Are you drowning in opinions every day? “This industry is dying.” “That sector is booming.” “AI will replace everything.” These are all just hot takes—here today, reversed tomorrow. If you live inside opinions, anxiety is guaranteed because you can never keep up.
So what lasts? Something that outlives every argument and every era. A thousand years ago, a man named Shen Kuo figured it out. In the Northern Song dynasty, everyone was debating grand theories: Wang Anshi’s reforms, Sima Guang’s history, the neo-Confucian cosmology. Shen Kuo didn’t join the fight. Instead, he leaned in close—to the veins of a rock, the angle of a compass, the shape of a mountain, the shadow of the moon during an eclipse. He didn’t argue about what the world should be. He just recorded what it was.
Later, exiled in a small town, he wrote down everything he’d seen and thought. That book—Dream Pool Essays—seemed unimpressive at the time. No grand philosophy, no political stance. Just facts. A thousand years later, those grand philosophies are buried in academic archives, but Shen Kuo’s “trivial notes” became a landmark of Chinese scientific history. Why? Because opinions have expiration dates. Facts don’t. A carefully recorded stone or a precisely observed eclipse belongs to no faction—only to the world itself. Its shelf life is as long as civilization.
Today, we urgently need that same skill: turn the world into material, not opinions. Here are three ways to start:
- Ask “what is this?” more, and “what’s the use?” less. The first brings you closer to reality; the second chases trends. Trends are opinions. Reality is material.
- Pick one thing—something that feels useless—and do it for ten years without asking for a return. Shen Kuo never asked whether his observations were profitable. But that accumulation built something no one could take away.
- Spend ten minutes today writing a “useless list.” Put down whatever you’re already doing that others think is pointless but you secretly find interesting—even if it’s just one item. You don’t need to know where it leads. You just need to record it.
Time is the best filter. It filters out opinions and leaves materials. Start being a fact collector today. Your future self will thank you.