Reflections & Memory
What truly changes a life is rarely the big things, but the daily that gets taken seriously—the choice of a glass of water, the moment of clarity within suffering, the way of learning, the time spent observing family and oneself. This collection gathers my notes on life's details, observation of civilization, education, and the body, totaling 49 articles.
Health and the Body
The body is the most honest instrument; it records far more than you assume.
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The Weight the Dharma Instrument Bore for My Mother: Those Extra Six Years Were Both Grace and Farewell
In 2019, my mother was diagnosed with stage IV lung adenocarcinoma. I brought a human bone dharma instrument given to me by my Tibetan Buddhist teacher to the hospital. The next day, the instrument shattered, and my mother's condition improved. Over the next six years, we were thrust into time that should not have existed—mother and son walked further down that narrow passage. In 2025, she still left us. This article is not about the supernatural, not about promoting any religion, but about recording what a son learned in the face of life and death: the power of love is finite, but precisely because it is finite, you must pour everything into it while you still have it.
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What Do All Those Numbers on the Mineral Water Label Actually Mean?
That back-label list of minerals and numbers, decoded—what TDS, pH, calcium and sodium values actually tell you about the water you're drinking.
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Why Are the Water Menus in European Restaurants Longer Than the Coffee Menus?
At Noma, Eleven Madison Park, and El Celler de Can Roca, the water menu is longer than the coffee menu. Why do Europeans think water needs pairing? This piece decodes the mineral fingerprints of twelve waters across six countries, mapped to different cuisine styles.
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Why Do Germans Take Water So Seriously? — Starting From a State-Certified Healing Spring
German law divides mineral water into two tiers — natural mineral water and Heilwasser (healing water). Only around 55 sources in all of Germany hold this certification. This article begins with two springs in Hessen, exploring the structural differences of German mineral water culture through geology, history, and mineral analysis.
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Why Is Lithium Starting to Appear in Medical Discussions of European Mineral Water?
In August 2025, Harvard's Bruce Yankner team published a decade-long study in Nature: lithium may be a foundational metal for brain function, and in Alzheimer's patients, brain lithium gets "sponged away" by amyloid. The same Yankner laid the groundwork for the amyloid hypothesis 35 years ago, and 35 years later completed it himself. This piece begins with that study and looks back at a century of European lithium-bearing healing waters.
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A Rosbacher Glass Bottle's 2,000-Year Journey
Rosbacher mineral water has been consumed since Celtic and Roman times, with its first scholarly mention in 1565 in Commentarius de balneis. The parent group Hassia has run on 100% German hydroelectric power since 2015, with its Bad Vilbel plant climate-neutral since 2020, and new Mehrweg bottling equipment saving 20% water and 25% electricity per bottle. This piece tracks one glass bottle's 20,000 km sea journey to Taiwan, exposing both the German producer's responsibility system and the circular logic behind the fit-for-purpose choice of glass for table water.
Civilization and Era Observation
In the cracks of our era, see how things humans take for granted are quietly changing.
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The Overlooked Metric of Civilization: A Risk Philosophy of Replacing 'Goals' with 'Systems'
The progress of civilization cannot be measured by economic growth alone. Reducing risk and providing security are equally at the core of civilization. On a personal level, building a continuously operating life system leads to true happiness far more than chasing goals that have endpoints.
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Opening Your Eyes in Suffering: Reading Cioran's On the Heights of Despair
In an age that worships efficiency, suffering is often treated as an error to be corrected. But Cioran's words remind us: the depth of existence often surfaces amid disorder and brokenness. Contemplation is not an escape from reality, but the establishment of inner order for action.
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The Burnout Society: Trapped Between Burning Out and Lying Flat in the Self-Exploitation of Meritocracy
In the achievement society, we are no longer oppressed by external authority but reduced to free laborers engaged in self-exploitation. Byung-Chul Han's The Burnout Society exposes a paradox: when everyone becomes their own boss, everyone also becomes their own cruelest oppressor. Reclaiming the courage to be bored is the true starting point for resisting this violence of positivity.
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Igniting Meaning in Chaos: Humanistic Negative Entropy is Not Chicken Soup, It's a Survival Strategy
Negative entropy isn't cold knowledge from physics class. It's the only way to avoid being swept away in the information torrent—not through more knowledge, but through deeper meaning construction. From theological training to AI collaboration, a serial entrepreneur's notes on practicing humanistic negative entropy.
