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.
What and how I “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 just scrolling past. If a post someone made was actually good, I’d leave a comment instead of letting the moment pass silently. None of this seems significant on its own, but it was a pattern, and the pattern was the point: stop letting good moments go unmarked.
I even set up consumed.hzionn.com to log the things I consume (articles, words, songs, talks or even intesting websites). I made it a simple record to pin down what I’m taking in rather than just letting it wash over me.
From there it grew. I started showing up to more meetups, mostly tech ones, Golang, dbt, Google Developer Group communities. (I’m going many! You can see what I’m up to at here) I started meeting more friends instead of waiting for plans to happen to me. I started actually talking with people about what we’re building, what we’re working on, what ideas we’re chasing, instead of keeping those conversations in my head or saving them for “someday.” I started sharing more too, Instagram stories, notes and learnings on Threads, things I used to think weren’t worth posting.
I used to not be like this! The breakup with my ex sits somewhere on this timeline, not as the cause, but as the marker I remember it by. Before that, I had a routine so narrow it embarrasses me a little now: the same restaurant, three or four times a week, because choosing somewhere new felt like unnecessary effort. 不過我今年終於開始在公館和永和會找不同家的來吃了（我住在這裡都快三年了啊）。
Caring less felt so good and you should try it too
Here’s the part I think matters more than the “doing more” itself: doing more only became sustainable once I cared less about the things that didn’t deserve my attention in the first place. Worrying about how something would be perceived, overthinking whether a comment was worth leaving, hesitating before showing up somewhere new, all of that used to eat the energy I needed to actually engage with my life.
It turned into a loop, and a good one. As I cared less about the noise, I had more capacity to act. And the more I acted, the less the noise seemed to matter, because I had real things to point my attention at instead.
(but it’s not like I’m become a different person)
I expected my lifestyle to change. I didn’t expect my mental state to shift this much alongside it. It’s not that I solved anything profound, it’s that being active instead of passive seems to have a compounding effect on how I feel, not just on how my calendar looks.
That’s being tested right now, honestly. I started working full time this year, and most of my day disappears into the office and the commute. There’s a real pull back toward passivity, toward letting the default fill the hours instead of choosing them.
Sometimes I look back at how expressive I used to be and find it hard to believe how much I’ve lost—like my energy, my ability to articulate, and even my language skills have degraded to almost nothing :( Sharing online has become my way of setting a minimum for myself, a small way to keep the muscle working.
So.. this is more of a checkpoint: I’m reminding myself, even now, especially now, to keep doing more and caring less. 立個 flag：我要去學油畫！