Play House with a Quiet Heart

I think independent hobbies will ultimately form an independent character.

This topic is a bit big, but I think Chinese people in the future will have their own independent character, different from Westerners.

Although we also accept some Western brands and wear their clothes, in the end you will see that people, the “vibe,” the feeling, are all different from the West.

This will form our own things, so I feel very hopeful about the future.

As for this group of friends of mine, I think I can sum up one point—the word “faith.”

I once heard a saying like this: Chinese people have no faith.

I don’t see it that way.

I think it will become especially clear in the future that faith is absolutely not limited to religion; I think that would be far too narrow.

If someone treats a career or a hobby as faith, I think that kind of person deserves even more respect.

Of course I wasn’t the first to propose this idea; I heard it from an elder.

That elder is Mobai’s father, a traditional Chinese painter.

He especially loves painting; his passion for painting sometimes makes me feel ashamed.

When we go to his home, he is almost producing new works every day.

He gets up in the morning and paints right away, with great gusto.

A friend bought one of his paintings and, holding it, asked out of curiosity, “Sir, how long did this take you to paint?”

He thought for a moment and replied with one sentence: “It took me forty years to paint this.”

The elder’s daughter, Mobai—my girlfriend—is also a traditional painter.

She also does graphic design; and I should add that I especially like very simple design.

By “simple design,” I mean form is simple but content is rich.

I like people like that too; Mobai is that kind of person—she looks very simple, but her inner world is quite rich.

She’s often careless and forgetful.

For example, today she came to photograph me with a camera, and in the end discovered she hadn’t brought the CF card.

Things like this happen every day.

But she has another quality, a particularly good one—that is, her world is especially beautiful.

She sees everything as beautiful; she often says “such-and-such is so cute.”

She doesn’t like to hear you talk about someone’s faults, or hold forth to criticize things; she really doesn’t like that.

So that’s something I don’t have.

I began reflecting on myself because of her; I haven’t been very “simple” since I was little.

Of course that’s not a compliment.

I think too much; my mind is rather complicated.

I also don’t read much, because reading is tiring for me—turn any page and I start thinking a lot; that’s an excuse.

For example, a few years ago, when I was relatively younger, I had a very painful problem: I’m very sensitive, and I saw a lot of dark things in society.

Open a website’s front page or turn on the nightly news, and it’s all these rotten things in society.

These things caused me extreme pain and no sense of safety.

Because you imagine what it would be like if it happened to you; it made me unable to be calm, even unable to sleep.

Later I discovered that Mobai still slept like a log.

I began to change; I filtered these things out and stopped looking at them so much.

I don’t think that’s avoidance, because some people in society should do that work.

But I’m not the one doing it.

Those people may be professionals whose job is to make everyone reflect on things and discover things.

The problem is that too many people in society are doing this—there are too many who diagnose the illness and too few who cure it.

This has to do with us Chinese now: from childhood we learn in Lu Xun’s tone and style—irony and satire—so we develop this habit.

For example, you look online at a person or a matter; today they’re still being praised, and tomorrow a whole bunch of people will start cursing.

That also makes me particularly disgusted.

Back when I had quite a lot of followers on Weibo, I deleted that account and switched to a small one.

I quietly pay attention to society, but I don’t do live commentary anymore.

I hope my life can be quieter.

I try not to look at the things that make me feel bad.

What I think of as “not avoiding” and “having a sense of responsibility” is what you do when you face these things, not putting your eyes on others to watch what they do, but what you yourself are actually doing.

As for me, I’m a furniture maker—so what can I do?

I’ll design the furniture a bit better, make it sturdier, so everyone can use it for more years; in fact, it’s just that little thing.

We have many beautiful photos.

Many people online will look and say, “You post these beautiful things every day; surely in your life you also have a lot of messy stuff.”

There is, indeed.

And those things—like worry and pain—may take up even more time.

