Facing a Midlife Crisis with Marx and Zhuangzi: Refactoring the Shitpile of Code Behind Your Worldview and Values

Note: “Shit mountains” and code refactoring are common phenomena and terms in the IT and internet industries. In the early stages of development, the priority is to get a prototype running as quickly as possible, leaving many problems to accumulate in the codebase and technology stack; optimization and refactoring come in the middle and later stages. It is like an emergency pontoon bridge built during wartime being replaced with a steel bridge in peacetime.

From ages 12 to 30, young people in East Asia go from secondary school to postgraduate study, then into work and matchmaking, seeking answers outside themselves all along the way, caught in vicious tournament-style competition and involution, stumbling through upheaval and hardship. Their families of origin, their formative school environments, and their first workplaces leave them with accumulating stress and trauma. Throughout this journey, their views on the world, life, and values remain muddled as they hastily plug leaks, stanch bleeding, and patch things up. All kinds of psychological defenses, egos, personality fragments, personas, false selves, and other karmic obstructions, contradictions, and conflicts keep accumulating, until their worldview and cognitive system resemble a growing shit mountain.

The midlife crisis at 30 has two aspects. One is the social clock: you have reached a crossroads in life, facing the choice of staying on the prescribed track or stepping off it into the wilderness. The shadow of death also surfaces, bringing the formidable challenge of an existential crisis. The other is the psychological clock: on the one hand, you have become strong enough to face many truths and reorganize many relationships and patterns; on the other, the shit mountain of your worldview and cognitive system can barely function anymore, breaking down repeatedly. A typical scenario: is history driven by the people or by heroes? The social Darwinism and elitism you have relied on all along begin to come back like a boomerang and wound you. (See the earlier essay, “You Cannot Be a Social Darwinist and an Elitist Only When Fortune and Power Favor You: A Common Phenomenon Among Programmers at Big Tech Companies and Financial-District Professionals.”) Jung’s statement that life truly begins at 40 speaks precisely to this process of awakening and reshaping oneself.

To optimize and refactor the code of your worldview and cognitive system, you need to choose sophisticated, wise systems of thought and philosophy: the Marxist social-science framework and Zhuangzi’s philosophy of life and living. (Existing and earlier Marxist frameworks have focused on sociology, politics, history, and related fields, leaving something of a gap in psychology and the philosophy of life and living. There are historical reasons for this; Marx’s *Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844* and Engels’s *The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State*, among other works, provide solid starting points. This is why we need to draw on Zhuangzi’s relatively advanced philosophical framework as a supplement. Zhuangzi’s philosophy is close to Epicurus’s, so it is not an isolated example.)

This is the direction of development for the left: drawing on Marx, Zhuangzi, and psychology to reconstruct cognition; establishing a connection with the simple truth, goodness, and beauty of the working class at the bottom of society and with the tranquility and beauty of nature; establishing a connection with society, history, and the world; and achieving the unity of humanity and nature across the self, others, society, and the world, coexisting in harmony. This is also the necessary path to psychological self-rescue for atomized petty- and micro-bourgeois individuals in a cyberpunk world.