“The only true heroism in this world is to see the world as it is, and to love it anyway.”
— Romain Rolland

Lately, I have been asking the same question: as someone who has studied abroad, do you still think it’s worth it today?

With only half a year left before graduation, this feels like the right moment to put my answer into writing.

First, we must acknowledge a brutal reality: studying abroad is part of a complex industrial chain whose inner logic is far more intricate than most people imagine. Most top universities in the world are research universities. Their educational model is designed to cultivate philosophical minds, civilizational thinkers, industry elites and researchers. The market, however, often rewards compliance and operational efficiency. The tension between these roles is structural rather than accidental.

Parents believe studying abroad is a product that augments their children’s educational life. What students purchase though is a course in intellectual liberation. Parents don’t understand the curriculum; they only believe that reputable universities breed success. Students don’t dare tell them that they spend their days reading Foucault, Hayek or environmental justice. Universities also know perfectly well that such content does not translate directly into employable skills, and yet they package it as “holistic development.”

As a result, the aspirations of students, parents, and universities are not collinear —in fact, they exist in parallel universes. The only thing connecting them is the tuition payment receipt. For most people, studying abroad ultimately becomes an expensive detour: glamorous, brief, and fleeting.

So, do I regret studying abroad?

No. I don’t regret it at all. In fact, I feel profoundly fortunate.

For me, the core value of studying abroad was never those overused clichés—“broadening horizons,” “international perspectives” or “cultural exchange.” In an era where industrial civilization has reached full maturity, the real difference between Melbourne and my hometown of Wuxi, China may simply be the brands on supermarket shelves, the hollow exhaustion in commuters’ eyes on buses and trains that appear to be globally standardized.

What studying abroad truly did was force me to confront the real world head-on—to pay with time, sweat, and money for the rupture between ideals and reality. Over a few short years, it compelled me to rewrite the rules of my life entirely, shifting from passively accepting the world to actively designing my own. This cognitive transformation may be invisible to outsiders, but it can reshape a person’s entire worldview, as it did mine.

So if studying abroad forces you to experience an early collapse of your worldview—and then to rebuild your life with dignity from the ruins—then the tuition was indeed worth it. In that case, studying abroad becomes a gift of fate. Your twenties are not too early; they are precisely the right time, while everything is still salvageable.

You might otherwise have struggled your entire life within invisible social shackles. Now, you see the essence of the world. You learn to trust only yourself, to remain rational while others panic, and to let realism—not fantasy—guide your life. You understand that the world is a giant noisy classroom with no homeroom teacher, and that the direction of life must be steered by your own hands.

Then you decide to rewrite your life—from values to principles, from career paths to consumption habits, even down to daily routines, relationships, and interests. If necessary, you reconstruct everything. This is a cognitive revolution, a personal miracle of anti-entropy. It may appear extreme, it may generate enormous friction with the surrounding world, but it is a baptism offered to life itself—agonizing, yet worthwhile.

Experiences like studying abroad can catalyze this kind of transformation. Wisdom has never been free; it does not naturally emerge in the comfort of home study. In comfortable environments, no one voluntarily changes their mind. True intellectual leaps often arise from structural pain—not philosophical games, but survival responses. They are the desperate struggles of someone drowning in open water, the soul’s counterattack against adversity.

Epiphanies are not read from books, nor heard at TED talks. They occur when your parents spend millions, yet you still can’t find your footing in a foreign city; when you want to cry on the subway but can’t, so you put on headphones and pretend to be normal; when you walk past the gates of an elite university, yet feel more abandoned by the world than ever before. These moments become the breeding ground for real, individual thought.

Philosophy is not planned. It grows from ruins. It is never about being “cool”—it exists because without it you cannot survive.

This is an era unseen in a century. All signposts have fallen. Behind the towers we once admired lies barren land. We are like lost children in a desert, walking paths our parents never tread. Aside from our feet and our minds, we have little to rely on—and even our minds may not fully belong to us.

