By Jane Sonnenschein · September 17, 2026

A few days ago, I came across a sentence on Threads. The general idea was that the Tao Te Ching, despite being only a little over five thousand Chinese characters long, never tells people to work harder. Instead, it is supposedly about finding an environment that suits you and allowing yourself to slow down—and that, the post claimed, is the real meaning of life.

That is obviously not an accurate summary of the Tao Te Ching. It is deliberately exaggerated, at least to some extent. But the post had received more than six thousand likes and over four hundred reposts, and it was partly those numbers, together with the sentence itself, that made me stop and look again.

By coincidence, around the same time I saw a Chinese creator on TikTok promoting his own book about the Tao Te Ching. He had previously created fifty-eight stories around the text, first selling them as a PDF and later turning the material into a physical book on Amazon.

The two things had nothing to do with each other, yet they happened to appear in front of me at almost the same time. That made me seriously wonder: why can a book written more than two thousand years ago still make so many people stop and pay attention today?

Eventually, I began to think that perhaps it is not because modern people have suddenly fallen back in love with ancient philosophy.

Maybe it is because we are simply too tired.

From childhood, many of us are given a very clear path through life. Study hard so you can get into a good school. Get into a good school so you can find a good job. Get a good job so you can earn money, buy a home, get married and have children. Then, once you have children, you tell them the same thing: you must study hard now so that you can find a good job later.

The cycle is almost perfectly closed.

Every stage has a goal. Every stage has a way to measure whether you are doing well. At every stage, someone can tell you what the correct next step is.

And yet, strangely, very few people stop somewhere in the middle and ask:

What is all of this ultimately for? 

That suddenly reminded me of an old story about a fisherman.

Someone sees a fisherman lying on the beach in the sun and asks him, “The weather is so good. Why aren’t you out fishing? If you caught more fish, wouldn’t you make more money?”

The fisherman asks, “And after I make a lot of money?”

The other man begins planning his future for him. He could buy a bigger boat, hire more people, expand the business and make more and more money. Eventually, when he had enough, he could retire, go somewhere beautiful by the sea and spend his days doing nothing but lying in the sun.

The fisherman listens and says, “But isn’t that what I’m already doing?”

Of course, this story cannot really serve as a guide to life. In the real world, we need housing, health insurance and education for our children. We need some money set aside for illness and old age. Someone lying on a beach today does not necessarily have enough security for tomorrow.

But the reason the story carries a kind of dark humor is that it touches on another question:

Could we end up spending all of today preparing for the day when we will finally be able to live?

Money matters, of course. But money was originally a tool.

In that sense, it is quite similar to AI today. AI can greatly expand what a person is capable of doing, but it cannot decide what that person should use those abilities for. Money is the same. It can give us security, freedom and more choices, but it cannot answer the question of which kind of life is actually worth choosing.

And yet modern commercial society has a way of slowly turning tools into goals.

We may begin by earning money because we want security, only to end up pursuing more money for its own sake. We may start working because we want life to become easier, only to give most of our time and energy to work. We may hope that our children will have an easier future, while keeping the entire family in a state of long-term tension for the sake of that “future.”

What is particularly strange is that our material conditions are clearly better than those of many earlier periods in history. For a significant number of people, getting enough food is no longer the most urgent problem every day, and basic education has become much more widely available.

In theory, once the most basic pressures of survival begin to ease, people should have more space to think about their inner lives.

Yet reality often seems to move in the opposite direction.

We have more tools, greater efficiency, more products and faster access to information than ever before, yet so many people still feel exhausted and empty. They repeat the same routines every day without really knowing what any of it is for.

That may be why, especially in recent years when the economy has been difficult, feelings such as tang ping¹—“lying flat”—or simply “I don’t want to keep competing anymore” have become so common. I am reluctant to dismiss all of this as laziness.

If someone genuinely believes that working hard will clearly improve their life, they usually do not give up on effort so easily.

What wears people down is often something else: running every day without knowing where the finish line is, giving more and more without being able to tell what they are actually getting back, and discovering that every completed goal simply reveals another goal waiting ahead.

Because commercial society can always tell us that it is not enough yet.

The income could still be higher. The house could still be bigger. The children could still attend a better school. The career could still move one level higher. Life could still become a little more polished.

But very few people seriously tell us:

When is it enough? 

The more I thought about it, the more I felt that this was not only a question about money.

It may also have something to do with the way we understand the world today.

One very obvious feature of modern knowledge is that it has become increasingly specialized and increasingly precise. One field keeps dividing into new fields, and one question is broken down into smaller and smaller objects of study. Today, a person may spend decades researching one highly specific problem, and to truly understand that problem, they first have to read a huge amount of previous research.

This is, of course, one of the reasons modern science has been able to advance so far.

Our knowledge of particular aspects of the body, the universe, matter and society goes far beyond what people thousands of years ago could have known.

But this has also produced an interesting result: humanity as a whole knows more and more, while the proportion of all that knowledge that any individual person can truly grasp becomes smaller and smaller.

