Survival Is a Long Struggle Against Our Natural Love of Ease
I have never known an early-rising, hardworking, cautious, honest person who complained about ill fortune.
— Benjamin Franklin
Our greatest enemy has always been ourselves, not others. Laziness, ignorance, and vice have ruined many people's physical and mental health and personal fortunes, making their survival in this world difficult. Human beings' natural love of comfort and aversion to exertion runs counter to nature's arrangement of our fate. From birth we need nourishment to sustain life, and obtaining food requires every creature to toil. At the same time, we need labor and exercise to keep our somatic cells healthy; once the body stops moving, life withers.
Comfort is like poison dipped in honey, tempting us to taste it. Many are captured by it, become its slaves, and finally, through overindulgence and love of pleasure, fall ill and sink into poverty and sickness, eliminated by nature.
Therefore survival is a long struggle against our natural love of ease. If we can overcome that nature, we survive; if not, we are easily eliminated by nature's law of the survival of the fittest. To have a strong body and a healthy mind, we must cultivate from childhood the habits of diligence and honesty, and the conduct of prudence and self-restraint. Or at the very least, when misfortune strikes, we must promptly reflect on our shortcomings and turn over a new leaf. If we cannot do that, merely complaining about unfair fate will not change our fate.
In the end, the only one who can save us is ourselves. We must give before we are entitled to receive. Any reward that has not been earned is unreliable, as unreal as flowers in a mirror or the moon in water. People who strive are not only physically stronger but mostly inwardly strong, because the most important thing diligence brings is not material reward but an unshakable self-confidence. For a hardworking person, even if one day fate leaves them with nothing, they will not flinch, because their past experience lets them trust that their own hands can quickly create whatever they need.
Use it or lose it is a basic rule of biological evolution. Our limbs grow more deft through labor, our minds more developed through study and reflection, and our hearts stronger as we meet life's challenges. If we shrink back, if we are lazy, if we are captured by our love of ease, we begin on the road of degeneration; our bodies grow weaker, our minds grow sensitive and fragile. So only by "using" ourselves can we evolve.
Likewise, we need caution and restraint to avoid the biological phenomenon of "evolutionary suicide" overtaking us — by which a population evolves traits that ultimately lead to its own extinction, such as hyper-efficient resource consumption that leaves posterity with nothing, or exaggerated sexual ornaments that give predators an opening.
People whose desires are bottomless die from their own overgrown appetites; people addicted to unhealthy foods die from their own habits; careless people are easily devoured by crises that erupt at any moment. Why do such people not live out their natural span? In essence, their deaths are a form of suicide.
Living in this world has never been easy. We need not only diligent work but also tireless study of all kinds of knowledge, so as not to be so ignorant. Looking at the evolutionary history of humans on Earth, our average life span has grown longer: Peking Man at Zhoukoudian lived only to about fifteen or sixteen, our close relatives the chimpanzees have a natural life span of about forty, while today most people live past sixty — this is tied to humanity's accumulating knowledge about extending life. Longevity and health also require our own effort; only by learning and applying the knowledge and skills we acquire can we safeguard our own health.