#10/120 - Evergreen Fashion
If you feel anxious, lost in this rapidly changing world, this essay is for you. I will share a mindset I called Evergreen Fashion and three action items about how to implement your own.
If you feel anxious, lost in this rapidly changing world, this essay is for you. I will share a mindset I called Evergreen Fashion and three action items about how to implement your own.
I hadn’t planned for this essay to be written now, but given the current state of the world—rife with volatility, geopolitical conflict, economic instability, everything is changing and changing so fast.
I suddenly feel the urge to discuss how to sustain our long-term endeavors in these times. It's harder in any given time frame I am aware of and we are facing an unprecedented challenge which no human understands how it will unfold.
After multiple months of thinking and seeking, this essay finally came into shape. I want to mark this moment by exploring how to endure the chaos and mature wonderful things, for my readers and myself.
A flat, changing and overwhelming world
For centuries, information was scarce, passed along only by word of mouth or through the labor of scribes. Books were extremely rare, reserved for the wealthy or those in power.
Leofric, the Bishop of Exeter from 1050 to 1072, immediately created a scribe workshop to copy books upon becoming bishop. After 22 years, the workshop had produced only 66 books, yet these books made Exeter the fourth largest library in England1. This status persisted for hundreds of years.
But things changed drastically after the invention of the printing press. In just 43 years after this invention, more books were printed than in the previous thousand years. That was the tipping point of human information history. After the invention, people kept optimizing the efficiency of the machine—the speed, the quantity, the quality, all kept improving. Information not only had a better way to be stored, but it also became safer and easier to transport.
The next major leap came with the rise of the internet. Information, once a slow and difficult resource to share, could now be transmitted instantaneously, creating an unprecedented era of connectivity.
It changed many things, penetrating different layers of society. For example, before the age of the internet, if you were living in a small village with extraordinary creative skills, your talent wouldn't be valued. But now, you can spread your work across the world easily and sustain your life from your passion.
The internet virtually connects everything, creating an enormous area for humans to explore2. However, over time, we've discovered that not only humans, but also machines, can benefit from it. Artificial intelligence3, or more technically, large language models (LLMs), are also flourishing due to the internet's vast scale. Under the hood, we can say that LLMs make decisions by calculating data points that no single human can comprehend. They can easily connect seemingly unrelated dots and construct new understanding.
As a result, creativity no longer seems to be a human monopoly; machines can also understand and create. For the first time in human history, ideas, actions, and knowledge might not be produced by humans.
It’s repeated to say that everything is changing, throughout history, that has always been the case. But the unprecedented thing is the scale and frequency of change.
We have never been in such a chaotic world before.
The evergreen fashion
It's hard to sustain any kind of long-term endeavor in this era. Since everything is changing, we are constantly surrounded by doubt, both from external sources and our own inner child.
When you delve deeply into one thing, you're exposed to the fear of, "Maybe, five years later, this thing will already be obsolete. What should I do then?"
This question can't be easily answered. Before the industrial era, you could be sure which work would still exist hundreds of years later. After the industrial era, you might have faith in one skill for 50 years. But right now, we can't even say one craft will still be cherished five years later. We are entering a period of exponential growth in human history.
So, we need to think more deeply about the craft we choose to master. I call those worth mastering "Evergreen Fashion." It's a metaphor I like to use. Think about the fashion industry: it's an industry where brands need to artificially create trends to maintain people's curiosity and drive revenue. In contrast, clothes like T-shirts and jeans remain the same after multiple cycles, to a level where you can say, "Hey, they won't be out of fashion in the near future."
Let me share my family's story with you.
My father and our family have been in the land measuring industry for over three generations, spanning six decades. We measure land for landlords, construction companies, individual builders, and large corporations.
No matter the market condition, the architectural landscape, or even in the midst of international economic crises like the dot-com bubble, housing bubble, and COVID, our family has never been worried. My father often said, "The land is still there, and people need houses." The cases decrease, the trends change, but the same techniques are still there to serve this purpose.
Things work in cycles, and what we can do is recognize what remains after multiple cycles. They aren’t 100% steady, but overall, the essence remains untouched. Instead of chasing those trends, recognizing those real, fundamental things, evergreen fashions, can offer something constant that grounds us, even when everything else seems in chaos.
Here are my choice of "Evergreen Fashion"
My evergreen fashion
I have three evergreen fashion
Reading
Writing
Exercising
Sounds cliché, right? But bear with me. There is a deeper reason I chose them as my evergreen fashions.
Depth
All of them have multiple layers of understanding that you can only obtain by practicing them, which will eventually form a kind of specific knowledge that cannot be taught.
Origin
They have remained the same through thousands of years of evolution. We can learn specific skills from previous canons, and they connect back to the natural origin of humanity. For reading, we all want to know more to increase our chances of survival. For writing, we want to express ourselves on a scale larger than our immediate circle. For exercising, we want to stay in shape and have the ability to react to difficult changes.
Positive sum game
They all have the ability to form an endless marathon that is just for you. You don’t need to compete with anyone. You can just be yourself in these three realms. You are opting out of the status game.
Let’s take exercising for example. Recently, I’ve been challenging myself to work out every single day, and it turns out that this is a completely different story compared to a schedule where I only work out three days a week.
I started with running, which is my main exercise. My goal is to finish a half marathon by the end of 2025. After a week of running, I began to notice some IT band issues on my right leg. I needed to find a way to heal it while still sustaining my daily exercise challenge. So, when the IT band pain hit, I trained other parts of my body and focused on building strength in my leg to make it more resilient.
