Dedicate Your Best Years to Your Ideal
When are a person's best years? In my view, the best years are when one can direct one's own actions and care for oneself autonomously. As an idealist, I am willing to dedicate my best years to my ideal rather than submit to reality.
The life I can least bear is one in which I never strove for my ideal. To live for the sake of mere living is endless torment; such a life wears away one's passion day after day. Many people live like this, full of complaints, while criticizing those who live for their ideals as unrealistic.
This is all bullshit. But more than ninety percent of the crowd lives like walking corpses, muddling through this life in bullshit. When they close their eyes in death, they are still numb.
As a physician, what I see most of is birth, aging, illness and death. When people are healthy, they always feel they have unlimited time to squander; until one day they fall ill and must face death, they discover how brief life is—and by then, hobbled by disease, it is no longer possible to direct one's own actions. This is a tragedy.
Many people only at such moments realize that what they once chased was nothing but piles of shit, that their drift-with-the-current lives are hollow and meaningless—yet by then they are powerless to change.
To live for an ideal, even for a single day, is luminous. To live for reality, however dazzling, is nothing but a wine-skin and a rice-bag.
People are born free, yet grow accustomed to being controlled: as children by their parents, as adults by social conventions, by the prevailing currents of society—until one day they lose the ability to think freely and choose freely, becoming dead souls.
The conformists described in Gustave Le Bon's The Crowd are precisely such a flock of dead souls; they have no independent soul, and therefore no independent thought. Social currents are the factor that sways the majority most decisively. The so-called mortal world is nothing but man-made spiritual fences, wave upon wave of social currents.
If one could leap out of these spiritual fences into a world entirely one's own, what a happy thing that would be. But for most people, once out of these fences they do not know their own value! Hence they must, like cynics, huddle inside these fences, propping up their fragile hearts on the praise of others. For them, an ideal is to be envied by others—what a grave insult to the ideal.
An ideal is something one loves from the heart, a pursuit that can make one forget oneself. Because of an ideal, a person can overcome any difficulty and restrain any desire. An ideal need not be lofty, but it absolutely must not be self-deception. An ideal is not a showpiece for display; it is the life goal one is willing to pour one's heart's blood into.
I am willing to dedicate my best years to such an ideal, though in others' eyes it may not be worth a glance. But what has that to do with me? I do not live for the sake of being worth someone's glance.