Published on November 4, 2025 10:30 AM GMT

Editor’s Note

Ever since I began translating articles on free learning^[1] and critiques of schooling, ^[2]a difficult question has loomed over me like a dark cloud, filling me with doubt. This question has troubled me for a long time and has recently grown heavier as I’ve received inquiries from many readers who are eager to escape the shackles of schooling and explore the path of free learning.

This difficult question is: what happens after we leave school? It’s just as Mr. Lu Xun described in his speech, “What Happens After Nora Leaves Home?”.^[3] Nora, for the sake of her ideals and dignity, walks out of an unhappy and oppressive traditional marriage. Lu Xun was not optimistic about her fate: she would either degenerate or return. This was because, in the social environment of that time, women lacked economic rights. After leaving, she would either be ostracized by society, exploited by men, or forced by the hardships of life to eventually abandon her ideals and dignity, or else return to her old family. So, what happens after a dropout leaves? Previously, not being a dropout myself, I couldn’t make a definitive judgment. Today, however, I received a submission from a dropout that showed me the reality they face—a society not much different from the one Chinese women faced a century ago. Even though free learning endowed him with much knowledge and many abilities, society turned a deaf ear, even meeting him with ridicule.

Therefore, today’s article is not like my previous translations that expose the dark side of school education. Instead, it is an “Exhortation to Study”—an exhortation for everyone to find a way to survive within the school system. Many readers might think I’m about to do a “le zhuan fan,”^[4] to “backstab”^[5] them. But in truth, this article comes from a sincere place, hoping to provoke thought and promote meaningful discussion.

Although this article is quite long, every word is a sincere expression from the author. I genuinely implore my reader friends who wish to walk away from school education to please read this article patiently to the end.

March 14, 2023

Jarrett Ye

Free Learning in Today’s Society

Author: Anonymous 
Link: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/613820418
Source: Zhihu 
Copyright belongs to the author. 
For commercial reprints, please contact the author for authorization. For non-commercial reprints, please indicate the source.

The original reason for writing this article was a conversation. According to Jarrett, many people had read his articles and deeply agreed with his descriptions of the harm of school education. As a result, they wanted to drop out and devote themselves entirely to free learning at home, believing this would allow them to completely escape the damage from the education system and improve themselves more effectively.

After hearing this, I thought I might as well write an article on the topic to try and persuade these people otherwise. But as I wrote, I felt that simply writing a “persuasion to study” piece seemed to be speaking up for the school system. School education is so damaging to people, yet here I was, telling them to go back. It felt a lot like I was standing outside a fire pit, trying to trick people into jumping in.

So, after much thought, I figured a different approach might be best.

My inadvertent encounter with free education and my unique experiences are likely rare cases. Therefore, I flatter myself that I have some experience worth sharing, to give those who haven’t taken this step a better understanding of what the future holds.

At the same time, throughout this process, I will answer the question from the beginning—why I think “persuading people to study” is not a good thing, yet I still must write this article.

The Past

Let’s start with my experience.

I am a dropout, a complete and total dropout. I stopped attending school in junior high and have been at home ever since.

From about the age of 14 to 21, I stayed at home for a full 7 years. You could call me the most classic jialidun.^[6] The number of days I went out in a year could probably be counted on two hands. The kind of painful isolation many people feel was just a pleasant daily routine for me, day in and day out.

My dropping out, like that of many others, began with a hatred for school.

Elementary School

In elementary school, my grades were quite good. I was first in my class and grade, and I could handle pretty much every subject. Confident, loved learning, top student—all these halos could have been placed on me back then. But just like one of life’s illusions, the feeling of being unique only lasts until its time is up. Everything ended around the fifth or sixth grade. I don’t remember exactly when, but my attitude toward learning shifted from pleasant to abhorrent. It gradually became not so easy anymore, but a painful task. I started to realize I no longer loved learning as I used to. I don’t know when I fell behind in a few classes, or maybe I was just never interested, but I began to not understand many things and lost the motivation to study. I couldn’t absorb it, couldn’t learn it, and my grades plummeted. My exam rankings fell layer by layer until there was no further to fall.

