I think people lose the urge to express themselves very easily. You can list any number of reasons, but in the end they all come down to economics: the return on investment is too low => more trouble than it's worth.

  • Investment: expressing yourself means putting in time and energy, organising a little order out of chaos, while not expressing yourself is plainly the direction of least resistance, the natural one, the one in which entropy increases;

  • Return: ask yourself honestly, can you express anything of value? The world is noisy enough already. There is no shortage of voices wiser than yours, clearer than yours, more extreme than yours, or simply louder than yours.

So why not spend a wage slave's scant remaining free time and scant remaining energy lying flat in comfort? And so most people always choose silence.

In fact nobody is truly silent. It's just that most of what we say exists only in the office, at the dinner table and in bed, and these are all private channels. Private means safe, and closeness breeds likeness. People in a private channel always find it easier to talk to each other, because you have so much in common that you needn't lay out at length a concept that is even slightly abstract; a knowing look will do. Even when you run into something you can barely put into words yourself, you only need to add "you know" to get past it, easy and stress-free. Nor do you need to worry much about saying something stupid, something shocking, or a thought that isn't really a thought at all. As long as no tangle of interests is involved that could mean what you say "may be recorded" or "used as evidence in court", it's just casual talk. Words once spoken are like that other thing one lets out: they pass, and that's that (case closed).

And the public channel, as distinct from the private ones? Even if what you face is a sheet of paper (most likely an electronic one) and not a crowd holding rotten eggs or flowers or both, you feel a kind of pressure at every moment. How will your readers, listeners and viewers understand, regard and judge (see the questions people keep asking on Zhihu) everything you express? And the internet has given everyone the power to give feedback instantly. So you feel you may have a duty to express every bit of your thinking and every trace of your feeling more clearly, trying as far as you can to sync and resonate with the strangers in your head. Unfortunately our ability to communicate is still far from having evolved anywhere near perfection, which is why a thousand people have a thousand Hamlets. Getting your meaning across one hundred per cent to a single person is already as hard as climbing to heaven, and the public channel is such a big world, and people are so different: there are villagers and elites and the odd aberrant titan, some who go left, some who go right, and some who keep jumping from side to side. It is a problem that is easy to attack and hard to defend: you cannot possibly know in advance who will be on the other side at any given moment, or how their mind is wired.

So the few survivors who still express themselves in the public channel have gradually settled on one of two strategies. One is: I say my piece, and nobody else gets to talk (all comments switched off). The other is: I say my piece, and you may talk, but you had better share my worldview, and then we can go on chatting and laughing for three hundred rounds; otherwise, shut up.

The first strategy is already enough to satisfy the urge to express, apart from some practical needs like keeping things from blowing up; in a way it is close to recording what you say to yourself and inviting others in to look (it feels a bit odd to put it like that). The second strategy goes further and satisfies the urge to communicate as well, but as many people know (the you in my head is already itching to say it), this is a conversation inside an echo chamber. Not all of it is meaningless echo, but it can never achieve communication and mutual understanding between humans and beasts (this way of putting it seems to carry a value judgement; not great).

But it seems the only relationship between humans and beasts is to kill or be killed, which is also why they are defined as humans and beasts, two entirely distinct categories. If the two categories are in fact not as clear-cut as generations have handed down, if a blurry case like the half-human, half-beast appears, people who prefer things simple and elegant tend not to acknowledge this intermediate category: the human side considers them beasts, and the beast side considers them human. This state of affairs is usually temporary, and sooner or later it reaches one of two possible ends: either the half-human half-beasts disappear (because something happens), or they grow strong enough to become a recognised third category, breaking the original binary. Next on stage would be half-human half-rabbits, half-human half-eagles, or 1/4 human + 1/3 ox + 5/12 bear... and so our classification goes from two classes to many, from many classes to a continuous spectrum, and the spectrum from one dimension to n dimensions... Good grief. Our worldview went from a primitive's undifferentiated blur to something neat and orderly, and is finally destined to turn back into a blur. In the end we find that any division of people into groups is man-made, and that ultimately every individual is unique. If we spent just one more second thinking about each person, that would still take seven billion seconds. I'm tired. Let the world end already.

Sorry, all of the above was only a thought experiment; in reality we just need to choose a suitable balance between precision and breadth (easier said than done). What I really wanted to express is why expression is so hard (a little nesting-doll recursion is unavoidable), and, while I'm at it, to try to excuse myself for not having written anything longer than 500 characters in one go for a whole year (as if anyone really cares), and, while I'm at it, to plant a flag that I'll write more from now on (as if I could really manage it). Come to think of it, I don't seem to have explained yet why I want to go to the trouble of expressing myself at all. Perhaps I just want to insert a few more pages into the book of my life, so that when I reach the end of the road with nothing left to do, I can at least turn back and read a little longer. Or perhaps I'm simply irritated at drifting downstream in this baffling world, and want to ease it this way.