We have become increasingly good at taking problems apart.

That does not necessarily mean we have become equally good at putting them back together.

Sometimes I think of the old story of the blind men and the elephant.

Today, the problem is not that we know nothing about the elephant. One person may understand the trunk in extraordinary detail, another the legs, another the nervous system, and another the digestive system. Each person may know far more about the part they are studying than people in the past ever could.

But someone still has to step back and ask:

How does the whole elephant actually live?

Human beings are not so different.

If someone is anxious today, they can learn emotional regulation. If they cannot sleep, they can study sleep. If they are inefficient at work, they can learn time management. If they lack motivation, they can train themselves to execute better. If a relationship is going badly, they can study communication skills.

All of these things may help.

But if that person is working more than ten hours every day, living under long-term financial pressure, and being continuously drained by their family relationships, work environment and entire structure of life, then focusing only on “how to help this person adapt better” can be a little like treating a headache without asking what is happening to the whole body.

This is also why I increasingly understand the emphasis on wholeness in many strands of ancient Chinese thought.

Whether we are talking about Heaven, Earth and human beings, yin and yang, moving with circumstances, or the idea that too much can be as harmful as too little, they all begin from a similar assumption:

A person is not an isolated point.

We live inside environments, and we live inside relationships.

How we feel and function is not determined only by whether “I, as an individual, am working hard enough.” It is also shaped by the time we live in, our family, our bodies, our social environment, our desires and the limits of what we can actually bear.

That is why shun qi zi ran² does not mean lying down and doing nothing, and shun shi er wei³ does not mean giving up our own initiative.

They are closer to a reminder that we should not always assume more force is better, greater speed is better, or having more is better.

Because once the sense of proportion is lost, even something good can become a problem.

Effort is good, of course. But if a person works until their body breaks down, their family relationships disappear and their inner life remains exhausted for years, has “working hard” itself gone beyond a healthy limit?

Money matters. But if someone sacrifices the very life they originally hoped money would protect, has the tool become the master?

Efficiency is useful too. But if a society becomes better and better at answering “How can we do this faster?”, “How can we earn more?” and “How can we produce more?”, while fewer and fewer people ask what all of it is ultimately for, could we end up becoming a strange kind of civilization—one that knows how to do almost everything, but increasingly forgets why it is doing any of it? 

I do not want to romanticize the ancient world because of this.

The past was full of war, disease, poverty, rigid hierarchies and living conditions that most people today would find unbearable. The fact that ancient thinkers were able to leave behind philosophical works also does not mean ordinary people at the time spent their days leisurely contemplating the meaning of life.

The specialization of modern society, science, individual rights and technological progress have given us real freedoms. We cannot go back two thousand years, and there is no reason we should want to.

What may be worth recovering is not the way ancient people lived, but the kinds of questions they once asked very naturally:

What is the relationship between a person and the world?

What is enough?

What is appropriate?

When should we move forward, and when should we stop?

How can a person keep living without losing themselves while constantly gaining more?

When I later went back to the sentence I had seen on Threads—the one that reduced the Tao Te Ching to “finding an environment that suits you and allowing yourself to slow down”—I still felt that it was not quite right.

The Tao Te Ching is not telling people not to make an effort.

If I had to compress what I took from this accidental chain of reading into a single thought, I would put it differently:

Effective strength is often not about pushing harder, but about spending less energy fighting against the direction things are already moving.

Our generation has already learned a great deal about how to do things.

How to learn, how to work, how to earn money, how to become more efficient, how to use new tools, and even how to get AI to help us do everything faster.

But perhaps the question becoming increasingly scarce is another one:

Why am I doing it?

Because if that question never has an answer, a person can keep running forward almost indefinitely.

Until one day, they suddenly realize that they have travelled a very long way and accumulated far more than they once had, yet still find themselves asking, on some completely ordinary evening:

Why am I so busy every day? What is all of this for? 

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Notes

1. tang ping (躺平) — Literally “lying flat.” The term became popular in China as a way of describing a refusal, withdrawal, or reduced willingness to participate in relentless competition over work, income, housing, status and achievement. Depending on context, it can express exhaustion, resistance, resignation, or a deliberate choice to lower one’s ambitions rather than endlessly “keep up.”

2. shun qi zi ran (顺其自然) — Literally, roughly, “let things follow their natural course.” It does not necessarily mean passivity or doing nothing. In Chinese thought and everyday language, it can suggest respecting the way circumstances develop instead of trying to control every outcome through force.

3. shun shi er wei (顺势而为) — Literally, “act in accordance with the tendency or momentum of circumstances.” The idea is not to surrender agency, but to notice the direction in which conditions are already moving and act with that momentum rather than constantly fighting against it.

This essay is also available in other languages:

Chinese version: 我们知道得越来越多，却越来越不知道该怎么活

German version: Wir wissen immer mehr – und wissen doch immer weniger, wie wir leben sollen