Chapter 18: The Stupidest Path (Part II) — Why Walk It Still
Writing a Story in the Ruins
In 2024, an illness brought me to a complete stop.
Not a minor illness. Serious enough to force everything to a halt. After stopping, everything I had been pressing down floated to the surface. The wounds accumulated over years — tangled, interwoven, a thousand threads knotted together. Fallen ill, without the strength to pretend not to see them any longer, I could only look them in the eye.
The wound was not caused all at once. It was layered on, stratum by stratum. The first layer was silence — you discover something is wrong, calculate the cost, choose not to speak, thinking that if you just endure, things will move in the right direction. The second layer was sealing off — you try to confirm the truth, only to find every channel shut. The third layer was complicity — the people you brought in to help became instruments of cover-up; you yourself participated in processes that were altered; looking in the mirror, you see not only the wound but your own fingerprints. The fourth layer was failure to catch — you finally speak up, and the person closest to you asks "where's the evidence?"; well-meaning people respond with the system's logic. The fifth layer was positivity — society tells you to look forward, to let go, as if your wound were merely a matter of attitude.
Layer upon layer, and your moral worldview has been dismantled. Not fear — fear at least has an object. This is the uprooting of your fundamental trust in the world.
What comes after collapse? A long stretch of time in which nothing is certain. You do not know what you are doing. The old path can no longer be walked; the new one has not yet appeared. That state is not confusion — confusion at least implies a sense of direction. That phase has no coordinates at all.
Then, in those ruins, I began writing a story.
Not for publication, not for healing, not for anyone. Simply because those things, if I did not write them down, I could not contain them. The weight of eight layers of wound stacked together cannot be articulated in everyday language, but placed inside a fictional character, the structure can be seen clearly.
In the process of writing, the illness slowly redirected me. Not an inspirational epiphany. A very slow process — you begin to distinguish what you truly care about from what you thought you should care about. Once those "shoulds" are stripped away one by one, what remains is very little, but very clear.
Knowing it cannot be done, yet doing it still.
This is the starting point of the equation from the previous chapter. It did not begin with a business plan followed by execution. It began with a collapse, and then, in the ruins, picking up a pen.
Choosing the Medium
Choosing what medium to use was not a casual decision.
The first idea was software or game development. The logic was direct: if you want to transmit complex systemic knowledge, interactive experience is the most effective vehicle. But development costs are extremely high and the risks enormous. More importantly, once you go down the software-development path, you are inevitably pulled into the very structure you are critiquing.
Crowdfunding was an option, but crowdfunding is essentially pre-sales — you promise a group of people you will deliver something in the future, then use their money to develop it. Once money comes in, it influences your decisions. Investors want progress reports; supporters want to see results; the roadmap must be public and aligned with market expectations. You think you are doing independent development, but actually you are running a micro-enterprise, with the boss replaced by a thousand small shareholders.
There is also a fundamental asymmetry: software built for personal use and software built for commercial deployment are completely different things. For personal use, core functionality just needs to run, costing perhaps 5% of the effort. But once you must deploy, handle security, deal with user support, and maintain continuously — these "non-core" tasks swallow 95% of your energy. You think you are creating; in reality, you are doing operations.
So software stays for personal use; the public medium chosen was writing — especially the full-length novel.
The novel as a medium has several structural advantages. It depends on no single platform — it can be published anywhere, translated into any language, distributed as a PDF in a completely offline environment, and will not vanish because a platform shuts down or changes its algorithm. Its shelf life is measured in decades — a piece of software not updated for three years is obsolete; a piece of news commentary expires in three months; but a novel that captures the underlying patterns of human nature will remain relevant twenty years later. And the full-length novel is one of the few public vehicles currently capable of carrying systemic complexity — a hundred-thousand-plus words can accommodate the multi-layered operation of institutions, the interest dynamics among characters, and the causal chains that span time, none of which short essays or social media posts can achieve.
