What Life Lessons Did You Learn Too Late?

You must develop an offensive personality — always be proactive in what you do. It’s not that being passive means nothing good comes your way; it’s that being passive will definitely lead to disaster. A mindset that clings to the past and prefers to keep things as they are will be destroyed by entropy.

Desire is a good thing. Personal growth is actually the process of negotiating, compromising, and integrating with your own desires — understanding your true self. But our social environment deliberately stigmatizes and labels personal desires, with the goal of suppressing people’s drive to act, making people obedient and altruistic on command.

Learn to see things through the lens of entropy and game theory. This way, beyond the tool of morality, you’ll have at least three perspectives, allowing you to see things more clearly.

Be good at using alienation and manipulating value standards. Believe in the decisive role environmental alienation plays in shaping people. If you want to cultivate yourself into a certain kind of person, start with your environment and daily routines — design yourself. It won’t improve in a day or two, but after three months, you’ll see significant personal change. Society has a set of implicit value standards for judging individuals. Invest some resources in your personal image, and those value standards will vouch for you.

Everyone is living their first life. Most people aren’t as sophisticated or complex as their appearance and social media feeds suggest. Everyone has base instincts. Understanding the other person’s base instincts helps you get along better. In male-female relationships, understanding the base instincts of the opposite sex leads to better interactions.

Addition: the advantage of an offensive personality is that it snowballs. If you have an offensive personality, you’re more willing to try new things and learn new skills. Mastering one skill builds confidence to take on other things — like a hexagonal cycle game, constantly improving yourself. (I work first; when I get praised at work, I gain confidence to pursue hobbies. I’ve picked up fitness and swimming, which naturally gives me the confidence to learn tennis and drumming. These processes themselves provide me with confidence and depth, which is also why I’m good at striking up conversations with strangers now.)

The trap of East Asian society is that it deliberately fosters defensive or even withdrawn personalities, making people feel honored just to hold onto their little patch of work. That’s why many families sacrifice their children’s physical and mental health to make them study and grind at work. In the end, they get crushed in areas where they’re weak — emotional relationships and workplace psychology — always having their weaknesses exploited by others’ strengths, always being manipulated.

Break free from the social clockwork. Many people inexplicably end up on the “standard” life path — neijuan (involution / rat race), studying, working, arranged blind dates, marriage, taking on mortgages. At every stage, they lack reflection and process optimization, until they end up stuck like a wound-up clock, forced to accomplish many tasks every day (having to go to grad school, having to work, having to provide). Using an analogy: it’s like buttoning a shirt. If you button the first few wrong, it takes more than twice the time to undo them and re-button correctly than it would to do it right from the start. To undo the mis-buttoned parts of your life and avoid future mistakes, you need certain methods and techniques. Relying on sheer effort is just struggling in a spider web. You must examine yourself from every dimension: health, spirit, psychology, abilities, interpersonal relationships. Even more important, you must assess your own ideology — observe yourself. You can reference your parents, because for the first 30 years, parents have the greatest influence on their children’s ideology. You must also assess your social position and your position in the mating market. Acknowledging reality is the first step to changing your situation.

Use substitution to improve habits, design your environment to change your lifestyle. “I am the sum total of my habits.” Your daily behaviors determine what kind of person you are. For example, if you’re someone who loves gaming and devotes a lot of time to games, can you imagine life without games, or what you’d be like if you didn’t play games? You can use various scientific methods to design your daily routine. I haven’t played games in two years — I can’t even get into gaming for more than an hour. I can’t scroll through short videos for more than 10 minutes. All of this can be achieved by avoiding activation of the brain’s habit system.

Is it spending all your energy on willpower concentration, or using free will to change your life? You must believe in free will. Don’t believe in using willpower, “self-discipline,” and sheer effort. A person’s attention is a limited resource. Using self-discipline will only drain your mental reserves for the day and ruin it. The most effective approach is to guide your hobbies toward what you need to do through cyclical games and interests.

One more update: If you haven’t suffered from original family trauma, just rebel directly against the old man, throw a heavy punch, and you’ll win immediately — it’ll be cured right away. Talk to them about behavioral psychology — what’s going on with them and their parents, what’s going on with their own lives — and they’ll break down on the spot. If you’re being ganged up on, girls should run immediately. Guys, remember to smash things right there — make sure you break big, expensive items. Teach them a lesson.

The biggest lesson I’ve learned in the past 30 years is: life can only move forward. A person can only go forward. A person can only do what’s most appropriate in the present moment. Don’t be like an aging ox, repeatedly chewing over and ruminating on your suffering. Focus more on the present, not the past or the too-distant future. Many elderly people constantly chew over their past suffering, and in the end, drag those around them into that suffering too.

Success isn’t achieved overnight by one or two things, and it’s not about having just a few opportunities in a lifetime. Thinking there are only a few chances in life is, at its core, opportunism. Stay grounded. Design your life into a positive-cycle entropy-reducing system. Accumulate day by day, step forward step by step.