The world is like a machine spinning faster and faster: feeds roar, emotions rise and fall on screens, and algorithms treat every pause as an ‘anomaly.’ We are pushed into a run: today we must be more mature, tomorrow stronger, the day after more efficient. Yet in the quiet of the night, what truly weighs on our hearts is often not ‘I can’t do it,’ but ‘I haven’t had time to think it through.’
‘Efficiency’ is driving everyone forward with an irresistible force. Ever higher demands and ever greater speed sweep each of us along, leaving us little room to breathe and making restlessness hard to avoid.
This year, we witnessed an AI race: the explosion of agents, the emergence of world models, the frenzied accumulation of data… AI truly entered households everywhere, sharing our work and participating in our decisions, helping each of us act faster and produce better work.
This year, we lived through a tariff war. The international landscape was turbulent and unpredictable; competition between major powers continued to intensify, and certainty remained elusive.
This year, population aging deepened, and the retirement age was postponed for the first time. Amid the suffocating pressure of work and study, we once again sighed at how hard life can be.
This year, we felt the times pushing harder at our backs and the tyranny of efficiency pressing upon us. We hesitated amid the contest between humans and machines, lost our bearings in the uncertainty of the age, and, on some quiet night, put down our phones and privately wished for a little more of the feeling of being truly alive.
Life is, after all, an open wilderness, yet each of us stumbles along the tracks of society’s clock. Its possibilities are endless, but we seem to ‘prefabricate our lives’ again and again for some fixed future goal. More completion, less process; more outcomes, less experience; more certainty, less chance. In this arithmetic of more and less, the stories that make us who we are are slowly diminishing…
AI has entered every workflow, allowing us to obtain answers without needing to think. Formulaic routines replace distinctive voices, and sameness drowns out difference. Emojis replace genuine feeling, making it harder to look patiently into another person’s eyes when we meet. Wave after wave of universities becoming more like high schools rolls on; as we compete over GPAs and research, we forget the original purpose—to discover what we love and understand the direction of our lives.
Yet throughout history, your stories and mine—every moment when our hearts surged, every late night when we talked about anything and everything, those important moments that moved us, delighted us, or stirred our anger—have always come from within, from the lives we have experienced, and from every process in which we have put our hearts into doing something. Finding direction amid hesitation and uncertainty; holding to our principles when we are stranded like fish in a dry rut; coming to know ourselves through the warmth and coldness of human relations; thinking carefully, then continuing to try.
Please try to slow down. Slowness is not stagnation; it allows us to arrive more deeply. Tianwen-2’s journey through space toward an asteroid is long and lonely, but that long wait is for the sake of bringing back a few dozen grams of precious samples. Look at the athletes competing in the National Games: muscle memory cannot be rushed. Every drop of sweat must be seasoned by time before it can be unleashed at the decisive moment. What is truly precious in this world—trust, skill, love, and our stories—can never be obtained at ‘double speed.’
We witnessed Ne Zha’s box office reaching ten billion yuan, a return on the care taken to tell its story well. We saw DeepSeek reach a wider public and declare that China, too, has its own AI; behind that moment lay its team’s painstaking work. We witnessed how the September 3 military parade lifted the nation’s spirits and astonished the world. Behind every bright and impressive result are sustained output, a long process, daily perseverance and sweat, the pain of failure, and the small, certain joys of success.
To adapt to this age and understand this upheaval, steadfastness is both a state of belief and the right stance for making peace with ourselves and the world.
When the winds over the Pacific turned again, the nerves of global markets tightened like strings. Videos generated by Sora became difficult to distinguish from reality; AI agents worked through the night; the first personalized gene-editing treatment succeeded. Who can reckon with this year’s joys and sorrows amid fluctuating exchange rates? Who can forget the faces reddened by extreme heat, or the sweat poured out on the Greater Bay Area’s sports grounds? When an algorithm understands you better than the person beside you in bed, do you feel, amid the convenience, a little of the desolation of being seen through? As babies selected through embryo screening appear in Silicon Valley, do you feel a trace of the fear technology can bring?
Where, ultimately, is the contest between China and the United States heading? When will the successive tariff wars come to an end? Why is Japan bringing tensions to a crest at this moment? When will the Philippines stop its repeated provocations in the South China Sea?
The road to AGI is gradually becoming clearer. Machines are racing toward surpassing humans across the board, and major internet companies are putting AI among their reasons for layoffs. People seem replaceable. Where, then, will the meaning and value of your existence and mine lead?
To remain steadfast means more than staying steady in the face of present changes; it also means believing in our own values, choices, and efforts. From our country’s refusal to bow before America’s tariff bludgeon to each person’s ‘resilience’ amid changing circumstances, this year we held on to one great ideal after another and worked for one ordinary life after another. We responded to change through our actions, resisted oncoming currents with anchors of belief, defined ourselves through vivid stories, and built the future through deep remembrance. It is precisely these actions, carrying the particulars of who we are, that give each of us a unique steadfastness, write our distinctive stories, and forge the ultimate value of our existence.
Every person around us is an anchor for you and me; only together do all these people make up our whole world. They concentrate in office cubicles, sow seeds in the fields, clear obstacles from the streets, and seek breakthroughs in laboratories. They face the tide with those around them behind their backs, shoulder responsibility, and shelter their homes within it. The deepest certainty is never an unchanging life itself. It lies in the particular people who meet change alongside us amid upheaval. They gather small lights into stars, giving us, in a world that sways, the look in one another’s eyes that says we are here.
The night is long, but you and I both know that the sun will rise as always. The first sunlight of the new year will fall across the earth, reaching everywhere, driving away the cold of winter nights and lighting all living things. We feel hope at sunrise, look toward spring in the depths of winter, and find warmth in coming together on festive days. Years from now, whenever we consider the value of our existence, we will remember these scattered little moments. As we slowly savor these points of light from the past, we gain an anchor for a still more uncertain future, carrying the stories we know into a new tomorrow!
Happy New Year!
