Excerpt from the Internet; Wu Xiaobo
This article was written by Wu Xiaobo
When I was standing across from me, I had an anxiety attack, because I was looking at the pile of books next to me, and I was looking for any of my books, but I couldn't find any of them, and writers have this kind of anxiety. Actually, I came to talk about this topic because I myself, for about a decade, have been plagued by such problems as anxiety disorders.
I remember when I was in middle school, I didn't have any anxiety, I was very happy, playing football, playing, being beaten by my parents, and being kicked out at most. Then when I went to university, I went to listen to the first lecture, and I went to a lecture hall, and I remember it very well, and then there were a lot of people in it, and I went late, and there were all people standing next to me, and there was no way, so we hung on the window door, and looked inside, and then the speaker was a young lecturer in the philosophy department, and he told us very loudly, God is dead, and that we have to evaluate the value of everything, and everything that is hard will disappear, so I almost fell off it, and I was thinking that I had just been admitted to university. God is dead, so what should I do?
At that time, talking about girlfriends was probably a very depraved thing, so I began to think about some of the questions of the person itself, and then there was no answer to give you, saying what books should I read, teacher, there was no place to ask such questions, only to find it myself, so I spent four years in college, and I spent four years in the university library. Because at that time my girlfriend was in Hangzhou, I was studying in Shanghai, I read books for four years, and then I ran into the library, and I didn't know what books to read, along that shelf, history, literature, and philosophy read in rows, and when I read some books, I felt that my brain was very clear, and I understood a lot of truths, and then I was very excited, and I ran out with a red face, and when I returned to the dormitory, I forgot all about it, and then I became very excited, and then I was very angry, and I wanted to express something, but in fact, I couldn't express it clearly. So I wanted to be an intellectual, Roosevelt said: what is a qualified intellectual? He said that you should have a career that does not make a living, so that you can resist all kinds of temptations of all institutions, groups, and organizations, and you can have an independent voice, so when I was in college, I was not at all averse to wealth, to money itself, and I think it is good to be a rich person.
Confucius had two disciples, one was called Yan Hui, the other was called Zigong, Yan Hui was a very poor and happy person, but when Yan Hui was twenty-nine years old, his hair was full of gray hair, and he hung up at the age of forty, and then Zigong was a person who was also very well educated, but he was very rich, Confucius traveled around the world, and he relied on him to take care of everyone, and then relied on him to sponsor him, and then he lived for more than seventy years, because he was very rich and thoughtful, and when he went to the nations, the kings of the nations were in a pavilion, standing face to face with him, Then I exercised etiquette equally, and I thought that kind of state was quite good, so I would rather be willing to be Zigong than to be Yan Hui who hung up at the age of forty.
At the end of my junior year, I went to join a group of college students, and there were four of us in the class, and we raised 5,000 yuan, and we set off from Shanghai and went around South China. We were about five months away, just four stray dogs. I was a child who grew up in the city, and I had never been in contact with the countryside before that, and in those five months, I really saw how vast the real China was, how high its mountains were, how wide its rivers were, how big the dust on the roads was, how poor the people were, and how many people there were.
So I'm thinking that when you were younger, if you had a long trip, it would have a profound meaning for your life. For example, when I went to Hunan, I went to a county, and we told the county that we were going to see the poorest family, so he took us to a mountain, and a woman gave birth to three daughters and a family, and then when we went, the two daughters and their mothers met us at the door, and then the eldest daughter was lying on the bed, why? Because the three daughters only have two pants, and then you open the lid of her pot, and it is all sweet potatoes, and the walls are hung with dried peppers and dried corn, and there are two local chickens on the ground, and then the so-called "four walls of the family", which is the real four walls of the family, and then when we left, we left her a fifty yuan yuan, and put it on her kang, and we saw that the woman, jumping around the whole room, like a dancing god, and the people in their village told us that she knew that it was a big piece of money. But she didn't know how big the money was, so those five months changed a lot for me, and I became one later, not a particularly angry person.
