My name is Miao Lin. An unstable childhood gave my life an undertone of anxiety and led me to ask, from an early age, why people suffer and where happiness comes from. At thirteen or fourteen, I began writing a book about happiness. After forty years of pauses, rejection, and rewriting, it became the origin of Equilibrium Studies of Suffering and Joy.
My father loved calligraphy, and I picked up a brush when I was seven or eight. I showed little natural talent, yet always believed that each stroke concealed an order deeper than aesthetics. During factory night shifts, I practiced with water on warehouse walls yellowed by chlorine. I entered business twice and returned twice to calligraphy and the study of suffering and joy. A sudden heart attack in 2014 forced me to stop and confirm what I truly wanted to pursue for the rest of my life.
During five unsettled years in Canada, I experienced somatic anxiety and family separation. I also began turning my ideas about how people sense stimuli, form emotions, and react into code. In 2024, a new generation of AI tools opened engineering possibilities that had not existed before. I gradually converted my long-developed theoretical framework into runnable, testable, reviewable mechanisms. The ZhiNao research line evolved to its fourteenth generation, while my calligraphy research produced an AI-assisted evaluation tool.
Today, my work has formed three connected lines: calligraphy and the Way of Calligraphy, Human Reaction Mechanism and ZhiNao AI, and Equilibrium Studies of Suffering and Joy. I am not a conventional professional programmer. I am closer to a long-term questioner, theory builder, and explorer of mechanism architecture. I try to turn decades of personal experience and philosophical thought into theories, experiments, and lines of code. The road is still long, and I am setting out again.
Read the longform story: My First Half of Life
Watch the personal story video