不知道。
我只能阐述我在保持好奇心与学习动力上，都做了什么，以及抱持何种心态。
在这之前，分享我刚刚阅读的一篇文章‘More nothing now’，Edited by Marina Benjamin，里面有一个词叫：价值捕获。
这篇文章讲作者带着孩子玩游戏时，孩子自发无目的地游戏，而作者很想按照说明书给小孩讲述游戏规则。
刚好自己最近也在制作一款游戏，当下也正在想世界观阶段，要求是“世界观不影响游玩”，我想要的就是这个效果，团队想达到的也是这个目的。
当然传统商业游戏不会说：我们的游戏没有目的，没有奖励。
文章里写：你可以玩游戏，也可以参与游戏。当你遵循官方规则，追求既定目标，并与对手或评分系统进行比较时，那就是竞争。希腊人有一个词来形容这种游戏：agôn，源自象征冲突、斗争和竞争的神。但当我的孩子们拆开棋盘，把它变成一个世界时，他们做的是更古老、更奇特的事情。他们参与的是法国社会学家罗杰·凯卢瓦（Roger Caillois）在其著作《人、游戏与游戏》（Man, Play and Games，1958）中称之为paidia的游戏：自由的、自发的、非结构化的游戏。这种游戏没有赢家，没有分数，也没有优化目标。这种游戏在成人生活中几乎无处容身，但可以说，它恰恰是我们最需要的，尤其是在如今，就连我们的休闲活动都离不开排行榜。
在文明史的早期，Paidia才是游戏最原始的形态。人类在篝火旁讲故事、在泥地里堆城堡、在星空下发呆，这些行为没有外在参照系，没有积分，也没有胜负。它的意义就是它本身，是一种纯粹的“内在丰盈”。
但现在，跑步是为了排名，背单词是为了打卡，聊天是为了续火花……
“测量”吞噬“意义”，“工具”驯服“目的”。
充满好奇心的疑惑会得到一句什么回答：有什么用？
你学这些东西有什么用？知道这些有什么用？最终还是要变现。
考了几级？会唱几首歌？得过什么奖？
游戏原本是人类逃离现实功利法则的避风港，现在算法又将存在体验转译成了数据：停留时长、点击率、正念时长、睡眠质量分数，连修生养性都成了竞争性的绩效考核，一串可复盘的数据。
韩炳哲所说的绩效时代。
但前两天在阅读威尼斯电影节的报告还是什么，里面提到“曾经的人们阅读报纸，被大标题所吸引”，我突然意识到，是我生活在这个时代，所以我把“算法”的影响性扩大了，我切身感受着身边人的改变，所以我觉得算法是现代社会的怪兽。
它提倡“独立思考”，然后就连独立思考都变成了一种政治正确，一种口号。因为反主流话语一旦形成群体身份，都可能重新产生内部规范、正确答案和服从机制。“现代人应该独立思考”就变成了“既然是一个独立思考的现代人，就应该得出和我们一样的结论。”
如果是福柯，可能会命名叫：反规训话语自身的规训化？
它不是诞生于当下的东西，它继承了人类媒体一百多年来不断优化的欲望结构。人类一直都生活在这样的时代中，只是抢夺注意力的东西越来越容易进入个人边界。算法继承了人类早被训练一百多年的注意力工业，然后自动化、个体化、实时化。
因为可能19世纪报纸已经知道犯罪比政策吸睛，性比税制吸睛，恐惧比复杂解释吸睛，冲突比共识吸睛，名人私生活比制度吸睛。
后来是电视，再是互联网。
以前注意力捕获需要走到报摊；打开电视；买杂志。
现在只需要在任何地方，解锁手机，解锁手表，进入眼镜。
问题不是谁诱惑更强，是诱惑和人的私人边界之间越来越小，它无处不在，它紧贴着神经，它刺破人的皮肤，它能直接进入任何私密时刻。
早期硅谷的架构师、行为心理学家、流量算法的工程师们坐在凉爽的办公室，会意识到局部的理性，如何汇聚成整体的荒谬吗？
一开始我是很刻意在做这件事。
首先，清理手机里的程式；其次，关闭大部分程式的通知。
我保留了邮箱的通知，因为我喜欢第一时间看到前沿科技杂志的最新论文和发现。其余时间，我的手机永远不会有信息即时进入，只有当我主动打开手机，打开特定的图标，才会“收取中”。当然这有一些副作用，比如朋友给我发信息问我一会儿出来吃饭吗？我可能第二天才看到；比如我的好友圈天然会剔除所有“你必须秒回”的延迟满足感特别低的人群。
几天不看信息，我不会失去什么，几天不回信息，我的朋友也不会因此生气。
