Keep Everything Simple and Gladly Be a "Useless" Person
After five and a half years of use, my laptop suddenly gave out last night. I called customer service, who told me to take it to a repair shop on Xizhimen Road today for inspection. I thought it over: a laptop's lifespan is only this long, so I gave up and decided not to have it repaired. There is still a Lenovo desktop at home bought ten years ago that works; work can be moved to the desktop, data can be backed up on a USB drive, and from now on I need not necessarily have a laptop. So I packed the laptop and its charger together and put them in a storage cabinet. If repair is necessary later I will take it out, or buy a new one; for now I cannot be bothered with it.
One fewer daily object on the desk, and I feel not loss but relief. To be honest, at my age I have already amassed quite a lot; too many material possessions bring us not entirely comfort and convenience, but also encumbrance and burden.
When I was young I too once longed to acquire, once forged ahead, and badly wanted to be a "useful" person; I was deeply afraid of being "useless." Looking back now, none of this is human nature; it is purely the result of education, which makes people live their lives under heavy pressure. By our nature we did not want to possess so much, and no one is born shouldering a grand mission. The labels "useful" and "useless" are likewise artificially attached. To be useful is not necessarily glorious; to be useless is not necessarily shameful.
The way the ancient Chinese formed characters is interesting: "person" (人) plus "action/doing" (为) together make "artificial/false" (伪). The artificial is the false. The ultimate goal of Chinese Daoism is to remove the false and preserve the true—to strip away the artificial and preserve genuine nature. TCM embodies profound Daoist thought, and I love this kind of thinking; it lets me live lightly and freely.
After South Korea relaxed pandemic controls, only 1.2% of people were willing to return to the office. Some said that the mere thought of going back to the daily commute packed in vehicles and endless socializing made life feel meaningless. During the pandemic they worked from home and still kept their work in perfect order. The pandemic made many people realize that their previous lives contained too many worthless red tapes, all describable by the single character wei (artificial). People finally realized that a considerable part of the lives we had lived for years was meaningless, artificially added stuff—pure waste of time.
Now I too only want to live a life in which everything is kept simple, and gladly be a "useless" person. Let what is lost be lost naturally; I will not chase it back. What I cannot obtain I will no longer pursue; whatever I have at this moment I embrace. Occasionally an old friend asks how I have been lately; my answer is that the 365 days of the year are basically all the same, no big changes and no more big fluctuations.
I think such greetings are redundant; those who truly know me should know that my life is simple and stable, with basically no change over the years. I suspect most people's lives are like that too. If a person can bear this unchanging dullness and take pleasure in simplicity, then they possess a happiness not easily lost. The thrilling moments of life are few; most of the time we must learn to be happy in simplicity and plainness.