When we were young, interest alone was enough to make us throw ourselves into something. We would act first and think later. Many of those passions lasted only a few days; many ended in disappointment, confusion, or the disapproval of others. Even so, we kept going. We got hurt again and again, and still found a strange joy in it.
Then, for one reason or another, freedom quietly thinned out. The long stretches of idle time disappeared. So many dreams from those earlier years were shattered before we ever had the chance to truly lose ourselves in them. We began to like standing alone under the night sky, or walking by ourselves through empty streets after dark, letting the mind drift toward thoughts that felt both grand and insignificant. But by then, something essential was gone: we were no longer free.
Work, ambition, love—each of them, in its own way, buried the dreams we once carried. Not the practical dreams tied to status or reward, but the ones that had nothing to do with profit, nothing to do with age, nothing to do with what the world considered useful. We may still love writing, yet no longer have the time to live deeply enough to write, to feel enough to put pen to paper. We may still love travel, yet cannot afford even one impulsive departure, the kind where you simply leave because your heart says go. We may still love singing, yet remain silent, restrained by the circumstances around us.
Late at night, lying down in bed can feel like the greatest luxury. Outside the window, a small shop is still bright, and a group of young people are drinking and laughing together. The sound of glasses clinking breaks up the stillness of the night. Every evening, there seems to be a group like that somewhere. Maybe we are all the same in this way: we like to hide our deepest loneliness inside noise and company.
When dreams are gone and direction fades, people begin to move through life step by step, acting out a script whose ending seems to have been written long ago. Anger is swallowed. Words stay unspoken. Some sink instead into drink, desire, distraction—numbing themselves, drifting through the days half-awake.
It is often said that we grew up, that we became responsible. But perhaps it is more accurate to say that our hearts grew old, and we made peace with reality before we were ready. In a society flooded with material desire, we too become calculating. We lose even the courage to pursue what once mattered to us.
That is why one particular contradiction stands out so sharply now. There are more independent media voices than ever, flourishing everywhere, yet so many exist only to attract attention at any cost. They have drifted far from whatever first moved them to speak. It is almost absurd to see accounts that present themselves as literary or artistic spaces filling their pages with celebrity gossip, cheap entertainment, and easy jokes just to win clicks. It is hard to blame them entirely. In a restless age, deeper reflection is often treated as tedious or impractical, and it rarely brings any obvious reward. Even so, there are still people who hold on. They continue to protect what they love, reject what they despise, and refuse to give up the brave, young part of themselves.
Youth slips away little by little. We keep gaining things, and at the same time we keep losing things. Most of us, sooner or later, end up saying the same thing: how wonderful it was to be young, when dreams seemed endless and the heart seemed impossible to break. Now we appear much older—or at least much heavier in spirit. We no longer dare to wander too far in thought. We no longer dare to follow impulse into the unknown. Responsibility, duty, mission—these words become excuses we use to persuade ourselves. We say what we do not mean. We do what we do not truly choose. And in exchange for a more secure material life, we finally betray the dreams we carried for years.
I have always loved these lines by Bei Dao:
Back then, we had dreams
dreams of literature, of love,
of journeys that would carry us across the world.
Later, we drank deep into the night;
when our glasses touched,
that was the sound of dreams breaking.
If possible, sit down and have an honest talk with your former self. Ask what it was, exactly, that made us grow old so soon.