The tongue went to lick that tooth again.

Lower left first molar, porcelain crown done three years ago. The dentist said no problem, good for ten or twenty years, excellent material. But the tongue knows there’s a boundary there. An impossibly fine seam the tip of the tongue can feel. Between real gum and fake porcelain.

Recently the incisor next to it started loosening.

The dentist said this is normal—a porcelain crown changes how bite force distributes, the neighboring teeth bear more pressure. He said it casually. You can get another crown.

I asked him, what about the one next to that?

He laughed. Then we’ll do another one.

I didn’t ask further.

2.4 billion years ago, cyanobacteria learned photosynthesis.

I watched this documentary during one sleepless dawn. Cyanobacteria split water, released oxygen. They reproduced successfully—very successfully—spreading across all the oceans of Earth. Oxygen levels began to rise.

The problem was, all life on Earth at the time was anaerobic.

Oxygen was poison.

The cyanobacteria took several hundred million years, slowly pushing atmospheric oxygen from zero to twenty-one percent. This process killed nearly all anaerobic life. Including most of the cyanobacteria themselves.

The narrator said this was the largest extinction event in Earth’s history. Not an asteroid. Not volcanoes. It was success. It was expansion. It was some organism finding a positive feedback loop, and that loop running to its logical conclusion.

When I finished watching, dawn had already broken. Birds were calling outside the window. I thought: every breath of air they take is the legacy of that murder. They live in a world built on corpses.

So do I.

There’s a certain atmosphere in the office.

I can’t articulate what it is. Not tension, not excitement—a kind of. Hum. Like everyone’s waiting for something, but no one knows what.

Colleagues are watching charts. A green line climbing upward. Everyone’s posture tilted slightly forward, as if pulled by that line. Someone laughing, someone on the phone, voices a bit louder than usual.

I’m watching that line too. I know what that line is. I’ve written papers analyzing it. I know its composition: what percentage is liquidity, what percentage is leverage, what percentage is expectation, what percentage is expectation of expectation.

I know that line will stop eventually.

But my body doesn’t know. My body is also leaning forward. My heartbeat is also a little faster. A warm sensation rising from my chest, like I’ve been drinking.

This feeling has an academic name: affective contagion. But academic names can’t stop it from happening. Knowing the mechanism of fever doesn’t make you stop sweating.

Had malatang for lunch today. I ordered extra spicy.

The server glanced at me and asked, sir, are you sure? I said yes. She asked again. I said I’m from Sichuan. She didn’t say anything more.

I’m not actually from Sichuan.

When the spice brought tears to my eyes, I was thinking about a question: why do I need something this hot?

There’s a theory that capsaicin makes the brain release endorphins. Pain and pleasure share the same neural pathway. So eating spicy food is a form of legal self-harm.

But I think it’s more than that.

I think it’s because spicy is real.

When your tongue is burning, you can’t think about anything else. You can’t think about that green line, can’t think about that loosening incisor, can’t think about cyanobacteria and oxygen. You can only feel your mouth on fire.

It’s a kind of. Anchoring. A kind of proof. Proof that you still have a body. Proof that not everything is symbols.

I finished the last piece of beef on my plate. The chili oil had already congealed into a layer. I scraped it up with a spoon and drank it.

When the server came to clear the plate, her face had a strange expression. I couldn’t tell if it was respect or fear.

Had a dream that night.

Dreamed all my teeth fell out. This is a common dream, supposedly representing anxiety. But the situation in the dream was different.

After my teeth fell out, new teeth grew in my mouth. But the new teeth were porcelain. Blindingly white, perfectly aligned, like showroom samples. I licked them with my tongue and felt no seams at all. Too perfect.

Then I noticed my gums had changed too. Turned into pink plastic. Then my lips. Then my face.

I stood in front of the mirror, watching myself become a mannequin.

I wasn’t afraid. I just thought: finally don’t have to worry about cavities.

When I woke up, I first used my tongue to lick that porcelain crown. It was still there. The incisor next to it was still loose. The real parts were still slowly being consumed by the fake parts.

I lay in bed. There was a water stain on the ceiling. I stared at that stain and thought: that’s the house’s tooth. That stain is the house trying to tell me something. But I couldn’t understand.

Seventh draft of the paper now.

The reviewer wants me to add a section explaining the difference between “systemic risk” and “endogenous collapse.” He cited Minsky, cited Kindleberger, cited a bunch of people I’d also cited myself.

I know what he’s asking. He’s asking: is this thing you’re describing “breaking” or “working as designed”? Bug or feature?

I don’t know how to answer this question.

Or rather, I know the answer, but I don’t know how to write it in academic language.

The answer is: there is no difference.

Expansion is collapse. Rising is falling. The day cyanobacteria discovered photosynthesis was the day the mass extinction began. There’s no “turning point” between them, no line demarcating “from healthy to unhealthy.” The entire process is the same process.

I tried writing a paragraph to explain this. Deleted it when I finished.

Too much like philosophy. The reviewer won’t like it.

Saw a news article today about someone inventing a bacteria that can eat plastic.

They say this is good news. The plastic pollution problem finally has a solution. Those plastic bags floating in the ocean for fifty years can finally be decomposed.

Reading this article, I thought of cyanobacteria.

