Why Is My WeChat Account Called ‘What Is the Meaning of Life’?

My WeChat account is called “What Is the Meaning of Life”.

Readers often leave messages asking why someone in his twenties would choose such a vast, heavy question as a name. My usual reply is: “To explore the value of existence.” But that is not the whole reason.

The real reason is a secret I have never told anyone. I can see the countdown to every person’s death.

It is not a glowing virtual projection from a science-fiction film. It is a string of remarkably old-fashioned black LCD digits, like the display on an old digital watch. It floats just above each person’s carotid artery, rising and falling slightly with their pulse.

The format never changes: years-months-days-hours-minutes-seconds.

I am twenty-six. For all twenty-six years, those digits have been as ordinary a part of my visual world as traffic lights, zebra crossings, and little advertisements stuck to utility poles.

I have seen a newborn crying in an incubator with “82-04-11-15-22-01” above its neck. I have also seen a white-collar worker in a sharp suit on the morning subway, shoving someone over a seat while displaying “00-00-00-02-14-33”.

Two hours later, he died of a sudden heart attack. But at that moment, all he could think about was the empty pale-blue plastic seat. After seeing enough of this, my capacity for empathy burned out completely.

In my eyes, human beings were no longer flesh and blood, but hourglasses with preset expiration dates. You cannot feel pity for an hourglass as its sand runs out. I was like an observer sitting in a corner of the city, watching these carbon-based machines break down and lose power, one by one.

Until this afternoon. I was sitting in a noodle shop on a street corner, editing a new layout for my WeChat account on my phone. The afternoon sunlight slanted through the window, and dust in the air traced random Brownian motion through the beams.

Sharing my table was a middle-aged man in a dark-blue jacket. The digits above his carotid artery read: 00-00-00-00-47-12. Forty-seven minutes.

He ordered a bowl of knife-cut noodles, the kind we love in Shanxi. When the noodles arrived, he deftly added two spoonfuls of aged vinegar and one spoonful of chili oil. He took out his chopsticks, tapped their ends against the table to align them, and began mixing the noodles. Their tips scraped against the rough inner surface of the porcelain bowl with a faint rustling sound.

Thirty-five minutes. As he ate, he propped his phone beside the condiment jars. A shopping app was open on the screen. He was comparing two electric blankets with different power ratings.

The damp chill of early spring in the north had not entirely lifted, but the heating at home was about to be switched off. I had been feeling a little cold at home these past few days, too.

He squinted at the specifications for a long time, then opened a customer-service chat and dictated a message: “If an elderly person uses it, is the mite-removal mode noisy when it’s running during sleep?” Twenty minutes.

Halfway through his noodles, he took a phone call. He held the phone between his shoulder and ear, freeing a hand to pull out a tissue and wipe his mouth. “Yes, that’s right. I’ve finished revising the drawing. I’ll email it before I leave work. Sure, we’ll go through it again at tomorrow morning’s meeting.”

To someone at the other end of those electromagnetic waves, he quite naturally promised a “tomorrow” he would never reach. A poor, overworked employee—this was probably your last supper. Fifteen minutes.

He finished the noodles and drank more than half the broth. Then he stood up, went to the counter, and scanned the code to pay. Once the payment went through, the speaker at the counter announced in a crisp voice: “WeChat payment received: eight yuan.”

He pushed open the shop’s glass door and stepped outside. The brass bell above the door swayed without making a sound. Through the glass, I watched him walk toward the intersection. He stopped at the zebra crossing and waited for the red light.

00-00-00-00-01-03. Sixty-three seconds. His head was lowered; he was probably still reading the customer-service reply about the electric blanket. They seemed to have sent a picture. He spread his thumb and forefinger across the screen to enlarge it.

Ten seconds. The light turned green. He stepped forward with his right foot. Three seconds. A dump truck loaded with construction debris swerved sharply to avoid an electric bike that had suddenly darted into its path.

