Some people spend their whole lives chasing every last bit of the world's wealth, savouring all the glory and riches it can offer. But far more of us pour our whole lives in, earn the money, and lose the time. A lifetime of muddling through, only to leave behind one last sentence handed down to the next generation: "Study hard, find a good job, earn a bit more money." And once the poison is neatly wrapped and ready, they quietly close their eyes and slip away from this world.
Is an ideal really the exclusive privilege of the rich, or is it something every one of us — rich or poor — can possess? Robert Greene, the author of Mastery, argues that how to pursue an ideal is a secret the rich have wanted to lock away in their vaults for a thousand years, a secret they would rather not too many people knew. As the saying goes: "If everyone were busy striving for their own ideal, who would be left to strive for the boss's?" The rich have no wish to see more people climb up to their tier, while the poor scheme by every means to ascend — and how to leap across the chasm between the two has become the contested ground of every era.
Robert Greene believes that each of us harbours a kind of unique gift, in your body, in your very blood. Whether you like it or not, this unique gift was written into your genes long ago — settled the moment you were born. The whole process begins in childhood: every instrument you learn, every craft you make, every game you play, every person you meet. In truth, the brain is trying all the while to find the one thing that makes you passionate, the thing you can't stop thinking about, the thing you'd do all night long without rest. And this thing that fires your passion will generate an endless supply of drive, keeping you searching ceaselessly within that one unique domain. Robert Greene calls it your "Life's Task".
In Hong Kong, finding your own Life's Task is not the hard part — reacting to your Life's Task is the hardest part of all. When it comes to the cost of living, the length of working hours, the sheer weight of work pressure, Hong Kong is without doubt among the worst in the world. Even on a day off, even with a little free time, much of it gets siphoned away by parents, children and family. That inner voice about one's Life Task only grows fainter and fainter, until at last you have no choice but to take up a spade and bury it yourself. This situation is captured most ingeniously by Scarcity, written by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, which points out that the reason people become short-sighted, confined to whatever is right in front of them, comes down to "tunnelling" and "cognitive bandwidth": a short-term deadline or the end-of-month rent easily fixes a person's attention on the next few months, with all their cognitive capacity spent handling the demands right in front of them. And since pursuing an ideal is, by its nature, something measured in years, Hongkongers, under this prolonged narrowing of focus, simply have no mental room left to draw up a plan for how to realise their ideals.
"Dead at 25, buried at 70" is a melancholy thing. You might ask what wisdom the writer has to offer — how do we break out of this deadly rat race? I don't know either, especially in a place as hemmed-in as Hong Kong; just to win the occasional space to catch my breath, room enough to ponder the future, would already be no small thing.
References
Mullainathan, S., & Shafir, E. (2013). Scarcity: Why having too little means so much. Macmillan. （Scarcity: Why are we always racing the deadline? Why do we always feel we don't have enough time and money?）
Greene, R. (2012). Mastery. Penguin.
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