Connection with Fate

Connection with Destiny: Becoming the Chosen One of Your Own Era

I. The Chosen Ones of an Era

Watching WhynotTV interviews, I see young people studying EE, CS, mathematics, and physics at Tsinghua, Peking University, Fudan, and Shanghai Jiao Tong; programming and competing in contests; researching large AI models; and pursuing PhDs in AI and robotics at CMU. They are outstanding, and I highly recommend the videos. They can think *Real Steel* is cool, learn while having fun, finish their studies smoothly, and graduate into highly paid jobs at major AI companies, with limitless prospects, benefiting from the opportunities of their time.

These are the chosen ones of the early twenty-first century—the STEM era, the AI era.

China’s decades of growth and opportunity have produced plenty of chosen ones: cadres who joined the revolution in 1938, the last three cohorts of secondary-school students before the Cultural Revolution, Tsinghua’s X-designated classes, and so on.

II. Meta-Destiny

Are ordinary people ordinary simply because they do not work as hard as these young people? The luckier you are, the harder you work, rather than the harder you work, the luckier you get.

They lack those objective and subjective conditions. Circumstances did not allow them to do those things then, and they still lack the conditions to do them now. Talent is what is acquired through life; talent is destiny, and destiny is talent.

“At fifty, I understood the mandate of Heaven.” Form a connection with yourself, with your own destiny and mission, and align with the Way without deliberate intent.

Everyone has their own fate: meta-destiny, metacognition, meta-decisions, meta-views on the world, life, and values, and a karmic field. Actively or passively, we find our way into a particular system of views on the world, life, and values.

Take me, for example: a savior complex -> a fixation on the social sciences -> a sense of history and a historical perspective; losing my simplicity -> returning to simplicity; IT entrepreneurship -> great products, humanistic products, and so on. My meta-destiny, my life’s task, is to move toward Marx + Zhuangzi + psychology. This is the direction of my libido. These things are decent or beautiful, but at certain stages, they do not make for an ordinary, uneventful life.

Marx + Zhuangzi—historical materialism and the Daoist understanding of destiny—allow people to form a connection with history and destiny.

III. Become the Chosen One of Your Own Version, the Chosen One of Your Own Realm

Everyone must fulfill their own Way. Life’s only task is to be yourself, its only difficulty is living in the present, and its only achievement is fulfilling yourself. Form a connection with your own destiny, find your life’s task and your own version of life, become the chosen one of your own version and your own realm, and become the GOAT of your own life.

People such as Yu Donglai, Zhang Xue, Liu Cixin, the teacher Zhang Guimei, the academician Yuan Longping, Wang Baoqiang, Zhang Weili, and GAI, as well as those hemmed in by the circumstances of their own lives—Fried Chicken Brother, Helen Keller, Winter Swimming Brother, and Officer Tan—are all becoming chosen ones within their own destinies. There is no hierarchy among them; fame and fortune are no measure for comparison.

People judge talent only in terms of practical success, which is foolish. Whoever succeeds is said to have a talent for this or that. UFC founder Dana White was only an amateur boxer, but he excelled at operations and marketing, making the UFC a global sensation. What is his talent? Becoming the chosen one of his own version.

Countless people lose their way within their own destinies, losing their connection with themselves and the world. People such as Dangnian Mingyue and Zhang Xuefeng were dealt the hand of a chosen one, yet lost themselves within their version. This is the karmic force of fate. See, for example, “The Existential Crisis of a Middle-Aged Programmer at a Major Tech Company.”

IV. Be at Ease with the Rhythm of Your Own Version, and Wait for Its Wind

Zhuangzi opens with “Free and Easy Wandering.” The giant Peng bird benefits from the wind, but is also grounded when there is no wind. This is its destiny: to be at peace with its time and accept the course of things, composed and at ease. If it wallows in self-pity and feels it is worse off than a small bird, what traps it is not the absence of wind, but its troubled mind. “The exemplary person remains steadfast in hardship.”

The giant Peng bird and the small bird are not to be compared by how high they fly, but by their happiness and tranquility, their unity with Heaven and nature.

Be at ease with the rhythm of your own life. Compose your own music, dance your own dance, and quietly await those who understand you. Be at peace with your time and accept the course of things.

Zuo Zongtang focused on practical affairs and applying knowledge to the needs of the world. He struggled to find success through the imperial examinations. Only after he turned 40, when southern China fell into turmoil and conflicts between China and foreign powers intensified—when history underwent enormous changes, contradictions sharpened, and events surged—did his version arrive. The Chinese Communist Party was founded in 1921, but only after the April 12 Incident in 1927, when the times called for taking to the mountains and establishing armed worker-peasant base areas, did Mao Runzhi enter his version. And only after Zunyi in 1935 did he truly become a chosen one of the era.

Yet before Zuo Zongtang died, the Fujian Fleet, into which the Self-Strengthening Movement had poured its efforts, was destroyed in the Battle of Fuzhou. Even these great figures were battered by history and destiny, let alone ordinary people like us.

GAI, a junior-college graduate, was hungry and struggling before he shot to fame in 2017, the breakthrough year for Chinese rap. After 2017, his efforts bore fruit.

Professor Tang Jie of Zhipu was still teaching at Tsinghua as usual ten years ago, during the first era of AI’s “Four Little Dragons,” watching his students enjoy immense success. In the second era of AI’s “Four Little Dragons,” he is a leading figure. But once this wave of opportunity passes, how the subsequent destinies of the thousands of managers and employees across those four companies will unfold remains unknown. Many of the AI stars of ten years ago have already lost their way in the AI wave. It is all destiny.

V. An Ordinary Person’s Path to Embracing Mediocrity

For a mediocre person to embrace mediocrity is itself extraordinary. This is my version. My path is difficult, unconventional, and unstandardized—a long road, a long march, a broad Way, destined for quiet solitude and late fulfillment. As an ordinary, mediocre person, I already find it difficult. So an accompanying metacognitive understanding should be: walk slowly and take the long view. Short-termism is fundamentally unsuitable for anyone, and even less suitable for me.