Most people might encounter similar problems at this stage. Some in junior high, some, like me, starting in elementary school. They say things get harder later on, and it’s quite normal for early top students to become poor students, or vice versa.

Unfortunately, I was blocked at this first great point of divergence.

I never figured out how I became unable to learn that knowledge. Every exam was agony for me, and this agony intensified my fear. I grew to hate school more and more. Every class felt like torture. Sleeping, drawing, or daydreaming were no longer enough to escape this torment. It felt like every minute in school was purgatory—and then I started playing truant.

Back then, I was more interested in wild fantasies than in painful studies. Be it novels or comics, I was like most of my peers in this regard, which wasn’t strange. After escaping school, I liked to follow the principle that “the most dangerous place is the safest place.” I would sit in the stairwell three floors above my home, reading novels and miscellaneous books that I loved, whiling away the entire day in a spot I was proud my parents could never find. I didn’t have to worry about any hateful exams, the teachers’ discipline, the public criticism for falling behind in class, or those important subjects that I didn’t like at all and even found terrifying.

What’s the use of math, English, and Chinese? What’s the use of exams to me? The future? Prospects? Adults always told me these were important because the school tested them, and if I failed, I would be doomed, so I had to learn them. But I always thought, why do I have to take these tests? I don’t even like these subjects. And those adults hardly ever used this knowledge, so did that mean they had no future? Although I knew the future and prospects were important, I just didn’t like it, and I shouldn’t have to suppress this dislike and show no resistance, right? I also wondered why I had to go to school. I didn’t like it either. Why couldn’t I be free to learn whatever I liked at home? Was reading novels and miscellaneous books really not learning?

Anyway, no one could answer these questions, and similarly, no one could change my aversion to these things. At that time, the school hired a “psychologist” who, in hindsight, was very unprofessional. He was supposedly a doctor, but all he did was try to persuade me to go back to school—I doubt you could even call it persuasion. He was just going through the motions. At least, I never saw him make any “therapeutic” or “persuasive” efforts. We just chatted about some things, and then there was never a next time.

In short, after efforts from all sides, I reluctantly returned to school after being truant for a while. After all, it was compulsory education; they couldn’t just expel me. But people can indeed adapt. Although I hated it, with my parents’ authority looming over me, since I had to stay in school, so be it.

Before long, junior high life began.

Junior High

My grades were still terrible, but I do remember the anticipation and excitement I had for junior high life—looking back, it was less about excitement for “school” and more the excitement a child feels for a “new and novel life.” In any case, at the beginning of the semester, this novelty completely offset the unhappiness. Everything was new: new school buildings, new classmates, new teachers, and new knowledge.

I’ve always liked new things, including knowledge—of course, only the things that interest me. I still disliked the main subjects, but back then, I really liked humanities. Politics, history, with a bit of geography mixed in. At that time, I basically read the books on my own and never listened in class. While everyone else was flipping through their books, they were looking at the front, and I was looking at the back. As for being diligent, I never really was. I’ve never been good at memorizing things since I was young, so I’d forget whatever the teacher asked us to memorize after a few read-throughs. But what was amazing was that for these subjects I was interested in, I could almost always pass, especially politics.

Don’t underestimate just passing. This was a score I achieved without studying seriously, with the lectures going in one ear and out the other, without memorizing any key points, and even while battling the debuff^[7] of hating exams. So, it was one of my few sources of confidence back then. But the main subjects were a complete mess; I was bad at basically all of them. I still remember getting only a 9 in English. When the results were posted, we were called up to the front one by one to be publicly shamed. To be honest, I was expecting my score when I heard it. After all, I had just scribbled randomly on the test, filling in whatever looked right. The only thought I put into it was choosing between the long and short options. But what surprised me the most was, just when I thought I was last, there was someone with a lower score.

Some dude got a 0. It was the only time in my life I’ve ever heard of a score of 0.

Even I, who just wrote randomly, got a 9. How did this guy manage it? He turned in a blank paper.

In any case, this guy successfully drew all the teacher’s fire for us unfortunate souls, becoming the main target of criticism. And we, who had at least written something, got off lightly.