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Riding the Wave or Drowning? The Historical Turning Point We're Living Through
In early 2020, Australian bushfires raged for six months, COVID-19 spread from Wuhan across the globe, and the Tokyo Olympics faced their first-ever pandemic postponement. Looking back from the future, we'll see ourselves standing at a massive turning point. The question isn't whether the wave will come—the wave is already here. The question is: are you riding it, or are you drowning? This article was written in February 2020, when the pandemic was just beginning and everything remained unclear. But some insights, viewed six years later, remain valid: in times of great change, being light trumps being massive for survival.
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World Outlook 2030: Finding Your Position Between Technological Acceleration and Physical Limits
The world of 2030 will not be determined by any single technology, but constrained by the interplay of physical limits, geopolitical contests, and ethical boundaries. AGI, quantum computing, climate resilience—every axis has its ceiling. Facing an uncertain future, rather than chasing precise prediction, it's better to build strategic resilience that can survive across multiple scenarios.
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Respecting the Boundaries of the Unknown: Facing Market Crises with Falsificationist Thinking
In a world full of black swans, blind confidence is fatal. True risk management is built upon the humility of acknowledging that the thing-in-itself is unknowable. Whether facing a capital market crash or the spread of a global pandemic, constantly questioning yourself and rehearsing extreme scenarios is the only viable posture for coexisting with crisis.
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Revering the Unknown Tide: Market Lessons Ten Years After the Financial Crisis
In 2017, nearly ten years after the financial crisis, Taiwan's stock index reached a five-year high, the US Dow broke through 23,000 points, and global markets were optimistic. But what was truly driving the markets—genuine economic recovery or a flood of liquidity created by central banks printing money frantically? This question has no standard answer, and 'having no standard answer' is itself the most important revelation. Markets are not physical systems; they don't obey Newton's laws. Facing capital tides and complex economic systems, the only thing we can hold onto is humility toward the unknown.
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Pandemic Revelation: We Live in a Liquid World
The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 gave the world an instant experience of what sociologist Zygmunt Bauman called 'liquid modernity.' Those things we thought were solid—borders, flights, jobs, daily gatherings—turned out not to be solid at all. They had always been liquid; we had just chosen to ignore it. The pandemic didn't create uncertainty; it merely tore off the wrapping paper of certainty. As the world reopens, the question isn't 'how do we return to before,' but 'with this clarity, where do we go from here?'
Education
Learning is not infusion but ignition—but is our current education system igniting or extinguishing?
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The Truth About Homeschooling: A Parent's Reflections and Gentle Resistance
Choosing homeschooling isn't about finding a shortcut to academic success—it's a reflection on industrial civilization and capitalist life. Homeschooling is full of grey areas and uncertainty, putting a parent's capacity for accompaniment to the test. In the face of unfairness, true education means teaching children to practice 'gentle, courteous resistance.'
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The Brutal Test of Learning-Doesn't-Stop: A Resource War from the Parent's Perspective
The pandemic-era policy of 'classes suspended, learning continues' exposed the structural inequality of online learning. Gaps in hardware, space, and logistical support turned online education into a brutal contest of family resources. Parents must shift from passive recipients to active builders of management systems, because the paradigm shift in education won't wait for you to be ready.
Culture and Way of Living
A good life is not about more, but about precision—precisely knowing what matters to you.
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160 Years, Five Generations, 21 Shareholders: How Hassia Writes 'The Next Generation' Into Every Decision
A German mineral water house founded in 1864, still family-run across five generations and 21 shareholders—while rivals like Nestlé sell off their brands.
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Lessons from Shiseido GIC: Style Transcends Trends
At Shiseido's Global Innovation Center (GIC) in Yokohama, I witnessed a brand logic completely different from the trend-driven industry: not chasing trends, but defining style. Founded in 1872, Shiseido's survival code over nearly 150 years wasn't betting right on every trend, but never needing to chase them at all. This observation offers profound insights for personal branding and corporate strategy—in an era where everyone scrambles to follow trends, true competitive advantage comes from that which you don't need to follow.
