Yesterday I saw the news that Zhang Xuefeng had passed away—41 years old, sudden cardiac death. Three days prior, he was still checking in on WeChat Moments about his running, with a monthly mileage of 72 kilometers. He felt unwell after an afternoon run, was taken to the hospital, and three hours later, he was gone.
He left behind nine companies, an education group valued at hundreds of millions, and a nine-year-old daughter.
Just a few days ago, I wrote an article about AI entrepreneurship mentioning that the body is the hardest infrastructure in this wave of transformation. Work intensity is increasing, the pace is accelerating, but the body doesn't become more durable just because technology advances. I didn't expect to see news like this the very next day.
This isn't an isolated case. Ding Yun from Huawei, 53, died after running 28 kilometers. Sun Jian, chief scientist at Megvii, 45, passed away suddenly in the early morning. Zhang Rui, founder of Chunyuyisheng (Spring Rain Doctor), 44, died of a heart attack. Approximately 550,000 people die of sudden cardiac death in China each year—that's 1,500 people daily. These numbers existed before AI emerged, and the work intensity of the AI era will only make the situation more severe.
But what occupied my thoughts for a long time wasn't the topic of health preservation. It was that when facing these events, all the narratives about technological transformation and productivity explosions suddenly seemed very light.
Made $100 Million, Then What
The experience of Peter Steinberger, founder of OpenClaw, can be viewed alongside this.
He spent 13 years building a PDF SDK serving nearly a billion users, with clients including Apple, Adobe, and Dropbox. In 2021, he sold the company to Insight Partners for approximately $100 million.
Then he fell apart.
He described himself as "completely shattered." Waking up every morning with nothing to look forward to, no real challenges. He tried traveling, socializing, therapy—nothing filled that void. He told Lex Fridman: "If you wake up with nothing to look forward to, that boredom comes very quickly." By the end of 2024, he couldn't write a single line of code.
Later, he regained his passion because of AI agents, creating one of the fastest-growing open-source projects on GitHub in three months. But compared to the comeback itself, I'm more concerned about that blank period. A person who had already "succeeded" could still get completely stuck when faced with questions of meaning.
After external drivers disappear, what keeps a person moving forward? This question isn't just his.
The $120 Billion Deficit of Meaning
On one side is AI anxiety; on the other is AI metaphysics.
During the 2025 Spring Festival, DeepSeek fortune-telling hit the hot search lists. Input your birth date and time, and AI will cast your astrological chart, read your wealth luck, and predict your marriage. Zi Wei Dou Shu, Bazi (Eight Characters), Tarot, I Ching—all included, with more interactive engagement than human fortune-tellers.
This isn't a niche phenomenon. iiMedia Research predicts that China's AI fortune-telling market will exceed 120 billion yuan in 2025, with an annual growth rate of 35%. One leading platform has over 80 million registered users, conducting 2 million divinations daily. The user profile is also intriguing: ages 20 to 35 account for 73%, and those with bachelor's degrees or higher make up 82%.
It's not elderly people passing time. It's young, educated people seeking some kind of certainty from an algorithm.
I don't think this is a resurgence of superstition. It's more like a symptom. When technological change becomes too violent and the old narratives—work hard and you'll succeed, having a house and car means a good life—start to loosen, people instinctively search for more fundamental things to hold onto. Where do I come from? Where am I going? GPT can run all it wants, but it can't answer these. Rather, the faster technology moves, the more unavoidable these questions become.
AI Isn't Here to Steal Your Job
The logic chain behind most people's anxiety goes like this: AI can do the work → my job gets replaced → I have no value.
But there's a hidden premise in this chain: human value equals labor output.
Pull it out and look at it—this premise is actually quite suspicious.
If AI dramatically increases total social productivity, with digital employees running 24/7 and marginal costs approaching zero, then why does everyone still have to labor personally to obtain resources? With cheaper productivity that doesn't eat, sleep, or need social insurance, logically people should be liberated. To bask in the sun, to do things they're passionate about, to create something for fun or purely for leisure. Wouldn't that be a better life?
But people don't think about this. What they anxiously fear is having their job stolen. Actually, what they should be anxious about is something else: how the fruits of production are distributed.
Productivity is becoming increasingly abundant, but the distribution mechanism is still the old system—capital concentrated in the hands of a few, operating through market prices. The result is that a tiny minority decides where society's major resources go. Technology amplifies existing disparities, not equality.
Rather than panicking, we should seriously discuss: when technological transformation reaches this level, how do we achieve more reasonable redistribution? After people's time is liberated, where should needs be directed?
We're Missing a Positive Vision of the Future
I was chatting with a friend some time ago, and he said something that touched me deeply: what we're most lacking right now is effective imagination about the future.
Think about it carefully—it's true.
For decades, we actually had a consensus about what the future looked like. Economic growth, urbanization, globalization, continuously rising living standards. This framework was strong enough that it didn't need special discussion. The entire society was filled with a thriving sense of expectation.
Now that consensus has shattered. Regarding the future, most of the imagination we have comes from Hollywood. The Matrix, Blade Runner—the undertones are all dystopian: wealth disparity, corporate rule, technology out of control. Games occasionally offer interesting visions of social interaction in virtual worlds, but overall, exciting positive visions are painfully scarce.
This is quite dangerous. Pessimistic imagination certainly has its value, but if that's all we have, people are left with only fear and defense. A society driven by fear makes every choice a contractionary one.
Technology Is Neutral; Choices Aren't
Technology itself isn't good or evil. How it's used, how it's distributed, how society organizes itself to adapt to it—these determine the outcomes.
These aren't questions engineers can answer. Economists, sociologists, policymakers—these are the people who should step to the forefront precisely when technology is running fastest.
AI shakes things much deeper than most people realize. The meaning of labor, the logic of wealth, how time should be spent. These assumptions haven't been truly questioned for decades, and now they're all loosening.
The barriers to content creation are falling, and the costs of film, television, and cultural products are dropping. Under these conditions, earnestly imagining a positive vision of the future and investing in it is no longer a luxury. The United States is retreating from leading such imagination; if someone is going to take up the mantle, now is the time.
Back to the beginning. Zhang Xuefeng is gone, at 41. In the face of this, technological competition, industry anxiety—honestly, none of it is worth that much emotional energy. What deserves serious thought are those old questions: how to make society a little better, how to let people live more like human beings.