My blog and public account are named "Prime Life," inspired by prime numbers in mathematics.
The definition of a prime number is concise yet profound: a number greater than 1 that has no divisors other than 1 and itself. This unique characteristic mirrors the individuality of each person's life.
According to demographic estimates, approximately 106 billion people have existed on Earth throughout history. Although humans share similar social attributes and common emotional experiences, in the face of such a vast number, we can confidently say that each individual remains unique.
However, human society has not become fragmented due to so many unique individuals; on the contrary, when we express social issues, the complexity is not as high as one might imagine. Most people's lives often follow some simple and constant patterns.
I occasionally write about topics related to life, but more often, I see myself as a method to practice exploring life. I have never harbored grand visions of influencing others; even if I once did, it has gradually worn away amidst the setbacks that life brings.
Yet, some say that one tree can shake another tree, and one cloud can push another cloud. I have been shaken, so despite the limited discussion on the topic, I will still write these down. I guess there will always be someone who finds similar feelings under different life topics. If someone else is also shaken, that would be a nice coincidence.
Life is a Game of Accumulation#
Well-known media personality He Jiayan shared a viewpoint that can be summarized as follows: if we liken the operation of the world to a game, it can mainly be divided into two types of games: accumulation games and ranking games.
- Accumulation games: The goal is to accumulate more; the pain and failure in this game stem from insufficient accumulation.
- Ranking games: The goal is to rank higher than others; the pain and failure in this game stem from a lower ranking.
We can easily fit observable life phenomena into these types of games. For example, business is a typical accumulation game, while politics is a ranking game.
Often, we see a combination of these two types. For instance, learning should be an accumulation game, aiming to gather more knowledge, while the college entrance examination is a ranking game, which gives each stage of learning a clear ranking characteristic. For a child, the joy often comes not from scoring 90 in a knowledge test but from knowing their rank in the class.
Since knowledge is implicit, even though the ranking method has been widely criticized for not accurately reflecting the entirety of learning, it remains widely used because it is simple and effective.
Sports competitions are similar. People often remember only the champions while overlooking the efforts and sweat that all athletes put in compared to ordinary people. The recently popular "Squid Game 2" extreme fusion of these two game types leans more towards ranking games, where the reward for ranking is that the winner takes all the accumulated resources of the eliminated players. The series also showcases another cruel aspect of ranking games: people constantly sabotage others to lower their ranking to elevate their own.
We often confuse what game we are playing, leading to pain and frustration due to differing goals.
In my view, a person's life can only be an accumulation game. Whether it is health, knowledge, or wealth, even though people often use rankings to represent these. Unless you can confirm that you are exceptionally strong and can consistently maintain an advantageous position in ranking games, rankings will ultimately only bring pain.
Additionally, once you determine that life choices are to play an accumulation game, you should play according to the rules and goals of accumulation games, mentally discarding the influence of ranking games. For example, it’s better to quietly accumulate wealth without competing with others.
Recently, I have been practicing yoga, and I have felt this clear sense of accumulation. I know that no matter how much I practice, I cannot surpass a certain blogger or instructor, but surpassing others is not my goal.
When I feel that I used to struggle to reach my calves while bending over, and now I can easily reach them, I can practice until I can reach my ankles without issue. If I maintain this for a long time, when the weather warms up, I might be able to touch the ground with my palms. This continuous progress in accumulation makes exercise no longer a painful task. It also makes this life game not just about winning.
Every accumulation should bring you joy and should not cause you pain in comparison with others. If you feel pain, consider whether you have turned what should be an accumulation game into a ranking game.
Recommended Mac Software#
I recommend a Markdown editor for Mac: MarkEdit. As the name suggests, this application is aimed at the default TextEdit on Mac but focuses more on Markdown format.
Even though there are many excellent cross-platform Markdown editors available, I still recommend Mac users try it out, especially after trying numerous editors and needing a simple tool for editing Markdown documents. You can read the developer's own reasons for choosing it Why Choose MarkEdit; here are some of my personal experiences.
Since 2023, I have intentionally started transferring content originally stored on cloud platforms to local storage. The reason is that I want to try file operations at the operating system level to reduce dependence on platforms and applications. Two network failures with Yuque and Alibaba Cloud deepened my resolve to do this.
Markdown has greatly helped me with document notes, allowing me to switch between various operating systems without worrying about format compatibility. However, I have always had a pain point during use.
Most popular Markdown editors on the market are quite heavy, sometimes due to powerful features, like iA Writer or even VS Code, and sometimes because they store too much content, like the Obsidian I use. In reality, I usually only record frequently in a few documents each day, and these "heavyweights" become overkill for this scenario.
MarkEdit perfectly solves this problem; you just need to change the default opening method for md documents to MarkEdit. Trust me, you will be pleasantly surprised by many details and can genuinely feel that you can fully trust this is an editor that the developer also uses, which is quite important for a product.
I also strongly agree with its development philosophy:
Don't do everything, do enough things the correct way.
Of course, you can choose it for reasons that include but are not limited to:
- A compact size of only 3MB for the installation package, taking up minimal system resources
- Extremely fast startup speed
- Easily handles large files over 10MB
- Completely localized data management
- Real-time syntax highlighting + intelligent completion