But the problem is, at those times I don’t think to take photos, so you don’t see those kinds of pictures; actually, I’d like to see them too.

For example, I move house a lot, and I often have a lot of expectations for the next place.

For instance, the time before last we moved from the North Fourth Ring Road to the neighboring complex.

At that time we wanted to run the brand “Fanji” in a home I designed.

We moved there and realized that idea.

The place was indeed pretty good, but it had many problems.

It was a mixed-use building, and there were too many office workers.

Often, standing at the bottom of your building wanting to go up, you’d spend half an hour waiting for the elevator; three or four cars would stop and you still couldn’t squeeze in.

That feeling was like riding Line 1 of the subway.

We wanted the next move to be to a place that was a bit quieter, a bit more out of the way, with better air.

In 2012 we made it happen.

We spent a lot of money building a new Fanji Living Room and moved in, still using a family-style sales approach.

At the beginning it was fine, but over time new problems appeared.

As customers increased and staff increased, I gradually couldn’t tell my work from my life.

And at that time the work pressure was especially big; there was only one day off a week.

On that day off you might still have to make calls to discuss company matters.

There was basically no time for get-togethers, to go to other cities to see some scenery, or to source some inspiration.

So I realized my life had a huge problem.

Later I summed it up as: “I was about to be killed by the perfect life I had designed.”

In the end I decided to seek change.

So Mobai and I found another place and moved our life out.

This place was very out of the way but had a separate yard.

Back at the Fanji Living Room, I had insomnia almost every day, because every morning at five o’clock those four living alarm clocks would wake you up.

At that time, I was exhausted and felt awful.

By day it was basically: if I didn’t nap at noon, I’d collapse in the afternoon; if I did nap at noon, I’d waste the afternoon.

So we moved to the new home and arranged a more separate space for the cats and dogs, letting them have their own house.

After moving, we also changed many other ways of living.

For example, I’m fairly responsible, but that kind of busyness I couldn’t bear, so after I get home I usually turn off the phone.

I don’t think about, or I force myself not to think about, company matters.

Handle public work during work hours, and at home do very simple things—like brushing the dog or planting flowers and plants—simple things that don’t consume brainpower but can make one relatively calm.

We made those changes.

That was my life “show.”

There’s a saying online: “Show off your good life and you’ll die fast.”

So I’ll stop talking about my life and say something else.

A few days ago I saw a pretty interesting post and I’ll share it with everyone.

It was about the relative sizes of planets.

We could see the familiar blue Earth, which by then was already very small in that image, while Jupiter was that large.

In the next image, the Earth was gone, and there was only a pixel of a Sun; that big fireball was a planet several times larger than it.

We kept in mind that fireball.

In the next image, that fireball was no longer big; the largest one there was the biggest star we currently know.

But what everyone may not know is that this biggest star is only within the Milky Way.

So just how big is the universe—scientists don’t know either.

For example, pointing the Hubble telescope at a patch of the sky that the naked eye can’t see at all—utterly dark—he exposed it for four months, capturing all the points that could emit light within it.

In the end he captured more than a thousand points.

Those more than a thousand bright points are more than a thousand galaxies, which is to say more than a thousand “Milky Ways” like our own.

So the universe is really too vast.

In such circumstances, we humans are really too insignificant.

So, from that angle, if we think about who is “successful,” who has a pile of followers—these things are actually rather laughable and rather cute.

But for ourselves, if you turn your eyes back to yourself, you can see that your world is actually not big.

Your world is your life, your flowers and plants, your parents, your boyfriend or girlfriend, your partner, or your pets, your work—basically just these things.

So I think we should quietly settle our hearts and then experience, feel, and run our own lives with care.

That alone is already quite good.In the past, Mobai and I once had an idea: if we had a child, we wouldn’t want to send him to the kind of school that exists now.

We might want to raise him freely, in a kind of loose, natural way.

But one day, I suddenly thought of something.

I said to Mobai, if our child doesn’t go to school, he won’t have a circle, he won’t have that group of companions.

