人选天选论: Chapter 6
Once an explanation exists only to comfort you,
it eventually becomes the prison of your life.
《人选天选论》 Chapter 6 · Cracks in Tian Quan
姜蓝 著
The first time I met Axiang was on a very, very early morning. It was the summer after my freshman year of college, and I had come to Sihui to learn the jadeite business. I was riding a bicycle with one hand while holding a pile of materials with the other. Most of them were bad purchases. But at that age, I was actually very clear that losing money on materials was the price of learning jadeite. At that stage, I could see my own deficiencies. Greed and fear were in perfect balance. I could move freely between the two sides of Tian Quan.
Sihui at that time always felt damp. The air carried the smell of engine oil from saws and the powdery smell of freshly cut jade. Many workshops opened very late. That day, I woke up especially early, held my materials alone, and searched for workshops all along the area near the International Jade City.
The sky had just brightened. There were barely any people on the street, and most rolling shutters were still closed. Only one small stall had not fully shut its door. I remember it clearly. In the middle of a cluster of workshops filled with slab materials and jadeite cylinders, there was a storefront for custom processing. The rolling shutter had left a very narrow opening, roughly thirty centimeters wide.
I stood at the door and knocked. No response. I knocked again, gently. Still no one. So I carefully pulled the door sideways a little and peeked inside. It was dark. Someone was sleeping on a sofa. The sofa was very old, the kind with cracked leather. Beside it was a crutch. He was covered with a cheap coral-fleece blanket, and the blanket covered even his face. You could clearly see the outline of the person underneath it. More than half of his left leg was gone.
My heart jolted. It was not fear. It was just that, at that age, I had rarely seen a truly incomplete person from such a close distance. The feeling was strange, as if you had always believed life was only a matter of “success” and “failure.”
Then, one day, someone placed another thing in front of you: “fate.” Something you had repeatedly thought about before, but had never truly felt the weight of.
His head was still covered. I stood at the doorway and asked quietly, “Boss, are you there?”
He did not get up. Wrapped inside the blanket, he only replied, “What is it?”
His voice was lazy, like someone just dragged out of a dream.
I said, “I have some materials. I want to process them.”
He was silent for a while, then asked, “Is it urgent?”
I said, “Not urgent.”
Then I saw him slowly, very slowly, prop himself up from the sofa. First he reached around everywhere, looking for his glasses. After searching for a long time, he finally found them and put them on. Then his other hand continued searching for the crutch. He searched for quite a while before gripping it. After that, he supported himself bit by bit and stood up.
But the moment he stood, a smile appeared on his face. I remember that smile very deeply. It was not a sudden laugh. It was natural, like someone opening a window just a little. Many years later, I still remembered that smile, because it was strange. It was not a “happy” smile, nor was it a “pleasing” smile. It was more like the only remaining warmth left after someone had become used to life.
Only later did I learn that Axiang had been infected by bacteria as a child, and his leg had been amputated. For many years, he slept on that broken sofa because going upstairs was inconvenient, and also because he did not really have anything that could be called a “home.” But he was always smiling. He smiled when he saw anyone. When people talked to him, he smiled. When people joked, he smiled. Sometimes when people went too far, he still smiled.
Many people would think: this person’s mentality is really good. But later, I slowly discovered that someone who always smiles is not necessarily relaxed.
Sometimes it is only because he no longer has a way to express any other face. People are strange. If the cold lasts long enough, the hands go numb. If pain lasts long enough, the legs go numb too. It is like putting your hand into snow in winter. At first, the cold is piercing. Later, you feel as if it is no longer that cold. Many people think this is adaptation. It is not. It is sensation beginning to recede.
I once asked Axiang a question.
I said, “What if one day you got cancer?”
He smiled and said, “If I got cancer, I’d just die. It’s nothing. That would be fine too.”
He said it very lightly, as if talking about something very far away, as if death were not a wall but only a stone by the roadside. I did not really understand it at the time. I even thought he was genuinely detached.