To this day, I’m still grateful to that guy, although I’ve forgotten his name.

In short, my junior high can be summed up in four words: severely unbalanced in subjects.

Of course, the novelty wore off not long after school started, and the aversion I felt in elementary school came rushing back. But everything is a process. I managed to hold on for half a semester, and then, I started bolting again.

Ah, my friends, different time, but same place—the stairwell.

I once again replicated my past behavior, taking books to the rooftop to read, though this time I added a few other scenes. To avoid getting caught, I started using mobile tactics: one day on the roof of another building, the next on my own building’s roof. I just kept changing locations, making sure my parents could never find me. Sometimes I would even go to an internet cafe, though I didn’t go right away. I think I started going after being truant for a while, mainly to kill time. This was typical for boys that age: rent a computer for an afternoon of gaming. Of course, I did the same. But I gave up after a few times. On one hand, it cost money; on the other, I hated the smell of smoke in internet cafes. Every time I went in and came out, I’d be covered in a strange smell. Plus, I was bad at games (and sadly, still am today), so it wasn’t that appealing to me. In the end, it was better to find a place to read by myself.

I’ll skip the more specific details, but it was basically a continuous cycle of playing truant, getting caught and brought back, and playing truant again. The school first arranged for me to take a leave of absence. I barely attended the second half of seventh grade, but they actually dragged me back for eighth grade. I was already behind, and after half a year of freedom, how could I possibly stand school? So, I ran off again less than a week after the semester started, and took another leave of absence. Finally, I was dragged back again in the ninth grade—I’m surprised the school hadn’t expelled me by then, but this was the last time.

After my final act of truancy, I didn’t hide this time. Instead, I went home and had a very serious talk with my mother about wanting to self-study at home.

Actually, my self-studying had already begun in the seventh grade, during my first full leave of absence at home. By the ninth grade, I had already gotten used to that lifestyle, which is why I wanted to have a thorough talk with my mom.

During my truancy period, my mom was already at her wit’s end. Of course, she would hit me, but even so, we had a lot of communication. I would often explain my thoughts and opinions to her, so she wasn’t just unilaterally rejecting me. And this time, to be honest, even today I can hardly believe it, she just agreed to my request. Just like that, so smoothly, she let me stay at home. I only remember going back and having a good chat with her about my desire to self-study at home, telling her that I would definitely study hard—and then she agreed.

She said she believed her child would do it, so she agreed.

But looking back with today’s perspective, I think it was definitely more than just belief. At that time, it was less about agreement and more about exhaustion. The decision to let a child not go to school is something very few parents can accept so easily. I talked to her about it later, and she told me about her state of mind back then. She was having problems with her business, and her child was rebellious. She just couldn’t take it anymore, so she might as well let me stay home. In fact, my mom has said many times since that she should have forced me to go to school back then.

But I don’t think that’s in her nature. Although she hit me many times because of my truancy, her love for me always outweighed everything else. Being a single parent, she couldn’t resort to harsher methods. As I got older, she couldn’t really force me to do anything anymore, which is why she agreed after I made that request.

Before talking about my self-studying experience, I want to talk about my family first.

I feel that my ability to self-study so smoothly is largely inseparable from my family.

Family

I love to read. Yes, this hobby probably started when I was a child. There was a Xinhua Bookstore across from my house where you could read for free. Although most of the time my mother would buy books for me to read at home, sometimes I liked to sit in the bookstore. My mother was always busy and rarely had time to look after me, so I had to find interesting things on my own. I would either play with my friends, or sit on the floor of the bookstore, legs crossed, reading something I liked, slowly passing the afternoon, and then go home for dinner in the evening.

The process of reading always made me feel like I was exploring a new world. Unsolved Mysteries of the World, which seems absurd now, was on my bedside table back then. There were also The Diary of a Laughing Cat, The Adventure Team, and UCG—novels and magazines that I found extremely interesting. I often liked to read them late into the night, sometimes finishing a whole book before sleeping. Perhaps my habit of staying up late was passed down from that time.