In that instant, the laws of physics revealed their absolute precision and coldness. The brake pads rubbed against the tires with a piercing screech. The truck’s twenty or thirty tons of cargo lost their balance, and the bed tipped over to the right. Zero seconds.

There was no tragic slow motion like in a film, and no scream.

The black LCD digits that had floated above his carotid artery and ticked for more than forty years flickered out at the instant the truck fell, like a monitor whose power had been unplugged.

One second earlier, there had been a living brain still thinking about the noise of an electric blanket. One second later, at those same physical coordinates, there was only a pool of red liquid obeying the laws of fluid mechanics.

The street outside instantly descended into chaos. Screams, horns, and frantic footsteps tangled together like a pot of water boiling over.

But inside the noodle shop, I could hear nothing. Some immense emptiness had forcibly pressed the mute button on my hearing. Slowly, I lowered my head and looked at the table in front of me.

The porcelain bowl the man had used was still there. One mouthful of broth remained at the bottom, with a few white sesame seeds and a layer of red chili oil floating on its surface. Under the influence of the cold air, the edges of the oil were slowly beginning to congeal.

In a gap in the tabletop lay a little crumpled scrap of the tissue he had used to wipe his mouth. My eyes were fixed on that half bowl of leftover broth. I felt no fear of death, no terror at the accident.

Only horror at the act of being stripped away. A second earlier, the universe had contained a son choosing an electric blanket for an elderly parent, an employee promising to deliver a drawing tomorrow, a diner who had added two spoonfuls of aged vinegar.

Now the “Typing…” indicator in the customer-service chat had stopped forever; a chair in tomorrow’s meeting room would remain empty forever; this half bowl of broth, still holding the warmth of his mouth, had become nothing more than meaningless food waste.

Death is not the sigh of a life reaching its end. It is the brutally one-way severing of countless “next seconds”. It is a forced account deletion, an emptied recycle bin, with no recovery option provided.

Suddenly, I realized that what I had seen for twenty-six years was not a collection of countdowns, but burning fuses. All this time, I had stood among barrels of gunpowder about to explode, thinking they were merely fireworks for a festival.

The shopkeeper came over with a cloth, muttered “How awful,” and reached out to take the porcelain bowl away.

She wiped the table carelessly twice, leaving a wet streak that smelled of detergent. It evaporated quickly. Three seconds later, the tabletop was dry again, as though nothing had happened.

I picked up the glass of iced lemon water beside my hand, tipped back my head, and took a fierce, enormous gulp.

The painfully cold liquid dropped through my esophagus into my stomach, setting off a distinct spasm. I breathed in great gulps, feeling my alveoli expand, feeling my heart strike against my ribs inside my chest. Thump. Thump. Thump. I was still alive.

I lowered my head and continued typing in the layout editor for my WeChat account. The cursor blinked on the screen. The post was finished. I paid and pushed open the door.

The evening breeze at the corner carried the shrill siren of an ambulance against my face. An exhaustion I could not name washed over me.

I turned toward the shop’s glass door, coated in a thin film of grease, and stopped. I looked once at the black LCD digits above my own carotid artery. They were still ticking, steadily and coldly: 62-12-23-00-01-10.

Once, I had thought this was a generous gift. Now, looking at that suffocatingly long string of digits, I could see only a fuse burning exceptionally slowly.

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Postscript. After getting home that evening and taking a hot shower, I felt there were a few things I should make clear before clicking “Send” on this article.

Someone is bound to call me cold-blooded in the comments: if I can see that people are about to die, or that something dangerous is about to happen, why don’t I warn them to hide? Why don’t I protect them? Do you think I haven’t tried? Do you think it works?

When I was seven, I saw that my deskmate had only two hours left. I knew he liked swimming in the river after school. To save him, I locked him in the cleaning-supply cupboard when he wasn’t looking and refused to let him out. What happened? He had a rare acute asthma attack. The digits reached zero at precisely the appointed moment. That was the first punishment the physics engine imposed on me: making me carry out Death’s sentence with my own hands.

