I've gradually realized that what I lost was not language itself, but time—the time to feel, and the time to allow myself to express freely. In Péru, time collapses: what is real here feels unreal elsewhere, and vice versa. My heart's boundaries stretched outward, just a little, to hold land on the other side of the world.
Before coming, I had heard countless stories about Latin America—portrayed as dirty, chaotic, fragmented, backward, untrustworthy, and hopeless. What I encountered instead repeatedly humbled me, moved me, and forced me to recalibrate myself. I saw vivid red flowers growing out of the most rugged, muddy stone roads; five-hundred-year-old Incan ruins still firmly rooted in the earth. The Spanish could deploy every weapon they had, yet they could not destroy what was carved into the mountains themselves. Faith in Pachamama is something one can offer their own body to.
I saw people tugging horses up and down steep slopes at 5,000 meters above sea level; people sitting in the smallest shared offices yet carrying the grandest ideals; a mother who runs a small cocoa shop in the Amazon rainforest, teaches herself English, becomes a Machu Picchu guide, and lights up entirely when she speaks about her land. They survive intelligently and courageously—unafraid of failure, rejection, or starting over. They have no retreat, but they have hope.
The "Third World" is always being pushed forward. But what, exactly, is "forward"? In a city at 3,000 meters above sea level, no one may know what Sam Altman did today—but they know the name of every alpaca at home, recognize each neighbor by their eyes, understand how clouds drift and rain falls, know how to navigate the jungle, how to stay lucid on the plateau, can see every star above Cusco at night, and know how to steer a bus safely around a mountain bend in five seconds. They seem to have preserved a trace of the wildness with which humans were born—so much so that the sentence I said most often here, as a carefully raised modern person, was: "I'm such a vulnerable human being."
Compared with the silent, overwhelming sense of presence when Machu Picchu—a lost empire—emerges after winding through endless mountains, what the people here gave me was something warmer and more unexpected: generosity, kindness, amigos, familia.
Hegel's nonlinear conception of history has always given me anchor points—ways to confront my thoughts across time and space. We often say: they are always being pulled along by change. But an "era" is, in essence, an attempt by those who hold the rules to imagine, test, and push a version of the future. I know the future here is impossible to predict. I don't know how these children will grow up, what kinds of adults they will become, or whether their world will still be one where dogs sleep sprawled across the streets and yellow plastic bags flap from wooden poles.
The progression of the world involves a reversal of responsibility: those who proclaim "change the world"—mindful or not—are often the last who truly bear its consequences. Last night, sitting on the carpet of a hotel room talking, I brought up the distinction between two groups: those who "drive the world forward," and those who stop to care for the people still left behind. At its core, this is the divide between Growth and Degrowth. I used to believe these two were entirely separate. But the past year has been the fastest collapse of my idealism. The reality is that the former almost always drags the latter along, and most of the latter are forced to change. This realization rapidly reshaped how I locate myself in the world. What "changing the world" meant to me at high school graduation is now entirely different from what it means today.
First, I've come to see that the Growth and Degrowth camps are intellectually incommensurable—like Cantonese and Mandarin speakers, rarely mutually intelligible. This is understandable: one side holds discursive power, while the other—despite gaining broader channels of expression through the internet (itself a product of the Growth camp)—ultimately lacks real agency. At Duke, even within the small circle I can observe, I've gradually and unexpectedly realized that I belong fully to neither side. This is partly my own fault: I refuse to compromise with imperfect frameworks or definitions, and I'm deeply afraid of being "defined." Choosing a profession, after all, doesn't actually represent much—investment banking being the most obvious example.
From my observations, the Growth camp often sees itself as elite, scarce, and responsible for pushing history forward, and is usually aware of its own discursive power. The Degrowth camp, by contrast, often carries a sense of "How can no one see the importance of this?"—a pressure born of being unheard, coupled with a hint of heroic resistance. Yet it often fails to recognize that power and action reside in the other camp. Ironically, I suspect that the Growth camp consists of those at the very top of the social pyramid and those who have climbed up from the bottom, while the Degrowth camp is more often made up of university elites, well-protected middle-class children, professors, and intellectuals. Most people—Peruvians, Bolivians, and the majority of the world—belong to neither of these displayed categories.
Second, my definition of "changing the world" has shifted—from a consumerist, happiness-driven impulse of "insisting on what brings me joy," to something closer to understanding and participating in the rules, and then changing behavioral patterns within them. The Singularity Is Nearer, Sapiens, courses on Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, and finance preparation all profoundly influenced this shift. I've begun to form a preliminary understanding of capitalism and the broader logic of how the world came to be as it is. At the same time, traveling to San Francisco and across South America offered a parallel journey of distance—allowing me to test, in reality, the intellectual frameworks I've been building.