Five years later, he really got liver cancer. Only then did I discover that people are not so easily detached. He began to desperately want to live. He called me and told me to help him find medicine. He wanted to live. He wanted to live very, very much. In the end, he left.
The days after that repeatedly verified one thing: those who say they are not afraid of death are often the most afraid of death. Yet the more one wants to live, the closer death comes. That kind of pain, even now, after having empathized with it, is something I still do not dare recall. During that period, I even did not quite dare go see him.
It was not that I did not want to see him. It was that I knew: when someone has spent a long time standing on the side of “if I die, I die,” and is suddenly pulled back by the force of “I want to live,” that is not ordinary pain. It is the pain of the entire bridge being ripped open and shattered.
He had once seemed unafraid of death. But perhaps that was not true fearlessness. Perhaps the fear was simply too vast, so vast that he could only press it down with an extreme kind of optimism. Press it down long enough, and a person begins to think he is truly not afraid.
This is what it looks like when Tian Quan cracks open.
He had lived too long on the side of fear, or too long on the side of greed. After enough time, he lost the ability to move back and forth.
Why the Bridge Breaks
A normal person should be contradictory. He should be both confident and insecure, both brave and cowardly, both wanting to live and afraid to die. This contradiction is not a bad thing. It is precisely proof that his bridge of Tian Quan is still there. Greed can walk over to the side of fear and look around. Fear can also walk over to the side of greed and look around. He can move back and forth, so he can still adjust.
But if a person is left with only one side, the problem begins.
Only confidence, no insecurity.
This person will become boundlessly arrogant without knowing it, and by the time he ruins himself, waking up will already be too late.
Only insecurity, no confidence.
This person will keep lying to himself, keep rationalizing himself, and the accumulation of this self-consistency will eventually collapse.
Only greed, no fear.
This person will keep raising the stakes, all the way into madness.
Only fear, no greed.
This person will keep retreating, until this vast world no longer has any place for him.
At that point, it is not that he cannot think. It is that the bridge of Tian Quan has broken. He cannot cross. He cannot move from one side to the other and see his complete self.
Why does the bridge break? Not because people suddenly lose reason. Very often, it is because they want comfort too much.
Human beings are born with a powerful instinct to let themselves off. They reduce a complex world into one simple reason. Complexity is painful. Complexity means uncertainty, and uncertainty makes people afraid. So people search for the most comfortable explanation and use it to comfort themselves past the pain.
This kind of explanation is not for truth. It is not for knowledge. It is for comfort. Once the explanation works, he can tell himself: it is not that I am incapable. It is that the world has a problem.
With that, the heart regains balance. But the problem also begins there. Because the explanation a person uses to comfort himself will eventually become the logic of his actions.
This sentence is very important.
Today, for the sake of comfort, you explain the world incorrectly. Tomorrow, you will act according to that incorrect world. This is the truly terrifying part of the bridge breaking. It is not that you lied to yourself once today. It is that afterward, you will live your life according to the logic produced by that lie.
My Own Crack
I have also gone through this kind of period myself, and it was serious at the time.
I made money very young. By twenty-two, I had already made ten million. At that time, I was very arrogant. Subconsciously, I felt that among people my age, as long as they did not rely on their families, no one had more money than me, no one was more successful than me, and no one was smarter than me.
You see, that version of me was already in a state where the bridge was close to breaking. This was completely different from when I lost money buying materials and believed that losing money was only natural. At that time, I was standing only on the side of greed. I was not looking at the world. I was using the world to prove myself.
Later, when I was twenty-three, I saw someone: Yu Jiawen from Super Curriculum Schedule. At the time, his labels were loud: the strongest post-90s entrepreneur, the king of post-90s startups, and he even claimed he would hand out one hundred million in bonuses to everyone. The company’s valuation was high, in the billions. The media at the time were all saying he was impressive.