After that, I never interfered again, so as not to cause trouble for my parents.

Fate does not care which road you take. Once the endpoint arrives, it will even lay a track of inevitability for you on the spot. All human intervention is ultimately futile.

Likewise, situations that seem certain to be fatal are only false alarms in the face of the absolute time remaining. I once witnessed a car accident: a driver covered in blood was trapped in the mangled cab, and the bystanders shook their heads and said he probably wouldn’t make it. But I took one look from outside the police cordon and left. I could clearly see his digits: 34-07-22-14-11-09. He still had thirty-four years to live.

Some people may fantasize about having this ability to “foresee life and death”. But believe me: it is not fate’s gift. It is fate’s curse.

When an elder or relative you have always known sits smiling at the dinner table, discussing next year’s travel plans and asking whether you have a partner, while you can clearly see that they have less than three months left… do you think I feel pain?

No. That pain was exhausted long ago by the passing years. Now my capacity for empathy has been completely carbonized. Deep inside, I feel no sadness, no fear. I cannot squeeze out even a trace of pretend compassion.

Sometimes I express regret for someone who has died. That, too, is only a performance to navigate the social system’s conventions and obligations.

As a child, I also tried to break this curse. When I was five, I saw that the elderly woman next door had only three days left above her head. She was going to leave us. The adults laughed it off as childish talk. Three days later, she died after an accidental fall. At the funeral, nobody thought I was a prophet with a superpower. They looked at me with fear and disgust. My playmates called me a “jinx” and said I had “cursed” her to death.

My family’s cold remarks and lack of understanding sealed off my young heart completely. From then on, I kept my mouth shut.

Later, as I grew older and read more books, I finally understood: rather than the precise truth about death, many people need the illusion that “tomorrow will still exist”. If I tore through that thin screen, they would spend what remained of their lives in endless panic and suspicion. As long as I say nothing, they believe themselves immortal until the very second before the digits reach zero.

This way, the countdown to death can torment only me, and cannot hurt them. For while they are alive, they will not be dead; and once they are dead, death has nothing more to do with them.

In my eyes, death is not some grand philosophical proposition. It is a basic law of physics, no different from the sun rising and the moon setting, or wind and rain. I am merely the announcer who happened to get the weather forecast early.

I have also tried to investigate the cause of this ability scientifically. Was it an exceptionally rare recessive genetic mutation, or a retinal projection from higher-dimensional space? Had I, by chance, picked up the universe’s underlying cleanup code?

Eventually, I gave up. The logic underlying this world’s operation has always been filled with an arrogant inexplicability.

Just as you cannot explain why a world like this exists, or why light comes into being in the universe when the four-dimensional divergence of a second-order antisymmetric tensor equals zero, you cannot explain why two people who so clearly love each other must finally go their separate ways under the gravity of reality.

The cruelest thing about this world is this: its physical laws are always cold, precise, and governed by cause and effect. Only in its distribution of “fate” does it refuse to follow any reason at all.

Carbon-based creatures do not die only when they grow old. They can die at any moment. They have no idea that, from the instant a fertilized egg implants, the universe’s cleanup program is already counting down at random. I have seen countdowns ranging from zero seconds to decades.

Do you believe what I’m saying? Only a fool would, right? Yes, I made all of it up. Don’t worry. Tomorrow’s sun will still rise as usual.

So, like most people, treat this as a badly written science-fiction story, or simply my own nonsense.

But if… I mean, if you really believe everything I have said, and you have prepared yourself and want to see how much absolute time this shell of yours has left in this universe, you can come looking for me west of the Taihang Mountains, deep in the Lüliang Mountains.

Buy me a cup of hot tea, and I will read that number aloud to you. For now, though, close this post. Go and have a good meal. Turn around and embrace the person you love. If you are alone right now, cross your arms and give yourself a firm hug.

While your “next second” has not yet been forcibly deleted by the system.