Every item on the list has a self-help book. None of them covers doing it all at once.
It’s honestly so simple.
Just heal your family trauma, regulate your nervous system, break your addictions, process centuries of cultural trauma, repair your attachment style, reparent your inner child, and develop a spiritual practice that dissolves the boundaries between self and other,
all while watching generative AI cannibalize the white-collar sinecures that suddenly expose your decade of educational malinvestment as a mathematically absurd Ponzi scheme,
stripping away the exact economic prestige that was supposed to retroactively redeem the generational bitterness your parents swallowed to fund it,
which reduces your competitiveness in navigating a gamified romantic marketplace where your value is indexed by opaque algorithms that treat human intimacy as a high-frequency trading desk,
forcing you to oscillate between the looksmaxxing neurosis of the self-improvement industrial complex and the entropic gravitational pull of the blackpill,
which correctly identifies the structural collapse of the monogamous social contract but offers only sterile freedom as a refuge for the surplus population of a post-utility era,
which precedes your permanent exclusion from traditional asset ownership which you attempt to offset by aggressively gambling on dog-themed memecoins to simulate financial momentum,
which leaves you with a visceral, paralyzing rebellion against the old narrative structures that empowers you to deconstruct and criticize but not to build and create,
prompting you to chronically flake on your peers and self-isolate in your hyper-regulated doom-pod,
inevitably outsourcing your impossible demand for religious-level existential redemption onto fragile secular friendships that immediately fracture under the psychic load,
leaving you with absolutely no viable social technology for survival except literal cults, magical thinking, and paying thousands of dollars to wellness gurus and middlemen who promise you can get into a good school abroad
where you have better seats to watch the collapsing geopolitical world order, just so you can finally achieve optimal productivity for a remote gig-economy task that will be outsourced to an autonomous AI agent by next Tuesday.
说实话，这再简单不过了。
What makes it funny
Every clause names a real problem with a real body of knowledge behind it, and the garden has a note on each one. The joke is that they are all happening to the same person at the same time. Knowing what to do and being able to do it are separated by an ocean of overwhelm.
That is why the list can’t be worked through like a checklist. The ego would love to turn it into a self-improvement project with measurable milestones, and the point is that it cannot be done that way. Nor can you fix the world’s clauses first and your own later, because the person trying to solve the external problems IS the same person described in the first paragraph — and the solving is often just another form of the avoiding. The fruitional view offers the other door: you do not have to solve all of this before you can be free, because the freedom includes the not-yet-healed, and it is available in the middle of the mess.
The only sane response to the whole sentence is to laugh, then get to work on whichever clause is closest to your hands right now.
It’s honestly so simple.
References:
- Original satirical axiom, bilingual (English/Chinese)