Three Books That Stayed With Me in the First Half of 2023

I started a 365-day reading plan in the first half of 2023, and it pushed me to finish a decent number of books.

Over those six months I read around thirty. Some were revisits, like the Kyushu series. Some were science fiction: after watching The Wandering Earth 2, I went back and reread The Three-Body Problem trilogy from start to finish. Some were history books, especially on the Southern and Northern Dynasties and the Tang dynasty. At the very least, I can now finally tell which regimes belonged to the Southern Dynasties and which to the Northern Dynasties. I also picked up novels again and returned to Haruki Murakami. Of his books, the only two I can really lose myself in are 1Q84 and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. The rest somehow never pull me in. A friend once gave me Dance Dance Dance; it has sat on my shelf for seven or eight years, and I still haven’t managed to finish it. The one category I still avoid is serious literary fiction. I just can’t get through it.

Among everything I read, three books felt especially worth recording:

• A Guide to the Good Life
• Meditations
• I Deliver Parcels in Beijing

The first two revolve around Stoicism. The third is nonfiction, a record of one person’s hard and complicated working life in Beijing.

A Guide to the Good Life: Stoicism as something usable

This book introduces the past, present, and future of Stoicism. It is divided into four parts, but in terms of content it can be roughly understood as three:

• the history of Stoicism,
• methods for practicing Stoic philosophy,
• and what it might mean to live it now.

When I first picked it up, I read it for practical reasons and jumped straight to chapters 4 through 7. Those chapters happened to line up with four key Stoic tools:

• negative visualization,
• the trichotomy of control,
• fatalism,
• and self-denial.

After reading just those chapters, it was easy to understand why a philosophy more than two thousand years old is still being passed down while so many others have disappeared into history. So I went back and read the rest.

The book contains a lot more than I can summarize here, but these four ideas were the parts that stayed with me most.

Negative visualization

We should live as though every moment were our last. — Seneca

A lot of our unhappiness comes from desire that keeps expanding. We work hard to get something, and once we have it, we gradually lose interest. Then we start wanting something newer, more exciting, more refined. What we feel is not satisfaction but boredom, and that boredom breeds even more desire.

This is hedonic adaptation.

A very ordinary example: I bought a Nintendo Switch and thought it was amazing. It had three play modes—great. Then newer versions came out: the Lite, the longer-battery model, the OLED model. Each one seemed to improve on the original in some way. The Lite was more portable, the revised model had better battery life, the OLED screen looked much nicer. Suddenly the launch model in my hands started to feel shabby, as if it had become inadequate just because something better existed.

The same pattern appears in relationships. You meet someone you really like. At first everything feels intense and sweet. You think about them all the time. Then maybe the relationship turns into marriage, and the small frictions of everyday life wear away at the excitement. You begin to notice flaws. You start imagining some newer, more passionate love with someone else.

Stoicism suggests that if we want peace of mind, we have to interrupt this process of adaptation and stop treating what we already have as ordinary.

The point of a Switch is to play games. If it can play games, then the version is secondary. Later models may improve on certain details, but they are still all game consoles. A newer version does not make the old one incapable of doing what it was meant to do. Before owning one, I could not play Nintendo games at all. Now I can. That in itself is already something.

The same is true of people. There were reasons you were drawn to someone in the first place. Something about them moved you. Even after routine and conflict dull some of the original feeling, that person is still that person. The qualities that drew you in did not vanish completely. There are still things in them worth treasuring.

Another way to practice this is to imagine loss. Imagine one day your Switch is gone for good. The game cartridges you bought can no longer be played. The pleasure of those games disappears with it. Only then would you probably remember how happy you were simply to have had it.

Or imagine the person you love leaves. Suddenly your days feel empty. Nothing sounds good, nothing feels interesting. But then you return to the present and realize: my Switch is still here, and the person I care about is still beside me. That realization can make what already exists feel vivid again.

More concretely, Stoicism asks us to pause from time to time and think: we will not live forever; today could be the last day of our lives. The purpose is not to justify hedonism or reckless indulgence. It is to change the state of mind in which we live this day—to make us more attentive, more engaged, more capable of valuing what is already here.

The trichotomy of control

No activity is worth pursuing unless it has meaning. — Marcus Aurelius

Another major source of unhappiness is that we often seek satisfaction by trying to change the external world, and the external world regularly disappoints us. Stoicism proposes a different route: change yourself rather than demanding that reality rearrange itself for your comfort.

That sounds simple, but what does it mean in practice?