Cyanobacteria were also a solution. Cyanobacteria solved the problem of “how to survive in an environment lacking organic matter.” They found a method, a very elegant method, using sunlight and water to create energy.

Then their success turned the atmosphere into a gas chamber.

I’m not saying the plastic-eating bacteria will definitely cause problems. I’m just saying every “solution” is the beginning of another problem. Every balance sheet expansion is a kind of borrowing. Every fake tooth affects the real teeth next to it.

We invent something, we put it into the system, the system begins to revolve around it. Then we discover we can’t take it out anymore. The cost of removal is greater than the cost of keeping it.

So we add more things. Cover up. Compensate. Hedge.

Until the system becomes unrecognizable. Until we can’t tell what was always there from what was added later. Until we stand in front of the mirror, see a self with all porcelain teeth, and can’t remember what real teeth looked like.

Went to a stand-up comedy show this weekend.

One of the performers told a joke: he said he bought Bitcoin, it went up three hundred percent, then dropped back to the original price. He said he’d possessed that much money in his lifetime, but that money never really existed.

The audience laughed. I laughed too.

But I laughed for different reasons than them.

I laughed because what he said was true. That money really never existed. Not just Bitcoin. All money has never existed. Money is just a consensus. Consensus is a kind of expectation. Expectation is a kind of feeling.

Feelings change.

After the show, I went backstage to chat with him for a bit. I asked, do you still hold it?

He said, yeah, I hold.

I asked, do you still believe it’ll go up?

He said, I don’t know. But if I don’t believe in it, then why did I buy it in the first place?

I didn’t say anything more. I understood what he meant. He wasn’t talking about Bitcoin. He was saying: if I admit I was wrong before, then I have to admit I wasted these years of waiting. These years of anxiety. These years of hope.

That’s too expensive.

So he keeps holding. Not because he believes, but because the cost of not believing is too high.

This is also a kind of Ponzi. A Ponzi scheme against yourself. Using future hope to repay past investment. Until…

Until what?

I don’t know.

3 AM, I’m in the kitchen drinking water.

The sky outside the window is deep blue, not black. City lights have diluted the darkness. It’s always like this.

I’m thinking about a question: if cyanobacteria had consciousness, would they regret it?

Would they say, we shouldn’t have been so successful. We should have stopped while we were ahead. We should have stopped when oxygen hit five percent.

But they couldn’t stop. Because every individual cyanobacterium was doing what was best for itself. Photosynthesis. Division. Reproduction. No single cyanobacterium was “greedy.” They were just living.

The collapse of the entire system was accumulated from countless tiny, reasonable, locally optimal decisions.

This is what I write about in my paper. I proved it with mathematical models. My model ran ten thousand Monte Carlo simulations, all with the same result: individual rationality leads to collective madness. The equilibrium state is unstable. Expansion and collapse are two ends of the same curve.

But proving this doesn’t change anything.

I’ll still go to work. I’ll still watch that green line. I’ll still feel that hum. I’ll still eat extra spicy at lunch, still wake up at 3 AM to drink water.

I’m no different from cyanobacteria.

Went to the dentist today.

He said the incisor next to it needs a root canal now. The nerve has started to necrose. Then it’ll need a crown too.

I asked him, what about the one next to that?

He looked at the X-ray and said, looks okay for now. But we need to monitor it regularly.

I said, okay.

I lay in that chair, mouth stuffed with instruments, listening to the drill grinding on my tooth. That sound. High-frequency, piercing, penetrating the skull. It reminded me of something.

Reminded me of cyanobacteria. Reminded me of them in the ocean, dividing one by one, releasing oxygen bit by bit. They couldn’t hear the changes they were causing. They had no ears. No consciousness. They were just living.

The drill stopped. The dentist said, alright, that’s it for today. Come back next week for the temporary crown.

I got up from the chair, rinsed my mouth, looked at myself in the mirror. A bit of blood still at the corner of my mouth.

I smiled.

The person in the mirror smiled too. I couldn’t tell if that was me or someone else.

It started raining on the way home.

I didn’t have an umbrella. I stood under a bus stop shelter, watching rain hit the ground. A strange calm.

I thought, this is just how it is.

Not meaning “this is the end.” Meaning “this is what life looks like.”

You know everything is balance sheet expansion. You know expansion will stop eventually. You know the day it stops, everyone will get hurt. You know you’ll get hurt too.

But you’ll keep going anyway.

Not because of greed. Not because of stupidity. Just because the moment you exit, you have to face all the time you borrowed. All the hope you advanced yourself. All the cracks you pretended not to see.

That’s too expensive.

So you continue.

You lick that fake tooth with your tongue, feeling the real tooth next to it loosening. You watch the green line climb, knowing it’ll fall eventually. You breathe the murder from 2.4 billion years ago, pretending it’s natural.

The rain stopped.

I walked out from under the shelter, kept walking home. Puddles on the ground reflected the sky. The sky was gray, uniform, like a massive piece of porcelain.

I stepped into a puddle. Water splashed up.

In that instant, I felt something.

Not sadness. Not anger. Not fear.

I’m here. I’m in this expanding, eventually contracting world. I’m part of this system. I’m cyanobacteria. I’m the real tooth next to the fake one. I’m a point on that green line.

No exit.

But nothing that needs to exit either.