There is a formula for Cantonese street swearing. Five steps: opening, verse one, verse two, chorus, ending—a shape as recognizable as a pop song, or a hero’s journey, or any other scaffolding we impose on chaos to make it feel survivable. The opening grabs attention, usually some variation of fuck your mother. Verse one poses a rhetorical question: do you even know how to walk? Do you even know how to queue? Verse two paints the scene in excruciating detail, so everyone watching knows exactly what transgression has occurred. The chorus is where it becomes art—freestyle, creative, 8-Mile metaphors blooming in real-time on a sidewalk in Mong Kok. And then the ending dismisses the offender: go somewhere else, take your nonsense with you, show’s over.
The thing is, the formula isn’t real. Or rather, it’s real in the way all formulas are real—a pattern someone noticed after the fact, scaffolding for improvisation, not a recipe for replication. The best Cantonese cursers aren’t following a script. They’re riffing. The art is in the doing, not the knowing-how-to-do.
In 1965, a Japanese company selling pedometers named their product manpo-kei. ”The 10,000-step meter.” The name was chosen, as far as researchers can tell, because the Japanese character for 10,000 looks sort of like a man walking 万步. A pictographic accident. A visual pun. No one had ever validated 10,000 as the right number of steps. No study. No evidence. Just a character that resembled a figure in motion, and a marketing team that needed something catchy.
And yet. Millions of people have built real health on top of this arbitrary scaffolding. The formula was fake, but the walking was real. The structure was invented for commerce, but the bodies that moved through it were changed by moving.
This is either devastating or hopeful, depending on what kind of year you’ve had.
The formula was fake, but the walking was real.
I've been the fixer, the translator, the chief whatever officer—the one who makes other people's visions legible. Never a founder. I’ve spent my whole life waiting for conviction to arrive like weather—something that happens to you, not something you choose. And yet, I am considering starting two services. The first: a Vicarious Life Broker. The backlog is obvious. People want to experience lives they’ll never live—a neurosurgeon, an artist showing at 52 Walker, living in Shimokitazawa or the Haut Marais, raising six children in a farmhouse somewhere with reliable WiFi and unreliable weather. The broker matches you with people currently living your unlived lives, negotiates detailed access, creates what we might call experience derivatives. Other people’s lives become consumable. The second: a Threshold Anxiety Metabolizer, let’s call it TAM-1. Every major life transition—moving, marrying, quitting, dying—generates terror that no one processes systematically. The metabolizer detects approaching thresholds, pre-digests the anxiety, breaks transitions into metabolizable chunks, certifies safe passage. Life changes become digestible.
I’ve spent my whole life waiting for conviction to arrive like weather—something that happens to you, not something you choose.
I think they would help people. I think they would help me. And I am so tired—the kind of tired that makes you want someone else to hand you a formula, any formula, even one invented by a pedometer company sixty years ago. Especially one invented by a pedometer company sixty years ago. At least then you’d have somewhere to put your feet.
These are services designed to give you the formula. To tell you: here is the opening, here is verse one, here is how the chorus goes. And maybe the tragedy is that they will work, in the way all formulas work—partially, temporarily, enough to keep you paying. Because what they cannot give you is the riffing. The freestyle. The blooming in real-time of something that is yours and only yours because you are the one standing on the corner, improvising your way through.
Or maybe the tragedy is something else. Maybe it’s that I don’t have a chorus in me right now. That I am trying to learn how to dream, how to want things, how to manifest a future that doesn't look like the past, but this time I'm enough. A tachycardia event lasting eighteen hours should not be the only time my heart beats that fast—not from want, not from excitement, but from something breaking. I know this. I am working on it. But working on it looks less like riffing and more like walking—one arbitrary step after another, following a structure I didn’t choose, hoping the body that moves through it will be changed by the moving.
The formula for Cantonese street swearing exists so that someone learning the language can understand what’s happening. It’s a way of saying: here is a shape you might recognize. But the old woman who has been perfecting her curses for sixty years doesn’t think in steps. She thinks in rhythm, in the specific weight of this afternoon’s grievance, in the particular angle of smog light hitting the offender’s stupid face. She’s not following the formula. She’s making it up as she goes, and the formula follows her.
I am not that woman. I don't have sixty years of practice. I have half a year of collapse, of trying to enjoy things I was too anxious to enjoy when I had them, of watching someone with resources I'll never have move on to do all the things we used to do together. I could tell her to fuck off and die. Verse one: do you even know what you threw away? Verse two: here is the scene, watching you live the future that was supposed to be ours. The chorus is where it's supposed to become art, but I don't have a chorus for this. I just have the ending: go somewhere else, take your happiness with you, show's over. But she's already gone. The formula doesn't bring anyone back. It just gives you something to say while you're standing there, learning how to stand.
This is what purchased scaffolding gets you: someone else's Tokyo. Pre-digested anxiety. A professional who will tell you exactly when you're allowed to feel safe. What you cannot purchase is the moment when you are standing in a foreign convenience store at 2 a.m., jetlagged, lost and alone, realizing that you are exactly where you chose to be and that this is the only life you will ever get. That moment is not in the database. That moment is the riff.
But here’s what I keep coming back to: the 10,000 steps were always a marketing gimmick. A pictographic accident. And the walking was still real. The people who clipped those pedometers to their waistbands weren’t fools for following an arbitrary number. They were people who needed somewhere to start. They needed a structure to move through, even if the structure was invented for reasons that had nothing to do with them. And somewhere in the walking, some of them found out what they actually wanted. Some of them got healthy. Some of them just kept walking because walking was better than standing still.
Maybe this is what my services would really be selling: not the experience itself, but permission. Permission to want something you don’t have. Permission to be afraid of what’s coming. Permission to need help, to need structure, to need someone else to tell you that there’s a shape to this, even if the shape is something you have to discover by moving through it.
I will probably start these services anyway. Not because I believe formulas work, but because I need something to walk on while I’m learning how to walk. The grief of unlived lives is not cured by watching someone else live them. The terror of thresholds is not dissolved by breaking them into smaller pieces. I know this. But I also know the character for 10,000 looked like a man walking, and that was enough for millions of people to start moving.
This is either devastating or hopeful, depending on what kind of year you've had.
The chorus is supposed to be where it becomes art. Freestyle, creative, yours and only yours. I’m not there yet. I’m still in verse one, still asking the rhetorical questions: do you even know how to want things? Do you even know how to dream? But the old woman didn’t start with the chorus either. She started by learning the formula, by watching others, by opening her mouth before she knew what would come out.
So I’m opening my mouth. I’m putting one arbitrary foot in front of the other. I’m building scaffolding out of pictographic accidents and hoping the structure becomes real through the living of it.
The formula is a place to start. I am starting.
