Yanwen’s blog

8/1/2026

I recently read parts of Lonely Society (The Upcoming Fifth Consumer Era) by Atsushi Miura. One part in the book particularly made me think.

Japanese society faces a difficult problem: a huge number of young people have to provide care for family members. This can place a heavy burden on children and young adults, especially in a society facing both an aging population and growing loneliness.

Sociologist Atsushi Miura proposed turning the conventional one-way model of caregiving upside down. He calls it shared caregiving.

Instead of one young person struggling to support several elderly people, why not have several older people collectively support one young person?

Older residents might provide affordable housing, home-cooked meals, life experience, professional connections, and companionship.

Young residents, in return, might help older people with grocery shopping, household chores, transportation, and other physically demanding tasks.

The key is that both generations give and receive.

One example is SHARE Kanazawa, a community in Kanazawa that brings together elderly residents, people with disabilities, university students, and others. Students receive below-market housing in exchange for contributing time to the community and helping elderly residents.

One anecdote from SHARE Kanazawa is particularly unforgettable to me.

An art university student moved into the community determined to do everything she could to help the elderly residents. But soon, something else happened. The elderly women began bringing her homemade pickles, freshly baked pastries, vegetables from their gardens, and other treats.

Eventually, she realized that she wasn't simply there to help them. They were also taking care of her. She said it was the first time she had truly felt that someone cared about her well-being in the big lonely city.

This story impressed me for two reasons.

First, care can be mutual.

We often think of intergenerational care as a one-way relationship: the young take care of the old.

But the anecdote shows a different story. The young can provide the physical help that older people need, while older people can provide something the young may desperately need as well: warmth, attention, companionship, food, encouragement, and the feeling of being cared about.

Second, older people need more than care. They need a sense of dignity and usefulness.

The elderly residents are not simply useless people waiting to be cared for. They still have skills, experience, generosity, and love to offer.

They demonstrate that: They still have something to give and can still make someone happy.

Perhaps this is something we sometimes overlook when we talk about aging. We focus so much on what older people need from society that we forget to ask what they can still give to society.

Ultimately, people don't only need to be cared for. They also need someone to care for. They need to feel useful, needed, and valued in society.

A healthy community may be one in which people of different ages and abilities have reasons to depend on one another.

The young may need the strength and energy of youth. The old may offer wisdom, experience, generosity, and warmth.

The real answer to loneliness may not be simply to provide more services, but to create more opportunities for people to care for one another.

After all, sometimes the person we think we are helping may be helping us just as much.

7/31/2026

Yesterday I was rather disturbed when I read some new medical research about biological aging and early-onset cancer. I especially wanted to share the findings with the younger generation.

A study published last month in Nature Medicine, titled "Biological aging and generational shifts in early-onset cancer risk," analyzed 154,169 participants from the UK Biobank, with partial validation in more than 10,000 participants in the U.S.

The researchers compared people from different birth cohorts using several measures of biological aging, including PhenoAge, the Klemera-Doubal method, and metabolomic measures.

The results:

In the UK data, people born between 1965 and 1974 had a 23% higher standardized PhenoAge age gap than those born between 1950 and 1954. In other words, at the same chronological age, people in the more recent birth cohorts appeared to have more advanced biological aging. The pattern was also seen in the U.S. data: people born between 1990 and 1999 had a substantially higher PhenoAge age gap than those born between 1965 and 1969.

More importantly, greater biological aging was associated with a higher risk of early-onset solid cancers. Each standard-deviation increase in the PhenoAge age gap was associated with an 8% higher risk of early-onset solid cancer in the UK cohort. The researchers also found associations between immune-tissue aging and early-onset lung cancer, and between adipose-tissue aging and early-onset colorectal cancer.

Another recent review, "Early-onset colorectal cancer as an emerging disease of metabolic dysregulation," points to a related concern: early-onset colorectal cancer has been increasing, particularly in high-income countries, at the same time that obesity and metabolic disorders have become more common among younger people.

Researchers are investigating whether obesity, insulin resistance, chronic inflammation, altered gut microbiota, sedentary lifestyles and poor diet may contribute to an environment that makes colorectal cancer more likely.