Once, we studied late into the night, grinding forward for over a decade. Yet at the level of genuine thinking, most people spend the years after elementary school running in place, masking stagnation with increasingly complex terminology. We confuse knowledge with capability, education with wisdom. This is a massive misunderstanding. Meiosis, the Industrial Revolution, the Prime Meridian, or the invention of the steam engine—these exam topics once tormented us with rote memorization, only to be forgotten immediately after. And rightly so: they were never meant to help us understand the world, but to filter high scorers. They are tools of the system, not ladders we scale for individual growth. But the world is not a fixed textbook. True understanding depends on independent thinking, systemic observation, strategic judgment, and continuously refined cognitive models—none of which exams ever test.

For years, we believed we were becoming stronger. In fact, we were merely performing maturity. We learned restraint, cooperation, tolerance, and humility—not because they deepened our understanding of the world, but because they helped us survive within existing systems. We passed bar exams and CFA Level III, mastered interview techniques, navigated KPIs and promotions, yet remained largely ignorant of how the world actually works.

This is how “hollow professionals” are produced: polished, articulate, compliant, and perpetually busy, yet incapable of independently solving complex problems. Parents pour money into tutoring; children burn out physically and mentally; organizations reward imitation and packaging. We keep moving, but rarely stop to ask the most basic questions: Is our direction of effort even reasonable? Did these sacrifices generate real understanding—or merely the appearance of competence?

And today, some of us can no longer keep acting.

I, too, was once lost—unsure how the engineering mindset taught at the University of Melbourne could function in a Shanghai office or a Singapore construction site. Then it clicked: once I built a multi-dimensional cognitive framework, everything I had learned could be integrated within it, fundamentally reshaping how I understood the world. I eventually realized that reconstruction does not come from discovering new knowledge, but from reorganizing old knowledge under a new framework. The weapons of reconstruction are not secret. They hide in textbooks, in everyday facts we once dismissed as useless.

Take boiling water—something we learn in middle school and quickly forget. On its own, it seems trivial. But when abstracted into a model, it explains why corporate cash flow can collapse within days, or why operational risks erupt suddenly rather than gradually. The same applies elsewhere. Most legal systems allow close relatives to refuse testimony—not as a loophole, but as an acknowledgment that trust precedes rules. This principle applies far beyond law: relationships, organizations, even societies collapse not because rules are broken, but because trust fails to form or endure.

Physics and economics, law and intimacy, appear unrelated on the surface. Yet beneath them lies the same transferable logic. Once you learn to extract models rather than memorize facts, fragmented knowledge—boiling water, steel fracture points, inertia—becomes a cognitive arsenal. This is how one escapes the traps of common sense and begins to see the world as a system rather than a script.

Much of our cognitive potential remains underutilized within conventional educational frameworks—unless one experiences severe pain, actively constructs the self, deliberately steps outside collective consensus, and enters deep exploration. Studying abroad gave me that threshold moment.

Ultimately, life is not about scoring points in games designed by others. It is about recognizing the structure behind the game—and designing a better system to avoid unfair competition altogether. True freedom is never granted. It is reclaimed with dirt-covered hands.

We live in a post-growth, post-industrial, hyper-informational era. Social structures are largely fixed. Most tracks are monopolized. Opportunities are scarce. Elite institutions across the world excel at producing engineers, researchers, and institutional pillars, but they often suppress humanity’s rarest traits: independence and rebellion—the very forces that drive civilization forward.

Those who dare to question, to fail, to create may contribute little to maintaining the machine—but when the machine starts to fail, they build new ones. While everyone else climbs the ladder, someone invents the elevator.

My “elevator” is not complex algorithms, but a few core principles: independent thinking, long-termism, and cross-disciplinary reasoning. These ideas are old, even cliché—but studying abroad forced me to commit to practicing them for life. It’s like giving up a comfortable apartment to walk alone across an open wilderness. I’m used to solitude. I’m not afraid.

Camus said we must imagine Sisyphus happy.

But I say: you must imagine yourself happy.

Photography by Felicity Bayne