The year 2023 will soon pass. I miss it very much, but I don't want to do it again. What I miss is the passage of time. I don't want to come back because a lot of pessimistic and disappointing things happened in this year. At the beginning of the year, my body suffered from chronic illness, which led me to anxiety and mild depression for a time, followed by several exam failures, investment gains and losses, personnel disputes and persistent self doubt. For most of the year, I felt that my body lacked energy, slept for a long time, and idled for a long time.

At the end of the year, I read a book "Believe" by Cai Lei, a patient with progressive frostbite. I don't know whether Cai Lei wrote this book himself or whether his dictation was collated and processed by others. But the experience of reading this book is the same as that of reading Yu Hua's "To Live": you sit there quietly, five or six hours later, the sky is dark, There is nothing you can do about the ups and downs of death. You only feel that your nose is blocked, your chest is depressed, and you can't calm down for a long time. Just like Fugui's final choice to live is the reason for living, Cai Lei's choice to believe is the explanation for believing, because there is no other way.

When I was young, I had a romantic idea about death. When I saw Haizi, Zhang Guorong, and Kete Cobain, I felt that life should burn and not wait until the lights ran out. When you see, hear and experience too many deaths, you suddenly change your attitude towards life: when you come to the world, you should see the sun and walk on the street with your sweetheart. You don't know what will happen in the future. You don't have to miss the past. What you have is experience At this moment, no matter how happy or sad, you can grasp What you can do is just at this moment, regardless of joys and sorrows believe It can only be at this moment, regardless of resentment, love, parting, and begging.

As a billionaire, Cai Lei wrote such an episode in the book "Believe": as the world's first incurable disease, Cai Lei was inevitably cheated by the various tricks of the Jianghu doctors after he got the disease. He cheated too much, and sometimes he couldn't defeat his friends' good intentions, so he let his friends go to experience it for free

The elder sister comes to the clinic once a week, and I also hope to confirm the effect of early treatment with her, so I have an appointment with her.

……

"But the legs are still like that... The legs are weak..." The elder sister's ambiguous pronunciation has not landed yet, and suddenly she was interrupted by "Shifu": "Didn't you get cured that day? What have you done these two days? Did you stay up late again?"

After two or three days of contact, "Master" always spoke in a gentle voice, and the sudden reprimand startled my wife and me. The elder sister on the opposite side immediately closed her mouth and did not dare to speak again. Her eyes swept around the room, leaving nowhere to put them.

I have contacted my elder sister by phone many times before, Each time she said "effective" with certainty, and the determination in her tone did not sound like a fabrication.

But today, I finally understand what is going on. When evaluating the treatment effect, the therapist will repeatedly guide you to believe that your arms are higher, your fingers are more straight than before, and your whole body meridians are more unblocked. These words will give patients a strong psychological hint, and gradually you will feel from your heart that "really, the arms are higher, the fingers are straight, and the meridians are more open". To put it bluntly, faith is soul. If you believe that the treatment is effective, it is really effective.

Then it suddenly occurred to me that I could never read the great book of success called Human Weakness. I remember which chapter in the first chapter, which roughly means that Carnegie said that when a salesperson woke up every day, he said to himself that he wanted to be a sales champion and I wanted to be a sales champion, and then he finally became a sales champion. When I read this, I scolded: Isn't this a fucking lie? I also want to become the President of the country? I threw the book away because I didn't believe in the fabricated story.

However, the real strength of the placebo effect in psychology is that even if you know you are taking a placebo, the placebo effect still exists. Cai Lei later moved his house and changed his name. Of course, the frostbite did not heal itself. But with these placebo effects and psychological hints, the pineal gland of the brain secreted more melatonin, and then ended his insomnia for six months.

This inconspicuous little segment in Believe made me suddenly start to look at myself, because in the first half of my life, I was full of vigilance to the world, and regarded my disbelief as my principle of doing things. Maybe I had experienced too many failures, or perhaps I was deeply impressed with some failures. I always ask myself: Why me? So I always look at people, things and things around me from the perspective of outsiders.

Maybe it's time for me to change my perspective. This is my biggest gain and enlightenment in the past 2023.