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
It is funny because every clause names a real problem addressed by a real body of knowledge — and the joke is that all of them are happening simultaneously to the same person. The garden contains notes on every single item in this list. The satire is that knowing what to do and being able to do it are separated by an ocean of overwhelm.
The fruitional view says: you do not have to solve all of these before you can be free. You are already free — and the freedom includes the not-yet-healed. The ego would love to turn this list into a self-improvement project with measurable milestones. The point is that it cannot be done that way. It is not a sequence but a way of being — and the way of being is available right now, in the middle of the mess.
The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there. Not because the external problems aren’t real but 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.
Main Payoff
Every note in this garden is one clause of this sentence. The garden exists because the sentence is true — all of it, simultaneously — and the only sane response 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)