My day started with a philosophical debate with myself
My best friend called me up at 5:22Am, thinking it was around 9 my time. I begged her to just spare me and she did. I put the phone down, closed my eyes again and then several strange dreams came. One scenario: I was walking with someone I know on a street, in China. There was a big construction site and we were walking just beside the dig and among the cars. Air was bad. And it seemed to be quite dangerous. The strange thing was that I didn't seem to care.
Another one: still in China. My professor aunt and I was talking to a big fat middle-aged administrator at some kind of research institute. The guy was typically snobbish. Then a lower-class blue collar showed up, saying he's been waiting for a long time and they are gonna have dumplings. And then they just disappeared.
I woke up, with the sleepiness as if I got up at 5:22AM, and thinking why my nostalgia was suddenly boosted up by the 2 dreams. They showed the part of China I resented most (pollution, hierarchy etc), and yet, I never felt I missed my country this much. I remembered the typhoon that was coming when I left the island. That day I only cared about whether I could catch the flight and be back to the US. A friend asked about the severity of the typhoon when I was back and I couldn't give him an answer. I felt bad. Afterwards, I did some web search, and found that the typhoon was the most serious for the past several decades. It destroyed the hope of almost all the farmers on the island this year. No crops were left. Houses collapsed too. And I didn't know and I didn't care to know. What a selfish person I was. What is the meaning of life if I'm the only one I care about?
And the debate went on like this: Ok, if I were the only one I cared about and everybody cared only about themselves, what would be the difference between living in the Matrix and living in real world? Why still people would fight when they found out they were living in their own imagined world in their own tiny cell? Why have there already been 9 revolutions in Animatrix and more are yet to come? Oh, yeah, Matrix can program my cognition/brain so that I catch every flight and manage whatever I desire. But if it's only happening in the Matrix, it means nothing. Therefore, people must care, and they should, when life is still under our control, not the robots.
And also, I was thinking, if I could split myself into halves, I would send one to the island to be with my family, and one here, to pursue my own happiness. If only I could do so.