必备的一些工具也没有，比如xhs和wb这类，这类应用的分类只是工具，只是查资料，但查资料其实有无数种方式，我的目的并不是与世隔绝，而是我要求自己“主动”。我想知道什么的时候，我必须主动去搜索特定的词条，而不是等着大数据给我一个无底洞般下滑的世界；我想知道真相，我必须主动去更权威科学的网站搜寻关键词，而不是从无数人发帖的社区去寻求经验和“我觉得”。
当然权威也不等于真相，经验也可能拥有正式数据没有的局部知识，科学还有边界，认知还有上限。目的是区分不同来源回答不同类型的问题，以及正确答案的概率。
这几年离开那些市面惯用的信息流软件，我的信息输入并没有因此变少，反而越发庞大。
还有评论。如果想去一个地方，去一个餐厅，以前我会去看评分和下面评价，还有旅游攻略，什么路线，怎么走。
看，这就是开头说的那套规则。
少走的弯路不会永远少走，占过的便宜，代价不一定真便宜。
所以我去了没有攻略的地点，那里没人，一切都是全新的；所以我去了不了解的商铺，从老板那里得到了他的时间与见识。
因为我输入一个信息，就要主动去查另一些。我一无所知，所以我想要更多，但网络帖子似是而非点到为止给了些信息，总让人产生“我已全知”的错觉，但身临其境的、独特的体验减少，剩下的都是流水线工程一样的打卡。
世界原本是一片异质森林，最后被压缩成一张Excel，因为所有东西只能通过同一个尺度证明自己值得存在。
然后，保持阅读。
电子书和纸质书对我来说是一样的，因为都不存在通知和分散注意力的情况。当然前提是管住自己退出软件去点别的图标的手指。
每天一个小时。
曾经是这么定的，但在坚持的过程中，我觉得这样太为难自己，因为大多数情况我都不是一个小时准时关上书。有时候只有十来分钟，有时候会看三四个小时，场合遍布了每个碎片时间，地铁、等人……只要有时间拿起手机、点亮屏幕、打开软件、清理红点，就有时间看书，只是选择问题。
也不是每天都在看，有时候会几天几周都不打开书——这是兴趣，不是工作，没有愧疚感，如果阅读让我产生了愧疚与任务没完成的感觉，我可能会放弃一段时间这件事，直到我拿起书只是好奇。
再然后，保持发呆。
发呆是让我最有成就感和掌控感的事件之一。碎片时间不看书就发呆，大脑自然放空，这段时间我可能会出现在高空、宇宙、深海、冰川沙漠，或者路人的双肩背包里，随便在哪里。
是为了改变奖励机制的路径。
做这些事都是为了降低对“刺激”的依赖，那些永远在等“下一个一定更有意思”的依赖，让大脑的曲线降低，替换波峰的体验。
我有描述过这种感觉：坐在地铁上，虽然一个小时的路程，但完全不想拿手机，对我没有吸引力，我知道当时有信息，但是我觉得回复不是那么要紧的事，对方不会着急，我也不着急。什么都不想，脑海里也自然浮现了一些画面，没有剧情，就是脑海里的画面、地铁运行的中高频、空气压强的变化，虽然一个小时，但是我觉得时间很快，到我下地铁的时候，我觉得我的脑电波好像就是一条直线，一片空白，这种空白反而让我感受到了奖励，掌控感的奖励，自我统一性的奖励。
然后是对接收信息的筛选。
信息太多太杂，怎么处理？
他说了什么？
他凭什么知道？
他亲眼知道还是听来的？
谁告诉他的？
那个人又凭什么知道？
他为什么现在告诉我？
这条信息为什么会抵达我？
如果它是真的，谁受益？
如果它是假的，谁受益？
还有什么解释也能产生同样的现象？
有没有简化，有没有非黑即白，有没有默认前提？
当然，一开始这些都像是故意为难自己，让自己很累的问答题。
活那么累干什么？轻轻松松不就好了吗？
实际上这些问题从浮现在脑海，到得出结论，不过几秒。
和人们看到一条新闻后，问真的假的，然后转发给亲朋好友“我听说”“你知道吗”“你要注意，我看到说”“来吃瓜”，拥有的时间是一样的。
最后，我上面说的所有都是假的O(∩_∩)O。
——
I don’t know.
I can only describe what I have done to keep my curiosity alive and sustain the desire to learn, and the attitude I try to hold while doing so.
Before that, I want to share something from an essay I was just reading, More Nothing Now, edited by Marina Benjamin. It contains a term: value capture.
