You think hard work can change your destiny? Wrong. What awaits you is a world where even giving everything you have may not be enough to see a glimmer of hope.

This isn’t some motivational platitude. This is the honest reckoning of a man who has lived forty years.

The Woman Pushing Bricks in the Winter of 2008

In 2008, I was 25, fresh out of college, working as a computer technician at a research institute.

The campus was large, and one of the buildings was under construction. On a cold winter afternoon, I watched a young woman—probably not yet thirty—straining to push a wheelbarrow loaded with bricks. The wheel had caught in a rut. She pushed with all her strength, her face turning red, but the cart wouldn’t budge. She had to pull it back, reposition, and try again.

She was wearing a brand-new pair of flared jeans. You could tell she cared about looking good, about holding on to her dignity and her sense of beauty.

In that moment, I felt like her fate was exactly like that cart stuck in the rut—and her longing for a better life was like those new jeans: clean, bright, full of promise.

For years after, that image stayed with me. I often wondered: what could she do to change her life quickly? If I were in her position, what would I do?

After thinking it through, the answer seemed simple: leave the construction site, go back to school, learn English, learn to code. Study hard for a year or two, then land a job in tech.

But here’s the real question—did she even know that option existed? Did she have the means to pursue it?

The Woman Handing Out Flyers in the Winter of 2024

By the winter of 2024, I was no longer the 25-year-old kid. I was 41, a middle-aged man.

Near my apartment, I ran into a woman handing out promotional flyers. She held one out to me, and I could clearly see the rough, calloused skin on her hands—the hands of someone who had done years of hard physical labor. The phone tucked beneath her flyers had a shattered screen.

Not wanting to hurt her feelings, I took the flyer, thinking it might help her finish her shift a little sooner.

But the moment I took it, she launched into a sales pitch, pushing me to pay for the product on the flyer. It turned out I needed to pay upfront, and the flyer would act as a coupon—each one worth 50 yuan off.

I was taken aback. In my experience, this kind of setup is almost always a scam, or at best a deceptive promotion. So I declined and walked away quickly.

Later, I kept thinking about her. Was this all she could do? Was there anything she could do to change her life?

I couldn’t come up with an answer. She was older now—probably past the point of going back to school. She likely had a family to support. Her life path had a very high degree of certainty. Or rather, she was stuck on a platform—a low-value, low-status platform in the social hierarchy. From this platform, you can go left or right, but there are no steps leading upward. Or maybe there are a few narrow ledges, but climbing them is exhausting, and success is nearly impossible. She was locked in place by the sum total of how society defined her, her social connections, and her personal capabilities.

Poverty Isn’t the Scariest Thing—Having No Choice Is

The first woman was young. She still had a window of opportunity—but did she know how to use it? Probably not.

So by the time you hit thirty, what traps you is the broader environment, your family, your inner drive—or lack thereof—and the cognitive barriers created by limited knowledge and experience.

But at least there are still choices. Pick the right direction, work hard, and you might see returns.

What about forty?

By then, you’re embedded in the fixed structure of social relationships. The barriers are structural, deeply entrenched. If you’re still at the bottom at this point, you essentially have no right or opportunity to choose again.

Hard work won’t save you. In fact, whether hard work pays off depends entirely on the platform you’re standing on—not on how hard you work. If your platform is cheap, invisible, and undervalued, then your effort will be too.

The upward path is completely closed.

This is a universal, macro-level tragedy. It’s the kind of sorrow you feel when you look at one person’s life and see the lives of an entire class of people.

Will AI Change Anything?

Now AI is here. The collective intelligence of humanity is rising. We’re entering what I’ve called the AI Golden Age—a period of unprecedented technological collision that could reshape everything.

I hope that everyone’s upward mobility—or at least their baseline quality of life—rises with it.

AI shouldn’t just be a tool for the privileged few. It should become a crutch for ordinary people. It should help those who never got the chance to study learn something new. It should help those trapped at the bottom find a way out. It should give people who have no choices the right to choose again.

I hope that one day, we can reduce this universal, macro-level tragedy.

I hope that one day, every person who works hard can see hope—and have a real shot at something better.

These are the honest reflections of a 41-year-old man.

If you’ve had similar observations or thoughts, I’d love to hear them in the comments.

Let’s keep hoping for a fairer world.

About Me

I’ve worked at NetEase Games, Baidu, Tencent (8 years), and Meituan (nearly 7 years), leading large R&D projects and managing teams of over 100 engineers.

Now I build software as an independent developer.

Why? Because the world is full of uncertainty—staying at one company too long can make you addicted to certainty. Building on your own is like sailing into uncharted waters.

I believe good software should give people a sense of security and control. That’s the thread connecting everything I make:

  • PhotoRestore Pro — AI photo restoration that runs 100% offline on Windows. Your photos never leave your device. No cloud, no account, no compromise on privacy. Built for legal professionals, but anyone with old family photos will find it useful.

  • AstroSky — Think of it as “Snapseed for astronomy.” Turn raw FITS data into stunning celestial images. Fully offline, GPU-accelerated, with a Beauty/Science dual mode that serves both casual stargazers and researchers.

  • fastool.io — A collection of browser-based science tools. Right now it’s focused on astronomy: solar path tracking, moon phase analysis, sidereal time calculation, telescope FOV planning—all running in your browser with zero data upload.

Whether I’m gazing at the cosmos or refining a line of code, the goal is the same: build tools that put people in control of their own data.

Get in touch: HummingbirdLabs@outlook.com.