Their topics will be different.

For example, he won’t know about the popular video games that other kids play now.

Then Mobai said, well, our child would have other special skills—maybe he would go into the river to catch fish, or climb trees to get bird eggs.

I thought about it and said, if one of my friends drives out to the countryside to visit us, and their child plays with ours for a day, then when they go back to school, maybe they’ll write an essay titled “Me and Runtu.”

So later we got a puppy, and that puppy’s name was “Runtu.”

That dog’s personality is actually very similar to mine—it’s the reddish one with a bit of yellow.

Let me introduce myself.

I’m the father of two dogs and two cats, the boyfriend of a female painter, a business partner, the boss of a group of lovely young people, and also a furniture brand designer and founder.

Fanji Furniture—it officially began in 2009.

In 2009, it wasn’t yet called “Fanji,” because at that time I was still experimenting with furniture design.

We matched some of my designs into a few interior projects—that was a process of accumulation.

It wasn’t until 2011 that we officially registered the brand “Fanji” and formally began selling.

The way we sold at that time was quite coincidental.

Because our showroom then—was just the apartment Mobai and I rented for ourselves.

It happened to be right next to this theater.

In our own home, we displayed the furniture we lived with.

Some friends came to see, and they could custom-order the furniture.

That’s how it started.

Later, we had our own official website.

In 2012 we made a bigger change: we opened one “Fanji Living Room” by the Wenyu River in Beijing, and another one in Hangzhou.

Both living rooms were over 200 square meters, spacious enough to truly express the meaning of the two characters “Fanji.”

Many people might be curious about where this name came from.

So I can explain.

The character Fan (梵), in Sanskrit, means “emptiness” or “purity.”

“Purity” sounds abstract, but I wanted furniture to convey that feeling.

I can help you feel what I mean.

When I was a child, I grew up in my grandfather’s courtyard.

My grandfather was a craftsman and also a farmer.

We lived in that yard, and life wasn’t complicated like now—no electronics, no games.

It was very simple; there weren’t even many TV programs.

Every evening after dinner, we would sit in the courtyard and chat.

The adults talked, the children played.

When we got tired, we climbed onto the kang to sleep.

Children often couldn’t fall asleep easily, so we’d lie on the kang and stare outside.

Actually, there wasn’t much to see out there, but there wasn’t light pollution like now—no lamps everywhere.

Back then it was just moonlight, faintly bright, lighting up the ground just enough to see some outlines.

It was very interesting.

The only sounds you could hear were crickets and katydids, and that feeling was so good.

I’ve always hoped that in my lifetime I could return to that kind of life—quiet evenings, close to nature.

So I hoped my furniture could give people that kind of feeling.

Of course, I know many people haven’t lived that way, but I want to give them that feeling—so I called it “Fanji.”

Some of our design inspiration also comes from nature.

For example, the chair behind me, that’s a new model this year.

I named it the “Horse Ear Chair.”

The inspiration came from the image of a tall, strong horse.

I love horses—they’re handsome and graceful.

So in this chair, you can see traces of that: the tall pointed ears, the flowing lines, the strength and muscularity in the legs—all of these came from that sense of understanding.

This sofa is our newest product.

We spent months making prototypes, but the design started two years ago.

We haven’t named this sofa yet.

But when I first began designing it, we had a cat at home—a particularly fat cat, the one I mentioned earlier.

That cat was adorable but very insecure.

It would often sit far away from you, watching from a distance.

I loved that cat, and I really wanted to design a piece of furniture inspired by it.

I didn’t know what kind at first—maybe a very soft, comfortable sofa.

That idea stayed in my mind and I never did it.

Then when I was designing the legs of this sofa, I suddenly remembered that thought.

So I brought it in.

That’s why in this sofa, you can see the image of a chubby, steady creature crouching low to the ground—its weight balanced, calm and stable.

We have a process: whenever we design new furniture, we bring it into nature to photograph it for a Fanji poster.