The essay describes the author playing a game with her children. The children play spontaneously, without any particular purpose, while the author keeps wanting to explain the rules to them according to the instruction manual.
I happen to be working on a game myself at the moment. We are still developing its world, and one of the requirements is that “the worldbuilding should not interfere with play”. That is exactly the effect I want, and the effect the team wants as well.
Of course, a conventional commercial game is never going to announce: our game has no purpose and no rewards.
The essay says: you can play a game, or you can participate in play. When you follow official rules, pursue prescribed goals, and compare yourself with opponents or a scoring system, you are engaged in competition. The Greeks had a word for this kind of play: agôn, derived from a god associated with conflict, struggle and competition. But when my children took the board apart and turned it into a world, they were doing something older and stranger. They were taking part in what the French sociologist Roger Caillois, in Man, Play and Games (1958), called paidia: free, spontaneous, unstructured play. There are no winners, no scores and no optimisation targets. This kind of play has almost no place in adult life. Yet one could argue that it is precisely what we need most, especially now, when even our leisure has become inseparable from rankings.
In the early history of civilisation, paidia was the most primordial form of play. People told stories around fires, built castles out of mud and stared at the stars. These acts had no external frame of reference, no points and no winners or losers. Their meaning was simply themselves, a kind of pure inner abundance.
But now we run for rankings, memorise vocabulary for streaks, and chat to keep a flame alive…
Measurement devours meaning; tools tame ends.
What answer does a genuinely curious question so often receive?
What use is learning this? What use is knowing that? In the end, can you monetise it?
What grade did you get? How many songs can you sing? What prizes have you won?
Games were once a refuge from the utilitarian logic of reality. Now algorithms translate lived experience back into data: time spent, click-through rates, minutes of mindfulness, sleep-quality scores. Even self-cultivation has become a competitive performance review, a string of numbers ready to be analysed afterwards.
What Byung-Chul Han calls the achievement society.
A couple of days ago, though, I was reading a report from the Venice Film Festival, or something along those lines, and it mentioned how people once read newspapers and were drawn in by large headlines.
It suddenly occurred to me that because I live in this particular era, I may have exaggerated the singular influence of “the algorithm”. I can see the changes around me at close range, so the algorithm feels like the monster of modern society.
It tells us to “think independently”, until even independent thought becomes a form of political correctness, another slogan. Once a counter-mainstream discourse develops into a group identity, it can generate its own internal norms, correct answers and mechanisms of obedience. “A modern person should think independently” becomes: “If you are a modern person capable of independent thought, you should arrive at the same conclusion as we do.”
If it were Foucault, perhaps he might have called it something like: the disciplining of anti-disciplinary discourse itself?
But none of this was born today.
It inherits a structure of desire that human media have been refining for more than a century. Human beings have always lived in worlds like this. What has changed is that the things competing for our attention can enter our private boundaries with ever less resistance. Algorithms inherited an attention industry that had already been training us for more than a hundred years, and then made it automated, individualised and real-time.
Perhaps 19th-century newspapers already knew that crime attracts more attention than policy, sex more than taxation, fear more than complex explanation, conflict more than consensus, and the private lives of celebrities more than institutions.
Then came television.
Then the internet.
Attention capture once required you to walk to a newsstand, turn on the television, or buy a magazine.
Now, wherever you are, you need only unlock your phone, glance at your watch, or look through a pair of glasses.
The question is not which temptation is stronger. The distance between temptation and our private boundaries is shrinking. It is everywhere. It presses against the nervous system, pierces the skin, and can enter almost any private moment.
Did the early architects of Silicon Valley, the behavioural psychologists, the engineers building traffic and engagement algorithms, sitting in their cool offices, ever realise how local rationality might accumulate into global absurdity?
At first, I did all of this very deliberately.
First, I cleared apps from my phone. Then I turned off notifications for almost everything.
I kept email notifications because I like seeing the latest papers and discoveries from science and technology publications as soon as they arrive. Otherwise, information never enters my phone in real time. Only when I deliberately unlock it and open a particular app does anything begin to “come in”.
There are, of course, side effects.
A friend might message me asking whether I want to go out for dinner later, and I might not see it until the next day. My circle of friends also naturally filters out anyone with an extremely low tolerance for delayed gratification, anyone who believes: you must reply immediately.
If I do not check messages for a few days, I lose nothing. If I do not reply for a few days, my friends do not get angry.
I also do not keep some of the supposedly essential tools, apps such as Xiaohongshu or Weibo. I regard this kind of application as a tool, mainly for looking things up. But there are countless ways to research something.
