Stepping Out of the Ivory Tower: 'Unlearning' and Reshaping in the Folded Space-Time of the Greater Bay Area

In just a few days, rapidly shuttling across this Greater Bay Area land of Shenzhen, Hong Kong, and Macau, craning my neck upward at clusters of skyscrapers until it ached—this was not only a visual “eye-opening to the world,” but also a violent collision of perspectives.

When we truly find ourselves in the torrent of reality, the truths from books begin to become concrete and painful. The meaning of travel, perhaps, lies in breaking those “assumptions” and rebuilding a broader coordinate system of cognition.

One: Beware of Being a “Giant in Thought, Dwarf in Action”

Staying too long in the ivory tower, one easily falls into an illusion: thinking that reading a few books means understanding the world. However, when you actually walk into Shenzhen’s tech innovation companies, facing real production lines and laboratories, that sense of “losing words” hits you squarely.

While touring laboratories, facing guides spouting obscure professional jargon, we might feel bored. But more interesting observations come when we try to break the dullness with humor, or muster the courage to ask staff “Is work tough?”—reality’s feedback is often more complex than our assumptions.

This reminds me of the “ripple effect” Fei Xiaotong mentioned in “From the Soil”: our social relationships spread out like ripples, with everyone guarding their own circle. Long immersion in books and fantasies is actually wrapping oneself in a closed circle. Without “practicing on real matters,” trying to “train the heart” merely through reading novels is like scratching an itch through one’s boot.

As one senior said, success might be two-thirds “timing, location, and people,” with personal ability only one-third. But acknowledging this isn’t about lying flat—it’s about igniting enthusiasm to explore reality, just like Pinduoduo coming after Alibaba, ByteDance after Tencent, finding new cracks in seemingly saturated times.

Two: Language Is Not Just a Tool, But a Touchstone of Courage

When crossing the border into Hong Kong and Macau, a floating “drifting sensation” arises. Compared to internet information, reality’s impact lies in that mixture of strangeness and alienation.

Buying a cup of Masala Tea at HKUST became a micro cultural breakthrough. From stuttering English to facing the cashier’s confused look, to the sense of accomplishment when finally drinking the tea—this wasn’t just a transaction but psychological training. Similarly, using body language and fragments of Cantonese to buy rice cakes on Lamma Island, even without understanding most of the conversation, as long as you try hard to connect in the process, you can break through barriers.

This experience reminds us: language barriers aren’t the obstacle—excessive expectations of others and excessive protection of our own “face” are. Don’t fear awkwardness; those seemingly ridiculous moments are precisely the beginning of breaking out of our comfort zones.

Three: Life’s Wilderness: You Don’t Have to Live as a “Professor”

On the journey, we meet all kinds of people, seeing vastly different life samples.

There’s the sister who went from English teacher to state enterprise to foreign company to finally becoming a tour guide—though she jokes about “failure,” she has rich life experiences and a free spirit. There are professors and PhDs sharing experiences at hometown associations, standing at the peak of academia.

Looking at these “successful samples,” people easily feel envious. But we need to be vigilant: is this longing because of genuine passion, or merely cultural memory imposed by our environment? If you just want to explore life’s passion in the “stretch zone around the comfort zone,” you don’t necessarily have to persist single-mindedly on the research path.

We should observe those standing on mountaintops, see their true feelings, then decide whether to climb that mountain. No matter how many views we see, the primary task is still maintaining physical and mental health, not being kidnapped by an illusory “ideal.”

Four: Unlearn: Feel and Reshape Like a Child

Travel’s highlight moments sometimes aren’t about grand attractions, but returning to childlike innocence.

At Disneyland, when your brain is shaken up by roller coasters, when experiencing free fall on the Frozen roller coaster, that pure physiological thrill makes you temporarily forget adult troubles. It’s like sleeping in mom’s arms as a child—as we grow up, we’ve been searching for that sense of security and belonging.

In a Macau bookstore, finding a secondhand English copy of “Gone with the Wind” among old books brought that “this life is worth it” joy so simple and direct. Though I also hesitated at the expensive “The Psychology of Money,” this kind of trade-off is itself part of life.

University and the life ahead—perhaps the best state is like a senior’s blessing: “Unlearn a lot of things, and learn a lot of new things.”

We need to forget those outdated expectations, lower our dependence on others, like water “benefiting all things without competing,” embrace life’s reality with a gentler, more open Growth Mindset. (2024-7-25 to 2024-7-30) (Added 2025-11-26)