我一直排斥回到原生环境，甚至刻意与我喜欢的环境保持连接。
选择喜欢的地方。这原本是无可厚非的，但在生活变动且无法逆转的情况下，在我不得不去面对那个让我曾经排斥和逃离的环境时，我出现了一些戒断反应和分离焦虑，为了抵抗这种焦虑，我做了很多事，包括每天找条街坐着，看那些走过的形形色色的人，包括买火车票去一个没有去过的城市，一个人看日出、吹海风、拍照，或者什么都不做。
我对这两个地方是有偏见的，这些偏见来源于一些直观的感受。
我相信环境会深刻影响人的思维和行为，并且我认为，大部分的人都对这项认知深信不疑。我担心回去最终会落入他们的境地，那个无休止争吵、谈论他人家长里短，为了容貌、身材、婚姻、同事、工作，不断pua他人的地方，那个满地爬的都是婴儿的地方，那个把无知当寻常，把逃避当人生的地方。我会不会听多了，终于有一天也说起了这些？
在我用这些词汇去描述这个地方的时候，我已经感受到了自己的敌意与根深蒂固的偏见。
我在担心什么呢？
我觉得我现在身边的人是自由的、成熟的、独立的，因为都是我筛选出来的，而那里就是功利的、麻木的、抱团的。但昨天突然听到一个朋友说，他在工作之余只想打游戏。
我忽然产生了一种感觉，我看到了包裹在我们肉体里的监牢。
这其实和生活在哪里无关，但关乎人要怎么维持自己的信念，坚持自己的坚持。
我的担忧来源于对自己责任的外包。
因为把个人的主观意志转嫁于环境的塑造，本身就是一种自我意志的消解与对个体责任的逃避。在这样的情况下，我并不是在寻找一个居住地，而是在寻找一个完美的自我代持者，这个东西承担了“我”的功能。
我在这里询问自己。
当你认为环境能够决定你的思维与行为，担心你有一天也会和他们讨论那些你厌恶的东西，并引以为乐，而你却不再觉得有不妥的时候，你是否在潜意识里给自己签发了一张“免责声明”？
你变得卓越与自由，是因为你所在的地方自由的气息；你变得平庸与愁苦，是因为你所在的地方内卷的氛围。如此，那那个离开了环境加持，那个赤裸的、独立的你，到底拥有多少能对抗你边界以外的尘世的能力？
人摆脱中世纪社会传统纽带的束缚，获得自由，尽管个人会有一种新的独立感，但同时他又会感到孤独和孤立，会充满焦虑和怀疑，并被迫臣服于新的权威，从事强迫性的非理性活动。——弗洛姆《逃避自由》
你在担心自己的内在逻辑框架过于脆弱，你在这一刻，产生了对自我的不信任。但你仔细想想走过来的这一路，你抵御过多少环境的侵袭？
初中，同学开始学抽烟、打架、谈恋爱，以和异性发生关系为谈资，你每天和他们在一起，但你没学；
高中，同学开始找安稳的工作，学习职业培训，你的家人送你去学习护理，你提着行李箱跑了，你说你要读书，你想考大学。但有人说你能力不行、成绩不好、什么都不会，考不上大学的，不如省点钱，现在就出去工作。你不信，你要起得最早，睡得最晚，你要用一年时间学习人家三年的功课，甚至弥补人家十年的练习，然后你第一名；
大学，同学在课堂，在谈恋爱，在听老师灌输知识，你又跑了，你更相信自己的规划而不是学校培养工具式的流水线工程，你成功了；
于是你想去竞争研究生的名额，和国际上所有考生竞争一个，那天你见到了很多国家的同龄人，你很紧张，但你的入围作品被教授单独拿出来播放。
他们坚持人到什么年龄就要做什么，他们坚持怎么做才是标准，什么才是善、什么才是自由、什么才是幸福。
你选择了其中认同的小部分，剩下的拒绝了，你拒绝绑架、拒绝定义、拒绝约定俗成、拒绝公认的常规、拒绝他们趋之若鹜的确定感。
你要真理，要无憾，要不愧疚，要每天做的事都是“如果明天就是意外，那今天我要做它”。
你还记得在你写小说的那段时间，原本是最忙的时候，涉及考核和十个总谱五个配乐，如果不做，可能过去几年的成果付诸东流，那天你说了什么？
你说：如果明天意外先来，我却因为一个考核而没有给他们最后的结局，这一定会成为我这辈子最后悔的事。
“我”在这里，把责任都收回了我自己。
哪怕是此时此刻，这家咖啡厅，身边是熙来攘往的人，他人的谈笑、疾驰的鸣笛、泥土飞扬的土地工程。
写下这些文字的同时，你心无旁骛。
人除了自我塑造之外，什么都不是。
虽然萨特的存在主义理论仅限于单一的语境，但在这单一的语境里，它的力量无与伦比。
