On a solo trip to Yokohama, I came to a new understanding of the resource people are truly short on.
For a while now I've been feeling a bit restless, mostly for two reasons.
One: AI anxiety
Over the past two months, through intense vibe coding, I built 4 apps in my spare time and got a much closer feel for where AI's capabilities end. Work that used to take about a month can now be pushed to a decent state in two or three days. With a sudden leap in productivity like that, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't anxious.
Two: market FOMO
Over the same two months, the market went through a few extremely volatile weeks. A handful of candlesticks yanked prices back and forth, and emotions kept getting amplified. From waiting with a light position at the end of March, to spending all of April not being brave or resolute enough and missing the run-up in chip and memory stocks, the whole thing made me take a fresh look at my own judgment and strategy.
Then came May. Just last week, I noticed the negative emotions hadn't fully faded, and I gradually realized that over these few weeks FOMO had led me to make some decisions that weren't rational enough. I felt I needed a window to let this out. So last Tuesday, on short notice, I bought a ticket to fly solo to Japan that Friday, hoping this solo trip would let me properly clear my head.
Why Japan again?
Because this was my first solo trip in the true sense, and the main goal was to clear my head. And since it was a last-minute decision, Japan was the most natural choice: safe, hassle-free, and no complicated paperwork to sort out again. Oddly enough, at some point I started going to Japan three to five times a year, and it seems to have become my backyard.
This time I picked Yokohama as the place to unwind. Compared with Tokyo it's much quieter, yet just as convenient, and it has the same ichigo ichie kind of attentive service I've long grown used to. Those details spared me a lot of the low-quality thinking that chores tend to set off.
Unexpectedly, this solo trip turned out far better than I'd hoped. Doing whatever I felt like on my own is a superb way to clear my head, even a little addictive.
When I want to fully relax, flying alone to a city that's both unfamiliar and familiar, living at the local pace for a few days, and quieting down to feel and think through the shutter: this pattern might well go to the top of my list of ways to unwind.
One evening, I sat in a seaside park watching people come and go. I noticed that Yokohama doesn't have the heavy air of Tokyo's office workers. In its place is a slow, easy feel full of everyday life: people jogging along the shore, a teenage skateboarder falling on the steps and getting back up again and again, a few close friends playing frisbee on the grass, couples watching a fireworks show together, elderly people sketching on benches, mothers and babies picnicking together in the shade.
I want to dwell on the mothers and babies. Watching over these few days, I was surprised by how many mothers and babies there were in parks and public places here. Whether in the parks of Yokohama or in Shinjuku Gyoen, everywhere you looked there were mothers in groups and strollers lined up side by side.
The reason surfaced almost without my having to think: Japan's infrastructure for mothers and babies is about as complete as it gets.
Complete infrastructure spares mothers a huge amount of hassle. Taking a child out doesn't feel inconvenient. Even without a car, getting around on foot and by public transport alone, the cost of going out doesn't feel endlessly magnified; it even feels like the most natural thing in the world.
Exactly. And that brings me to the theme of this diary entry:
We don't need to waste our energy on low-value chores.
Some may think this is a correct but empty statement, but I don't think many people truly understand it. The mothers in the park are at ease not because they have unlimited energy, but because the city's systems have headed off a pile of the chores of taking a child out before they ever arise.
Taking the chance to unwind, I watched the skyline at sunset from the rooftop observation deck of Shibuya Sky and thought this theme through, then wrote this diary entry on the flight from Haneda back to Changi.
A person's scarcest resource has never been time; it's brainpower.
The brainpower a person has in a day for high-quality, creative thinking is actually pitifully small. And the cruelest thing about chores isn't how much of your time they take up, but that they occupy your mind. Even just keeping them in the back of your head, switching back and forth, quietly lowers the ceiling on your thinking. As for freeing your energy from low-value chores, I believe the biggest lever in this era is AI. More precisely, this wave of generative AI represented by GPT and Claude.
I started using generative AI with GPT-3.5 at the end of 2022, so it's been almost four years now. You could say it has completely permeated my life, and I can hardly do without it. Maybe without even realizing it myself, I long ago became the person who "talks to AI more." I watched it evolve step by step: from the early chatbot to today's Agent that can run long workflows. This isn't an exaggeration; it's a leap in productivity.
My view of it also changed as I used it. When GPT first came out, many people said, "Isn't this just a chatbot?" But one layer deeper, it's an intelligent agent that reasons on its own. This paradigm shift in itself holds endless possibilities. Two years later, Agents appeared and began plugging into workflows, and that layer of possibility started to pay off bit by bit. I can understand why some people still think it's overrated. They're focused on "what AI still can't solve for me right now," not on "if it keeps going at this slope, how will it change the way we work in two or three years." It's a difference in perspective.
What best represents this view is the support system I built for myself with AI. It was originally based on openclaw and Codex, later moved entirely to Claude Code, and it's still being iterated on and optimized, like a living thing that keeps evolving and never rests, day or night, with no end in sight. The process is actually simple: I only provide the ideas, and the execution goes to AI. Through conversation I get it to pin down my intent, and in that process the system's framework and workflows get built bit by bit. Once it's done, I only look at the basis for decisions and the conclusions; I don't touch any of the other chores, and they don't even take up space in my head. At first I didn't think much of it. But looking back: someone who was almost a blank slate in this field building a reasonably complete system like this in a short time, on the strength of his own ideas, would have been unthinkable before. It isn't especially professional, but it has genuinely filled in my gaps in this field. It's hard to imagine that I, a blank slate last year, can already hold my own in a conversation about it with others this year.
Once you've truly mastered AI, you can hand the unimportant, low-value things to it and let it become your second brain. Your first brain is then free to focus on higher-quality, higher-level, more creative thinking. In the near future, ideas will be what's scarce, and execution will keep getting cheaper. The "super-individual" that's been so popular lately means exactly this to me: a person with ideas, plus the leverage on capability that AI brings, can improve in several fields at once. I even think the standard for judging a person will slowly converge on "can they harness AI?" Because harnessing AI is itself a reflection of all-round ability. Some say AI will blur the boundaries of ability. I think it's more accurate to say: AI blurs the boundaries between fields, but makes the limits of individual ability clearer. What leverage amplifies has never been the tool, but the person holding it. Between people who can use AI and people who can't, a gap will silently open up, and it will last a long time.
The future is already here. Pessimists are often right; optimists are moving forward. If I had to choose, I'd choose the one moving forward. Just like this trip: hand off the chores, and save the brainpower and time you get back for that bench in the Yokohama dusk, that viewfinder, and the things you can only think through clearly once you've truly quieted down.