Facing the Midlife Crisis with Marx and Zhuangzi: Refactoring the Shitpile of Code Behind Our Worldview, Outlook on Life, and Values

Facing the Midlife Crisis with Marx and Zhuangzi: Refactoring the Shitpile of Code Behind Our Worldview, Outlook on Life, and Values

Note: “Shitpile” code and code refactoring are common phenomena and terms in IT and the internet industry. In the early stages of development, the priority is to get a prototype running as quickly as possible, leaving many accumulated problems in the codebase and technology stack to be optimized and refactored in the middle and later stages. It is like replacing an emergency pontoon bridge built during wartime with a steel bridge in peacetime.

From ages 12 to 30, young people in East Asia move from secondary school to graduate school, then into work and matchmaking, seeking answers and validation outside themselves all along the way, caught in vicious tournament-style competition and involution, battered and adrift throughout. Their families of origin, their formative school environments, and their first workplaces leave them with accumulated stress and trauma. Along the way, their worldview, outlook on life, and values remain muddled as they hastily plug leaks, stanch bleeding, and patch things up. All kinds of psychological defenses, ego, personality fragments, personas, false selves, and other karmic obstructions, contradictions, and conflicts keep accumulating, until their entire system of beliefs and understanding resembles a growing shitpile of code.

The midlife crisis at 30 involves, first, the social clock: reaching a crossroads in life and deciding whether to stay on the prescribed track or leave it for the open wilderness. The shadow of death also begins to surface, presenting the formidable challenge of an existential crisis. Second, it involves the psychological clock: on the one hand, you are now strong enough to face many truths and reorganize many relationships and patterns; on the other, the shitpile of code underlying your beliefs and understanding can barely run anymore and keeps breaking down. A typical question: is history made by the people or by heroes? The social Darwinism and elitism you have relied on all along begin to boomerang back and wound you. (See my earlier piece, “You Cannot Be a Social Darwinist and an Elitist Only When Luck and Power Are on Your Side: A Common Phenomenon Among Coders at Big Tech Companies and Financial-District Professionals.”) Jung said that real life only begins at 40; this is about awakening and reshaping oneself.

To optimize and refactor the code behind our worldview, outlook on life, values, and cognitive system, we 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 so on, leaving some gaps 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. We therefore need to draw on the relatively advanced philosophical system of Zhuangzi to fill these gaps. Zhuangzi’s philosophy is close to Epicurean philosophy; it is not an isolated case.)

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