Rest and Play Before You Feel Exhausted and Bored

I study and work about sixty hours a week. I estimate that even in my seventies or eighties I could still work fifty hours a week, and I think I would want to keep working; on the contrary, if I were not allowed to work I would feel lost. For one thing I love my work; for another I am in my prime, so at this stage, although my workload is heavy, I do not feel strained.

More importantly, I have mastered a trick for resting before fatigue and boredom set in. My principle is never to exceed my mental and physical capacity in study and work. Although, generally speaking, I am an energetic person, I still rest before I feel tired and bored. I rarely stay up late working or doze off, and I do not force myself to study things I do not want to learn or do work I do not want to do.

With almost no social life, outside study and work I can still walk in a park near home and exercise, and I can spare time to play the guqin (ancient zither) to relax my body and mind.

I believe the good state I maintain is related to having been raised freely and loosely since childhood. This way of growing up honored my own interests, hobbies, and nature to the greatest extent.

Needless to say about primary school: back then I was almost completely a wild child. My parents never nagged me to do homework, and I don't recall any teacher caring whether I finished. The teachers at the village school had limited responsibility, to be honest; they had their own crops to tend at home and preferred to avoid trouble, so they basically left students to themselves. I don't remember whether I handed in homework on time, but I do remember often tearing up textbooks and exercise books to fold into paper planes, or losing games to classmates.

In junior high my parents were not around, so study depended entirely on self-discipline. But looking back, I was not exactly self-disciplined; I was always trying to play table tennis when the teachers weren't looking. In high school the teachers gave me special treatment, allowing me to skip class and not to do homework in the conventional way.

Such a growth pattern is incompatible with China's exam-oriented education, so objectively speaking I probably scored 50-100 points lower on the college entrance exam than I might have. If someone had controlled me and educated me by the exam-oriented model, given my peak academic performance back then, I should have scored near full marks and gotten into any university in China.

But precisely because no one controlled me, my nature was allowed to develop fully. Looking back on my life, I feel this is what I am most grateful for. From parents to teachers, no one stifled my nature; thank heaven for that.

It pains me to see today's adults working exhausted and today's students studying exhausted. We Chinese, generation after generation, repeat this highly tense state of study and work; everyone is bored and fatigued by their studies and work, fearful and anxious about the future; most people are chronic procrastinators, and few are passionate about what they do.

All this stems from an education that disrespects human nature; only a very few escape its influence, and I was simply lucky. Because no one had high hopes for me in primary school, they basically gave up on me. In junior high my parents left to make a living and I became a 'left-behind child,' seeing them only a few times a year. In high school my grades were so good that teachers felt no need to manage me. By university, when my teachers tried to manage me, I said bye-bye to them.

Human nature leans toward ease over toil, but once a person is truly interested in study and work, that laziness vanishes, because the thirst for knowledge overcomes nature. Yet only when a person reaches a certain age and has found life's direction will they rein in their inertia and throw themselves into study and work.

We are used to forced growth, coercively molding children who are not yet of age into the 'good boys and girls' their parents want—sitting there primly absorbing boring knowledge, desperately drilling and repeatedly reviewing for exam scores. I have no fondness for this excessive drilling and review; I hope my descendants are spared this drudgery. Such a human-destroying education, apart from killing the interest a person should naturally have, can have no other effect.

I believe that boredom and fatigue with study and work are natural, and children should be allowed to 'play' and 'be restless' from an early age. From my experience, so-called 'playfulness' and 'restlessness' are precisely a person's best way of self-regulation within tedious study. Unless it goes so far as to affect normal learning, it should not be controlled. The more you control, the more you drive a person toward hatred of learning. Once a person develops aversion to study and work, they very easily feel fatigued by it.

Let children rest and play before they feel exhausted and bored; do not let them feel tense and pressured about their studies, or once they leave school they will never again want to read or study. Many of my classmates read hardly a handful of books a year after graduating. I myself read basically 50-100 books a year, and over time the knowledge gap between us widened.

We have entered an age of lifelong learning. True lifelong learning is never forcing oneself to study; it is knowledge that draws us to learn. Life is short; who would want to force themselves to do, their whole life, things they do not like? Especially once an adult has financial independence, who can force them to study? So if an adult still studies with enthusiasm, it can only be for one reason: they truly love learning.

The thirst for knowledge is one of human nature's instincts, and over-studying is the main reason it is stifled. People who grew tired of learning as children easily grow tired of work as adults. Although China has many people engaged in research, as far as I know few actually love it, so those who truly devote themselves to research are pitifully few.

The medical field is the same: many doctors work exhausted, then spend their off-hours at mahjong tables or entertainment, unwilling to put thought into developing their medical skill. Ultimately it is because these people are tired of the medical profession—the bitter fruit of not having grown up healthily in childhood.