At the very beginning, I was very straightforward about it—I just wanted to shoot it that way.

Later, I especially wanted to keep that approach going.

The first shoot was in Fuzhou, and the photographer was me—because the budget was low, I played five or six roles myself.

Later, I got too busy, and I also wanted better results, so I asked my friend, photographer Yang Hongxun, for help.

Then we formed a small team, and another friend—Niang Studio—helped me shoot a documentary.

We went to Moganshan to shoot that season’s Fanji posters.

During that process, I started to understand some things.

Why did we have to bring furniture into nature?

Was it really just to get a final picture?

I don’t think so.

Because through that process, we realized a lot and trained ourselves a lot.

Shooting furniture is actually hard.

It’s not like shooting models—models have legs; they can walk.

Clothing is light.

But our furniture is bulky and heavy; it has to be carried by truck, all the way to a scenic spot.

The places we choose are usually wild—we don’t want to see many artificial things like telephone poles.

So we often pick wild locations where cars can’t reach.

That brings a series of problems.

For this shoot, for example, we chose a spot—a beautiful place, a grove of metasequoias with a plain in front of it.

We decided to shoot there.

The next day, when we carried the furniture in, the first step we took landed in a swamp.

The water inside was deep—about this deep.

We bought boots.

Even then, the workers started complaining that I hadn’t picked the spot right and didn’t want to shoot.

We held a quick team meeting to discuss whether to change the location.

In the end, because the photographer and several friends were perfectionists and loved that scene, we decided firmly to shoot it.

Fine, then I led the way—because if the workers wouldn’t do it, I had to.

So I carried the pieces myself and waded in.

We carried the furniture over two kilometers, then trudged another fifty meters through the swamp to the site.

But the ground was all water—how could we place anything?

We used bamboo poles and wooden stakes to support the furniture above the surface.

From a distance, you couldn’t see it—only the grass.

So we set it up in the middle of the plain.

The photographer worked very hard too.

He set up a step ladder, mounted a tripod on top of it, and took large-format shots, which are slow.

Under the blazing sun, each photo took half an hour to capture.

That shoot lasted all morning and was exhausting.

After finishing, when we returned to the guesthouse, we were so tired—took a shower and couldn’t even get up from bed.

But when we chatted afterward, everyone felt so happy, so fulfilled—like a feeling we hadn’t had in a long time.

I think this kind of process, where we form a temporary team and challenge nature to bring our furniture into it, is actually a reflection on ourselves.

It’s an incredibly comforting process.

So my friend shot a documentary about it, and later used clips from it to edit Fanji’s advertisement for this year.

Now everyone can see it.

Later, I began calling the process of shooting the posters the “coming-of-age ceremony” of Fanji Furniture.

It’s something the pieces must go through before they can enter the market.

Our advertisement had a theme: “Born in the Wild, Settled in the Home.”

Furniture ultimately belongs in homes, so I hope my furniture can enter many ordinary people’s homes.

I believe that folk design is good design.

If we look back, in many Chinese dynasties, representative furniture designs were first created and used by elites.

We might know the names—official’s hat chair, round-back chair—but not who designed them.

Yet eventually they entered thousands of households.

So if my furniture can enter thousands of households, I think that’s wonderful.

Fanji Furniture is meant to be furniture that walks into people’s lives.In the slide that was being shown, there was a photo of him when he was a child.

He said he didn’t want everyone to focus on how he looked as a kid, but rather to notice the little cart behind him.

The photo didn’t capture it completely, but that cart was made of bamboo.

Even today, in some of Beijing’s alleyways, you can still see carts like that.

He said he really liked that design.

Sometimes he thinks, if everything he learns and creates in this lifetime could surpass the design of that bamboo cart, then that would already count as a success.

The cart was interesting — one child could sit in it, or two children could sit facing each other.

Because it had a removable board, and another small board that, when the two children sat face-to-face, could be used as a tiny tea table between them.