在优选的选项中做选择，那叫消费者权利；在荒芜甚至恶劣的土地上，依然有能力定义自己的生命意义，那才是“我”。
那么，如果你被放逐到一个完全真空、没有任何社会评价体系的地方，你还会坚持你现在所热爱的那些东西吗？答案是肯定的，那么地理边界对你就只是“坐标”，不是“枷锁”。
意识到这些后，我发现我再也不能心安理得地把“平庸”甩包给环境了。
或者说，它的影响并没有通常意义的那么大，它是流动的变量，而“人本身”才是泥流中扎根的石头。石头在湍急里会受影响吗？会的，它的边缘会被侵蚀；但石头会受影响吗？
考虑到更多可能，我需要重新审视我要做的事。
我曾经认为生命只是体验，体验这个世界本来的面貌，就像之前写过，去除“心”的滤镜后，世界有世界本来的模样。因此那些“庸常”无异于人类自己给自己的枷锁，当然这里的“枷锁”仅仅是站在现在这个时代的立场。国际社会与经济要求每个人成为“人”，而不再是工具，所以“体验”至关重要。
我常常在说，我的目的是“体验”，但刚刚突然意识到，世界本来的模样也包含了那些我避之不及的肮脏、恐惧、机械、麻木、偏见、强迫。
弗兰克尔在集中营那种极致匮乏、毫无“体验”的环境中，依然找到了生命的意义，那我此刻谈论的“体验”是否包含了这些？还是只是在用另一种“低摩擦”的状态去包装羸弱？
如果环境变得粗糙、充满冲突、甚至审美匮乏，我还依然具备体验的能力吗？如果所谓的“体验”必须依赖于优质的外部环境，那么这种体验是否只是另一种形式的、对环境的深度成瘾与依赖？“体验”是否包含对痛苦、混乱、平庸以及与不合拍的人共存的体验？
如果一个人的体验只筛选美好的、自由的部分，那它本质上是否还是一种对现实的剪裁，对环境的依赖，而非对世界全貌的拥抱，依然是逃避，只是给“逃避”穿上了更光鲜的外衣。
写到这里，我的想法忽然有了一些转变。我想在“体验”后面增加一个“创造”，不是我常说的创作一首歌、创造一个角色，而是作为一个现实的干扰源，提供一个实例，提出一种思维模型，用我的“创造”强行在现实中撕开一道裂缝。
体验产生于意志与外界阻力的剧烈碰撞中。
所以我开始不认为“体验”是多么轻松的事，说得那么轻而易举。咖啡、阳光和海风，那不是体验，那只是享受。高愉悦、低摩擦、可控、去冲突，既然处于一个高度同频的既定环境里，享受就享受，别把所有责任的外包赋予“体验”这样宏大的叙事。
享受的时候，意志休眠。我们一天有一半的时间当然需要休眠，另一半时间则需要睁眼。
如果代价是必须先经历一段极度平庸、甚至令人反胃的“为了活着而死去”的磨损期，我希望拥有记得依然能在那片荒原上，创造出属于自己的、关于自由的歌的能力。我要的不是需要外界供氧的温室花朵，是能自带光合作用的深海发光体，或者，我决定哪里是海。
另外，我也不认为这些分离焦虑是多愁善感，那是依恋本能，而这个本能催生我的破执。
环境之所以是环境，因为它是背景，我们却把它拔高到和我们有强烈主体意识和行动力的生物一个维度。
那个“内卷的、麻虚的、谈论家长里短的环境里，我依然是我”，比“我找了一个好的环境来证明我是我”，要难上一万倍。
最后再问自己。
如果剥离那个同质化的、舒适的环境，最原始、赤裸的你还剩下什么？
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今天天气不错，尽管不如昨天海边的太阳炽烈，但有一种温和的柔软。
复活节结束了，很多人拖着行李箱从我面前走过，路过这家咖啡厅，背后的年轻女孩一直在聊天；有两个男人彼此错身，在打电话；还有一个女生的行李箱好像坏了，拖在地上拉出灰色划痕，如果声音足够小，或许是能让人入睡的白噪；黑人夫妇推着婴儿车；隔壁的广场有人在吹萨克斯，我看不到他。
有风吹过来了，泥土与灰尘，夹杂着烟草的颗粒。
街边转角的咖啡厅，永远忙碌。他们路过的脚步，永远走在秒针上。
——
I have always rejected returning to my original environment, and even deliberately maintained a connection with the environments I like.
