Luo Rongxin

A conversation unlike any I've had in China, and like few I've had in life. We talked philosophy by the riverside, the entire time.

When I asked about his recent marriage (3 days ago!) he said they have different styles of thinking versus feeling. He asked if I'm a thinking or feeling person, and that got us onto a long conversation about thoughts making feelings, purpose, death, the need for meaning. What people care about (status, money, family, partner), why we do anything, love, parenting, living a full life, why I travel, why I'm here, etc.

He's a programmer too, and asked if we write programs for the sake of writing them or to run them. He assumed run them. But I challenged that and said the reason why I like programming from scratch is because it's where I get to know the problem better. Understanding it is often more important to me than just having it done, otherwise I'd just use others' software.

But the highlight, for me, was after I said that I try to correct my thoughts when they lead to bad feelings, he said, "You're debugging!" Then later when I explained my journaling process of questioning all of my thoughts, he said, "Ah, so you put your whole system into debug mode!" I laughed so hard that I had to call my friend in Spain, on the spot, and record that moment.

Then that led to more comparisons of programmers who just run things without debugging (live life without questioning).