English translation · Reader alias: YanxiaRead the Chinese original ↗
Echo correspondenceNO. 09
First exchange / For Airing
From Yanxia
Why am I still anxious when I have free time?
Reader alias · Yanxia
NO. 09Letter
Yanxia to Airing
Hey man! It’s Yanxia!
I bet you did not expect an email from me! This is a way of communicating I have recently discovered. At first I wanted to tell a close friend abroad what I was doing. After two emails, I found I loved the feeling. For someone like me, who is not very good at socializing or expressing himself—an introvert, I suppose—this unhurried way of entering someone’s inner world is so much better than instant messaging: surface-level talk, constantly guessing how people feel, and all those social safety words. By the way, I invented that phrase. I mean things like “hahaha” and the dog-head emoji. You know what I mean.
I think things turn around when they reach an extreme. Instant messaging now dominates society, yet there seem to be more introverts and fewer places for the long-form communication they need. Perhaps people would use an app that offered that, haha. That reminded me: wasn’t Twin Diary that sort of app? I looked in the App Store today and it was gone. What a shame.
The phrase “walls of the heart” never used to mean much to me. Now those walls seem to be everywhere. A long letter feels like a tunnel connecting two people’s inner worlds. Even a face-to-face conversation cannot replace that.
I downloaded MoFlow and tried it too. What struck me most was the polished interface: it feels like facing the inside of a wall of the heart, except with artworks hanging on it. Like communicating with yourself through long passages of writing. I imagine many of its users must be anxious people.
Over the past couple of years I have become increasingly anxious, and so have the people I see and hear about. You too, perhaps? A few days ago I saw a Bilibili video titled “Life allows much more room for error than you think.” I stared at that title for a long time. Perhaps many supposedly exceptional people allow themselves too little margin for error. They turn Earth Online from an enjoyable RPG into a punishing Souls-like game: one little mistake costs a lot of health, a few hits from minor enemies and you are dead. [An example involving a third party’s sensitive personal circumstances has been omitted.] I think anxiety is often a form of conceit. The annoying thing is that, even knowing this, I am still anxious every day. That is the power of our social environment. If nobody were anxious, wouldn’t we become a highly contented society? How would society progress then? Haha.
Anyway, I only wanted to share a few wandering thoughts as a friend. This is not a “valuable” email, and I do not want to add to your social obligations. No need to spend time replying.
NO. 09Reply
Airing to Yanxia
Hey, brother!
When this letter arrived, I was first surprised, then delighted, and finally moved.
I have often thought of you over the years. [Private relationships and details of shared experiences have been removed.]
[The address and circumstances of a visit to a former shared home have been removed.] All the memories came back. [Details of when I lived there have been removed.] It felt so familiar. Everything was unchanged, yet everything had changed… The more anxious I become, the more I seem to think about the old days and how good they were. But time cannot run backward. We can only take the next step, here and now.
I think I stopped maintaining Twin Diary after graduation. MoFlow is my persistence about making products given a tangible form, and Twin Diary’s successor. I hope it can hold my thoughts and help other introverts find somewhere to record emotions, discover ideas and understand their beliefs.
As you say, the product tends to attract anxious, introverted users, so there is quite a lot of negative energy. But I hope MoFlow can help transform that energy, allowing people to recognize more possibilities behind their feelings.
Ah, once I start talking about MoFlow, I cannot stop. Let’s talk about life’s margin for error. I saw that same video a few days ago. Life takes so many forms, and none is necessarily bad. With good health and enough food and clothing—even without both—things can be acceptable. Yet I am always pursuing the best, the possibility of something better, and I wear myself out.
For example, while making MoFlow—there I go again—I went to [city removed] and deliberately chose a beautiful, quiet, elegant courtyard home with fairly high rent. Yet [length of stay and number of outings removed]. I hardly rested. I would wake up and start coding, meeting and debugging, only turning off the screen at midnight… I feel that my pursuit of time has become unhealthy; I keep, keep refusing to accept time slipping away…
Later, I realized I needed to work on my state of mind: be less attached to the future, try to experience the present, feel this moment through breathing, sound and touch. If I can feel the reality of time, it stops being an abstraction, and its passing becomes less frightening and unsettling.
These years have been exhausting. [Shared personal timeline removed.] The internet industry was declining at the time. Much of the work I did, apart from [career period removed], was not work I enjoyed. Every day brought more requests, meetings, arguments, communication and coordination. I did so much, yet felt as though I had done nothing. [Comments about a former team and specific career and project details have been removed.]
We are now making an international version of MoFlow to work around review issues. It should launch around [release date removed], then probably move into maintenance. I am also looking for work. [Specific interview arrangements removed.] After being out on my own for so long, I have found life without income rather tight, with no secure footing for the future. So I have decided to return to employment for a few years while making a small project each year with these friends and looking for opportunities to start something.
How have things been for you these past few years?