Choosing a place one likes. This is inherently beyond reproach, but under circumstances where life changes and cannot be reversed, when I had to face the environment I once rejected and escaped from, I experienced some withdrawal symptoms and separation anxiety. To resist this anxiety, I did many things, including finding a street to sit on every day, watching the diverse people walking by, including buying a train ticket to a city I hadn’t been to before, watching the sunrise alone, feeling the sea breeze, taking photos, or doing nothing at all.
I have prejudices against these two places, and these prejudices stem from some intuitive feelings.
I believe that the environment profoundly affects people’s thinking and behavior, and I think most people firmly believe in this cognition. I am worried that returning will ultimately cause me to fall into their situation—that place of endless arguing, talking about others’ domestic trivia, constantly PUA-ing others over appearance, figure, marriage, colleagues, and work; that place where babies are crawling all over the floor; that place that takes ignorance as the norm and escaping as a way of life. If I listen to it too much, will I eventually start talking about these things one day too?
When I use these words to describe this place, I have already felt my own hostility and deep-rooted prejudice.
What am I worried about?
I feel that the people around me now are free, mature, and independent, because they were all screened out by me, while over there it is utilitarian, numb, and cliquish. But yesterday, I suddenly heard a friend say that outside of work, he only wants to play video games.
I suddenly had a feeling; I saw the prison wrapped inside our flesh.
This actually has nothing to do with where one lives, but it is about how a person maintains their own convictions and persists in what they hold onto.
My worry stems from the outsourcing of my own responsibility.
Because transferring one’s personal subjective will onto the shaping of the environment is, in itself, a dissolution of self-will and an evasion of individual responsibility. Under such circumstances, I am not looking for a place to live, but rather looking for a perfect proxy for the self, a thing that undertakes the function of “I.”
I ask myself here.
When you think the environment can determine your thinking and behavior, worrying that one day you will also discuss those things you loathe with them and take pleasure in it, while no longer feeling anything is wrong, have you subconsciously issued yourself a “liability waiver”?
You become outstanding and free because of the atmosphere of freedom in the place where you are; you become mediocre and sorrowful because of the involuted atmosphere in the place where you are. If so, then that you who has left the blessing of the environment, that naked, independent you, exactly how much ability do you possess to resist the mortal world beyond your boundaries?
Man breaks free from the bondage of traditional ties in medieval society and gains freedom; although the individual will have a new sense of independence, at the same time he will feel lonely and isolated, will be full of anxiety and doubt, and will be forced to submit to new authorities, engaging in compulsive irrational activities. — Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom
You are worried that your internal logical framework is too fragile; at this moment, you have generated a distrust of yourself. But if you think carefully about the path you’ve walked along the way, how many invasions from the environment have you fended off?
In junior high school, classmates started learning to smoke, fight, and date, using having relations with the opposite sex as conversation pieces. You were with them every day, but you didn’t learn it;
In high school, classmates started looking for stable jobs and taking vocational training. Your family sent you to study nursing, but you ran away with your suitcase; you said you wanted to study, you wanted to test into a university. But some people said your abilities were lacking, your grades were bad, you knew nothing, and you wouldn’t be able to get into a university; it would be better to save some money and go out to work right now. You didn’t believe it. You had to wake up the earliest, sleep the latest, you had to use one year to study three years of others’ coursework, even making up for ten years of others’ practice, and then you were first place;
In university, classmates were in the classroom, dating, listening to teachers instill knowledge, and you ran away again. You believed more in your own planning rather than the school’s assembly-line engineering of cultivating tools, and you succeeded.
Thus, you wanted to compete for a postgraduate spot, competing with all international candidates for one. That day, you met peers from many countries; you were very nervous, but your shortlisted work was singled out by the professor to be played.
They insist on what a person should do at what age; they insist on what the standard is for how to do things, what is good, what is freedom, and what is happiness.
You chose the small part of it that you agreed with, and rejected the rest. You rejected kidnapping, rejected definitions, rejected established conventions, rejected recognized norms, and rejected the sense of certainty they flock to.
You want the truth, want no regrets, want no guilt, want the things you do every day to be “If tomorrow is an accident, then today I must do this.”
Do you still remember that during the time you were writing a novel, which was originally the busiest time, involving assessments and ten full scores and five soundtracks, if you didn’t do it, the results of the past few years might go down the drain. What did you say that day?
You said: If the accident comes first tomorrow, yet I failed to give them the final ending because of an assessment, this will definitely become the most regretful thing in my life.
