If I look back over my own path, I find it hard to describe it as a succession of daring judgments.
If anything, it looks too smooth. I was born at a reasonably fortunate time, followed a clear and stable educational path, and did not face structural unemployment immediately after graduation. The industries and companies I joined remained on the growth side of the economy for a long time.
Many of my choices hardly qualified as “decisions.” They were natural next steps under the circumstances, an accumulation of chance opportunities against a favorable historical background.
Joining Ford and choosing a field related to new-energy vehicles, for instance, was hardly radical at the time. Those years placed new energy at the intersection of almost every grand narrative: policy support, technological progress, investment and global industrial upgrading. I was not “betting on the future.” I was taking what looked like a logical path within a system that seemed sufficiently sound, mainstream and proven.
That is precisely why I was slow to realize that the real warning sign was not whether one decision might fail. It was whether I had unknowingly staked my entire life on a single system.
For a long time, that system seemed almost beyond reproach.
It told you what counted as accumulation and advancement, and which efforts would eventually be recognized, rewarded and added to your résumé. You only had to keep investing time and ability; the system seemed capable of handling the conversion automatically. Repeated confirmation made it difficult to question.
Many of my choices followed that logic.
I bought a home while prices were rising, not as a speculation but from a familiar middle-class instinct: a secure foothold in a rapidly expanding city would anchor me to its growth. I barely participated in the stock market—not because of exceptional judgment, but because it seemed troublesome and I could hardly be bothered to open an account. In retrospect, “missing out” became an accidental form of risk avoidance.
The problem was not that the system had always been wrong. It was that it worked so smoothly for so long that its conditions became invisible.
People came to assume it could support an entire lifetime. In that assumption, support was first mistaken for permanence.
A system that runs reliably for years makes us forget a premise: every reward depends on a particular structure. When that structure changes, the things we regarded as “anchors of security” do not immediately fail. They quietly amplify risk when we need to change direction.
A home, a position, an industry label and an established professional identity are protective moats during an upswing. After a turning point, they can become obstacles. Not because they have deteriorated in themselves, but because extracting yourself from them has become difficult.
I know this condition well. It is not fear of the future so much as a subtler psychological mechanism: you know exactly what you would give up, but cannot know whether the future will offer an equivalent return. You hesitate, postpone and use past successes to explain a changing reality.
If anything kept me from losing my judgment in that hesitation, it was not the professional expertise I once considered my “hardest” skill. It was the training I had taken less seriously: language, and the ways of thinking that grow around it.
At first, language was simply a gateway.
After China joined the WTO, English was almost an admission ticket to foreign companies and international institutions. Knowing English meant that the system could select you, a larger organization could absorb you, and you could enter what looked like a more reliable upward path.
Only later did I realize that what language really provides is not opportunity itself, but the ability to move between contexts.
Every language you enter gives you access to the interior of another account of the world. The same event has a different center of gravity in different languages; the same concept carries different moral weight across cultures. Language continually forces you to recognize that your familiar logic is not the world's only explanation.
During an upswing, this ability may seem unremarkable, even “slow.” But when conditions loosen and rules are rewritten, it prevents you from resting every judgment on a single interpretation. You notice changing narratives more easily, understand the motives behind rules, and are less likely to mistake one successful route for a universal truth.
I did not yet use a phrase such as “staking everything on one system,” but reality kept sending reminders.
Around that time, my father recommended that I watch the film Upstream.
That detail mattered. It suggested that within their own frame of reference, my parents were beginning to sense that something was wrong, without being able to identify it precisely. The world of delivery workers was real to them, but also highly abstract. Employment changes, housing pressure, economic decline and a tightening international environment were not invisible; they were difficult to integrate into a coherent chain of causes. They felt the tension but could not locate its direction.
In a sense, the film gave them an artistic point of entry. It compressed an unfolding structural change into recognizable people: middle-aged, educated individuals who had once stood safely inside the system, then found themselves rapidly thrown off course, their lives reversed with an almost tragic force. But the film neither explained the causes nor needed to. It presented consequences, impact and the rupture of individual lives amid systemic change, rather than the logic of that structural transformation.
For my parents, this was already the furthest they could reach. They passed such things to us as a way to compare notes and express empathy.
They were not offering advice so much as seeking confirmation: this was not an individual's defeat, but a structural retreat experienced by a generation.
There was still no answer.
The path they knew had genuinely worked and had been validated repeatedly. In that experience, problems could usually be solved by working harder and proceeding more carefully, rather than questioning the path itself.
Faced with these changes, they could only watch with mixed belief and doubt while instinctively hoping we would return to the track they once understood. It was not that they lacked understanding. The track had quietly disappeared.
As the economy weakened, asset prices fell and income growth flattened, familiar names began reappearing in unfamiliar ways. Not at industry conferences or celebratory dinners, but in quieter corners of social-media feeds. Some were selling cars; some were clearing out homes; others suddenly took odd jobs far removed from their professional histories.
What stayed with me from Upstream was not a particular line, but the pressure of always being on the move: someone is still working hard and supporting a family, yet finds it increasingly difficult to turn present hardship into lasting security. This is my interpretation after watching the film, not a verbatim account of a specific scene or line.
You realize then that many people were not brought down by one mistake. They felt the magnified costs of structural change only after continuing to apply lessons learned when “the tide was rising.”
They tied their professional identities to one industry, concentrated assets in one city, and committed time and credit to a repeatedly validated logic of return. When the structure changed, the risk was not simply “slowing down.” It multiplied abruptly. The mortgage remained, family duties remained, physical needs remained, but the system no longer caught them.
That descent is undramatic but extraordinarily long. It is not losing everything overnight. It is waking each day to find yourself slightly less able to return to your former position.
Only then did I fully understand that the real risk of betting on one system is not the probability of failure, but whether you still have room to act when failure arrives.
I remained relatively intact during that period not because my judgment was superior, but because I had inadvertently kept a little unobtrusive redundancy in my priorities.
Although most of my resources remained concentrated in one system, language, experience across regions and other roles left me some room. During growth this redundancy looked inefficient, even indecisive. Once the downturn truly began, it became an ability to slow the fall.
I began to rethink the word “asset.”
It no longer meant only things that could be quantified or inherited. It also meant capabilities and room for maneuver that could be carried away, transferred and recombined as systems changed. The question was not how much you owned, but whether you could keep acting after losing some of it.
This was not a rejection of the past.
Quite the contrary: past accumulation made this reordering possible. But if I kept the old priorities, those accumulated advantages would themselves become part of the risk.
In this sense I was becoming more cautious, not more radical. My caution concerned certainty, rather than change.
A single system once lifted us. As it ages, continuing to stake our entire lives on it is itself a way of magnifying risk.
Recognizing this, I began to understand that the question deserving serious attention was not “Where should I go next?” It was whether, as the world keeps rearranging itself, I had left room to keep acting in the face of the unknown.
The next discussion concerns how to rebuild a structure that can move with us through uncertainty.