My mom raised me all by herself, and she has always been a very open-minded and kind person to me, so kind that I feel it’s doting. You could say she would support whatever I wanted to do. If I wanted to buy books, she would buy them for me. If I wanted to learn piano, she would help pay the tuition. If I wanted to study painting, she would support that too. Every time I wanted to learn something, she would just smile and say, “You always have a three-minute passion. Isn’t it a waste of money?” but she would still give me the money. My family wasn’t wealthy. We ran a small shop, and our income was about average. But she got me the things I wanted, like a computer and a phone, early on. You could say she gave me unprecedented support.

All of this, in the eyes of some parents, would be considered an absolute disaster. Playing truant every day, wasting money on miscellaneous hobbies that have no use for studies. “With all this effort, can’t you focus on the right path?” And with that mindset, they would sign their kids up for a bunch of “right path” tutoring classes and force them to learn. I’m afraid most parents would be more inclined to do this, rather than consistently supporting their child like my mom did.

But this support became a crucial foundation for me later on. In my growth process, I encountered absolutely no external obstacles in exploring my own interests; there was only the retreat after exploring something and finding it uninteresting. And reading a large number of “leisure books” also cultivated my ability to handle long texts without issue. The idea of “only being able to read if there are pictures” doesn’t apply to me. To put it plainly, it’s an adaptation to low-density stimulation. No matter how many words there are, as long as I’m interested, I can read it.

You could say I had already entered the process of free learning long ago, I just hadn’t realized it at the time.

Self-Study

Politics and Zhihu

I have a hobby that’s not quite typical for my age. Probably after junior high, I started to really enjoy reading about society-related topics.

How should I put it? If I look back with today’s perspective, I would say I have a strong interest in human political organization, society, and all the related sciences and history. But at the time, of course, I couldn’t explain it like that. I just really liked reading related content, whether it was books or articles. In school, it was politics, history, and some human geography. Outside of school, it was miscellaneous books and articles on my phone that others considered useless for exams and studies. After I completely left school and stayed at home, you could call me an “internet-addicted youth” who was on his phone and computer all day. Except I wasn’t playing games, but reading a large amount of content that interested me.

Most of my absorption of social science knowledge came after I started using Zhihu.^[8] I began following Zhihu on my phone back in my seventh-grade leave of absence. I hadn’t registered an account then, but I thought it was a very interesting platform with many interesting articles. I could find answers to almost any question I was interested in, so I was constantly browsing it.

It wasn’t until I officially registered an account in eighth grade that I became completely engrossed. After my leave of absence, although I said I was self-studying, like most teenagers, I didn’t really have a strict goal or any plans. I said I was self-studying, but I didn’t know what I would learn. At that time, all I did was browse Zhihu and play on the computer, browse Zhihu and play on the computer, reading things that interested me. Although I occasionally played some games, most of the time I was on Zhihu. I would often browse until I was completely lost in it, opening my phone in the morning and browsing until night, then suddenly looking up as if I had been in another world, wondering how it got dark.

Every single day, I was reading a massive amount of things that interested me. One moment it was politics, the next history, then economics—mostly social sciences. Of course, when I was too tired, I would look at some brainless, witty content.^[9] In short, I had a blast browsing.

This was completely different from the conventional impression of “self-study”—sitting with a textbook, reading it sequentially, and constantly taking notes and memorizing from online courses. No, no, no, I’m not a fan of that stuff. My only goal back then was one word: “satisfaction.” Whatever was satisfying, I did. Whatever was easy, I did. Whatever interested me, I did. It’s not that I didn’t try watching online courses and reading textbooks; they often just brought back bad memories after a short while, like being back in the classroom. I could almost never last, so I eventually gave up on them.

Because of the very broad interests I cultivated since childhood, I would read about almost anything that caught my interest. And I’m grateful that Zhihu had almost everything. Whatever I wanted to learn about, it seemed to recommend a series of related content. Or I could just search, and I could almost always find high-quality articles that I couldn’t find elsewhere. It seemed that for almost any topic I was interested in, no matter how niche, it could find something.

Looking back now, isn’t this exactly free learning? No compulsion, no goals, only personal interest. Of course, I didn’t have that awareness at the time. I was just reading broadly based on my own interests, for the sake of pleasure.