There is the familiar dichotomy of control: some things are within our control, and some are not. It reminds me of a very silly joke: all animals in the world can be divided into two kinds—elephants and non-elephants. Ridiculous as it sounds, the Stoic move is not entirely different. The things that trouble us can also be divided into two kinds: what we can control and what we cannot.

If something is within our control, act on it. If it is not, brooding over it only produces anxiety and disappointment.

Epictetus says that if you refuse to enter contests you might lose, then you will never lose one. The outcome of a contest is not fully under your control, so one way to protect your peace is not to enter at all. If you know your chances of winning a tennis match are extremely low, then the safest route to inner calm is simply not to play.

That is the basic logic of the dichotomy.

But this book pushes it a step further into a trichotomy of control, which feels more realistic. Not everything is black and white. There is a middle territory. Some things are fully under our control, some are completely beyond it, and some are only partly controllable.

So we get three categories:

• things we can control completely, such as the goals we set for ourselves;
• things we cannot control at all, such as whether tomorrow will be sunny or cloudy;
• things we can influence but not fully control, such as whether we win a tennis match.

The third category is the most important.

Take tennis again. Under a strict dichotomy, because winning is uncertain, competing seems risky: you may lose and suffer for it. But the trichotomy lets us look more carefully. We can convert an external goal into an internal one.

The external goal is to win the match. That is only partly under our control. The internal goal is to play to the best of our ability. That is under our control.

Once the external goal is transformed into an internal one, much of the anxiety around the result softens. Winning is no longer the true target; doing one’s best is. If you have fully exerted your ability, then you have achieved your aim regardless of the scoreboard.

The same idea applies to relationships. Whether another person loves me is important, but it is not something I can fully command. In that case, the better goal is not make her love me but conduct myself in a way worthy of love. That is an internal standard. Other people remain other people. No amount of effort guarantees the desired outcome. If I insist on setting my peace of mind on what I cannot fully control, I am only inviting disturbance.

Fatalism

A good person should welcome every experience the loom of fate weaves for them. — Marcus Aurelius

The book distinguishes between fatalism toward the past and fatalism toward the present.

For the past, the Stoic view is that once something has happened, sinking into it serves little purpose. What matters is extracting the lesson so the same mistake is less likely to happen again.

Suppose a project fails because of a tiny oversight—something as small as misreading a decimal point. Stoicism would not ask us to endlessly condemn ourselves. It would ask: what can be learned here? Check more carefully next time. Build in multiple rounds of review. Arrange for several people to verify the same number. The point is correction, not self-torment.

For the present, Stoicism encourages acceptance and participation rather than complaint. The best path to satisfaction is not necessarily to keep feeding desire, but to be content with life as it already is—to see that what exists now can already be enough.

This fits closely with the trichotomy of control. The past is outside our control, so there is no point fastening ourselves to it. In the present, we can still choose how to attend, how to accept, how to engage. Worrying ourselves sick over what is gone or what has not yet arrived solves nothing.

Self-denial

Chasing pleasure is like pursuing a wild beast: once caught, it turns and tears us apart. — Seneca

Self-denial feels like an extension of negative visualization. It is not only imagining that things might go badly, but living for a while as if the worse condition were already real.

For example, one might imagine having only a single meal in a day, and then go a step further and actually arrange the day that way, eating one proper meal and keeping the others as plain as possible. The value of this is not punishment for its own sake. It makes the ordinary comforts we already have feel visible again. It restores the ability to taste gratitude.

The book describes two forms of self-denial: seeking discomfort and giving up pleasures.

In ordinary life, that might mean deliberately choosing some inconvenience—say, not turning on the air conditioner or the fan in hot weather. Or it might mean refusing an immediate pleasure, like not buying an ice cream on a summer day or passing on an iced milk tea.

The point is to remain on guard against pleasure itself. Pleasure has a darker side. Once we become attached to intense pleasure, it captures us. Our threshold rises. Repeating the same experience no longer gives the same satisfaction. Little by little, we lose sensitivity to the actual texture of daily life.

Why this book works as an introduction

These four tools—negative visualization, the trichotomy of control, fatalism, and self-denial—are only part of Stoicism. The broader framework also includes advice on duty, insult, grief, anger, social life, personal values, and death.

What struck me most was how practical it is. In some ways it overlaps with psychology. The trichotomy of control, for example, feels very close to Adler’s idea of separating tasks. Both are concerned with how negative emotions disrupt inner peace, and both spend a lot of effort identifying ways either to avoid those emotions or to reduce their force.