We should be careful, however. These studies do not prove that overeating or obesity directly causes the generational increase in biological aging or early-onset cancer. Cancer has many causes, and the researchers emphasize that the full explanation remains unknown. Other possible contributors include alcohol, sleep disruption, environmental exposures, socioeconomic conditions and factors that scientists have not yet identified.

Still, there is an important lesson here.

I think about what my 95-year-old mother has told me about her childhood, youth and most of her adult years. Her generation experienced famine and malnutrition. Today's younger generation lives in almost the opposite environment: food is abundant, inexpensive and available all the time. Nutrition is way too much.

That transformation is one of humanity's great achievements. But abundance brings its own challenge. Together with it is new food processing technologies making it harder to resist over eating.

For greater part of human history, the problem was food shortages. Today, we live in an age of abundant food, but our bodies have not evolved quickly enough to adapt to this abundance.

Perhaps we need to learn a new kind of discipline: just because we have more does not mean we should eat more.

We cannot control every environmental factor that may influence biological aging or cancer. But we can control some of the basics: how much we eat, what we eat, how active we are, how much we sleep, and whether we allow excess weight and metabolic problems to develop.

My hope is that the younger generation can enjoy the abundance without becoming victims of that abundance.

7/30/2026

Yesterday I was talking with another grandparent about our newborn grandson and the future of higher education.

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence, it's difficult to imagine what education will look like twenty years from now. AI is becoming increasingly capable while it costs only a fraction of human labor. Some people even wonder whether AI will eventually replace many human teachers.

As I looked at my tiny grandson, however, another thought touched me.

No matter how advanced AI becomes, what a baby needs most during the first years of his life is still human attachment—the warmth and feeling of being held, spoken to, comforted, encouraged, protected and loved.

That thought reminded me of a new expression that has become popular on Chinese social media: 活人感 (huórén gǎn).

Literally, 活人 means "a living person," and 感 means a feeling or sense.

It describes someone who feels genuinely human—authentic, emotional, unpretentious, and refreshingly real. Such a person doesn't sound scripted or mechanically polite. They have quirks, imperfections, spontaneous reactions, and genuine emotions.

Interestingly, calling someone "very有活人感" has become one of the highest compliments on the Chinese internet.

The expression says something about our times.

Many people feel that AI-generated writing is impeccably organized, endlessly polite, grammatically correct, and highly predictable. Social media has also encouraged carefully curated online personas. Against this backdrop, someone who simply feels like authentic human stands out.

What intrigues me most is the irony.

For centuries, people admired perfection. Today, one of the highest compliments is to say that someone simply feels human who is not perfect.

Is it because the perfection of AI makes us appreciate the imperfections of human beings even more?

Or is it because, in the age of AI, authenticity has become increasingly rare? People naturally value what is rare, just as they treasure pandas.

Or perhaps the answer is even simpler. Unlike AI, we are emotional beings. However much we strive for perfection, we still want to remain authentically ourselves.

Our occasional hesitation, spontaneous laughter, genuine curiosity, emotional warmth, human attachments and even our flaws remind others that there is a real person behind the words.

And perhaps that is the enduring lesson for my grandson.

No matter how intelligent and error-free AI becomes, the qualities that shape a meaningful life—and meaningful relationships—will still be profoundly human.

7/29/2026

On July 23, I was surprised to hear the news of the passing of Keigo Higashino (東野圭吾), the renowned Japanese mystery novelist.

Born in Osaka in 1958, Keigo Higashino majored in electrical engineering and worked as an engineer before turning to writing. He wrote in his spare time, won a literary prize in 1985, and eventually resigned from his engineering job to become a full-time author.

His road to success was anything but easy. It took years before he established himself as one of Japan's leading novelists. Over a four-decade writing career, he published more than one hundred books and received numerous literary honors, including Japan's Medal with Purple Ribbon.

One aspect of Higashino's writing that I have found especially fascinating is his mastery of leaving narrative blank space.