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Life Database Engineering: When 70,267 Memory Nodes Get Structured
In the process of organizing seventy thousand photos with AI collaboration, I accidentally excavated my life trajectory over the past decade. Metadata is more honest than memory, and our generation's recollections are migrating from brain cells into data structures.
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The Quiet Edge: Thirteen Linguistic Nodes on Self-Restraint, Discernment, and Walking Forward
These thirteen observations on life—covering self-restraint, discernment, relational boundaries, and the nature of self-discipline—sketch out a high-level posture for survival: refusing pointless proof and argument, replacing confrontation with selection, and bowing the head at the right moment. Self-discipline isn't deprivation; it's the reshaping of freedom's borders.
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The Life You Envy Is Actually Someone Else's Miracle
We spend enormous time on social media envying others' lives—their travels, their income, their freedom. But if you shift your perspective from Instagram to the globe, you'll discover an uncomfortable truth: the life you're living right now is a miracle to most people on Earth. Stable utilities, accessible healthcare, the right to freely choose your career—these aren't 'basic,' they're historical exceptions. This article isn't asking you to stop pursuing a better life, but to first see clearly where you already stand before pursuing more.
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The Addiction Economy and the Lonely Generation: Starting with Pornography
Pornography sites surpass the combined traffic of Netflix, Amazon, and Twitter. This isn't a moral issue, but a structural analysis of the algorithmic economy. From pornography to short videos, how the addiction economy systematically absorbs human energy and creates an entire lonely generation.
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Seeing Yourself in the Information Deluge: The Value Spectrum of Social Media Posts
Scrolling through hundreds of social media posts daily, what kind of content makes you pause? From knowledge density to emotional resonance to visual healing, social feeds are actually projectors of human psychological needs. The deeper question is: you're not just a consumer of information, but also a producer—what you choose to create determines your persona in the digital world.
Other
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Ten Years Ago We Flipped Education. What Do Kids Still Need to Climb in the Age of AI?
UNESCO released a student AI competency framework in 2024, 12 competencies across four dimensions, and countries are now turning AI literacy into curriculum, delivered by the credit hour. But an education experiment from ten years ago raises a question: is there a syllabus for collaborative literacy? Can systems thinking be put on a timetable? This piece examines the tension between curriculum-based and task-based approaches to AI-era education, and asks what kids still need to climb after the flip.
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When AI Accelerates Learning, Where Do Children Practice Slowing Down?
A type of AI school in the United States compresses core academics into a two-hour morning block, leaving the rest of the day for project work. The logic is clear: remove friction, make learning faster. But capability is born from friction. When AI optimizes away the struggle in academic learning, the space where children practice facing difficulty becomes scarce. This piece examines the collision between the logic of efficiency and the logic of friction.
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Assessment Without Grades: What T1/T2/T3 Learning Feedback Actually Looks Like
A semester assessment from an experimental school on a trimester calendar: one page per subject, radar charts with written commentary, no total score, no letter grade, no ranking. That same year, the same child received a report from an outside program with a 500-point composite score and letter grades. This piece uses two documents sitting in the same folder to ask what assessment without grades actually says, what it carries, and what it costs.
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The Engineer with Six Months to Live, and His Bread
In the 1970s, engineer Ōchi Shūzō was diagnosed with cancer and given six months to live. He traveled to Europe, learned to bake bread, and restored his health through a bread-centered diet. His story shaped fermentation master Shiga Katsuei's thinking on "food as medicine" and offers a window into why long-fermented bread works differently on the body. Part of the Taiwan-Japan bread series.
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Camps and Experiential Education: How a Shared Fate Gets Built
Five days, three camps: a tea garden, vocal expression, outdoor experiential education. Starting from a decade-old camp schedule and course design, this piece examines how a shared fate gets engineered, and sets it beside The Anxious Generation: Haidt's subtractive approach returns the real world to children; the camp's additive approach designs collective tasks within that real world.
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A Child Is Not the Product of Educational Design: How Parents Can Engage, and How to Let Go
The "From Flipping to Climbing" series traces ten years of educational design, learning portfolios, and evidence of competency. This final piece turns toward relationship and the inner life. A father reflects: how do you participate in your child's education without turning him into proof of your methods, and how do you gradually step back as he forms his own judgment? The series closes with different forms of success, the child's autonomy, and his wellbeing.