Even programming, which later completely changed my family’s situation, was learned during this process.

Programming and Mania

As for programming, learning it was probably the closest I ever came to a “formal self-study” experience. I not only found a textbook but also watched an entire online course from start to finish.

At that time, I found it very interesting. You could input something and get immediate feedback, which was very satisfying. So I found a beginner’s programming book, if I remember correctly, it was Python Crash Course. This book, written by a foreign author, was completely different from the school textbooks I had seen before. The author was witty, used a lot of examples, and it was a pleasure to read.

But strictly speaking, I didn’t follow his instructions to the letter. What I did was constantly replicate the code based on his requirements. The general structure of the book was: start a new chapter, present a requirement, show the code, and then explain it. But I basically ignored all that. As soon as he proposed what to write, I would leave the book and independently implement a program that met his requirements. My solution was always completely different from his example, but miraculously, it always achieved the same effect, which deepened my interest in programming.

Of course, this process was also accompanied by a lot of pain. Because I was replicating it independently, errors were all too common, and I couldn’t find solutions in the book. I had no idea why the errors were happening. So, the end result was that I passively learned the skill of all chengxuyuan,^[10] Baidu-oriented programming.^[11] The internet has everything; it just depends on whether you know how to search. Sometimes it was serious, with very complex problems, but sometimes it was comical, like being stuck for an afternoon not because of a logic issue but because I missed a comma.

In the end, I could always find a solution and overcome the difficulties. You could say that for the entire second half of that year, I was completely absorbed in it. During the peak of my enthusiasm, almost every day when my mom came into my room, she would see me staring motionless at a bunch of colorful text on a black background, as if I were possessed.

Of course, I wasn’t at this high intensity every day. The interest in learning is always a process of peaks and valleys. When I wanted to learn, I’d be at it for days on end. When I didn’t, I might not touch it for days. It was on and off like that. I’d just look up what I didn’t know, follow some articles on Zhihu, find some books, and learn bit by bit from the code in them. Finally, after I managed to build a web scraper, I suddenly felt that Python was no longer interesting, so I dropped it and never touched it again. But later I went on to learn front-end development, completing an entire online course. The process was similar: when the teacher gave an example, I paid no attention to the content, tried to replicate it myself first, then went back to compare how it was written. I finished a 40-plus-hour React course over a few months like that. Anyway, it was quite interesting.

This is a characteristic of mine: when I’m interested in something, I will learn it and read about it frantically. When I lose interest, I drop it immediately and might not touch it again for a long time. And that’s indeed how it was. Later, my learning cycles stretched to a monthly basis. Sometimes I might get a sudden whim and dive back in for a day, but the high-intensity, continuous days or even half-months of obsession like in the beginning basically never happened again.

But I never expected that just this period of learning would completely alleviate a major difficulty my family later faced—

As for what that was, I’ll get to it later.

Anyway, besides these topics, I was interested in politics, economics, history—any social science topic. Philosophy, psychology, artificial intelligence, Japanese, and even creative writing—I studied them all.

What I had in abundance back then was time. While others were painstakingly memorizing texts, I was reading things that interested me. While others were taking exams, I was reading things that interested me. Anyway, I just spent my days reading aimlessly, reading whatever was interesting. This perfectly matches that diagram of free learning—chaotic, yet broad.

Novels and Creation

I even wrote novels, because I’ve always had a strong interest in creating stories (and still do). Of course, as I got older, I also realized I needed to earn some money. And writing web novels was indeed a way to do that. At that time, I had no knowledge of creative writing techniques. I just wrote with pure passion. Somehow, I managed to get a contract. So, I wrote. I painstakingly wrote over a hundred thousand words, and the more I wrote, the more painful it became. Writer’s block is a hurdle every writer faces, and I was no exception. After padding out more than sixty chapters, I finally couldn’t take it anymore and “castrated” the project.^[12]

But after that, partly because I had no money and partly because my hands were itching to write, I started another book. Then I repeated the same process, only this time I wrote for longer. I finally earned my first pot of gold—the 600 yuan full-attendance bonus from Qidian.^[13] My mom was so happy, saying I could finally earn money instead of just idling at home. But in the end, I hit the writer’s block wall again. After struggling for a long time, I accidentally deleted several thousand words of my saved draft, and I completely bengbu zhu^[14] and entered the palace once more. This time, the record was 179 chapters, a new high for me. Later, I started a few more books and even changed my pen name. In short, I got a contract every time, and every time I abandoned it not long after, never again making it to the point of being published on the paid platform to get the full-attendance bonus.

