1. An Uneasy Beginning
I was born into upheaval.
Instability defined my childhood. It laid a foundation of anxiety over the beginning of my life and became the reason I kept asking why people suffer.
At thirteen or fourteen, I began turning my thoughts into words in a book about happiness.
I continued writing it for forty years, with many pauses, rejections, and rewrites, until it was finally completed in 2018. It became the origin of what I later called Equilibrium Studies of Suffering and Joy.
2. My Father and the Brush
My father loved calligraphy. Surrounded by it, I began making marks on newspapers with a brush when I was seven or eight.
I showed little natural talent, yet I could never shake the intuition that calligraphy was not merely what people usually said it was.
It was certainly art and aesthetics, but behind the fall and unfolding of every stroke, and behind the formation of a whole work, there seemed to be a deeper order. Perhaps my habit of asking what suffering was gave me the desire to explore further. That desire offset the frustration of practicing diligently while making almost no progress.
I later studied fine art and calligraphy. Zhao Mengfu's idea that “calligraphy and painting share the same source” moved me deeply for the first time, and scattered clues began to gather into a faint framework.
I once told my classmates, “Calligraphy is not simple. It may be connected with the Dao.” Together with my reading of Laozi's Dao De Jing and the I Ching, the outline of a Way of Calligraphy gradually became clearer.
3. Night Shifts and Cover
After I began working, I never abandoned the brush or my thinking about suffering.
During night shifts, while others rested, I dipped a brush in water and practiced on warehouse walls yellowed by chlorine, trying to understand the Way of Calligraphy. Even under the pressure of four crews competing for a few dozen extra yuan each month, I secretly read whenever I could. I read every kind of book, like a desert traveler thirsting for rain.
My coworkers jokingly called me “Master Miao.” Those difficult days were made bearable by these kind people, who repeatedly covered for me and helped me avoid the foreman's reprimands.
4. Business and the Cemetery
In 1994, as the fire inside me burned more intensely, I finally left the state-owned enterprise where I had worked for five years.
I followed my mother and her colleague into business, but showed no commercial talent and failed to sell even a few rolls of wallpaper. In my youthful arrogance, I did not think the problem was mine.
In 1996, still unwilling to give up, I used more than twenty thousand yuan from my parents to take over a decorating company. It was called a company, but it was really only a storefront. To survive, I put calligraphy and writing behind me for a time. After four years, the business closed quietly.
In 2000, discouraged, I returned to studying painting and calligraphy and directly faced the recurring questions of suffering in my mind. I stayed with this for seven years.
I often went to Huishan. Behind the mountain was a bamboo grove where only birds could be heard, and below the old forest lay a large cemetery. There I felt an unusual peace, far from everyday noise, in a silent conversation with time, death, and myself.
Walking among the gravestones, I would stop and silently face one deceased person or another, listening to their wordless accounts of life. Then one day, quite suddenly, the thoughts of happiness and suffering that had trapped me for so long seemed to thaw. They began to flow freely through my mind. It was the first great eruption of the work.
5. When Fate Pressed Pause
In 2007, I began preparing another business with partners. Two years later, Jiutian Optoelectronics was formally established.
In those years, already in my forties, I married and had two children. The business and our wealth grew.
But my troubles grew as well. Work pressure tightened my nerves until it became anxiety. Around September 2014, I even thought that it would be good if something forced me to stop.
A few months later, just before my birthday, I suffered a heart attack. Fate truly pressed the pause button in a way I could not refuse.
6. Between Life and Death, and Starting Again
Lying in an intensive care bed, I did not know whether to feel fortunate or sorrowful.
Who was I? If my life ended there, what could I leave to my family or to the world? How much of what I had considered important was truly worthwhile? Did the so-called career really matter?
When I picked up the two pursuits that reality had repeatedly interrupted, writing about happiness and suffering and exploring the Way of Calligraphy, I became certain of what I wanted.
Four years later, Studies of Happiness and The Ancient Code of Calligraphy were completed and published on Amazon.
7. Canada: Five Years Adrift
I had thought these two undertakings were complete. I did not realize that everything was only beginning.
The anxiety that had formed around 2009 gradually became visible after I arrived in Canada in 2018. I mistook the bodily symptoms for another cardiovascular problem, yet remained unwilling to undergo a complete examination.
