By Jane Sonnenschein · June 15, 2025

The Zhongyong¹ says: “Before joy, anger, sorrow, and pleasure arise, this is called the center; when they arise and are all expressed in the right measure, this is called harmony.” True zhongyong has never meant having no position, or trying not to offend anyone. It means finding a balance within complicated people and situations — one that is neither excessive nor extreme, and that can actually be sustained.

I used to feel that the word zhongyong sounded a little unsatisfying. It does not have the sharpness of an extreme position, nor does it give you the instant certainty of a slogan. In many public debates especially, if someone is not forceful enough, does not immediately take sides, or refuses to offer a quick conclusion, they can easily be accused of simply smoothing things over.

But over time, I have come to think that real zhongyong is not vagueness. It is maturity. It understands that many problems in the real world simply cannot be summed up by one simple answer.

Recently, while talking about Freud and Adler, I suddenly found myself thinking about this again.

Freud seems to ask: Why did I become the person I am today? Are my pain, personality, and reactions connected to my childhood, family, or trauma?

Adler, by contrast, seems to remind us: Do not let the past define you forever. Think about the person you want to become.

One looks backward, the other forward. One emphasizes causes, the other purpose. Each perspective has real power on its own. But when either is pushed too far, something gets distorted.

If someone stays entirely with Freud, they may keep looking back, explaining every present difficulty through their family of origin, childhood wounds, or painful relationships. That can certainly explain many things. It can also help someone understand, at least for a while, why they are suffering.

But if they remain there forever, it is easy to slip into helplessness: If the past has already happened this way, what can I possibly do now?

Yet if someone stands entirely with Adler, change can begin to sound too easy, as though all you need to do is decide who you want to become and the past will no longer matter. That sounds inspiring, but it can also push people who simply cannot change yet into even deeper self-blame.

Real people are not that black and white.

We are shaped by the past, but we do not have to be completely determined by it. We need to understand why we are stuck, but after that understanding, we also need to move forward slowly.

The real question is not whether Freud or Adler is right. It is how to find a path between “Why am I like this?” and “Who do I want to become?” — a path that we ourselves can actually walk.

That path, to me, comes much closer to zhongyong.

Zhongyong is not about standing in the middle and giving both sides equal blame. It means admitting that there may be some truth on both sides, while also recognizing that either side can become harmful when taken to an extreme.

It is a little like the yin-yang symbol: there is white within black and black within white. Yin and yang are not simply opposites. They restrain one another and transform into one another.

A person needs to look back at the past, but also move toward the future. We need to notice our wounds, but also build the ability to act. We need to admit our powerlessness at times, but still leave room for possibility.

If we talk only about wounds, people can sink into them. If we talk only about possibility, people can end up feeling pressured to the point where they can barely breathe.

And this is not only a question of psychology. The same pattern appears in many real-world issues.

Public debate today often moves toward extremes. One side may moralize everything, as though kindness and tolerance alone will naturally make every conflict disappear. The other side may reduce complicated problems to one group of people, one category, or one label.

Take immigration, for example. Some people blame every difficulty on immigrants, as though society would automatically improve if one particular group simply disappeared. But the reality is that many immigrants are also doing jobs that local people do not want to do, and they are keeping certain industries running.

The problem is never caused by one group alone. It is usually tied to economics, institutions, the labor market, cultural adaptation, education, and political manipulation all at once.

The most attractive thing about extreme opinions is that they save us effort.

They do not ask us to keep thinking. They do not ask us to keep looking at complexity. They simply give us a clear enemy, a clear answer, and a clear direction. And that can feel reassuring.

But once we become used to these effortless explanations, it becomes easy to lose the ability to understand reality itself.

Because reality is not effortless.

Real people contain contradictions. They have limitations, histories, circumstances, things they had little choice about, and choices they still made. Cutting all of that down into one sentence can feel satisfying, but it does not necessarily make it true.

The same is true of success culture.

Someone may say: I succeeded because I was disciplined. You did not succeed because you were not disciplined enough.

The explanation is simple, and that is exactly why it spreads so easily. But it erases far too many variables.

A person’s success may have something to do with hard work, but it can also be shaped by family background, physical health, opportunity, the advantages of a particular platform, resources, connections, the era they happened to live in, and luck.

Failure may sometimes have something to do with not persisting long enough. But it may also come from chronic pressure, low energy, the wrong approach, lack of support, or very real difficulties in someone’s life.

Explaining everything with a single word may look clear. In reality, it is crude.

That is why I increasingly feel that the most valuable thing about zhongyong is not that it makes people less sharp. It makes us less quick to be brutal in our judgments.

It asks us to acknowledge complexity before making a judgment.

It does not ask us to give up having a position. It asks us not to build that position on lazy explanations.

Real zhongyong is not: “Everyone has a point, so never mind.”

It is: “I want to see as many of the relevant factors as I can, and then decide where my effort should actually go.”

The same applies when we try to understand ourselves.

We cannot simply say, “I am like this today because of what happened to me in the past.”

But neither can we say, “The past does not matter. I just need more discipline and then I can change.”

A more truthful approach might be this: I acknowledge that the past really has shaped me, and I also acknowledge that I still have choices now. I admit that some things are genuinely difficult for me, but I do not turn that difficulty into an unchangeable fate. I do not use other people’s success to judge myself, but I also do not treat my own difficulties as proof that I can do nothing.

This attitude is not dramatic. But it may help a person keep going for much longer.

Very often, what we need most is not an extreme answer, but the ability to find balance.

When should we trace something back to its causes, and when should we stop ruminating?

When should we push ourselves, and when should we rest first?

When should we persist, and when should we change direction?

When should we learn from other people, and when should we return to our own circumstances and look carefully at what actually applies to us?

Much of real wisdom in life lies in this sense of proportion.

So zhongyong has never meant smoothing things over.

It is not weakness, and it is not an escape from judgment. In some ways, it requires a more difficult kind of clarity.

Seeing complexity is much harder than giving a simple answer. Recognizing that people are different is much harder than judging everyone by the same standard. Finding a path between two extremes that you can actually keep walking is also much harder than standing at either extreme and shouting slogans.

People are not samples in a theory. Nor are they case studies in a success manual.

Each person carries their own past, energy, circumstances, personality, and the accidents of fate.

To truly understand someone, we cannot reduce them to a single explanation. To truly change ourselves, we cannot rely on a single sentence either.

What we need is not to swing from one extreme to another, but to learn, little by little, to look at each problem in its own context and find a balance that belongs to our own life.

Perhaps this is where the real strength of zhongyong lies.

It does not promise to make you feel immediately certain or satisfied. But it may make you a little less extreme.

It does not promise one solution to every problem. Instead, it reminds you to look more completely at each particular person and each particular situation.

Only when we can see more of the whole do we have a chance of getting closer to what is real. 

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Notes

1. Zhōngyōng (中庸)
Zhongyong is a central concept in Confucian thought and also the title of the classical text commonly translated into English as The Doctrine of the Mean. The word is difficult to capture fully in English. It does not simply mean “moderation,” “compromise,” or always choosing the middle position. In this essay, it refers more broadly to maintaining proportion, avoiding extremes, seeing multiple sides of a situation, and finding a balanced response that fits the specific circumstances.

This essay is also available in other languages:

Chinese version: 中庸不是和稀泥，而是看见人的复杂

German version: Zhongyong bedeutet nicht, es allen recht zu machen – sondern die Komplexität des Menschen zu sehen