Censoring this to avoid being doxxed,^[15] though I don’t know why the final author’s note was blocked.

But I always have this urge to create. Frustrated with why I couldn’t write stories, I searched online, and that’s when I started to learn about creative writing, about techniques, shaping conflict, character development, and so on. I read many articles by experts on Zhihu on how to write, read many translated creative writing books, and learned from the experiences of other web novel gurus. But it’s not like learning the techniques guarantees you’ll write well. I still ended up abandoning my projects. Internalizing these techniques truly requires deliberate practice; writing can’t just stay on the page. Of course, my reading on creative writing continued. In short, I was doing everything I could to create stories that could truly move people, instead of blindly starting new books.

I haven’t formally written a book in a while, but the desire is still there. When something lasts this long, it probably means my passion for writing isn’t just a three-minute wonder. This is truly where my interest lies, and I really want to make it a reality. After reading many techniques recently, I feel a growing sense of understanding, a feeling that’s hard to describe, like I’ve grasped something. So, I’m planning to prepare and start a new book based on what I’ve learned. Of course, it’s still in the conceptual stage. In short, the techniques that free learning brought me seem to have been partially internalized. Whether that’s true or not will have to be tested when I start writing, but right now, I feel I won’t just dive in with blind passion like before. First, I’ll research the market, see what the audience likes. When I write, I’ll consider foreshadowing and suspense, how to stir the audience’s emotions, create conflict, and so on. At least, I now know what to do when I have writer’s block.

Reflection

In short, it was a constant process of learning. I would just encounter something I was interested in, read about it, then drop it and move on to something else, then drop that too, constantly changing my interests, reading materials, directions, and fields. At first, I was constantly browsing Zhihu; that’s how it was for the first year or two. But later, I slowly started to feel that Zhihu wasn’t enough. I began to turn to various e-books, and then to academic papers, not just in Chinese but also in English.

Yes, I mentioned before that my English was terrible, and I even hated it. But some high-quality knowledge is only in English, so I had no choice. Fortunately, I had the powerful weapon of machine translation, so I could still read it despite my poor English. Anyway, I tried all sorts of things I could read. As the depth and breadth of my interests grew, my reading materials gradually expanded beyond Zhihu into various other fields.

Looking back now, I’ve discovered a few important points.

Broad reading and acting based on interest are essential prerequisites. My childhood habit of reading and my mother’s doting nature—getting me whatever I wanted—cultivated these from the very beginning. I don’t feel disgusted or bored by large amounts of text, nor do I just keep my interests bottled up without acting on them.

These served as a foundation, exposing me to a vast and complex body of knowledge, which trained my later thinking and opened up the second stage of free learning.

Critical Thinking

What kind of thinking?

Critical thinking—these words have probably been beaten to death by many, but I must say, it is truly crucial for free learning. But how is it cultivated? Like any skill, it requires training. And how do you train it?

For this training, I believe it’s more important not to look for a textbook on critical thinking. It can be a reference, but being completely boxed in by its content will only make you hate it. Anyway, I’ve never finished any of those things. All my critical and logical thinking was developed for the purpose of reading, and built upon reading.

Because I read a huge number of articles on Zhihu at the time, this large volume brought a problem: they included all sorts of viewpoints. Many of these viewpoints would conflict with each other. What was I to do? At first, like many people, I would subconsciously avoid them, only reading articles that supported my own views. But, I don’t know what I stumbled upon, or maybe it was just that Zhihu’s early algorithm wasn’t perfect, but my feed wasn’t filled with only things that supported my views. This led to a result where it would sometimes even recommend things that opposed my views. And when I saw them, I’d get curious. Just pure curiosity. I just wanted to go in and see.

