“Thinking too much and doing too little”—most people probably know the feeling. I am a living example. Dreams fail to become real not because they are too large or too distant, but because our feet never take that first step. Sometimes we cannot take it because we do not know what the journey is supposed to mean; at least, that is often true for me. At other times, halfway there—or not even halfway—we want to give up because we cannot do it perfectly.
That was how it was with the stories of the Dark Wings Universe. I wanted to write them for years, yet I did not know what purpose writing them would serve. Fantasizing about becoming J. K. Rowling or some other commercially successful author was utterly unrealistic. Should writing be something we do for our own pleasure, or a way to earn a living? At least before AI entered the world, the question of how a person ought to live was not merely metaphysical and philosophical; it was also a physical question of survival. On some level, I look forward to the future the mad visionary Elon Musk describes for humanity: one in which people are freed from laborious work and can devote themselves to self-actualization.
But perhaps so many things never begin precisely because we have already imagined—or even foreseen—an ending that disappoints us. Loss aversion tells us to forget it: if we do nothing, there can be no disappointment or hurt. Sometimes I apply that logic to the deadlocked war between Russia and Ukraine. If an exhausted Ukraine were ultimately defeated and Russia achieved total victory, would that mean Zelenskyy should have fled and abandoned his country when the war began, thereby preventing its brutal losses? Should the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna have admitted Hitler, so that Europe might have gained one mediocre painter but lost one Führer? History has no “what if,” and life offers no advance knowledge. Perhaps it was precisely these reflections that made the Dark Wings Universe a story told from its ending. A mighty dynasty will fall in the end; a relationship filled with wounds will eventually pass away as well.
To resist nihilism, success or failure should not be the focus. What matters is what we did along the way, what trials we endured, and what choices we made. In an age when AI can generate answers that appear faster, more accurate, and more perfect in every possible form, we learn in order to think better—not merely to earn a better score.
On September 12, with only a few hours left before the language school’s online test closed, I hurried to complete it. I could understand almost none of the listening section. Passages with no kanji, written entirely in kana, were painfully slow and difficult to read. The grammar I had learned would not come back to me. All I felt was shame.
But I told myself: go on. Go on, slowly.
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