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A Family Education Experiment from a Decade Ago, Why Does It Match Today's Global Skills List?
The World Economic Forum's 2025 Future of Jobs Report surveyed over a thousand employers and identified five most-needed skills: analytical thinking, resilience and agility, leadership and social influence, creative thinking, and motivation and self-awareness. That list maps almost exactly onto the abilities that grew out of a family education experiment built around real tasks, a decade earlier. This piece explores why real tasks naturally produce the human skills most worth holding onto in the age of AI.
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I Cannot Prove This Was the Best Path: Opening One Family's Educational Choices to Public Scrutiny
A father looks back on a decade of unconventional educational choices: can his child's eventual outcomes prove the original decisions were right? Drawing on children's rights, educational equity, and public accountability, this piece examines where the lines fall between power, protection, and autonomy when parents design a child's education.
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Financial Freedom Is More Than Just a Money Question
While clearing out a drawer, I came across a student ID from China Evangelical Seminary dated 2000, and suddenly it carried me back to those years when I placed faith and calling above income. When I was young, I once ran a money stress test on myself: at the time my monthly income was a little over thirty thousand NTD, and I forced myself to keep only one-tenth of it as living expenses. That wasn't romanticism, nor was it a performance — it was simply a test of myself: if money was not the core of my sense of security, could I hold steady? After all these years, looking again at so-called "financial freedom," my conclusion has actually become more distilled: it isn't having so much money that you never have to work, but rather no longer letting money decide who I am, how I live, and what I live for.
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Five Design Principles Worth Taking With You: A Decade of Educational Practice, Distilled
A decade of homeschool education distilled: real tasks, freedom inside structure, intentionally designed group experiences, adults as learning environment designers, and preserving evidence of competence from day one. Five portable design principles, each tied to real cases from the series, an e-commerce site, a summer camp, a mentor contract, a learning portfolio database. The principles are yours to borrow; the path is yours to design.
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From Flipping to Climbing: Education Is Not Escaping the System, But Redesigning the Path of Growth
Written after organizing ten years and over 2,300 files of self-directed education practice: from flipped learning and experimental education to special admissions, unconventional education requires four conditions simultaneously, real tasks, collaborative community, adult mentorship, and long-term documentation. The core of education is enabling children to encounter the world as it actually is.
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Four Kids, One Summer, One Website That Had to Launch
In the summer of 2018, I gave four middle schoolers a real task: one summer to build a functional e-commerce website from scratch. The first two weeks were a blank page. A month later, they delivered something remarkable. This is a record of that summer, how the task was designed, what the adults' role actually was, and one thing I kept confirming: we consistently underestimate what kids can learn.
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The 28th Proof: Ten Years of Pressing Theology into Every Word
After graduating with a Master of Divinity from China Evangelical Seminary in 2003, my first ministry-related role was sitting at an editorial desk as one of the editors for a study Bible project, responsible for the Galatians volume of the Chinese Union Version Study Bible — synthesizing the scholarship of a community of scholars into a single book. This work of word-by-word refinement, of pressing theology into every phrase, taught me to turn theological reflection into written pastoral care, and it shaped the way I write to this day.
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The Hidden Ledger of Education Innovation: 142 Hours Behind One Stunning Outcome
A story about four teenagers building a stunning e-commerce site over one summer carries a bill nobody sees: 142 hours of adult labor, 4 adults, more than 15 planning meetings, and 9 students who were interested, 4 of whom joined. This piece opens the hidden ledger of education innovation, time, money, mentor contracts, insurance, and team formation. Without this accounting, authentic project-based learning gets retold as a myth anyone can replicate with enough passion. That's not honest to the families and teachers who want to follow suit.
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From Homeschooling to Special Admission: How an Unconventional Path Gets Recognized by the System
An institutional anatomy of an unconventional university pathway: personal homeschooling requires a full experimental education plan submitted for committee review, an official approval letter, and a thirty-plus-page annual learning report. In the final year of high school, three tracks ran simultaneously, special admission, the university entrance exam, and an employment program. This piece examines the administrative skeleton of homeschooling, the philosophy of assessment without exams, and what the institution ultimately understood.
