Peaceful Happiness Requires a Wall Between You and the Mundane World

The greatest burdens of worldly life are vanity and lies. Living in such an environment, the waste of time is astonishing, and the number of trivial words spoken each day is incalculable. So if a person can put up a wall between themselves and the mundane world, it would be the greatest happiness. For a period, I followed the Buddhist precept against four kinds of verbal misconduct: dual-tongue (sowing discord), harsh speech (uttering vicious words), false speech (lies and exaggeration), and frivolous speech (pretty-sounding but empty talk). I discovered that over 90% of the words exchanged in human interaction could be dispensed with.

Relatively speaking, I most enjoy being with people who are humorous and understand humor; being with such people is pleasant. But for relationships to reach the point where one can comfortably tease each other is not easy. Most of the time, in reality, we only dare to be fully humorous with our intimate partners or closest friends.

I personally take a conservative attitude toward interpersonal relationships. I have built a wall between my own world and the mundane world. Although my writing contains much critical commentary, in real life I am almost completely isolated from the world. My published articles often attract overwhelming criticism, but I don't care at all. In real life, my long-term social contacts consist only of my wife, child, and a very few close friends—those so-called close friends, I might meet only a few times a year, sometimes not seeing each other for several years. On holidays, I return home to visit relatives. Beyond that, there is only the doctor-patient interaction with my patients.

Such a lifestyle saves both money and time. I can concentrate money and time on buying books, reading, studying medicine, and writing—amusing myself and finding endless joy. The most reliable happiness is simple happiness—the kind that remains inexhaustible even when the heart is still as still as water. For me, such happiness can only be found in reading, walking, and writing; it does not depend on external circumstances.

I do not live within any institutional system. Over all these years, apart from a few months of wage labor, I have supported myself and my family through my own efforts. Therefore, any survival method built on dependency relationships does not exist for me. As the ancients put it, this is called self-sufficiency. This lifestyle is essentially the same as pastoral life. As a freelancer, my income may be unstable, but as long as I don't care about the amount, living frugally and with planning is not a problem at all.

As long as I do not proactively seek them out, the negative influences of interpersonal relationships simply cannot reach my world. In a restless age, living in seclusion minimizes living costs and saves time to the greatest extent, allowing me to follow my inclinations and do more of what I enjoy.

For a reader-scholar, there is no more ideal state of living than this. I should be content and seek nothing more.