read and be Happy

  When AI can summarize One Hundred Years of Solitude in three seconds, when large language models can generate perfectly formatted book notes for any work, a question grows sharper by the day: do we still need to read for ourselves? If machines can "read" on our behalf, why should we still turn pages word by word? Hainan Hui has a song called "How to Love Artificial Intelligence," whose lyrics pose a thought-provoking question: "People used to say 'a' and 'i' spelled love; now people say 'A' and 'I' spell the future. How should we love AI — as a beast of burden, or as a parent?" ( read the original article ). This question lands with particular force in the context of reading. Do you treat AI as your reading "beast of burden" — letting it extract key points and generate summaries while you simply reap the benefits? Or do you treat it as a reading "parent" — uncritically accepting its interpretations an...

  Is reading a one-way act of absorption, or a two-way exchange? On the surface, reading appears to be a process in which the reader extracts knowledge, wisdom, and emotion from a book — the book gives, and we receive. But upon deeper reflection, reading itself embodies a subtle "philosophy of giving": what do we invest in the act of reading? And what do we keep for ourselves from the books we read? The answers to these questions may be far older than you imagine. A Cantonese song puts it with wry humor: "Sending someone borscht, only your nose gets to smell the aroma." ( Click to read original ) This seemingly playful lyric touches on a profound question in classical philosophy: when giving becomes one-way depletion, when the giver cannot even nourish themselves, the halo of "selfless dedication" turns deeply ironic. Apply this logic to reading, and it becomes equally thought-provoking — if reading is purely about "acquiring," greedily flipping ...

  If you've ever been to a traditional teahouse in Guangzhou's old town on a weekend morning, you've witnessed a curious scene: elderly patrons, one newspaper per person, rustling pages amid the steam rising from har gow and chicken feet, while young people beside them swipe furiously at phone screens. At first glance they're reading entirely different things, but look closer — they're all doing the same thing: searching the city's crevices for their own portion of "spiritual sustenance." A while back I came across an article about how the Cantonese song "The Streets Are Full of People Searching for a Living" echoes the bustling street culture of the Song Dynasty from a thousand years ago. The piece quotes Meng Yuanlao's Dreams of Splendor of the Eastern Capital , which describes the streets of Bianjing: "The night market lasted until the third watch, and reopened again by the fifth watch. Places of amusement bustled without end thro...