The Simpler, More Routined and Focused, the Lighter and Healthier
Society is complex, but a person can choose simplicity; the world is fickle and ever-changing, yet for most of one's life one can live a very regular life without much variation; the outside world is rich and colorful, yet it need not prevent us from focusing on our own field. If we choose simplicity, regularity and focus, we will find life becomes lighter and our body and mind healthier.
A complex, fluctuating, hard-to-focus life means a great deal of unnecessary expenditure and also speeds up our metabolism, and excessive expenditure and too-rapid metabolism are important reasons why most people die young. A person exhausted all day by social obligations and entangled in sundry chores can hardly have a healthy body or a joyful mood. Simplicity, regularity and focus create for us a relatively calm life.
Calm is a precious state of being, but in modern society it is no easy thing to achieve. Ubiquitous temptations and stimuli keep humans—a not-easily-settled animal—constantly restless. Our innate nature contains many disadvantageous factors that control our behavior, keep us in an irrational state, and lead us to wrong judgments and choices. Certain abilities we use to cope with environmental events can also make us unreasonable: our capacity for guarding against danger, pushed to the extreme, becomes greed; our stress response to the environment produces many pointless quarrels and hatreds.
The ultimate goal of evolution is to eliminate these disadvantageous factors, make us better adapted to the environment, and able to adjust our behavior at any time according to environmental changes, so that our survival capacity is greatly enhanced. Unfortunately, we are still in the process of evolution rather than having completed it; we still have too many imperfections.
In humanity's long evolutionary history, the evolutionary event that most affected lifespan was the evolution of the neocortex, which roughly doubled our life expectancy. The neocortex occupies two-thirds of the volume of the human brain and governs human reason and wisdom. Unlike our "physiological brain" and "emotional brain," the neocortex allows us to break free from control by physiological needs and emotional reactions, and to remain rational and calm.
The greatest difference between people lies in the operating state of the brain: some are controlled by the "physiological brain," some by the "emotional brain," and some can use their wisdom and reason to control both. But to truly reduce the control of the "physiological brain" and "emotional brain," besides developing our reason and wisdom, we also need to reduce the number of external stimulating events.
Choosing a relatively simple, regular and focused life reduces a great deal of external stimulation—and moderate external stimulation is not a bad thing, especially in childhood, where appropriate stimulation promotes brain development; infants under-stimulated are prone to abnormal intellectual development.
But modern life, driven by consumerism and commercial interests, over-stimulates the human brain; most people's brains are kept in a state of constant stimulation. This fills many people's brains with "noise," which keeps them in "fight-or-flight" mode, easily irritable, anxious and depressed, with poor sleep and unstable physical and mental health, breeding all kinds of illness.
If we want to reduce this noise and keep ourselves in a relatively light and comfortable state, we must make good use of the reason and wisdom we have evolved, using them to control our "physiological brain" and "emotional brain." If we can do this, why would we need great wealth or public acclaim in order to be happy?