Somewhere in the middle of this year, I noticed a shift. I started doing more of what mattered to me, and caring a lot less about what didn’t. It sounds simple when I write it like that, but “do more” and “care less” were vague feelings before they were anything else. I want to pin down what they actually mean, because vague feelings are easy to romanticize and hard to act on.
How I started doing more
It started small. I stopped being passive about the things I genuinely liked. If a reel made me laugh, I’d like it instead of scrolling past. If someone wrote a good post, I’d leave a comment instead of letting the moment pass silently. None of this feels groundbreaking on its own, but the pattern was the point. I stopped letting good moments slip away unmarked.
I also built consumed.hzionn.com to log the things I take in, like articles, quotes, songs, talks, and interesting websites. It is a simple record to pin down what I consume rather than letting it wash over me.
From there, it grew. I showed up to tech meetups around Golang, dbt, and Google Developer Groups. You can see what I’ve been attending on my timeline. I caught up with friends instead of waiting for plans to fall into place. I talked openly with people about what we were building and what ideas we were chasing, instead of keeping those thoughts in my head for “someday.” I posted more too, sharing Instagram stories, notes on Threads, and things I used to dismiss as not worth sharing.
I wasn’t always like this. The breakup with my ex sits on this timeline, not as the root cause, but as the marker I remember it by. Before that, my routine was narrow enough to embarrass me now. I would eat at the same restaurant three or four times a week because picking somewhere new felt like unnecessary effort. 不過我今年終於開始在公館和永和找不同家店來吃了，我住在這裡都快三年了啊。
Caring less made it sustainable
Doing more only worked once I stopped caring about things that never deserved my attention. Worrying about how people might perceive me, overthinking whether a comment was worth writing, hesitating before walking into a room of strangers, all of that drained the energy I needed for my actual life.
That turned into a positive loop. As I tuned out the noise, I had more capacity to act. And the more I acted, the less the noise mattered, because I had real things in front of me to care about instead.
I haven’t become a different person
I expected my schedule to change, but I didn’t expect my headspace to shift this much with it. I didn’t solve anything profound. Being active instead of passive simply compounded into how I feel as much as how my calendar looks.
Work is testing that right now. I started a full-time job this year, and most of the day disappears into the office and the commute. The pull back toward passivity is real, letting default habits fill the hours instead of choosing them intentionally.
Sometimes I look back at how expressive I used to be and struggle to recognize how much has faded. My energy, my ability to articulate thoughts, and even my language skills feel degraded. Sharing online has become my baseline, a way to keep the muscle working.
This post is a checkpoint. A reminder to myself, especially now, to keep doing more and caring less. 立個 flag：我要去學油畫！