You Are Striving to Shackle Yourself

jiejing

You Are Striving to Shackle Yourself

Xuefeng

September 6, 2025

You may think you are striving, but in truth you are fastening shackles on yourself.

A family labors for more than a decade and finally pays five million for a 200-square-meter apartment—three million out of pocket and a two-million bank loan, repaid at ten thousand per month in principal and interest. Then prices fall: the five-million home is now worth two and a half. A downturn brings unemployment; the monthly payments cannot be met. The bank auctions the property for 2.5 million, takes 1.9 million to clear the loan, deducts administrative costs, and the family walks away with four hundred thousand. The house they paid for is gone; of the three million they once put down, only four hundred thousand remains. Had they not striven, not fought, not struggled, not bought the house, the ending would not have been so.

Ge Junming, head of Sichuan Mingda Group, amassed assets over a hundred million through relentless striving; on July 21, 2004, amid a compensation dispute, he was killed by an explosion in his office at forty-one. Henan’s onetime richest man, Qiao Jinling—worth billions—took his own LIFE at fifty-seven. Liu Enqian, chairman of Gansu Changqing Real Estate, was killed at home at fifty-five. The number of entrepreneurs killed, imprisoned, or driven to take their own lives is staggering. Had they not plunged into ceaseless striving, would their endings have been the same?

Over the past decade and more, hundreds of thousands of officials—from state and vice-state rank, Central Military Commission level, ministers and vice-ministers, provincial governors, department heads, down to county chiefs and section chiefs—have been arrested and imprisoned. Nearly every one rose to office through effort and struggle. The result? After a brief moment above others, they fell and became prisoners.

Consider also the gifted scholars—Yang Baode, Lin Ruosu, Hou Jingjing, Zhang Dongwen, Yang Zhigao, Tao Chongyuan, Tang Xiaolin, Chen Huixiang, Ge Weiwei, Dong Sijia, and others—each brilliant, each young, yet each took their own LIFE. Can we say they did not strive, did not fight, did not push themselves? How then did effort and struggle bring such endings? It is heartbreaking.

From the cases above: millions who stretched to buy homes now carry crushing debt; countless officials, tens of thousands of entrepreneurs, and thousands of PhDs and Masters have landed in prison, been killed, taken their own lives, or gone bankrupt—precisely because of relentless striving. This tells us: striving can become the very shackles we wear.

And these are only the visible extremes. Beneath the surface lies a vast population that, through ceaseless struggle, has driven itself into worry, pain, fear, depression, illness, tension, and even to the brink of collapse. We are compelled to reflect on what this phenomenon is teaching us.

It presses us to ask: Why do we live? What is our purpose? Where are we going?
We study, toil, “make something of ourselves,” claw for office, gamble for profit—for what? Can the aim truly be reached? And once gained, can it be kept?

I have long urged people to walk the Way of the Greatest Creator—the Way of Nature. Before you prepare to “work harder,” “strive more,” or “fight on,” ask whether your view of value, of human life, of LIFE, and of the universe (the world) is in accord with the heart’s rightness, reason, law, our innate nature, and the Tao. Otherwise, LIFE becomes blind collision, and blind collision ends only one way: with the self battered—head broken, bones fractured, sinews torn.

Right now—are you fastening shackles on yourself, or are you setting yourself free?