He Went Through the Convenience Store Bag Three Times Before He Remembered the Unchecked Lottery Receipt

The month Chen Chia-hao was promoted to sales manager, there wasn't a single empty square on his calendar. He chased clients during the day, attended business dinners at night, and often got home at 11:30, only to leave again at seven the next morning. He figured this was just a transitional phase and that he'd get through it, until one Wednesday afternoon in the conference room, halfway through presenting a slide deck, he suddenly forgot what he was about to say next. It wasn't anything serious—just a second where his mind felt hollowed out. He stood in front of the whiteboard, smiled, and picked the thread back up, but that one second stayed with him for a long time.

What really made him face the issue was the company's annual health check. The day the report came out, he sat on a plastic chair outside the examination room, flipping through those few pages, most of the numbers hovering at the edge of the reference ranges. The doctor didn't say much—just reminded him that sleep habits, diet, and stress needed to be looked at together, and to bring in whatever he was taking next time. He nodded, folded the report, and stuffed it into his briefcase. On the way home, he thought about those bottles in his drawer—some his wife had bought, some from a colleague's group order, and one he'd won at last year's year-end party. He'd never once read the label carefully.

That night he dumped the entire drawer out. Bottles and jars lined the table—some half-empty, some with the seal still unbroken. He pulled out his phone to look things up, typed a few words, and was stunned by how many results popped up. He realized he couldn't tell which were food products and which were medications, or the difference between "you'll feel it" and "it won't do anything." He clicked into a few pages at random—some were written with absolute certainty, others were just one long sales pitch. After twenty minutes, he felt more confused than before.

The next day at lunch, he ran into Yi-chun from his department in the break room. Yi-chun was the kind of person who filed her receipts by month. He casually asked her: Don't you think looking this stuff up is harder than researching a client list? Yi-chun said she'd gone through a round of research herself, then just took photos of all the bottles at home and brought them to a community pharmacy to ask. She said the pharmacist won't decide for you whether to take something, but will help you read the labels, check the ingredient lists, and see if anything overlaps. Chen Chia-hao didn't respond, but he filed it away in his mind.

On the weekend he went back to his hometown and saw a stack of unchecked lottery receipts on the coffee table in the living room. His mother had a habit of stuffing receipts into a tin box, saying she'd check them when she had time. He flipped through a few—one was from a chain drugstore, with two or three items printed on the receipt, names he'd never heard of. He took a photo, and when he got home, he compared it against the bottles in his drawer. That's when he realized: one bottle in his drawer was the same brand as something on the receipt but a different size; another one he'd bought last year had long expired. Sitting at his desk, he suddenly felt like he was investigating a small case: the clues were there, but they didn't fit together.

He decided to try a different approach. Instead of starting with "which one works," he'd first ask "what is this bottle, exactly." He turned each bottle over to the back, copying the product name, ingredients, suggested dosage, and warnings into a notebook, one by one. By the third bottle, he stopped—because he realized he couldn't even say whether it counted as food or medicine. He remembered what Yi-chun had said, so he opened his phone and wrote down his questions one by one: which ones to ask a pharmacist, which ones to ask a doctor, and which ones he could figure out just by reading the label carefully. He also typed men's health supplements into the search bar, wanting to see what kind of information others had put together—but he told himself this was just to find direction, not to find answers.

Two weeks later, he actually brought that notebook to the pharmacy. The pharmacist was a middle-aged man with glasses. After hearing him out, he first asked whether Chen Chia-hao was taking anything else and whether he had regular check-ups. Chen Chia-hao handed over the list. The pharmacist went through it item by item, circling a few things he hadn't noticed: some had overlapping ingredients, some had unclear labeling, and some simply didn't need to be taken right now. The pharmacist didn't say which was good or bad—only that he should take the list home and show it to his doctor at his next appointment, so the two sides could be compared for a clearer picture. When Chen Chia-hao walked out of the pharmacy, it was already dark. He put the notebook back in his bag and suddenly felt that stack of receipts was no longer just unchecked paper.

He didn't immediately empty the drawer afterward, nor did he rush out to buy anything new. What he did was something else: he wrote the expiration date on each bottle's label, pulled out the duplicates, and put the ones of unknown origin into a separate box to ask about at his next appointment. He also opened a memo on his phone, titled "Ask First, Then Buy." That unchecked receipt—he kept it, tucked into the last page of his notebook. Not because it might win, but because it reminded him that many things aren't about not researching enough—it's about doing it in the wrong order. Understanding what you already have before thinking about whether to buy more—for him, that step was more practical than anything.