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Kumano Kodo: Travel Is Not Tourism, It's an International Project Run by Students
In autumn 2019, a group of high schoolers organized an eight-day overseas learning trip: walking 38.5 kilometers of the Kumano Kodo, one of only two UNESCO World Heritage pilgrimage routes in the world. Each student held a real role, someone managed the budget, someone handled insurance, someone planned the route, and each designed an individual research project, presenting their findings in a closing exhibition. This piece is about how travel can be designed as an international project, not as tourism.
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Learning Portfolios vs. AI-Generated Résumés: The Trust Asymmetry in Proving Competence
The competency-based transcript movement is becoming institutionalized: 822 colleges and universities (as of July 2026) have accepted applicants who submitted a Mastery Transcript, including Harvard, Stanford, and MIT. At the same time, AI makes it possible to mass-produce résumés and portfolios, and the more polished they look, the more suspect they become. This piece examines the trust asymmetry in proving competence, and what ten years of learning records demonstrate as a solution: timestamps and process density.
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Long Fermentation in a Fast Age
In an era where everything demands speed, Masayoshi Shiga and his apprentice Lisa let a single loaf ferment for 18 hours. Fast fermentation is a product of industrial thinking; a system with no option to slow down is a system out of control. The second piece in the Taiwan-Japan Bread series.
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How to Find a Mentor Teacher: The Governance of Selection, Contracts, and Appointment Letters
A self-directed learning institution developed four documents to hire mentor teachers: a five-criterion qualifications evaluation form, a twelve-point disqualification declaration, a thirteen-clause commission contract, and an appointment letter signed by the principal. This article examines the design of that governance system, and honestly identifies its blind spot: it protected children's physical safety and the mentor's intellectual property, but left student work ownership entirely unaddressed.
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The Translation Craft of College Portfolios: Rendering Nontraditional Learning Legible to Universities
An anatomy of one special admissions supplementary document: the first page offers reviewers a map through a personal statement; the second compresses six years into a single timeline matrix; each subsequent experience is cast in the same sentence structure (when, where, what role, what was learned), then anchored with certificates and photographs as an evidence layer. This piece breaks down four techniques for making nontraditional learning legible to institutions, and why honesty is part of the translation.
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When Assignments Can Be Generated, Why Real Tasks Matter More
Generative AI means essays, assignments, and reports can be produced at a keystroke. The assumption that a written product reflects personal ability has quietly broken down. In 2022, 'The Death of the College Essay' fired the first shot; by 2025, the WEF estimated that 39% of core skills will change before 2030. This piece asks: when assignments can be generated, why does the authentic task, the one thing AI cannot produce, shift from an educational philosophy to a basic necessity?
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Ten Years on Seesaw: How Everyday Records Grew Into a Learning Portfolio Archive
A nontraditional learner's Seesaw record: 1,585 files, photos and videos included, each entry timestamped. From everyday classroom documentation to the supporting materials for university special admissions, three steps stand in between: timeline organization, competency translation, and curation. This piece examines how daily records grow into a learning portfolio archive, and the privacy discipline required when that archive is also a repository of personal data.
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Egg Tarts, Shokupan, and a Bread That Refuses to Chase Trends
Taiwan has a habit of treating food as fast-moving consumer goods: egg tarts, shokupan, one craze after another, arriving quickly and fading just as fast. But a bread built around long fermentation and health can't be sold with FMCG logic. This is the tension the author kept running into while doing marketing for a Taipei bakery. Third and final installment of the Taiwan-Japan Bread series.
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The Director of This Taipei Bakery Lives in Tokyo
In 2019, Lin-san asked me in Japan whether I'd help look after a bakery he'd invested in back in Taiwan. I only later discovered that the shop's listed 'director' was Tokyo fermentation master Shiga Katsueii, and the head baker was his apprentice. A story about how Taiwan-Japan collaboration happens through fate, not planning.
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Who Owns What Students Make: A Blind Spot in Real-World Learning
A group of students spent over a month designing a complete overseas learning itinerary, for free, because the school said this was a "course," not a "tour," so students had to do it themselves. I later discovered that the adult leading the trip launched a paid program with significant overlap, while describing his own contribution as unpaid, voluntary service. This piece names no one. It addresses a blind spot that experimental education rarely guards against: who owns what students produce without pay, and how should mentor conflicts of interest be governed.