It was playful, practical, and clever.

Although the picture didn’t show the whole thing clearly, he described it vividly enough that I could imagine it.

He said, if you ever see one on the street, pay attention — it’s worth noticing.

Then he mentioned something else:

“Design in the Folk” — that’s the name of a column they run on Douban and Weibo.

He used to walk through streets and alleys of different cities because of work.

And he said that as a designer, he’s extremely sensitive to details of the street — always noticing the small objects around him.

He discovered that those everyday designs were fascinating, because their creation process was completely different from professional design.

Most of them were made by ordinary people, using whatever materials were on hand, created for one clear purpose — to be used.

There was no excessive desire or deliberate style in them.

And that was precisely why the things that came out of it were so pure, powerful, and thought-provoking.

He showed a few photos of those discoveries.

For example, in the bottom-right corner there was a long wooden bench that he especially liked.

It too was made with found materials — a design that simply followed the form of the wood itself.

Maybe, he said, it shouldn’t even be called a “design,” but it carried a quiet ingenuity.

Later, Fanji created a corner office desk inspired by that very bench.

He didn’t know whether anyone in the audience studied design, but he said that was where his part about design ended for the day.

Then he turned to talk about film.

He said that sometimes you watch a movie for a long time and still can’t tell who the protagonist really is.

And when the director is asked in an interview, the director says, “I was filming an era.”

He smiled and said that Fanji — or rather, Yixi — also belonged to an era.

“What is Yixi?” he asked rhetorically.

He said that after coming to Yixi that day, he finally understood.

“Yixi,” he said, “is this carpet.”

So many people stand on it — these people themselves are an era.

It’s a very interesting and special era.

He gave it a name: the Renaissance Era of China.

When speaking of art, he continued, one can’t avoid a popular term — “wenyi qingnian,” or “art youth.”

Nowadays that phrase has become odd — it’s almost like an insult, usually prefixed by two characters: “stupid.”

But he didn’t think it should be seen so narrowly.

He said, “If you think about it, who among us isn’t a little bit ‘artistic’ now?

If anything, not being one is even harder to imagine.”

He told me that once Mobai had said to him, “You’re not an art youth,” and he had spent an entire night coming to terms with that.

So later he redefined it in his mind.

He thought that this era shouldn’t simply be called the era of “art youth,” but rather the era of cultural youth.

“What is culture?” he said.

“Everything is culture — eating, drinking, playing, talking.

Keeping crickets, raising birds, brewing tea — all of that is culture.

Even something as simple as playing slackline — that’s culture too.

Because when you do something deeply enough, when a group of people do it together, it becomes a culture.”

He believed that this was exactly what was happening in China now.

It wasn’t that there hadn’t been art youth before — there had been, but only a few.

Now it had become widespread, matrix-like, and diverse.

People’s hobbies were completely different from one another, and that made it all the more interesting.

If you looked at these people’s homes, he said, you’d find each one unique.

He personally loved observing people’s homes.

Every arrangement, every small object they bought, reflected their individuality.

Their clothing too had its own style — what he called fanr, a kind of personal aura or character.

He mentioned that Chen Danqing once wrote an essay called The Republican Fanr — “Min’guo Fanr” — which he loved.

Chen later said in an interview that people today had lost that fanr, that everyone in the Republican era had it.

“Maybe that was true,” he said, “but I believe the future will be different.

In the future, many people will have fanr — everyone sitting here will have fanr.”

Then the screen showed a group of his friends.

He began introducing them one by one.

Some were brand designers — for example, one of them had designed the branding for 21cake and its forks and plates.

Another friend, Yaoyang, was a chef.

Another was his photographer friend, Yang Hongxun, the one who shot Fanji’s posters.

His close friend Shang Guanzhe ran a fashion label.

Then there was Wang Yiyang from the brand SU RAN, and another friend named Haidi who collected and identified different types of wood.