The book also makes a funny contrast between practical philosophy and purely analytic philosophy. If you ask a twentieth-century analytic philosopher, “I want to live a good life—how should I do it?”, the response might be a long examination of what “good” means, what “life” means, whether the question is coherent, and why the terms collapse under scrutiny. A Stoic, by contrast, would more likely tell you what to do.

That difference matters to me. Investigating the literal meaning of “the good life” can be intellectually interesting, but if the goal is actually to live better, at some point you have to try something.

One more thing stayed with me after finishing the book: avoiding negative emotions is not the same as suppressing them. Avoiding them means allowing them to arise and then working in ways that help them pass. Suppressing them means denying them, deciding they should not exist. But emotions accumulate. If they are continually pressed down, then one day they return all at once, like a volcanic eruption. It seems better to accept that sadness, anger, or disappointment will occur and face them naturally.

Meditations: flashes of insight scattered through a notebook

Meditations was written by the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. It feels less like a conventional book than a diary of thoughts. I borrowed a small edition from the library and read it in fragments during spare moments.

It is divided into twelve books, each made up of short entries. That structure makes the reading experience harder than I expected. The writing can be obscure, and different translations matter a lot. Some versions are much clearer than others.

One passage in particular left an impression on me. It is a long section about dealing with other people, anger, and judgment. Even after reading it, I didn’t fully understand it at first, so I turned to a secondary book that offered explanations.

What I took away from that section was roughly this:

1. Human beings are meant for mutual help. We are social creatures. If someone offends us, one possibility is simply that they lack the education, experience, or perspective to recognize what they are doing. That does not make the offense pleasant, but it gives us a reason for patience.

2. People act according to their own inner logic. That logic is shaped by their past experiences. If we try to understand why someone behaves as they do, our understanding of them becomes less shallow.

3. Everyone makes mistakes. There is no need to be especially severe about the mistakes of others.

4. Time reduces everything to dust. Ordinary people, great people, nations, humanity, even the universe—everything is temporary.

5. What angers or saddens us is often our judgment of another person’s action rather than the action itself. If I no longer interpret what someone did as an attack on me, if I do not frame it as something humiliating or devastating, then anger and sorrow may weaken. This is easy to say and very hard to do.

6. Remain sincere and preserve your own nature. Treat others in accordance with your own principles. Keep your warmth and your goodness. Hold onto the desire to help more people if you can. Keep learning, stay curious, respect difference, and maintain courage and enthusiasm toward life. You should not lose yourself because of someone else’s behavior.

That, for me, is where Meditations lives: not as a tightly organized system, but as bursts of clarity scattered across pages. Some lines suddenly illuminate something; others feel opaque and remote. Compared with A Guide to the Good Life, it is much less orderly and therefore more difficult as a starting point. If someone wanted an introduction to Stoicism, I would hand them the modern book first.

I Deliver Parcels in Beijing: work, humiliation, and the shaping of a person

The third book is very different. It is a memoir built from the author’s work experiences: night shifts at a logistics company, delivering parcels in Beijing, laboring in Shanghai, and other jobs done along the way.

The language is plain, but the feeling behind it is sincere. The book records, in detail, the bitterness and exhaustion of working life. Since I haven’t worked yet myself, it felt almost like reference material from the real world—valuable precisely because it made labor feel concrete rather than abstract.

What stayed with me most were the author’s reflections on his own past mind.

He writes that he is no longer like his younger self, always anxiously trying to prove himself to others, even deliberately accepting unfair treatment because he feared people might suspect him of being insincere. Later he realized that the urge to please everyone was blind and futile. Everyone judges others through the lens of themselves. You can never make an insincere person believe in your sincerity. And if someone is sincere, there is no need to prove it to them in the first place.

He also reflects on how embarrassing it feels, even now, to explain just how foolish he once was. He worries modern readers may not understand why he acted so stupidly back then, and yet even he himself can hardly believe it now. There is something painfully honest in that kind of self-exposure.

Another line that struck me was his realization that most people can only see from their own point of view, not from someone else’s. That is not a sophisticated insight, but in the book it lands with the weight of lived experience.

He also writes that when a person behaves selflessly, what others often return is not kindness but increased greed. That sentence is bleak, but it does not feel theatrical; it feels learned the hard way.