But inside, I was uncomfortable. That discomfort was not ordinary jealousy. It was as if a corner of my world had been smashed open. Because the explanation I had given myself before was: among people my age who did not rely on their families, no one was stronger than me. But suddenly, someone appeared who seemed to stand higher and stronger than me. I felt terrible.
Unable to bear that discomfort, I called people from my company into a meeting.
I asked them, “What do you think of this person?”
The people following me were simple inside. They said, “He’s very impressive.”
At that moment, I could not stand it. What I was really asking in my heart was not “what is he like?” What I was really asking was: is he more impressive, or am I more impressive?
This is greed. It is the desire to prove oneself. But behind this greed, fear immediately followed. I was afraid I was not the most impressive one. I was afraid that my self-narrative would be shattered. I was afraid that the whole set of things I had believed was not valid.
So I began searching for explanations.
I said: his money is capital’s money. It is not his own cash.
I said: that is valuation. It is not money he has truly earned.
I said: he has investment, packaging, media. He is different from me.
Is it possible that all these explanations were entirely wrong? Of course not. But the question was not whether they were true. The question was why I was so desperate to explain. Because I needed comfort. I needed to explain away the thing that had pierced me and shattered my world. I needed to tell myself: it is not that he is truly stronger than me; it is only that his strength and my strength are different.
This is where the bridge began to go wrong.
If, at that time, I had been able to walk from greed to the side of fear and look around, what I should have seen was:
- Why am I so afraid of others being stronger than me?
- Why must I be the most impressive person among my peers?
- Why can’t I accept that someone in this world has taken another path?
- Why can’t I admit that some people are willing to bear costs I am unwilling to bear?
Many, many years later, when I often livestreamed, people would ask me about the success rate of AI entrepreneurship. What I want to tell everyone is this: the probability of succeeding in the AI industry today may be one in a million, but if ten million people are willing to do it, someone will definitely succeed.
As for me? I am too unwilling to do things with a one-in-a-million probability. I prefer doing things with a success probability above sixty percent. Because I was deeply shaped by The Art of War, I understand the principle of winning first, then fighting.
This is not about who is superior or inferior. It is about different choices. I use a lower ceiling and pay a larger price in exchange for higher certainty. Others use greater risk in exchange for greater possibility.
This is the complete view of the world and entrepreneurship. This is what one should see when the bridge is still there.
But at the time, I did not think this way. I only wanted to explain away his strength. Once I had explained it away, I felt comfortable.
Negation can make me extremely comfortable. But that comfort has a price, because it makes me continue to see the world through incorrect logic. I would become more and more likely to attribute other people’s success to:
- He has capital.
- He has resources.
- He has connections.
- He has packaging.
These can certainly be factors. But if I only look at these, I will fail to see other things.
- I will fail to see the risks he dared to take.
- I will fail to see the probability he was willing to gamble on.
- I will fail to see the costs of his choice.
- I will fail to see what he endured while standing in that position.
The Comfort of Being Inside the Painting
This is what is terrifying about the inside-the-painting mind. It makes you comfortable, but it also blinds both your eyes while you remain completely unaware.
So you will see many people like this. You see a girl, a beautiful girl, whose classmate becomes a big star. This girl feels uncomfortable inside. She is simply unwilling to admit that the other girl may truly be prettier, may truly have worked harder, may truly be better at expressing herself, may truly be more willing to gamble, or may simply have encountered an opportunity at the right time.
All of this is too complex. So she gives herself an explanation: didn’t she just sleep with the director?
The moment this explanation appears, she becomes comfortable, because she no longer has to face the gap between them.
When someone becomes student council president, he says: isn’t it just because he knows how to please teachers?
When someone gets promoted, he says: isn’t it just because he flatters the boss?
When someone makes money, he says: isn’t it just because his father is rich? Isn’t it just because he has connections?
Do you see it? He never wants to search for the true laws of this world. He is searching for an explanation that makes him comfortable. But this explanation will not remain merely an explanation. It will become the guidance for his future actions. It will become the compass pointing his direction.
