What Is Wrong with Being a Commoner for Life?

One emotion I have never experienced throughout my life should be jealousy; I may not even have experienced envy. I never begrudge others' lifestyles, social status, or economic conditions, so there is no comparison and thus no inferiority or superiority complex. Anyway, everyone is equal; no one needs to envy anyone else. Now that I have learned some brain science, I realize this trait is innate rather than the result of education, and from what I observe, people without envy seem to have been the majority all along.

Unfortunately, our families, schools, and society keep training people to be envious. Society cultivates competitiveness and envy by setting up all kinds of competitive rules. These trends affect every family, and unhealthy families keep reinforcing envy. As a result, some people grow up intensely envious, unable to accept being inferior to others, never at peace enough to enjoy their own lives. This is an ignorant, backward, and evil side of human civilization, and many tragedies arise from it.

Usually, when a person envies others, he also looks down on them, and his emotions are easily provoked. Because he oscillates between inferiority and superiority, even a slight remark that might offend his dignity can trigger shame or rage.

The success theory touted by Westerners is mass-producing such people. We now constantly discuss what counts as success, linking happiness to career success. One idea from the father of success theory, Carnegie, is that everyone has a desire to be important. To a psychiatrist, this statement is the typical product of abnormal thinking in a mentally ill person.

The construction "everyone ..." is a universal quantifier in logic; it is easily refuted: find just one person without such a desire and the proposition collapses. A normal, confident, and calm person need not have a desire to be important; he can enjoy his own life and does not care whether he is regarded as important. A healthy society is one where most people pursue happiness rather than success or being important. When a society is always talking about success, it shows the whole society is sick.

Proving one's importance is actually driven by latent inferiority; confident people have no motive to prove their importance. Carnegie had a strong inferiority complex, himself had this desire to be important, and projected it onto everyone else, assuming everyone has it. This is a very arbitrary way of thinking; it reflects his self-absorption, his inability to see how others differ from himself.

Interestingly, this obviously unhealthy thinking prevails in the world, thanks to modern media and marketing, which always use all kinds of rhetoric to stir people's herd mentality. Eventually, some pyramid-scheme promoters pushed success theory into madness, coining a delightful motto: "To succeed, first go crazy; with a simple head, charge forward." This vividly describes the state of many people—a simple-minded, headlong, crazed charge. Over time, under societal stimulation and brainwashing by all sorts of people, too many refuse to be merely ordinary commoners.

The economic organizations of modern consumerist society also make full use of psychological rules and have done a great job of stirring up people's undesirable desires; whether these behaviors bring true human well-being is another matter.

A classic advertising theory holds that people in a calm state have no consumption desire; one must stimulate excitement, fear, anxiety, and unease to arouse the desire to consume. If we carefully study various advertisements—and now various short videos—we can feel how the public's emotions are manipulated by marketing experts hidden behind the scenes.

Staying away from mass media and self-media, reading more in-depth books, or simply enjoying the present moment can markedly improve one's emotional state. But few modern people already captured by the fast-food culture of the information age can break this addictive behavior. Many people reach for all kinds of instant information that excites, anxieties, empties, and unsettles them like a drug user; stopping the habit instead produces withdrawal.

One fact cannot be denied: the vast majority of people are ordinary commoners for their whole lives. Where are all these "important people" in the world? The so-called great ones, in real life, are just mortals who, like everyone else, need to eat, drink, and eliminate. Einstein developed relativity while a lowly clerk at the patent office. Mendel wanted to be a natural-science teacher but failed the exams; unable to make a living that way, he became a priest out of necessity. While serving as a priest, he ran pea experiments and discovered the laws of inheritance that changed the history of human science. Had they spent their whole lives trying to be important, they might never have settled down to do research, never produced relativity or Mendelian inheritance—and would have had no happiness either.

Having dealt with patients from all walks of life, I have found that people content to be commoners have a much higher happiness index than those who cannot bear it. Street vendors and farmers know more about the wisdom of living than social celebrities; they have truly grasped the secret of happiness. But absurdly, those on stage lecturing everyone on how to live happily are often not the people who actually live happily—this is a kind of comedy.