What Happens After Nora Leaves? What Happens After Lying Flat?

I. Many Young People Ask: I Feel So Lost—How Do I Choose a Direction in Life?

Life is like the little horse crossing the river: you have to wade through it yourself.

People are not capable of giving others advice. Separate your responsibilities from theirs, and respect their destinies.

When young people reach the point where they no longer ask others which direction to choose, but ask only themselves, they have reached the next milestone in growing up and have made some headway along the path of exploration.

Feeling lost is common. This mainly falls under psychological “growth and development,” the concerns of psychoanalysis, developmental psychology, and positive psychology.

II. We Need a Framework of Marx, Zhuangzi, and Psychology

“Marx and Zhuangzi Offer a Philosophy for Ordinary People and Those Who Lie Flat”; Marx and Zhuangzi are beacons for ordinary people.

“Marx, Zhuangzi, and Psychology: Marxism from the Bottom Up”:

As ordinary people, we will spend a long time surviving in the cracks as atomized individuals in a cyberpunk world. What ordinary people need is a practical philosophy to guide individual survival amid these cracks and alienation: a worldview, an outlook on life and values, a philosophy of happiness and joy, and knowledge of mental hygiene. This means drawing on Marx, Zhuangzi, and psychology to discern and absorb the simple truth, goodness, and beauty in an alienated, impoverished external environment, and to form a connection with other people, the world, society, and history—nourishing the heart and allowing its innate wholeness to develop fully.

IV. Stop Seeking Outside Yourself; Look Within

The simple answer is Marxism (the pinnacle of systems of social science), humanism (innate wholeness, an equal and complete mind), and existentialism (unconditional existence, presence, and being at ease in oneself). The simple method is to love yourself and be yourself.

Society is alienated, yet everyone possesses innate wholeness, an equal and complete mind, unconditional existence, presence, and ease in oneself, and the usefulness of the useless. This is Zhuangzi’s butterfly fluttering in flight. See the previous article, “Gilligan’s Psychology: The School of Psychology Closest to My Own Views.”

What happens after Nora leaves? Wherever this heart finds peace is my home.

But this growth may take many years (I did not embrace Marxism until I was 30, or attain insight into Zhuangzi until I was 34).

See the previous article, “Suffering Did Not Devour Me; a Lotus Bloomed in My Heart.”

How many years does it take someone with a sense of inferiority to reach conditional confidence, and then unconditional confidence? Many years. Does being anxious help? No. Can anyone intervene to control the pace? No. See the previous article, “Spiritual Cultivation Is a False Concept.”

V. How to Earn Money, How to Put Food on the Table

(Many people: Finally, we’re getting to something practical.)

Can anyone answer this for you?

Ultimately, people need to eat, earn money, survive, and develop. They need to explore a humanistic path they themselves believe in, a virtuous cycle in their studies, careers, and social lives. A virtuous cycle of fulfilling oneself, helping others fulfill themselves, and being helped by others to fulfill oneself. What Fromm called “productiveness,” and what Maslow called self-actualization.

Art, sports, programming, independent media, and so on—who knows what your path is? Libido. See the previous article, “Mental Energy/Libido Determines Your Destiny.”

But you cannot rush it; follow your own pace. Look at Marx: he lived in poverty all his life, died without finishing *Capital*, and never saw a world revolution.

All I can tell you is to see beyond wealth and poverty, be at peace with your circumstances, and accept your fate. Look at the resolve and open-mindedness of great people, and find peace with things. The less you can see beyond wealth and poverty, the more they will hold you captive.

See the previous article, “Zhuangzi on How the Exemplary Person Remains Steadfast in Poverty.”

“Individual Problems Are Often Social Problems and Problems of Humanity.”

(Many people: Still nothing about how to get rich or succeed, and no stock tickers. Reading this article was a waste of time.)

Haha.

VI. From the Previous Article, “A Brief Discussion of Balancing Work and Rest” (Excerpt):

(I) Pace and Rhythm

Chill

The most important thing in life is balancing work and rest → pace and rhythm → slowing down and chilling. If you keep pushing yourself to stay tense, you are bound to neglect rest, and your efficiency will not be particularly high either. Slowing down makes it easier to notice fatigue and disruptions to your rhythm, and to recognize that you need rest.

Work well and rest well: the more you balance work and rest on the right path, and the more your instinctual self is at peace, the better things become.

Conversely, the more you are disturbed and interrupted by karmic obstructions, the more you wander in confusion, and the more you flail about and indulge yourself in harmful ways, the worse things become.

Work well and rest well, and proceed along the right path. It is a simple principle, but few people put it into practice.

(II) Zhuangzi: Talent vs. Lack of Talent, Usefulness vs. Uselessness

Talent vs. Lack of Talent

The Inner Chapters of the *Zhuangzi* discuss the way of “uselessness.” In the Outer Chapters, his followers wrote the story of “talent and lack of talent”: Zhuangzi’s disciples asked him why a great tree was able to survive because it was useless, while a goose was stewed in an iron pot because it was useless. Should one be useful or useless?

Zhuangzi smiled and said: “I would place myself between having talent and lacking talent. But even this is not a good solution. Ride upon the Way and its virtue and roam freely, transforming with the times, without committing yourself to any single course. Roam with the ancestor of all things; treat things as things without being made into a thing by them. Acting with purposes and pursuing things will bring frustration and humiliation.”

This is the central dilemma troubling Zhuangzi’s followers: without working for a living, you starve; working for a living, you cannot roam free. What are you to do?

Marx said that a human being is the sum of social relations. Can people be free of society, free of labor, free of being useful? No.

Life is always caught in the dialectic between “usefulness and uselessness,” between “labor and inactivity.” This is balancing work and rest.

If someone were free of labor, free of troubles and karmic obstructions, with nothing left but leisure, they would be an immortal. Only a handful have appeared in thousands of years.

Zhuangzi’s Approach to Making a Living

The *Zhuangzi* contains stories of Liezi raising pigs, Gengsang Chu farming, and Zhuangzi borrowing money. These are all very practical matters of labor, making ends meet, and survival. The approach to making a living advocated in the *Zhuangzi* is not to abandon productive work, achieve immortality through cultivation, and wait for others to support you. That is a misguided path.

Zhuangzi dragged his tail through the mud; Liezi considered himself to have attained nothing; when villagers wanted to make offerings to Gengsang Chu, he hurried away to avoid becoming entangled in chains of cause and effect. Without claiming ability or taking contrived action, without desires or pursuits, and without a fondness for setting oneself up as a teacher.

Marx made a living contributing articles explaining ideas to an American newspaper, and when he was desperately poor he even considered applying for an office job. Engels worked at a textile factory. They were simply adapting to their circumstances.

(III) Fate

A person’s brief life passes quietly amid this balance of work and rest. It is no different from the lives of swimming fish, flying birds, or other animals.

The wheat ripens just a few dozen times.

Both work and rest have their limits. Marx labored all his life without finishing the three volumes of *Capital*, and without establishing any Soviet state.

Be at peace wherever you find yourself. An individual is finite; all one can do is adapt to present circumstances, practice living in the present, and balance work and rest. Are external people and events, the times and circumstances, things you can control?