Only with the support of this “capacity to move” could I admit something I had previously avoided:
I had not actually worked out where to go next.
Under the old world's logic, “not having it figured out” was dangerous, taboo, an error requiring immediate correction. Once I could cross between systems, I began to see that this uncertainty might not be my inadequacy, but the new world's normal condition.
Real change did not begin after I had thought everything through.
Quite the reverse: over these two or three years, I increasingly realized that not having a clear answer was becoming normal rather than a temporary lapse.
Before the pandemic ended, much of the world shared a similar expectation. Policymakers, executives and ordinary families generally believed this was an external shock: get through it, and pent-up demand would produce a sharp rebound, returning growth to its former path in a V-shaped recovery. This was not an empty expectation. It rested on decades of experience in which recovery followed financial crises or regional recessions as long as the system survived.
Precisely because this expectation was so widespread, the contrast with reality became stark when pandemic restrictions ended and borders reopened.
Cities quickly grew lively, flights multiplied, restaurants had queues and calendars filled meeting rooms again. Yet the imagined rebound did not arrive on schedule. Many countries showed macroeconomic recovery, but individual sentiment did not follow. Consumption failed to expand continuously, companies hesitated to commit heavily to long-term growth, and families approached the future cautiously. The default confidence that once supported long-range planning did not return to its old position.
I sensed this not through one grand event, but through ordinary details that kept repeating.
Meeting-room discussions quietly changed direction. Once centered on “how to expand next” and “how to capture the window,” they now revolved around “risk control,” “pace management” and “responding to uncertainty.” These terms were not new, but had moved from background to foreground, from supporting considerations to the dominant logic. Discussions remained professional and rational, but less certain about the future.
Changes in social feeds were more obvious. Stories of promotions, job changes and home purchases became rarer, replaced by ambiguous reposts, observations about the economy or avoidance of career subjects altogether. Few explicitly described failure, yet many were clearly shifting from “Where do I want to go?” to “For now, I should stay still.”
The news maintained an almost continuous low-pressure atmosphere. Foreign companies in China “seemed fine,” yet reports of cuts, contraction and mergers persisted. Industries once considered secure faced repeated questions about their structural prospects. Property moved from a consensus asset to a topic requiring cautious language. None of these changes was explosive, but together they created a persistent pressure that discouraged concentrated bets.
Changes across the Pacific also became impossible to ignore. The United States showed considerable resilience after the pandemic: employment improved, capital markets recovered quickly and technology companies remained active. But resilience did not automatically create social security. For many families, higher living costs, heavier education and healthcare burdens, and less continuous employment opened a gap between “growth can recover” and “we dare to plan for the long term.” The system functioned while individuals hesitated to commit. That mismatch undermined familiar frameworks of judgment.
Against this background, factors once treated as distant, long-term variables entered personal decisions. During the pandemic, several people around me who had planned to stay in China quietly changed their residency or living arrangements. Foreign nationals also revised asset allocations and educational plans. This was neither panic nor a political realignment, but a very quiet diversification of risk.
My first real encounter with this suspended uncertainty came not in the news, but on an ordinary business trip.
In 2022, I was working in Xiamen. During a break, local colleagues took me on a cable-car ride. We rose slowly above the growing city, with the sea in the distance. Along the way we passed Hulishan Fortress, a late-Qing coastal defense site now partly open as a historic attraction.
The cable car swayed. I casually asked why there were no taller buildings in the area. A companion pointed into the distance and said tall buildings could not be built there.
I assumed this meant heritage protection or landscape controls. Then he added: “If something happens across the strait, this area will be a key location.”
He spoke calmly, without agitation or political declaration, as if describing a fact already embedded in how the city operated. Nobody pursued the subject. The cable car continued and the city opened out again.
What struck me was not an abstract lesson about how macro forces shape space, but something more unsettling. In Shanghai, less than a thousand li away, we rarely incorporated Taiwan Strait tensions into everyday decisions, much less home purchases, settlement or long-term planning. Here, at least in my companion's explanation, they had entered the understanding of urban space. I did not verify the actual planning basis for local height restrictions, so this conversation is not causal evidence. What affected me was how the same broad risk becomes tangible in different places.
For the first time, I clearly saw that supposedly permanent background conditions had already shifted in many places, just not simultaneously or in a uniform way. The deeper problem is that a human life is so short that we often mistake one historical moment for an eternal yardstick with which to project the future.
At this stage, the Taiwan Strait did not enter everyday life through a dramatic event. It did so as an enduring state of suspension, shaping how people imagined the next ten or twenty years.
Together, these changes forced a serious question: if the future cannot be predicted clearly, compressing oneself into a highly fixed identity becomes a risk. When society no longer provides automatic support, certainty is not necessarily safety. It can amplify every consequence of a failed judgment.
This thought did not arrive suddenly. It accumulated through small discomforts. I became less willing to let one title summarize all my abilities and more wary of career stories that sounded too complete or linear. I kept asking an unglamorous question: if this system stops responding as expected, what can I still use to keep acting?
Seemingly scattered changes began to move in the same direction.
I stopped rushing to assign myself a sharper label or commit all effort to one upward curve. I deliberately preserved some ambiguity, allowing different capabilities to coexist and possibilities to develop in several directions. Others might see insufficient focus. To me, it was a buffer against an uncertain future.
Alongside that buffer, I took more concrete, sometimes clumsy steps. Reading became systematic and extended beyond industry news into history, economics, geopolitics and social structure. Keeping notes became a daily habit, not to broadcast opinions but to separate judgments from emotions. Whenever possible I went out to see the world, not to collect destinations, but to observe how societies operated on different timelines.
In Hong Kong I saw traces of the intense striving of the 1970s and 1980s; in Dubai, an expansionary energy reminiscent of coastal China twenty years earlier; in Tokyo, a society learning to live slowly after rapid growth and a long glide; in Los Angeles, division and confusion inside a still-powerful empire. These experiences gave no immediate answers, but greatly changed my sense of scale. The world does not inhabit a single time. That fact itself requires individuals to reconsider their position.
My understanding of geography changed too. Cities were no longer merely destinations or outcomes; they became part of a structure. Different regions carry different rhythms, and different institutions allow different possibilities. You need not establish yourself everywhere, but should at least know where alternative space might exist.
The hardest adjustment remained psychological. For a generation trained to be intensely goal-oriented, allowing oneself temporarily not to know is difficult. Yet reality repeatedly reminded me that postponing judgment is not necessarily avoidance. Sometimes it is an essential survival strategy.
Only when space existed simultaneously in identity, geography and psychology did a new coordinate system begin to emerge. It was not secure, but it had one important quality: it could be adjusted.
Looking back, this was not the instant an era ended. The world did not collapse, systems kept working and city lights stayed on. The essential change was in our generation's position toward the world. Growth, stability, accumulation and advancement had not disappeared, but they no longer took effect automatically.
With this understanding, anxiety did not vanish. It changed form—not because problems diminished, but because I stopped demanding immediate answers. The world could remain indistinct, paths unclear and judgments deferred, on one condition: I retained the ability to act rather than being swept away by one change.
This was not retreat. It was repositioning.
I am Ni Mouren. The Uncontrolled Age of Light Speed continues.