My aim is not to isolate myself from the world. What I demand of myself is initiative.
When I want to know something, I have to actively search for a specific term, rather than wait for big data to hand me a bottomless world that I can scroll through forever. When I want to know what is true, I have to actively search more authoritative scientific sources, rather than looking to endless community posts for experience and “I think”.
Of course, authority is not the same thing as truth. Personal experience can contain local knowledge that formal data miss. Science has boundaries; cognition has limits.
The point is to distinguish between the kinds of questions different sources are capable of answering, and the probability that an answer is correct.
In the years since I left the information-feed apps that dominate the market, the amount of information I take in has not decreased. If anything, it has grown.
Then there are reviews.
If I wanted to visit somewhere, or eat at a restaurant, I used to look up ratings and read the comments beneath them. I would search for travel guides: which route to take, how to get there.
Look.
This is exactly the system of rules I mentioned at the beginning.
Fewer detours now do not mean fewer detours forever. What looks like a bargain is not necessarily cheap in terms of value.
So I began going to places without reading guides. There would be no one there, and everything would be new.
I began walking into shops I knew nothing about, and sometimes received, from the owner, their time and their knowledge.
Because once I take in one piece of information, I have to actively search for others.
I know nothing, and so I want to know more. But online posts often give us fragments of information that are vague, suggestive and incomplete, while somehow producing the illusion that “I already know”.
Meanwhile, the distinctive experience of actually being somewhere diminishes, until what remains is something like an assembly line of places to be ticked off.
The world was once a heterogeneous forest.
In the end, it gets compressed into an Excel spreadsheet, because everything must prove that it deserves to exist through the same single scale of measurement.
Then: keep reading.
For me, ebooks and paper books are the same, because neither contains notifications or inherently divides my attention.
The condition, of course, is that I stop my own fingers from exiting the reading app and tapping another icon.
One hour a day.
That used to be the rule.
But while trying to stick to it, I realised I was making things unnecessarily difficult for myself. Most of the time I do not close a book precisely after an hour. Sometimes I read for ten minutes. Sometimes three or four hours. It happens in every fragment of spare time: on the metro, while waiting for someone…
If there is time to pick up a phone, light the screen, open an app and clear the little red notification dots, there is time to read.
It is simply a choice.
I do not read every day, either. Sometimes I go days or weeks without opening a book.
This is an interest, not a job.
There is no guilt.
If reading begins to make me feel guilty, as though I have failed to complete some task, I may stop doing it for a while, until the next time I pick up a book simply because I am curious.
Then: keep staring into space.
Staring into space is one of the things that gives me the strongest sense of accomplishment and control. If I am not reading during some spare moment, I let my mind go blank.
During that time I might find myself high in the air, in outer space, in the deep sea, on a glacier, in a desert, or inside a passer-by’s backpack.
Anywhere.
The point is to reroute the reward mechanism.
Everything I do here is meant to reduce my dependence on stimulation, the dependence that keeps waiting for “the next thing will definitely be more interesting”, to lower that curve and replace the experience of constantly needing peaks.
I have described the feeling before.
I can sit on the metro for an hour and feel absolutely no desire to pick up my phone. It has no attraction for me. I know there are messages waiting, but replying does not seem particularly urgent. The other person is not worried. Neither am I.
I think about nothing.
Images may float naturally into my mind, but there is no plot. Just images, the mid-to-high frequencies of the metro in motion, changes in air pressure.
An hour passes, but it feels quick.
By the time I get off the train, my brainwaves feel as though they have flattened into a straight line.
Blank.
And strangely, that blankness itself feels rewarding.
The reward of control.
The reward of inner coherence.
Then there is filtering the information I receive.
There is too much information, and it is too messy. How do I deal with it?
What did they actually say?
How do they know?
Did they see it themselves, or hear it from someone else?
Who told them?
And how did that person know?
Why are they telling me now?
Why did this particular piece of information reach me?
If it is true, who benefits?
If it is false, who benefits?
What other explanation could produce the same phenomenon?
Has anything been oversimplified?
Has it been reduced to black and white?
What assumptions are being taken for granted?
At first, of course, all of these questions feel like an exhausting questionnaire I have deliberately invented to make life harder for myself.
Why live so tired?
Wouldn’t it be easier just to relax?
In reality, only a few seconds pass between these questions appearing in my mind and my reaching some provisional conclusion.
It takes no more time than seeing a piece of news, wondering whether it is true, and forwarding it to friends and family:
“I heard…”
“Did you know…?”
“Be careful, I saw something saying…”
“Come look at this gossip.”
The time is the same.
Finally, everything I have said above is false O(∩_∩)O.