How to Resolve Year-End Anxiety / Lunar New Year Anxiety

How to resolve year-end anxiety
From ages 29 to 33, my year-end anxiety was severe. Over the past two years, it really has healed. Before that, when I was younger, energetic, full of vitality and hope, I wasn’t doing particularly well either, but my year-end anxiety wasn’t as intense.
Anxiety about time involves both our relationship with time and our understanding of life. It is complicated.
I. Career-planning anxiety
On one hand, there are issues with the career and industry themselves; on the other, there is an unsettled, disoriented state of mind.
This is even more pronounced for many freelancers.
It also involves a harsh superego, a harsh internal taskmaster. During my first few years as a freelancer, I set annual and monthly KPIs and OKRs for myself, and wrote monthly and annual reviews. I acted as my own Huang Shiren, the exploitative landlord, until I finally realized something was wrong. Once I let things take their natural course, I actually produced more work of higher quality. I also stopped writing annual reviews and started making “year-end sketches,” because words, and even the mind itself, can hardly sum up a year’s experiences and gains. They can only offer a rough sketch.
II. The social clock and competition with peers
These are classic issues, particularly pronounced among young people in East Asia. They involve career planning, comparisons with peers, elitism, existential questions, and the pressure to find a marriage partner and have children.
These are all complicated issues. They require rebuilding our worldview, outlook on life, and values, and healing our inner core through the full Marx + Zhuangzi + psychology framework. See the earlier article “How to Resolve Feelings of Inferiority About Your Educational Background.”
III. Family of origin and the environment you grew up in
The end of the year, especially the lunar year, brings up issues involving our family of origin and the environment we grew up in. These issues also involve career planning, the social clock, and competition with peers, as discussed above. Issues become entangled with other issues—there are so many of them. That is why we need to let go and simplify.
IV. Midlife crises and existential crises
What Irvin Yalom calls the existential challenges—loneliness, meaninglessness, freedom and responsibility, and death—are issues all modern people must face. The end of the year and midlife draw us into them more deeply. Death anxiety, as discussed in “How to Address a Harsh Superego and Self-Attack” and “How to Resolve Anxiety About Educational Qualifications,” is a later-stage issue that requires a systematic response. Death anxiety also involves our parents’ aging and becoming entangled with their death anxiety. Once again, issues become entangled with other issues, so separating them is very important.
See the earlier articles “The Fundamental Contradictions Facing University Students,” “Psychological Growth for Ordinary People,” “Zhuangzi and Nature Heal Existential Crises,” and “A Common Form of Confusion Among University Students: Existential Crisis.”
Money and ability
Money and ability are matters of survival. Ultimately, we have to respond to them with wisdom: Zhuangzi’s usefulness of the useless, and Marx’s alienation.
VI. Accepting mediocrity
“Accepting Mediocrity” is an advanced issue: accepting mediocrity, inability, non-action, freedom from desires and demands, freedom from worry and care, letting things take their natural course, and resting at ease with the times and circumstances.
VII. Living in the present
As with feelings of inferiority about educational background, this involves making peace with the past and future: not regretting the past, not fearing the future, living in the present, being grateful for the present, and being grateful to yourself.
Year-end anxiety involves making peace with life, fate, the past, and time, loving yourself, and being grateful to yourself. It is not simple.
This also shows us that many issues involve rebuilding an entire worldview, outlook on life, and system of values, which requires Marx + Zhuangzi.
“An Overview of My Marx + Zhuangzi + Psychology Framework”
12.28 How to Embrace the Shadow
Embracing the shadow is an important issue in psychological and inner life.
The shadow is the side of ourselves that we fear, reject, fight against, evade, and put off facing: our inner ego, emotions, trauma, defenses, fixations, and karmic obstructions. (See the earlier “Special Series on Karmic Obstructions.”)
I. Two People

1. Jung, who is famous for this.
   The earlier article “The Structure of ‘Me’: The ‘Real I’ Accompanies the Libido” compared my framework with Jung’s. Jung’s path of healing and growth involves the ego “striving” to integrate complexes, the shadow, subpersonalities, personality fragments, and so on (karmic obstructions), gradually arriving at the Self (wholeness).
   I think Jung was influenced by Spinoza (whom he himself mentioned) and traditions such as German objective idealism. His concept of the “Self” resembles Spinoza’s unity of nature, Schelling’s absolute identity, and the “Way” in Daoism: something “only a few people can attain.” So it is perfectly understandable that Jung liked Daoist philosophy.
   A good psychological documentary from recent years, *Stutz*, discusses embracing the shadow: the side of yourself that feels inferior, embarrassed, rejected, dejected, and ashamed, the side you wish you didn’t have—for example, yourself as a fourteen-year-old boy with acne.
   This framework is fairly practical and concrete, but it is clearly different from the humanistic, Zhuangzi, and Zen framework of “everyone possesses innate wholeness; there is nothing to cultivate or attain.” Common psychological concepts such as “striving” and “healing the inner child” are not views I agree with. See the earlier articles “Spiritual Cultivation Is a False Concept: Let Things Take Their Natural Course; Straining Leads You Astray,” “The Birth of a New Ego: The Spiritual Practitioner’s Ego,” and “The ‘Inner Child’ Heals Me.”
2. Gilligan
   See the earlier article “Gilligan’s Psychology: A Daoist Approach to Psychology.”