He also had friends who made documentaries, or handcrafted leather goods — so many people from different fields.

He said they all shared some common traits — traits he probably had too:

They were stubborn, obsessive, perfectionistic.

They spent immense effort on the small points they cared about.

He gave an example — Yaoyang, the chef, once spent ages choosing a seashell.

Suppliers brought him all kinds, saying, “This one is basically identical to what you want.”

But in his eyes, the difference was still huge.

His best friend, Shang Guanzhe in Xiamen, had actually inspired him to start his own independent furniture brand.

That friend had just launched a new line of clothing, all made with hand-dyed and hand-woven materials sourced from places like Nepal.

He wanted to rediscover folk crafts and bring those extreme handmade elements into fashion.

So his new season used those fabrics.

He said there were many others he hadn’t mentioned.

All of them were a little bit obsessive, but also his teachers and friends.

He said he learned a lot from them and deeply respected them.

The photos he showed were in black and white, he added, “but they’re all very much alive.”

And then he circled back —

He said again that independent hobbies ultimately form independent personalities.

It’s a big topic, but he truly believed that the future Chinese would develop their own independent character —

different from the Western kind.

Even though we use Western brands and wear Western clothes, in the end you can tell — the people, the temperament, the feeling — are all different.

That’s how our own thing will form.

So he said he held great hope for the future.

Then he returned to one word that summarized all his friends and perhaps himself — faith.

He said, “I once heard people say that Chinese people have no faith.”

But he didn’t agree.

He thought the future would make that difference even clearer —

because faith, he said, is not limited to religion; that would be too narrow.

He said, “If someone treats their career, or their passion, as their faith — that’s even more admirable.”

He said this idea wasn’t his — he first heard it from an old man, Mobai’s father, who was a traditional painter.

The old man loved painting so much that his passion made him feel ashamed by comparison.

When they visited him, he was always producing new work — every morning he rose and painted with enthusiasm.

One friend who bought a painting once asked the old man, “Sir, how long did it take you to paint this?”

The old man thought for a moment and said, “I spent forty years painting this.”

Then he smiled — and said, “That’s faith.”He said, “That’s something I don’t have.”

He told me that through her — Mobai — he began to reflect on himself.

He said that ever since he was little, he hadn’t been a simple person.

That wasn’t meant as praise.

He said, “I think too much. My thoughts are complicated. I don’t even read much, because reading exhausts me. I can’t get through a page without thinking too deeply about everything.”

He smiled, calling it an excuse.

He recalled that several years ago, when he was a little younger, he had gone through a painful period.

He said he was too sensitive.

He saw too much darkness in society.

“Open any news site,” he said, “turn on the evening broadcast — it’s all bad news. Corruption, injustice, tragedy.

Every time I saw it, I felt this terrible anxiety, like the world wasn’t safe.

I’d imagine what it would be like if those things happened to me.

I couldn’t stay calm. I couldn’t sleep.”

Then he said that Mobai, in contrast, could still sleep soundly.

And that’s when he began to change.

He started filtering those things out — not looking at them as much.

He said, “It’s not avoidance. Some people are meant to do that work — to expose, to awaken others.

But that’s not what I do.

There are already too many people diagnosing this society, too few healing it.”

He paused, then added:

“This has something to do with how we Chinese are educated.

From childhood we read Lu Xun.

We learn his tone — his irony, his criticism, his satire.

We grow up in that language, so we inherit that habit.”

He said that if you look at the internet now, it’s the same pattern:

“Someone is praised one day, and the next day a crowd comes to curse them.”

He said that cycle disgusted him.

So at one point, when he still had a large following on Weibo, he deleted it.

He made a small private account.

He said, “Now I follow the world quietly. I don’t broadcast it anymore.”

He said he just wanted a calmer life.

He tried not to look at what hurt him.

He said, “People think responsibility means staring at everything ugly, but I think real responsibility is about what you do yourself — not what others do.