If he thinks others succeed by giving gifts, he will go give gifts. If he thinks others rise by flattering people, he will go flatter people. If he thinks others make money through connections, he will only look for connections.
Perhaps in the end, he really bows his head. He really gives gifts. He really flatters. He may even sleep with someone. He truly places himself low enough, but he still does not get the result he wants.
Why?
Because the cause and effect he first saw, the cause and effect he used to deceive himself and summarize the world, was wrong from the beginning. He only used it to comfort himself. He did not truly see the world.
This is the inside-the-painting mind. It is not stupidity. It is a choice to give up becoming someone outside the painting for the sake of temporary comfort. It numbs itself by lowering dimensions, and that numbness also controls it.
So the rupture of Tian Quan is not an abstract concept. It means you can only see the world through one explanation. You can only stand on the side of greed, or only stand on the side of fear.
You can no longer move back and forth. You can no longer confirm between “what I want” and “what I fear.” At this point, a person begins to move toward extremes.
People at the extreme of greed become more and more arrogant. They only see what they want and cannot see the cost.
People at the extreme of fear shrink more and more. They only see risk and cannot see that they still want many things.
These two kinds of people look opposite on the surface.
One rushes forward.
One retreats.
But underneath, they are the same.
Both are cases where the bridge of Tian Quan has collapsed.
Explanation Is Only a Temporary Bridge
Many, many years later, I increasingly feel that humans of course need to explain the world. Without explanations, people cannot live. But you must know this: your explanation is only temporary. It is not ultimate truth.
The only truth in the world is that there is no truth. All explanations are only a small part of movement and change itself.
Of course, this includes Ren Xuan Tian Xuan Lun. It is also my temporary explanation of the world. I predict that in less than ten years, I will overturn my previous explanations myself. But this does not mean this current explanation has no value.
A person’s growth is not that he possesses a set of explanations that are forever correct. It is that he knows: my explanation may also exist only to make me comfortable. What I see now may only be one side of the coin. The place where I now stand may only be one side of the bridge.
If we can still think this way, our bridge is still there.
If we are completely unable to think this way, then cracks have already begun to appear in the bridge.
Axiang’s story let me see the bridge breaking on the side of fear. My own story let me see the bridge breaking on the side of greed.
One is smiling after too much pain.
One is hurting after too much pleasure.
On the surface, they are completely different. But in essence, they are the same: a person has stayed too long on one side and can no longer return.
So why does the bridge crack? Not because people lack wisdom, but because people need comfort too much. They want too badly to feel comfortable, to believe they are not wrong, to make the world simple. So they use one explanation to cover pain, and then are forced to use that explanation to guide the direction of their life.
In the end, explanation becomes a prison.
And the bridge slowly cracks.
It is half past midnight in Tokyo now. The night is deep. I am still on the balcony writing this article. Xiaolong brought me a blanket and poured me a glass of water. He stood beside me, watching what I was writing. When he saw this part, Xiaolong asked me: does that mean we should not be greedy, should not be afraid, and should not explain the world?
My answer is no.
People will certainly be greedy. People will certainly be afraid. People will certainly explain the world.
What truly matters is this: after you finish explaining, are you still willing to look back once? After you become comfortable, are you still willing to ask: is this explanation for truth, or is it for protecting myself?
As long as you can still ask, the bridge has not broken.
Once you completely stop asking, that bridge of Tian Quan has already begun moving toward collapse.
All right. Please remember: we will certainly find reasons and excuses for ourselves. This is the innate self-repairing capacity of the human heart, and it is also an inseparable and important part of Tian Quan. But we must remember this: greed and fear are not the fundamental human nature we need to overcome. But every action necessarily has a cost.
In the next two chapters, we will discuss the cost of fear and the cost of greed.
—— 姜蓝《人选天选论》・Chapter 6 · Cracks in Tian Quan ——
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