Over time, I’ve developed specific knowledge about my own body. For example, after every meal, I take a short walk for 10-15 minutes, which greatly increases my energy levels. I also began to carefully stretch my body after every workout, and by doing so, I learned more about how my muscles react to stress. I’ve become more mindful of my energy levels and adjusted my training schedule accordingly. I set up a sacred time zone before sleep, reducing the use of electronic devices during that period.
All in all, exercising has become part of my daily routine, and I now know my body much better than before. There’s still a long way to go in terms of improvement, but I have faith that I can overcome these challenges. It pushes me to go deeper, learn more, and, along the way, I’m not competing with anyone. I’m competing with my previous self. That means there’s no win or loss.
All I need to do is staying in the game.
How to find your?
There is deep fulfillment when you practice your evergreen fashion every day and harvest the fruits of your efforts. I would argue that no joy in the world can be more sustainable than this.
But the next question is: How do you cultivate your own?
There are three ingredients you need to consider.
Infinite Game
To find your own evergreen practice, you need to enter what Simon Sinek4 calls the "infinite game", an endeavor with no final goal, where the value lies not in completion but in the ongoing process of growth and mastery.
An infinite game is the opposite of a zero-sum game. It demands that all its players compete with themselves. Everyone in the game wins together and simultaneously benefits from the flourishing of the game.
Let’s take reading for example. First, there is no completion in this activity. Second, when more people read, more writers will be willing to write, which benefits all players. Third, reading is an activity that has endless potential, it’s a skill that you can endlessly improve.
Specific Knowledge can not be taught
Borrowing from Naval Ravikant5, specific knowledge cannot be taught; it can only be learned. My take on this hard-to-understand concept is imagining a dark, random maze. Everyone starts with a blank map, and as you explore the maze, you draw the map of how it looks.
Everyone’s map will look different, and most importantly, you will get faster every time you re-enter the maze. However, if you give your map to someone who has never been in your maze, they can get through it, but they won’t understand the tiny yet crucial elements that help you navigate the maze.
Let’s take writing for example. Writing is a well-defined task that everyone thinks they have the ability to do. But the truth is, it’s a specific knowledge that varies across mediums. Writing on Threads is different from writing on YouTube, and it’s different from writing in a newsletter or a book. Each requires the writer to be mindful of their audience.
You can’t give your writing blueprint to someone else and expect them to achieve the same outcome, vice versa. It’s specific knowledge that cannot be taught.
The thought experiment: 1 hour on stage
Here’s a thought experiment I always use when thinking about my evergreen fashion.
If you were suddenly asked (without any hint or preparation) to give a one-hour speech in front of thousands of people, do you have a topic you could speak about?
I highly recommend pausing your reading here and taking 5-10 minutes to think about it.
What is the topic?
What valuable knowledge would you share?
What’s the key to not having a dull moment?
This thought experiment serves as a powerful tool for identifying your own evergreen practices. If you can confidently speak on a subject for an hour, without preparation, then you’ve likely found an area that has true, lasting value to you.
If you don’t have one, that’s okay. Use the thought experiment as an anchor. Pick a category that excites you, flourishes your life, and stick with it to a point that you can give a one-hour speech on stage. That’s the fastest way I know to form an evergreen fashion.
Stay in the game, master one thing
There’s no "low-hanging fruit" in the journey of cultivating evergreen fashion. Everything is high-hanging fruit and demands your patience.
I want to borrow a quote from Naval Ravikant6:
"Impatience with actions, patience with results."
Train yourself not to react to anyone else’s overnight success. You don’t know what they’ve sacrificed or how they sustain their effort. This information will only harm your judgment.7
Ironically, the way to reduce anxiety is actually doing the thing that you are anxiously thinking about whether you should do it.
Play an infinite game, focus on acquiring those specific knowledge which can not be taught, master one thing to a level that you can share it on stage for one hour without a single dull moment.
That is my recipe for playing a long term game in this chaotic era.
This month's connection: Igor Tsvetkov
This month's connection is Igor Tsvetkov. I encountered Igor's art half a year ago. It was a quiet night, and I was scrolling through Threads before going to bed. All I had in my mind was some exhaustion from work and anxiety about my own project.
Suddenly, his art popped into my view.
For me, it was a unique moment. Watching his art animated on the small screen felt like entering another exotic world: a world I had never conceived of before. A world with chaotic streams, a world with guns, bombs, and violence, a world with relentless... something. Then a tear came out. I replayed the video until I finally fell asleep.
From then on, I would go back to Igor's Threads account to seek inspiration. His art has something original within it; for me, it's the animal I have never seen before.
It enlightens a part of me, and I hope you can find that enlightenment too.
Thanks
Thanks Jonathan, Lucy for reading the draft of this article. I can not make this far without your help.
Perter K. Yu, "Of Monks, Medieval Scribes, and Middlemen," Michigan State Law Review 2006, no. 1 (2006): 7
I do think internet itself serves as the frontier for human to get used to what things are going to be unfold in the future, it's a place where heterogeneous and homogeneous blended together. With internet, we finally can understand what it might feel like when everyone is connected.
Yuval Noah Harari urges us to rename artificial intelligence to alien intelligence, because it is not the same as the intelligence known by humans, they are silicon based intelligence, and for now, we know very few about it.
His thinking is extremely helpful when it comes to this extremely chaotic era. Highly recommend reading his thoughts.
I wrote about this topic in the sixth newsletter Seeing the engineered system of life