“I”, here, took all the responsibilities back to myself.
Even at this very moment, in this cafe, the people bustling about around me, the chatting and laughing of others, the speeding honks, the dirt-flying earthworks. While writing down these words, you are totally focused with no distractions.
Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.
Although Sartre’s existentialist theory is limited to a single context, within this single context, its power is unparalleled.
Making choices among optimal options, that is called consumer rights; still having the ability to define one’s own meaning of life on barren and even harsh land, that is the true “I.”
So, if you were exiled to a complete vacuum, a place without any social evaluation system, would you still persist in those things you love right now? The answer is affirmative, so geographical boundaries are to you merely “coordinates,” not “shackles.”
After realizing these, I found that I could no longer with peace of mind pass the buck of “mediocrity” to the environment.
Or rather, its impact is not as great in the usual sense; it is a flowing variable, and “man himself” is the stone rooted in the mudflow. Will the stone be affected in the torrent? Yes, its edges will be eroded; but will the stone be affected?
Considering more possibilities, I need to re-examine what I want to do.
I once thought that life was merely an experience, experiencing the original face of this world, just as I wrote before, after removing the filter of the “mind,” the world has its original appearance. Therefore, that “banality” is no different from the shackles humans place on themselves; of course, the “shackles” here are merely from the standpoint of the current era. International society and economy require everyone to become a “human being” and no longer a tool, so “experience” is crucial.
I often say my goal is to “experience,” but I just suddenly realized that the world’s original appearance also contains the dirt, fear, machinery, numbness, prejudice, and compulsion that I avoid like the plague.
Frankl still found the meaning of life in the extremely deprived environment of the concentration camp where there was no “experience” at all, so does the “experience” I am talking about at this moment include these? Or is it merely using another kind of “low-friction” state to package frailty?
If the environment becomes rough, full of conflicts, and even aesthetically deprived, do I still possess the ability to experience? If the so-called “experience” must rely on a high-quality external environment, then is this experience merely another form of deep addiction and dependence on the environment? Does “experience” include the experience of pain, chaos, mediocrity, and coexisting with people who are out of sync?
If a person’s experience only filters out the beautiful and free parts, is it in essence still a tailoring of reality, a dependence on the environment, rather than an embrace of the complete picture of the world? It is still an escape, only putting a more glamorous coat on “escape.”
Writing up to here, my thoughts suddenly had a bit of a shift. I want to add a “creation” after “experience”—not creating a song or creating a character as I often say, but acting as a source of interference in reality, providing an instance, proposing a mental model, using my “creation” to forcibly tear open a crack in reality.
Experience is generated in the violent collision between the will and external resistance.
Therefore, I begin to no longer think that “experience” is such an easy thing, spoken of so effortlessly. Coffee, sunshine, and sea breeze, that is not experience, that is merely enjoyment. High pleasure, low friction, controllable, de-conflicted; since one is in an established environment of high frequency alignment, just enjoy it, do not grant the outsourcing of all responsibility to a grand narrative like “experience.”
When enjoying, the will goes dormant. Of course, we need to be dormant for half of the time in a day, while for the other half, we need to open our eyes.
If the price is that one must first go through a period of extremely mediocre, even nauseating wear and tear of “dying in order to live,” I hope to possess the ability to remember that I can still create my own song about freedom on that wasteland. What I want is not a greenhouse flower that needs oxygen supply from the outside world, but a deep-sea luminous body that comes with its own photosynthesis, or, I decide where the sea is.
In addition, I do not think these separation anxieties are sentimental; that is the attachment instinct, and this instinct catalyzes the breaking of my fixations.
The environment is the environment because it is the background, yet we elevate it to the same dimension as us creatures who have strong subjective consciousness and agency.
That “I am still me in that involuted, numb environment talking about domestic trivia” is ten thousand times harder than “I found a good environment to prove that I am me.”
Finally, I ask myself again.
If that homogenized, comfortable environment is stripped away, what is left of the most primitive, naked you?
The weather is nice today; although the sun is not as blazing as it was by the seaside yesterday, it has a kind of gentle softness.
Easter is over, and many people walk past me dragging their suitcases, passing by this cafe. The young girls behind me have been chatting the whole time; two men pass each other by, talking on their phones; there is also a girl whose suitcase seems to be broken, dragging on the ground pulling out gray scratches—if the sound were small enough, perhaps it could be white noise that puts people to sleep; a black couple pushes a stroller; someone is playing the saxophone in the square next door, but I cannot see him.
A breeze blows over, dirt and dust, mixed with particles of tobacco.
The cafe at the street corner is forever busy. Their passing footsteps are forever walking on the second hand.