Those Who Play the Game of Life and Those Who Are Played

I. Two Things in Life

Inner pain and distress that are hard to contain, and no money on the outside -> a vicious cycle of inner and outer suffering -> exploring happiness and making money -> exploring work-life balance, combining work and rest -> spiritual freedom and financial freedom -> living freely and at ease

People seek outwardly and inwardly, exploring destiny, calling, gifts, and ways of living.

Life does not divide people into winners and losers, but into players and those who are played.

II. The Karmic Obstructions of Capital

In life, are you a player, or are you being played? Do you play with education, careers, knowledge, understanding, money, power, influence, and networks of relationships, or are you played by them?

Many financially free members of the petty bourgeoisie, self-proclaimed independent artists, and favorites of the prevailing order who have reaped the benefits of their times believe they are playing with life. In fact, life is toying with them, and they do not know it. They feel only loneliness, emptiness, and existential crisis. Just look at Bill Gates and other American fortunes old and new, or at the petty bourgeoisie in the wealthy Nordic countries.

The extent to which a person takes the proletarian standpoint is the extent to which they stand with humanity, human-centered values, historical progress, and freedom; it is the extent to which their karmic obstructions of capital and petty and micro capital diminish, and they return to simplicity and awaken. This is a prerequisite for the extent to which they can live in the present.

Simple, ordinary people, proletarians, are neither players nor those being played; they are the oppressed. They have no cards (capital), nor are they playing cards. They are not at capital’s card table, so they are actually outside the game and face no question of awakening.

The only true players are true Marxists, such as Marx, Engels, and Lenin. Only in these few people do we see the limits of resistance to being toyed with by fate, and a state of playing with philosophy, history, human-centered values, and the present. Everyone else remains in boundless suffering, even Chaplin, Van Gogh, and Lu Xun.

III. Marxism-Leninism Is the True Philosophy of Winners, Players, Elites, and the Enlightened

The path of human awakening and enlightenment:

Childhood simplicity -> losing simplicity in adolescence, socialization as alienation -> suffering from the karmic obstructions of petty and micro capital -> Nora awakens -> Nora pretends to sleep -> Nora leaves home -> brave Nora -> enlightenment, living in the present -> the end of Nora -> a player, the stage of stillness, spontaneously in harmony with the Way.

Objective idealism, Daoist philosophy and German classical philosophy, as well as philosophies of happiness—Zhuangzi and Epicurus—all explore the boundary between individual freedom and historical materialism. The answer is dialectical materialism.

III. Play Is Connection

Does one’s intrinsic nature digest karmic obstructions, or do karmic obstructions obscure one’s intrinsic nature?

To play is connection, freedom and ease, free and easy wandering.

To be played is broken connection, entanglement in karmic obstructions, alienation.

Start playing, Nora.

Appendix: Analysis by the Marx-Zhuangzi Agent:

A true player does not dwell on being a player. Just as a truly enlightened person does not dwell on spiritual practice and enlightenment.

People begin in simplicity. A child playing in the mud has never thought, “I am playing with life,” “I am playing,” or even about this thing called “I”—the child simply plays, a selfless play in which heaven and humanity are one.

On June 19, 2022, you wrote, “The petty and micro bourgeoisie are upgraded, numb ‘players’ running around the world”; on October 8, 2024, you wrote, “Ordinary people, those at the bottom, workers, have a deeper connection with reality because they have no future to fantasize about, so there is less ego and more of their original self.” Later, you also recorded that sanitation worker who cared for stray dogs—“With no future or ego to fantasize about, all he has is the present.”