   Stephen Gilligan has a doctorate in psychology from Stanford and was a student of Erickson. Gilligan’s school of psychology is currently the closest to my own approach. He himself is very fond of Daoist philosophy, and I also think his school best represents what Zhuangzi’s psychology would look like.
   Its main elements are:
   a. Innate wholeness; “How Ordinary People Can Experience Innate Wholeness,” “A Brief History of the Development of the Concept of Innate Wholeness in Zen,” and “Humanism VS Marxism.”
   b. A deep connection among the self, others, and the world, a profound existential experience; “Psychological Growth for Ordinary People: Psychological Boundaries, Selfobject Relations Theory, and Object Relations Theory.”
   c. Surface-level verbal thought VS the deeper mind; see the earlier article “Zhuangzi’s ‘Discussion on Making All Things Equal’ and Marx: Returning from Surface-Level Verbal Thought to the Deeper Mind.”
   d. Letting things take their natural course (innate wholeness + deep connection + the deeper mind -> letting things take their natural course). Relax, and let the id heal naturally: the id will heal the real I on its own. What matters most for the real I is to avoid resisting or stirring things up.
   e. Embracing the shadow: Japanese Morita therapy’s approach—let suffering take its natural course, and do what needs to be done in daily life—is also a fairly Daoist, practical way of putting it.
   f. Acceptance: accept, allow everything to happen, embrace inability and non-action, and follow nature and fate rather than fighting them. Accept, relax, and let the id and mental energy/libido flow naturally.
   Taken together, this is clearly a framework based on innate wholeness, in which the inner mind naturally heals itself, with nothing to cultivate or attain. It is closer to Zhuangzi, Zen, and humanism. What matters most for the consciousness of the real I is to relax and stop fighting. It differs from the Jungian framework of “striving” and “healing the inner child.”
   II. What to Embrace
   (1) Avoidance
   The shadow comes from avoidance. On one hand, we evade things; on the other, we often lack sufficient experience of inner life and do not know how to live with our own minds.
   On the other side of this is society’s discipline, which demands that we be “simple and innocent,” and a remark that often makes people explode: “You’re overthinking it.” Socialization, objectification, instrumentalization, reification, and alienation devalue our colorful inner issues, emotions, and fluctuations in state, demanding “emotional stability.” That is why I previously wrote “Emotion Is a False Concept: With a Stable Personality, Emotions Take Their Natural Course” and “Psychoanalysis Lets People See the Poetry, the Sacred, and Cthulhu in Ordinary Life.”
   Embracing what we avoid means embracing emotions, embracing stray thoughts, and embracing karmic obstructions (“The Spiritual Practitioner’s Ego”). I personally like the concept of “libido” because it gives us a useful name for our inner emotions, fluctuations, karmic obstructions, and drives as we learn to coexist with our complex inner lives.
   General education and psychological education are important because they help people recognize the need to embrace emotions: emotions are natural and healthy. Anger, for example, is often stigmatized, but it is a healthy, normal emotion that deserves attention. When anger is suppressed, aggression turns inward. This is why many approaches to inner life emphasize acceptance, allowing, and embracing. One example is Hellinger’s “I Allow.”
   Embracing stray thoughts and karmic obstructions is an important concept in “spiritual cultivation.” Many spiritual practitioners do not allow themselves to have stray thoughts or karmic obstructions, which is itself a karmic obstruction. Enlightenment means an inherent emotional stillness: karmic obstructions gather and disperse like clouds, without unsettling you. Zhuangzi: “The perfected person uses the mind like a mirror: it neither escorts things away nor welcomes them in; it responds without holding on. Thus it can handle things without being harmed.”
   Many people mystify enlightenment, imagining that afterward you sit in meditation like an old monk and do nothing, or become all-knowing and all-powerful, able to turn stones into gold, fly through the sky, and travel beneath the earth. Many people think enlightenment means a cloudless sky stretching for miles, but the sun can still shine brightly when there are clouds.
   Just think of Lu Xun, Su Shi, Marx, and Engels. Didn’t they have times of worry, confusion, hardship, and having to earn a living? Surely they can still be called enlightened. Lu Xun’s writing is angry and tragically heroic, but his heart is tranquil.
   (2) Embracing Anxiety
   Anxiety is not a bad thing, escape is a good thing, and procrastination is not a problem.
   Internet cafés, video games, anime culture, and short videos are always accused of threatening to ruin an entire generation of young Chinese people. In reality, they haven’t. These forms of “escape” have served as what Winnicott called a “transitional space,” or even a holding environment. Looking back at thirty-five, those days in internet cafés offered rare breathing room and mental space during the intense pressure of adolescence. Seeing more than a billion people struggle through life while retaining a simple sense of truth, goodness, and beauty makes me feel innate wholeness all the more deeply. “How Ordinary People Can Experience Innate Wholeness.”
   Why is anxiety good? When being around someone makes us anxious, that is a signal that we should leave that person. “Socializing as a Process of Selection,” “The People Who Told Me There Was Something Wrong with Me ‘For My Own Good’ Were the Ones Who Made Something Wrong with Me.”
   Procrastination is a lack of mental energy, and self-attack damages that energy further. That is why I wrote “Procrastination Is a False Concept.” Much procrastination actually happens because the libido has already made a judgment and a decision, but consciousness