Moreover — returning to that collapse — the people driven to the brink by the system, the people who disappeared in the data, the colleagues who chose self-destruction because of systemic oppression — the horror of these things lies not in any single incident but in the structure. Write an emotional exposé and people read it, say "how tragic," and scroll past. But if you dismantle the structure and let the reader walk alongside the characters, layer by layer into the depths, only then will they truly understand how that suffocating feeling comes about. Short pieces cannot do this. Only the novel's length and immersive power can contain it.
Chasing current events is indeed the fastest way to gain exposure. But such content has an extremely short half-life — three days later, no one reads it. Worse, chasing current events gradually changes the way you think: you start focusing on what will "go viral" instead of what is "true." Human nature is stubbornly unchanging. Technology will change, platforms will turn over, terminology will be updated, but the underlying motives driving human behaviour — fear, greed, conformity, self-deception — will not. What I want to write about are these unchanging things.
And this is the specific form that Chapter 16's "differentiation" takes in my case. No rat-racing — no selling courses, no chasing hot takes, no competing with same-category AI content creators for the same pool of traffic. Making my own pie — using the full-length novel to carry structural knowledge, using a free strategy to build a distribution base. There are almost no direct competitors on this path, because most people would not choose a road this slow, this stupid, this incompatible with "monetisation logic."
Some will ask: if you write with AI, does what you write still count as "yours"?
This question was already dismantled in Chapters 11 and 12. AI can help you write more fluently, but it cannot decide for you what to write, why to write it, or from what angle to approach it. All these decisions come from your consciousness, and consciousness is built up over decades. If you remove the AI, what is left? That remaining thing is your consciousness. If a great deal remains, AI merely made you faster; if very little remains, the question you need to face is not "which AI should I use" but "do I actually have something to say."
I chose to write this kind of thing rather than sell AI courses — not because I do not know how to sell, but because I can dismantle every layer inside that model — Chapter 7 dismantled the structure of anxiety arbitrage; Chapter 5 dismantled the mechanism of information feudalism — and once it is dismantled, I cannot bring myself to do it. Not following the trend, not taking shortcuts, has always come with a cost. Chapter 15 already laid out that bill. But I believe this is a cost I can bear, and I believe my choice still has a viable path.
Facing the 90%
Returning to a more fundamental question: if only 1% to 10% of society possesses the highest-order knowledge, what about the remaining 90%?
One path is to serve that top 10%. Produce premium content, charge high prices, compete with other elites for the same pool of high-net-worth clients. This path is viable during periods of economic expansion, because the top-tier market is growing. But in an era of overall economic contraction, the top-tier market is also shrinking, and competitors will not decrease. The closed loop dismantled in Chapter 16 operates in the knowledge-services market as well.
The other path is to face the 90%.
This is not charity, nor the persona of "doing good deeds." It is a judgement-based choice: in a world where information stratification is intensifying, reducing deep knowledge to a form ordinary people can understand and use has greater long-term value than serving the top tier.
The class stratification of knowledge is not new, but it is accelerating. According to data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the price of college textbooks rose 1,041% from 1977 to 2015 — more than three times the rate of inflation over the same period (NBC News, 2015; Bureau of Labor Statistics). Sixty-three percent of college students choose not to purchase textbooks because they are too expensive (Education Data Initiative, 2026). The textbooks assigned by courses are already expensive, but the supplementary references professors recommend are even more so — and the insights, frameworks, and depth in those books are genuinely far superior to standard textbooks. The best knowledge hides behind the most expensive carriers. The information feudalism dismantled in Chapter 5 exists in education in its most naked form — if you cannot afford the price, you will never see that layer.
Some will say this is market mechanism, not unfairness. But if you are not a beneficiary of this unfair system and yet rationalise the phenomenon, you are only inadvertently reinforcing the inequality. Why demand fairness? Precisely because the world is inherently unfair.
Reduction does not mean reduction in quality. Sometimes, teaching a person to install Linux, get online with affordable hardware, and learn to use AI tools for self-directed exploration of resources — this fundamental but durable knowledge is already enough to transform a person from "being fed by algorithms" to "actively searching." The significance of this transformation is greater than any single technical skill.