I clicked in, read it, and found it very problematic, which triggered a series of physiological reactions. I believe many people have had this experience: you see something you oppose, you feel uncomfortable all over, and you have a visceral urge to reject it, to escape the text. But I don’t know why, I have this compulsive need to finish any article I click on, unless it’s truly uninteresting. And it just so happened that the articles opposing my views were the ones I was curious about, so in a sense, they were interesting. Although I would back out of most after a quick look, I would always finish the interesting ones.

Then, one day, I suddenly realized that my resistance to these things didn’t seem so intense anymore.

At this point, I seemed to have gained some awareness and began to reflect on my previous actions. I had read a lot and knew about things like critical thinking. At the time, I was wondering how to develop this skill. It was described in such a mystical way, as if there was no practical method. Everyone said to think critically, but I had no idea what that even was… But that strong rejection of opposing viewpoints, and then the lessening of that rejection as I read more—wasn’t this the process of developing an open, critical mindset? So, at this point, I started to deliberately read them. I had to go in, I had to see how I would judge the content of these articles with my knowledge and logic.

Yes, just reading is not enough. The evaluation and output after reading are equally important.

It was truly uncomfortable, my whole body felt it. Every moment I spent reading those articles, I wanted to back out. But in the end, I forced myself to read on, forcing myself to reread them repeatedly to understand what the author was saying as much as possible without creating a strawman,^[16] and then carefully analyzing the views in the article with my own knowledge to judge their validity. Why did I think it was problematic? Where was the problem? Were my views and stance reasonable? Did they have support? Was it based on emotion or on well-evidenced agreement? Just like that, I would read views I supported and views I opposed, and in this constant collision between two viewpoints, I gradually seemed to get used to it. The strong feelings lessened. Although it was still very uncomfortable, I could persist in reading, and even read them repeatedly.

This training in dealing with opposing views really did make my brain adapt.

Many times, I would even intentionally train the recommendation algorithm. I would linger a bit longer on articles that opposed my views. Although I wouldn’t like them, I believe this prolonged stay would definitely be recognized by the algorithm. And this extra time also allowed me to read those views more carefully and repeatedly, and to critique them based on my background knowledge. Of course, it wasn’t all criticism; sometimes I would partially accept some of the content and change my original understanding.

As this whole process went on, I began to realize a painful truth: I might be wrong.

In my reflection and exposure to more criticism, I discovered that my original views had many flaws. They might be unstable, without evidence, a pure emotion, a blind faith. I still remember that winter; my thoughts were in utter chaos, and it was extremely painful. It felt like my worldview was being rebuilt. I began to rethink the worldview I had built up through extensive reading, discovered its errors, and it wasn’t until the following year that I finally completed the subsequent steps.

So, it was only after this destruction that I felt my critical thinking had been preliminarily established. Although I don’t have the confidence to say I am a completely critical person, I can at least say I have a certain critical ability. At the very least, I can articulate a point based on my logical arguments and ensure that all the beliefs I establish are supported, not just blind faith, with reason measuring everything instead of emotion.

Debating and Outputting

So here comes the third point. Another important aspect of free learning that I discovered, besides interest and reading, is the training method for critical thinking.

And within this actually lies the last point: the analysis during training, which is essentially a form of output.

And my main training method for this output back then was—online debating.^[17]

Yes, online debating, or you could call it discussion. Discussing with all sorts of people, those who support your views and those who oppose them. In any situation, under any possible circumstance, engage in some form of output: writing, commenting, note-taking, or just saying it out loud. Although I recommend writing it down, as long as there is output, this step is complete. Output is itself a summary of the thoughts and content we’ve learned. The moment I output it, it means I must take someone else’s original content and express it in my own words, apply it to a specific question, and explain why this content is used for this question. Even in the face of various people refuting your views, you need to output to defend your own views and critique their flawed ones.

Why do I call it “debating”? Because often, my desire to output is triggered when I want to respond to views I disagree with. Yes, defending one’s own beliefs, this most instinctive thing, ended up being my training for output. In the 2549 days since I registered on Zhihu, I have written thousands of comments. A large part of them were casually written while I was bored and reading articles back in those years. It was these casual actions that formed a habit, so that today, whenever I have an opinion, I immediately say it or write it down.

