Disclaimer: ESL speaker with bad English writing skills. This rant is "Organic🌱🌿♻️🍃" produced and has not be auto-corrected by spell-checkers nor AI/LLM chemicals.

I engage with online arguments from strangers on the Interweb from time to time. Some of replies I receive often is "Essence of Leverage", a slang/meme in Chinese which resembles "trolling". I confess I did do this on purpose in order to consume my bordom and adjust my low self-esteem. During today's heated back & forth replies, the thread was moved to flamewar section, the opposition laughed me for been too childish like a tolder, or too old like a stuborn 40yo, which if funny, because apparently there's something wrong that urgently needs correction?

Calling me old might ouch me if I were younger, but now it's hurting less, maybe just a meh. In retrospection, I came to the conclusion that there are two stages of world-view: for young adults, there's a strong opinion that some part of the world is wrong, and there's strong motivation of pursuade others how the world should be. Few years back I was in that precise state, I spent hours and days battling speech from others, like to defend my faith or something, hoping to achieve something out of it.

As age grows, I found stalemate , and hopefully peace. There's nothing wrong with the world, in fact that the world is inperfect by design, our brain is modeling the world in a causuality-reality way. But physical world can't always be encapsulated in matters of verbatim reasons, shit happens all the time for no reason. and would never go the way with most people's wish. There's little one could do to change it, maybe at special occasions, by some extreme luck, chosen ones can play a role in some social movement showing how the world could be.

This brings up my favorite episodes from 2023, What If from Marvel Studios. There are so many possibilities for each alternate story line. So in real life, why do we have to assign ourselves to the fixed label given by desiganated social hierarchy? Does 40yo have to be wise and know-all? Does opinions from adults have to be affirmative? I think it's not. People grow up accustomed with education background and socio-economic environments, and get used and blind-folded by it. Staying curious and foolish is the key to jump out of the circle. Challenge one's world-view and vice-versa is benificial for one's own good, and especially so in "collective" culture sphere of China, but changing others' is a waste of time.