Instead of explaining everything, he intentionally leaves certain details unsaid, allowing readers to infer, imagine, and reach their own conclusions.

These carefully arranged gaps are one reason his novels stay with readers long after the final page. Even after closing the book, you find yourself replaying the story, filling in the missing pieces, and discovering new meanings.

I have tried to learn from this technique in my own writing, particularly in my essays about Liu Kaixin and about the phenomenon of "read but unreplied" (已读不回).

Rather than stating every lesson explicitly, I have learned that it is often more powerful to stop just before the final conclusion. Readers tend to remember the insights they discover for themselves more vividly than those simply handed to them.

Lately, it has occurred to me that this principle extends far beyond writing.

Sometimes, less is more. The same idea applies to parenting.

There is a popular Chinese saying:

懒妈妈养勤快孩子，勤快妈妈养懒孩子。
Lǎn māma yǎng qínkuài háizi, qínkuài māma yǎng lǎn háizi.

Literally, it means, "A 'lazy' mother raises a hardworking child, while a hardworking mother raises a lazy child."

Of course, it does not mean to encourage parents to be lazy. Rather, it reminds us that parents should not do everything for them when the child can do it himself. 

A child who is given opportunities to solve problems, make decisions, and shoulder responsibilities gradually develops ability, independence and confidence. 

A child whose path is constantly cleared by parents may instead become dependent on them.

Perhaps writing and parenting are not so different after all.

A skilled writer leaves space for readers to think. A wise parent leaves space for children to grow.

Both understand that growth often comes not from being given every answer, but from discovering some answers for ourselves.

7/28/2026

This year, a new expression has become popular on the Chinese internet: "奥德赛时期" (Àodésài shíqī), or "the Odyssey Years."

It refers to the period from the early twenties to the early or mid-thirties, when many young adults have left school but have not yet settled into a stable career, family life, or even a clear sense of identity. It is a time of uncertainty, exploration, trial and error, and self-discovery.

The popularity of the term reflects the reality in China that many young people face today. They spend nearly twenty years moving from one classroom to another, acquiring knowledge and preparing for examinations, having no time for self-discovery and exploration. Yet after graduation they suddenly enter a world where there are no standard answers. Traditional paths to success seem less certain, new opportunities emerge constantly, and the future feels increasingly unpredictable.

One reason the idea resonates is that many young people are trying to discover not only the world but also themselves—what genuinely interests them, where their strengths lie, and what kind of life they want to build.

More than two thousand years ago, Laozi wrote:

知人者智，自知者明。
Zhī rén zhě zhì, zì zhī zhě míng.
Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom.

Perhaps education should aim at both. It should help students understand the world while also helping them understand themselves.

The term "Odyssey Years" comes from Homer's epic The Odyssey. After the Trojan War, the Greek hero Odysseus spent ten years wandering before finally returning home. His long journey became a metaphor for exploration, uncertainty, and personal growth.

The concept made me think of two questions.

The first concerns when the odyssey begins.

The popular definition suggests that self-discovery starts after college. No!

The journey should begin much earlier, during adolescence. Those years should already be a time for exploring interests, discovering strengths and weaknesses, trying different sports, music, art, volunteering, and developing values. 

If students graduate without knowing much about themselves, perhaps education has accomplished only part of its mission.

The second question is when the odyssey ends.

The popular definition suggests that it ends sometime in our thirties. No!

Today's world changes too quickly for self-discovery ever to be complete. New technologies emerge. Industries rise and disappear. Careers change. Our priorities evolve with age. The person we are at twenty-five is not the same person we become at forty-five or sixty-five.

Charles Darwin continued refining his ideas throughout his life. Millions of immigrants began entirely new lives after their thirties. Many retirees discover new passions by learning a language, painting, writing, or volunteering.

Each is still on an odyssey on its own.

Perhaps the real value of the concept lies not in its age range but in its mindset.

Life itself is an odyssey.

Some stages involve more exploration than others, but exploration never truly ends. The more we learn about ourselves and the world, the more we realize how much remains to be discovered.

The Odyssey is not a decade of life. It is a way of living.