Recently, a fellow PhD classmate commented on my two-minute video from yesterday.
He said: "If I had gritted my teeth back then, given up on that humanities PhD, and thrown myself into the C++ wave of the 90s to become a programmer in Silicon Valley — then today, I would probably be writing a different Liwei 2min: My biggest regret is being led astray by C++, never finishing my PhD."
I replied: "yeh u know." Because I know it too well.
Others thought it was a joke. It wasn't. It was two old-timers, looking at each other across thirty-plus years of life, and then laughing at the same time. Because we both knew. He was talking about himself. And the 'what if' he described — that was me.
Years ago, he left our shared advisor and headed south to Silicon Valley. He went through various startups and big tech companies. Today he still works at a major company, responsible for a product used by hundreds of millions. Riding the wind all the way.
I stayed on the other path. Chasing that 'damn' humanities PhD, I missed the early excitement of the 90s, but caught the dot-com bubble at the turn of the century.
Two different life trajectories. Converging at last in Silicon Valley.
What's interesting is — at this age, we've begun to understand and tease each other more. Perhaps this is the most wondrous thing about human nature. What you have slowly becomes taken for granted. What you don't have keeps appreciating in memory.
When young, we thought life was a multiple-choice question. Later we discovered — life is actually a question of what you give up. Every time you choose or are chosen for one answer, you simultaneously give up countless alternatives.
And those abandoned or rejected answers — they'll keep coming back to knock on your door, years later. Telling you: maybe this was the right one after all.
The truth? Nobody knows. Because life's greatest magic trick is this: real life can only be lived once. But parallel universes can be fantasized ten thousand times.
Reality can never beat fantasy. Because fantasy doesn't have to pay the mortgage. Doesn't have to work late. Doesn't have to face the boss. Doesn't have to face middle-age weight gain. Fantasy forever stays frozen on the most beautiful frame.
So many regrets — it's not really that we chose wrong. It's that we discovered: perhaps, somewhere in the unseen, there truly is fate.
Lately I've been thinking about something else. If our generation's regret is being diverted by the era, chosen by the era — then the younger generation's predicament is even more bewildering and challenging: they are being leveled by the era.
When all doors are open, when all knowledge and skills are at your fingertips, when both humanities and sciences face the same shrinking job market, when new graduate hires become fewer and fewer — the new generation faces not career choices and planning. They face no choices, and no way to plan.
This confusion and helplessness, this inability to find one's place or purpose, is becoming the prevailing sentiment across universities. This is not something a platitude about 'embracing AI' can soothe.
For decades, knowledge was a scarce resource. Whoever possessed knowledge held an advantage. A book. A degree. A skill. Any of these could change your fate.
But after AI arrived, knowledge became like tap water. What once required a trip to the library can now be obtained with a single sentence. Designs that once took a decade of experience can now be generated in minutes.
Is knowledge still useful? Of course it is. But possessing knowledge no longer matters — because everyone can possess it. Just like electricity is essential, but owning a power plant no longer matters — because every household has an outlet.
This is a strange era. Knowledge is no longer scarce. Words are no longer scarce. Even intelligence itself is beginning to lose its scarcity.
What remains in the end — is not knowledge. Not degrees. Not titles. But lived experience.
AI knows what heartbreak is. But it has never waited for that call that never came. AI knows what aging is. But it has never watched its parents grow old day by day. AI knows what regret is. But it has never, at sixty, suddenly remembered a life it didn't choose forty years ago.
Knowledge belongs to machines. Experience belongs to humans. Efficiency belongs to machines. Feeling belongs to humans. Perhaps the most precious thing in the future — is not what you know, but what you have truly lived.
So I've come to feel, more and more — life's greatest regret is neither being diverted too early by the era, nor being leveled too late by the era. It is, after having lived a singular, unrepeatable life, still wanting to live on behalf of another self that never existed.
That guy — let him stay in the parallel universe. As for us — let's keep playing this round to the end.
But most crucially, and what worries me more: in this era of breakneck technological change, how do we build social welfare systems that ensure AI's dividends are shared by all? How do we ensure the next generation no longer faces the challenge of countless doors wide open, yet no path to walk through?