This path is extremely arduous. Without paid courses, there is no stable income; without a persona, there is no traffic boost; without chasing hot takes, there is no algorithmic recommendation. Giving up these three things is equivalent to giving up virtually every verified monetisation path in today's content economy.
But giving them up buys something in return: what you write is not contaminated by any interest structure. Without paid courses, you need not manufacture anxiety for the sake of "course sales" — the "anxiety is the best product" dismantled in Chapter 7; you need not become a part of that machine. Without a persona, you need not maintain a "knowledge KOL" image or continuously produce performative content. Without chasing hot takes, you can spend your time on observations whose value will only become apparent a decade from now.
Leaving It for the Future
Some things do not need predicting, because they will not change: power concentrates; information is monopolised; the middle layer is squeezed; most people unknowingly cede their judgement. These are the foundational patterns of social architecture and human nature.
What I want to do is to continue observing and recording these patterns. To leave them for the young people who will step into society in ten or twenty years, about to face all manner of bewilderment.
Understand the mechanics, and no change in technology can frighten you.
But this endeavour is time-pressured.
The closed loop dismantled in Chapter 16 — credential inflation, the collapse of "more work, more reward," the compression of survival space — what is its macro consequence? The social structure itself is deforming. I once grew up in a bell-curve society — a massive middle class supporting the entire structure, with only a tiny fraction of the very rich and the very poor. That society rewarded diligence; social mobility had clear rules. Imperfect, but you could find a place for yourself and find room to rise.
Today's society is degenerating from bell-curve to M-shaped, even K-shaped — the middle layer is being squeezed to nothing; you either move up or fall down; the platform that once let the majority live stably is vanishing. Data supports this judgement: according to the OECD's 2024 report, in OECD countries, the wealthiest 10% of households own more than 52% of all household wealth; in the United States, that figure reaches 79% (OECD, 2024). The OECD's 2025 wealth-distribution report further notes that even when relative wealth inequality increases only modestly, against a backdrop of rapid overall wealth growth, the absolute gaps between strata are widening sharply — "these widening absolute gaps pose greater barriers to social mobility" (OECD, 2025). Chapter 16's "the ladder was stolen" is a personal experience; here, the entire floor structure is deforming. The ladder being gone is one thing; the floors themselves collapsing is another.
If this deformed structure persists for another fifty years, no one will be well off — including those standing at the top today, because a society without a middle-class buffer will not be stable, and instability means everyone lives on edge. This is not prediction; it is already happening.
So "freely distributing deep knowledge" is not merely my personal choice; it points to a larger problem: if knowledge continues to be class-stratified and the middle layer continues to be compressed, the number of people who can read the mechanics, who can identify narrative manipulation, who can make independent judgements will dwindle. And the fewer such people there are, the harder this structure becomes to change. This is another closed loop — bigger, slower, and more lethal than the one in Chapter 16.
Chapter 13 dismantled a phenomenon: the same book read at different life stages yields different things. Not because the book changed, but because your cognitive model evolved. But this only applies when the "word" in the book has "meaning" compressed from real experience behind it. A book built from tautologies yields the same thing no matter how many times you read it.
The books I intend to write — industry analyses are fertiliser for the database; the books themselves are the gift for the future. Ten or twenty years from now, young people reading them for the first time may see only the surface-level cases and stories. Once they have hit enough walls themselves, experienced the squeeze of the system, tasted what it feels like when the ladder is stolen, they will open the same book and read an entirely different layer.
This is the stupidest path. Not because smarter choices do not exist, but because every smarter choice requires you to give up something you are not willing to give up. Chapter 14's "knowing it cannot be done, yet doing it still," applied to me, is this path. No guarantee of success, no guarantee of supporting oneself, not even a guarantee of being seen. But it is mine.
Not because I have confidence, but because I still have things I want to write. As long as I still have things I want to write, the moment to cut losses has not yet arrived.
The road is chosen. The last thing to account for is time — for whom, exactly, are these things being written?