It’s not about watching other people’s actions. It’s about asking: what am I doing?”

“For me,” he said, “I’m just a furniture maker.

So what can I do?

I’ll make better furniture — stronger, simpler, so people can use it longer.

That’s it.”

He smiled when he said that — it sounded almost plain, but it carried conviction.

He mentioned that many people online often look at their photos and say, “You always post beautiful things — surely your life must have plenty of chaos too.”

And he admitted, “Yes, of course.

There’s worry, pain — those times may even take up more of my life.

But during those moments, I never think to take photos.

So what you see is only the bright side.

I sometimes wish I could see the other side too.”

He said he often moved homes, and every time, he looked forward to the next one.

He recalled one move — from the North Fourth Ring to the neighboring compound.

At that time, he wanted to run Fanji from within a home he had designed himself.

That move fulfilled the idea.The house was nice, but it had many problems.

It was a commercial-residential building, and the elevators were always jammed.

“You could stand downstairs half an hour, and still not get in,” he said.

“It felt like being stuck on Subway Line 1.”

So they decided that the next time, they’d move somewhere quieter, farther, with cleaner air.

And in 2012, they did it.

They invested heavily and opened the new Fanji Living Room — still in the family-style setup.

At first, things were fine.

But over time, as customers and employees increased, his life started to blur into his work.

The pressure became immense.

He said, “I had only one day off per week — and even on that day, I’d still be on the phone discussing company issues.

No gatherings, no trips, no new landscapes.

No time to recharge or find inspiration.”

He realized his life had a serious problem.

Then he said something that struck me:

“I realized I was being killed by the perfect life I had designed.”

So he decided to change.

He and Mobai found another house — far from the city, but with a private yard.

He said that in the old Fanji Living Room, he almost never slept.

“Every morning at five, my four living alarm clocks would wake me,” he said — referring to the cats and dogs.

He was physically drained, always exhausted — “If I didn’t nap at noon, I’d collapse; if I did nap, the afternoon was gone.”

So when they moved, they gave the animals their own independent space — their own house.

And then, other parts of life began to change too.

He said he was responsible by nature, but the constant busyness had made him miserable.

So now, when he came home, he turned off his phone.

He forced himself not to think about work.

During work hours, he focused; at home, he did simple things.

He said, “I brush the dog’s fur.

I plant flowers and grass.

I do things that don’t require much thought but bring a quiet peace.”

That, he said, was how they changed their way of living.

He joked that this was his “life show.”

Then he quoted something he’d seen online: “Show too much happiness and you die fast.”

So, he said, “I’ll stop talking about my life and move on to something else.”

Then he shared a post he’d seen recently — something he thought was fascinating.

It showed the comparative sizes of planets.

He described it vividly.

In the first image, he said, there was the familiar blue Earth — already very small — and beside it, Jupiter, huge.

In the next image, the Earth was gone; only the Sun remained, a blazing fireball many times larger than other planets.

He said, “Remember that fireball.”

In the following image, even that fireball wasn’t big anymore.

There was something larger — the biggest star known to us now.

He said, “But that biggest star only exists within the Milky Way.

As for how vast the universe truly is, even scientists don’t know.”

He explained how a scientist once aimed the Hubble telescope at a completely dark patch of sky — a place invisible to the naked eye — and photographed it for four months.

Every dot of light it captured turned out to be a galaxy.

A thousand bright dots — a thousand galaxies, each like our Milky Way.

He said, “The universe is that big.”

Then he looked up and said softly, “And we humans are that small.”

“So when you think about things like who succeeded, who has the most followers — those are actually quite laughable, even kind of cute.”

He smiled again.

“But for ourselves,” he said, “if we just turn our eyes back inward, we’ll see our world is not large.

Our world is our daily life — our plants, our parents, our partners, our pets, our work.

That’s all it really is.”

And he said, “So let’s just quiet down, feel it, and take care of our own lives with heart.

That alone is already enough.”