There is another revealing passage about praise. If someone complimented him, he would immediately deny it and try hard to belittle himself. He was afraid that later they would discover he was not as good as they thought and become disappointed. Better, he felt, to persuade them from the start that he was not good at all. He could not bear the sense of being at risk of exposure whenever someone thought well of him. If a person insisted on praising him, he would avoid them.

And then there is his reflection on Beijing itself. He says that if any one of his other work experiences were removed, the person he is today might not have changed much. But without the period in Beijing, he would be someone very different. Maybe “reborn” would be too strong, but at the very least that experience gave shape to his earliest self, like a starting point. He no longer feels panicked by the differences between himself and others. Instead, he values his own individuality. He still considers himself ignorant and timid, but beneath that there is now more persistence and more confidence.

The work scenes are equally memorable.

He notes that people almost always lose weight doing that kind of job. One coworker joined only a few days later than he did and went from more than 180 jin to more than 130 in three months. The author himself was not overweight to begin with, but after a few months he still lost more than ten jin.

On his first trial day, no one explained the schedule to him. He had already eaten dinner before arriving. At nine o’clock, when everyone else went to eat, he wasn’t hungry and skipped it, assuming there would be another chance later in the night. There wasn’t. From 9:30 p.m. until 7 the next morning, he worked with nothing but water and no food. He had brought no snacks. By the time morning came, he was dizzy with hunger.

He also describes how fatigue changes your standards. When you are exhausted, you start to think there is no point washing too carefully because you will just get dirty again tomorrow, and strong detergent costs money anyway, so soap is enough. Even after the clothes dry, they may still carry a heavy smell of sweat. But once you are doing that kind of job, you gradually stop caring.

He says sleep is the hardest part. Everyone adapts differently to a life where day and night are reversed.

One especially vivid episode involves a girl who looked physically unsuited to the work: thin arms and legs, short, not at all like someone who could do such heavy labor. But once she had been sent there, the team could not simply return her to HR or push her onto another group. She had to try. The team leader didn’t really want someone like that, because if she moved slowly she would drag down the whole group’s productivity, and if she couldn’t take the hardship and quit after a month or two, training her would have been wasted effort.

So during the trial period, the team leader specifically told them not to help her. Trial work was already the hardest part. People who had never done this kind of labor usually needed one or two weeks to adapt, and for someone with weaker physical condition it would be even tougher. But that was exactly why they could not help her. If they did, they might mislead her into thinking she was capable of the work. She had to suffer the full difficulty of it; only if she still believed she could do it after that would it prove she really could.

Oddly, he says they would lend a hand to people who looked strong and sturdy.

There is also a line about the emotional atmosphere of the workplace: everyone had their own pressure, their own family troubles, and no one had spare energy to care for other people. In that kind of environment, life squeezes everyone so hard that sympathy gets overdrawn, and people slowly become numb and indifferent without noticing it.

In another setting, because they were only interns who would leave after a few months, the permanent staff did not want to waste time teaching them. So they were usually assigned low-skill work: arranging cups and dishes, moving tables and chairs, and similar tasks.

While reading, I kept thinking the author might be highly sensitive. That would explain the close observation of everything around him, and the unusual precision with which he describes his own psychological state.

What I felt after finishing the book was a kind of empathy with distance. The distance comes from not having worked myself; I cannot truly know the pain of labor through direct experience. The empathy comes from recognizing that these experiences are not isolated. They happen across industries, in many forms, to many people. Even from outside, there is something to learn from them.

After reading all three

I don’t think reading books automatically makes life better. It is probably unwise to place one’s confidence in a book, or even in several books. That confidence has to rest in oneself.

Maybe insight only comes when the ideas are actually practiced. You can possess philosophy and still live badly. You will still be sad when sadness comes. You will still feel hurt when something hurts. Philosophy does not abolish suffering. At best, it gives you some way to move through it.

There is a line in Yi Yi that says that after the invention of film, human life became at least three times longer than before, because through film we can observe how other people live. Even though films are artistic creations shaped from reality, they still offer reference points. Books feel similar to me. If someone takes the trouble to write a book, it is because they have something they need to say, some meaning they want to carry across.

I once heard a podcast say something like this: the beautiful people we know have all gone through failure, pain, struggle, and setbacks. They found a way out of the abyss. After passing through those valleys, they gain a kind of sensitivity and appreciation, and their understanding of life fills them with compassion, gentleness, and deep care. No one becomes beautiful for no reason. Behind every beautiful person there are scars. What we can hope for, when we go through our own dark valleys, is to have some philosophy that keeps us from sinking into despair without end.

I hope all of us get to be happy.