langju. (This approach, by the way, carried staggering costs in logistics and casualties, which forced Emperor Wu of Han to impose salt and iron monopolies and endless currency debasement to turbocharge the state apparatus. The common people of the mighty Han dynasty lived miserably.)
The stirrup changed warfare entirely. Cavalry could charge with lances braced, their feet planted in the stirrups to absorb the impact. Infantry formations crumbled before a cavalry charge like beads on a skewer. And the advantage compounded: cavalry carried their own supplies, horses grazed as they went — infinite range. Infantry could neither pursue nor escape.
Metal single stirrups appeared in China during the Wei-Jin period; double stirrups followed in the Eastern Jin. Coinciding with a Little Ice Age, nomadic peoples rode south, and Chinese civilization entered an era of great ethnic convergence. Later, Genghis Khan launched three westward campaigns on horseback. Europe developed its knight class, the Crusades brought back ancient Greek texts preserved by Arab scholars during the Translation Movement, sparking the Renaissance in medieval Europe. All of these transformations trace back, through tangled threads, to the invention of the stirrup.
So what other simple invention could produce such enormous impact? When human civilization hits a bottleneck, when all advanced tools have been universally adopted and everyone’s productivity has been equalized, the factor that determines progress may be the most fundamental, most overlooked one — time. I want to build good tools, paired with good methods, so that more people’s time is spent more meaningfully, thereby raising humanity’s collective productivity and well-being.
A few more things
I set up this newsletter at the end of July, but I could never decide what to do with it.
My original idea was simple: a place to write, share updates, and stay connected with people in a convenient way. I don’t like WeChat Moments or WeChat messaging. The official accounts platform is passable, but Tencent’s censorship is too aggressive. (Part of my dislike for WeChat stems from the fact that my old account got nuked — that story is in A Month Semi-Detached from WeChat.)
So I was very clear that this newsletter would not be a content curation service — I can just drop links in Telegram for that. Over the past few months, I went through some low points. At the time I didn’t think things were that bad, but looking back now I can see I was in genuinely poor shape. There were many reasons — 99% were my own doing, and I’m a slow person when it comes to self-awareness. So Ventuss Correspondence kept getting postponed until now, when I’m barely managing to send this first update.
Feel free to subscribe or unsubscribe. Since this is correspondence, I’d actually prefer it not to be widely shared — something more private, like letters between gentlemen in ancient times, carried by messenger pigeons. Back when mail traveled by horse and boat, everything moved slowly. I’ve already planned the next few letters: what we talk about when we ski; on outcomes that never arrive; a science fiction story: the last Coca-Cola on Earth; why I’m building Polytime; some life updates; the annual year-end review.
Thank you for reading this far. Wishing you well.
btw, if you’re interested, try writing your own ten-year questionnaire — the process itself is quite rewarding.
2021-12-19 @Beijing