Don’t underestimate this process of debating. Especially when facing someone who opposes your views, you will frantically search for information to prove your point. All sorts of papers and data can be used in your arguments. I still remember one time, to refute someone, I spent a whole day reading literature, just to confidently slap them in the face that night. The process of debating forces you to carefully examine the other person’s argument and try to prove your own. No matter how this proof is attempted, it is an attempt at proof. It forces you to use your logic to win, to use enough evidence to overwhelm them. And for this process, you need to try to construct text, to constantly organize your arguments, and to read a wider range of literature.

Sometimes you’ll even find that you are the one who is wrong. That is an excellent opportunity. You’ve encountered a rare chance to have someone correct you for free. Although in such situations, I usually wouldn’t verbally admit defeat, in my heart, I had already accepted it, because in such cases, my arguments would become weaker and weaker until I had nothing left to say.

So I knew I was wrong, I realized it, and then I had the chance to change it.

The so-called truth becomes clearer through debate. And you can also learn during the process of debate. This is a key point I’ve realized from my online debates to this day. Debating is not just about venting emotions and defeating the opponent. The key point of debating is to organize your own logic and then prove your correctness with rich arguments. If you do it enough, you’ll even get used to the emotions. The more you get used to it, the easier it is to calm down and observe yourself, and not let yourself fall into emotional actions, merely insulting the other person out of emotion and thus becoming irrational.

Of course, if you really don’t want to debate, you can try to output a lot by writing comments and notes. What are comment-notes? After reading something, you make a comment on it based on your own background knowledge. It’s essentially simulating the process of publishing a comment on a public website, or you can just rephrase the author’s ideas in your own words. Of course, this way you can’t enjoy the service of being corrected by others for free, nor the training of emotional stability, nor the process of frantically checking sources and absorbing knowledge to refute the other person. But writing notes is still output. As long as you summarize the knowledge you see into your own language and output it, it’s always better than nothing.

So, the above are the four points I’ve summarized from my past free learning experience: reading, interest, critical thinking, and output.

Programming and Change

Free learning has helped me immensely. Remember what I said about programming earlier?

I said it changed my family and helped us overcome a major hurdle. Because at that time, I earned some money with my programming skills. During the pandemic, our family business was struggling, inventory was piling up, and on top of that, we had a lot of debt from various family reasons, all of which came crashing down on us. We desperately needed money, a lot of money. The bank wanted us to repay, relatives wanted us to repay, but where would we get the money? There was no business during the pandemic, and it was impossible to go out and work. What could we do? I had no earning ability, and almost all the burden fell on my mother.

You could call it a coincidence. Long before the pandemic, I had created a small tool for my daily use, to meet some of my own needs. And it just so happened that with the surge in demand for remote work during the pandemic, my little tool was perfectly suited for it. At first, I was just trying it out to earn some pocket money, not thinking it would solve our family’s income problem—and then, beyond my imagination, it suddenly blew up.

I suddenly earned an amount of money that, in all my years of life, I had never even dared to imagine I could earn myself.

Don’t forget, before this, the most I had ever earned was the 600 yuan per month full-attendance bonus from writing web novels. I had no other source of income whatsoever. So, you can probably imagine the shock this explosive income gave me.

Most of this money was used to pay off debts, so my monthly expenses were almost the same as before. Except for spending five thousand yuan on two art courses without batting an eye, I had almost no large expenses.

Look at how much is left by 2023. So, I’m also very fortunate that for me, there was no issue of it being hard to go from lavish to frugal. The whole process was like a dream. It rose suddenly with the pandemic and then disappeared just as suddenly with the pandemic. However, my feelings about it are rather calm, because I’ve always seen it as luck. This was not something I could achieve with my own abilities. For example, this little tool itself had almost no technical complexity. I just threw something together. Anyone who has learned a bit of programming could have made it. Is that my skill? If this is really my skill, then my level is far too low.

So, in the end, it was just that I was lucky. At the ri