For five years, I continued to devote much of my time to the Way of Calligraphy and Equilibrium Studies of Suffering and Joy. The pressure of life and the anxiety of failing to achieve a breakthrough made the physical symptoms worse.
All of this also changed my family relationships. In 2023, my two young children remained in Vancouver while I chose to return to China alone and live apart from them.
This was the heaviest price I paid to continue this path of exploration, and I still find it difficult to face.
8. A Software Company and the Possibility Opened by AI
As an entrepreneur under a business immigration program, I founded a software company in Canada and employed five or six people. At that time, I had already begun trying to turn my long study of suffering, joy, and human reaction mechanisms into code.
While studying happiness and suffering, my attention had moved to a more basic question: how do people react to stimuli? How are emotions related to changes in internal state? How do external and internal stimuli jointly influence the next behavior? These questions gradually formed the theory of Human Reaction Mechanism.
Progress was slow because of my limited engineering ability and the tools then available.
When I encountered a new generation of AI tools in 2024, I devoted myself fully to the work and rapidly began converting my accumulated theoretical framework into runnable, testable, and reviewable engineering structures.
The ZhiNao research line gradually evolved to its fourteenth generation. This represents an iterative internal research path that tries to turn reaction, state, candidates, adjudication, feedback, and direction calibration into mechanism structures.
At the same time, I transformed my calligraphy research into an AI-assisted evaluation tool, attempting to turn structure, rhythm, brushwork, and overall relationships into observable, analyzable, and responsive digital indicators.
9. Three Lines of Work
Today, my long exploration has gradually formed three related lines, each with its own boundaries.
Calligraphy and the Way of Calligraphy
This line comes from forty years of calligraphy practice. I study not only resemblance or beauty, but also structure, rhythm, force, variation, and the relationships that form a complete work. I try to show that the Way of Calligraphy need not remain a mystical expression: at least part of it can be observed, summarized, discussed, and digitally modeled.
It includes three directions: helping serious calligraphy practitioners improve their work and develop a personal style; continuing the study of calligraphy and Daoist thought; and applying ideas about change, balance, and direction judgment to daily life and practical decisions.
Human Reaction Mechanism and ZhiNao AI
Human Reaction Mechanism grew from my long questioning of happiness and suffering. It proposes a unified reaction-level framework for behavior, emotion, and cognition: how stimulus changes state, how state produces candidate responses, how candidates pass through adjudication into action, and how action results feed back into later choices.
The book is under contract with Cambridge Scholars Publishing and is moving through the publication process.
ZhiNao is the engineering exploration of this theory in artificial intelligence. It does not reject the LLM or set itself in simple opposition to it. LLMs are good at expanding language, association, and candidate possibilities. ZhiNao studies how a system can continuously calibrate direction within a given goal, current state, permission boundary, risk, and feedback.
My long-term vision points toward a controllable general intelligence governed by humanity's highest goals and boundaries. The present first step is to establish an external adjudication, safety-control, and runtime-governance foundation for LLMs.
LLMs open possibilities. ZhiNao calibrates direction.
This is a research path toward AGI, not a statement that AGI has already been achieved.
Equilibrium Studies of Suffering and Joy
This is the line to which I have devoted the most time and which lies closest to the roots of my life. Its vision is to help people gradually understand changes in suffering and joy, patterns of reaction, and states of life, so that they can gain greater clarity and autonomy through long practice.
It is not a medical or psychological treatment, and it does not promise rapid freedom from suffering. It is closer to a long-term study and practice of how life understands and adjusts itself.
10. This Moment
In 2026, I have reached another moment that requires a choice.
The first half of my life has passed through upheaval, failure, pause, restart, another pause, and another restart. It was never glorious, but it was real.
I am not a professional programmer in the conventional sense, nor do I intend to present myself as an all-powerful technical genius. My role is closer to that of a long-term questioner, theory builder, and explorer of mechanism architecture.
Engineering ability is essential. If this path is to reach larger-scale validation, it must depend on professional engineers, safety researchers, product specialists, and researchers from different fields working together.
What I can contribute are the questions that I have pursued for decades and cannot easily put down:
Why do people react as they do?
Why do people suffer?
Why are people happy?
I am turning these questions from personal experience and philosophical thought into lines of code.
The road is still long.
I am only fifty-seven.