After I graduated from college, in the 90s, money began to become the main force in the country. National progress, say whether our country is progressive, we consider GDP (gross domestic product), what about individuals? How much money do you have? Then at that time, on all the roads in China, there was a saying that time is money. There has been a big change in people's perceptions, and in fact, during that time, when you faced these changes in facts, as a bystander, that anxiety was very great.
For example, once I went to a county to do research, it was a "fake village", they mixed flour and sugar together, then steamed it dry, and then it turned into granular stuff and poured into various bags and packages, and then it became banlan root, what kind of stomach nourishing powder, all kinds of bag packaging medicine. After I finished my investigation, when I left the village, I went to the entrance of the village, and I said to the village chief, I said that you have no morality, and all the people who buy your things are patients, and then the village chief told me, Comrade Wu, do you know?
My greatest morality is to make my whole village rich, let some people get rich first, regardless of white cats and black cats, catching mice is a good cat, I am the cat that catches mice.
After this paragraph, I feel that whether it is life or the progress of the country, it is not a very clear thing between black and white, and a large number of things happen in a gray area, which is also a major position and point of view that I wrote later.
Personally, I am very fortunate that in the early days, because of various chances, I was able to slowly cultivate myself into a person who relied on his own craft, relied on writing to eat, and in a particularly narrow field, such as financial writing, to be able to make himself relatively satisfied. It was when I was thirty years old. Lincoln once said that your parents gave you this face before the age of thirty, and after the age of thirty this face is your own. If you haven't been angry before the age of 30, like we have said about the angry youth, you have no conscience, and after the age of 30 you are still an angry youth, and you only know the words of anger, then you have no brains.
Our current anxiety may be the anxiety of growth, the anxiety of wanting to succeed, but successful people do have a lot of troubles for successful people. I have a very good entrepreneur friend, in 2001, he sold his business to a foreigner, he had more than 1 billion yuan in cash, in 2001, he had more than 1 billion yuan in cash in Chinese, probably no more than three people, so he is a very successful person in everyone's opinion. Then one year I went out with him to travel to the United States, and when I was going through customs, there was an American who had a very small child at customs, a child of five or six years old, and he picked up the child and showed it to the customs officer, and my friend suddenly burst into tears, and he said that he had a son and a daughter, and he said that I can't remember what my son and daughter looked like when they were five or six years old, and whether I had ever hugged them.
For more than ten years, he basically lived in the factory, and two-thirds of the time was out on business trips, so the children were handed over to his wife to manage, so when he had more than a billion, what did he lose? What he lost was that he had no choice but to hug his daughter, and that daughter was no longer his own, and I once asked a few of the richest people in China, and I was very curious about a question, and I asked them: You already have a lot of money, right? Why are you still making money?" I want to know how much money I'll make in my life" is probably the most anxious answer I've ever heard about wealth. I think there are probably three reasons for anxiety: the first is uncertainty. We are faced with an uncertain future, not knowing where we are going; The second point is that anxiety arises from comparison. It is more popular than death.
Two days ago, I met a 26-year-old young man, he told me that I was very anxious, when Einstein was 26 years old, he had already written "Special Relativity", Michelangelo was 26 years old, he had already carved out that David, he said that there was another person when he was 26 years old, he took a nap at noon, and there were three people who looked at the thatched house and wanted to invite him out to calm the world, that person was called Zhuge Liang.
He said I'm also 26 years old, why am I still here, and asked you if I want to start a business. So I think there will be a lot of anxiety in comparison; What about the third type of anxiety? I think it's the choice. will appear in your life
A lot of forks in the road, and then every time you choose it will consume your time, consume your energy, I think the way to overcome anxiety, in fact, is probably that you are between the age of twenty and thirty, during this period of time, when your vitality is the most vigorous, you have to think about a few things clearly, the first thing you have to think clearly about what is my favorite job in my life, what I love, this is the most critical thing; second, to make yourself a professional; Third, are you willing to spend the next 20 years to complete, this work you like and your professional things, I don't know if everyone is more anxious after I talk like this, or is it a little better?