Agency: The Conceptual Trap of Steady-State Survival

Let’s play a thought game. Imagine you are a highly successful pillar of society—perhaps a great entrepreneur, a social activist, a famous scientist, or a high-ranking official. You are now very old and nearing the end of your life. The good news is that you will be reincarnated, and in your next life, you will still be born in China. The bad news is that reincarnation is completely random; you will most likely be born into an ordinary family, perhaps even a poor one. You certainly wouldn’t be content to be an ordinary person, but the game doesn’t allow you to reserve secret wealth for the next life, and your current knowledge and skills will all be forgotten.

Now the game opens a backdoor: you are allowed to write a “Manual for Life” for your next self, which his parents will give him when he is old enough to understand. So, what would you write?

I would probably tell myself to go to a big city to study and live as soon as possible, master several transferable skills, strive for asymmetric advantages, and accumulate compound interest. To this end, I would want him to understand the “Heavy-Tail Distribution” and why one must join the “Multiplicative World” to make big moves. To keep up with the latest situation, he should get a smartphone and maybe learn some insights on an app called “Get”…

A manual can’t hold too much, but I believe there is one aspect you must include because it’s unlikely to be taught elsewhere—that is, breaking free from the shackles of mediocre concepts.

I would write in the manual: The people around you—your classmates, teachers, and even your parents—think these concepts are self-evident. But little do they know that the ladders everyone uses mostly only reach the heights everyone can reach. If you want to achieve great things, you must transcend these concepts.

In this lecture, let’s sort through some common mediocre concepts. I don’t want to use words like “weak,” “underprivileged,” or “pre-modern” to describe these concepts, because people in all eras and from all walks of life believe in them; these are strategic issues, not class issues.

I call them “Steady-State Survival Logic” because the most prominent feature of mediocre concepts is the pursuit of stability.

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Until recently, the vast majority of people in China lived a steady-state life. One place, one skill, one job for a lifetime, surrounded by the same group of people—this is the environment in which the steady-state survival logic evolved. China today is very different; one might change careers several times in a lifetime, many people go to distant places to study and live, and jobs once thought to be stable may be lost. A person’s fate in life will have more fluctuations, so logically, that set of logic should no longer apply.

However, there is a law called “Cultural Lag” [1], which means that the update of cultural concepts is always much slower than the change of material conditions. The world has changed, but people’s concepts will not be upgraded in time; they are still immersed in the narratives of the past, and thus they will limit themselves.

Simply put, the steady-state survival logic has three main genes: resource scarcity, strong conformity, and seeing the world through simple models. Many bad customs that modern people lament can be derived from these three genes, such as risk aversion, low agency, face culture, and index worship—they truly must be examined carefully.

Perhaps one must go through painful reflection and deconstruct the steady-state survival logic to be transformed… let’s talk about them one by one.

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Resource scarcity causes people to focus on survival while neglecting development, let alone colorful self-expression. Looking from an era of abundance, you might think the various practices in an era of scarcity were out of helplessness—but the people on the scene at the time didn’t think it was a lack of choice, because they never even considered other possibilities. They elevated the scarcity survival logic into values, morality, and even aesthetics.

Take food, for example: Korean kimchi, British fish and chips, and American potlucks—all were originally cheap ways to fill the stomach out of necessity during hard times. But once people are used to them, they beautify them, saying this is our national characteristic and a culture that needs to be passed down.

Another example is Japan’s “Wabi-sabi” culture, the so-called aesthetic pursuit of imperfection, which also originated from previous material scarcity, where things had to be made to do even if they were broken, and then this was taken as a point of pride.

Borrowing the terms from two economists at MIT, Moshe Hoffman and Erez Yoeli, in their book Hidden Games [2], this is called “secondary rewards”: you didn’t originally like this thing, but you learned to like it.

Scarcity explains many things.

For example, “Renqing” (social favors). In the past, people were unable to purchase services, and neighbors had to help each other with everything—today you help me move, tomorrow I help you watch the kids. This mutual aid seems casual, but it is actually very important, so much so that everyone silently records the debt of favors, and it’s best if no one loses out. You can occasionally overdraw, but you will remain sensitive to favors.

There was also the special emphasis on “Filial Piety” in ancient China, where children were mentally preparing to provide for their parents’ old age almost from the day they became sensible, ideally achieving obedience to the bone—now we see that it was actually a form of old-age insurance using emotional kidnapping as a means. Once China had pensions, the independence of parents immediately increased, and they didn’t necessarily have to live with their children [3]. Can you say modern children are not filial? The reality is that studies in multiple countries [4] have found that social welfare has not weakened the relationship between children and parents; it has only made that relationship purer—it is spontaneous affection rather than a moral burden.

Scarcity also automatically triggers “Zero-Sum” thinking. Resources are only so much; if you take a little more, I take a little less. People subconsciously treat others as competitors rather than partners, adopting a default defensive posture.

A corollary of zero-sum thinking is that poverty represents morality and the rich are all bad people. Since there is only so much stuff, if you take more, you must be taking someone else’s share! It doesn’t matter if you take it by cleverness or by force; anyway, there’s definitely something wrong with you! In extreme periods, people were proud of being poor.

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Perhaps the deepest impact of scarcity on the mind is “Risk Aversion.” If you have a million yuan, maybe uncertainty is your friend; but if you only have a thousand yuan, you are not qualified to do any “investment”—this is money to guarantee your survival.

People in the era of scarcity don’t think about how to make money, but how to save money. This is why “Diligence and Thrift” is the most important traditional virtue. Diligence has limited effect; the core is thrift. Thrift = low risk.

Why did people in the past have such high requirements for private morality and value women’s chastity so much? It was all to reduce risk; after all, the risk of accidental pregnancy was too high. Why did traditional society talk about being “attached to the land and unwilling to move” and being particularly unwilling to leave one’s hometown to venture out? Because the world outside was dangerous.

Risk aversion is probably the most deep-rooted cultural lag. Like now, in an era of attention scarcity, you must be very good at expressing yourself to be seen and get cooperation opportunities, right? So why are parents still instilling in their children the old saying that “the bird that sticks its head out gets shot,” requiring them to be low-key in everything? Because they are still afraid of being envied.

That fear can be invisible. For example, modern business emphasizes the “Minimum Viable Product (MVP).” If you have an idea, you should first create a basic version as quickly as possible and push it to the market, selling and modifying as you go to get feedback quickly and iterate rapidly… But some people insist on a perfect plan, hoping everything is ready before taking action, which is actually a fear of failure.

Traditional society didn’t encourage you to take risks at all.

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This leads to the herd mentality. Strong conformity is because of weak rules.

If a society has perfect rules, then you can do anything as long as it doesn’t clearly violate the rules; you can be individualistic with full justification. But in a weak-rule society, the law can’t be your shield; you often don’t know what action will offend whom, so the safest way is to do what most people do.

Strong-rule societies encourage individuality; weak-rule societies encourage a stampede. Buying whatever others buy, spreading whatever others say—either no one is there or a huge crowd is there, both are phenomena of strong conformity.

Since the sense of security comes from interpersonal relationships rather than the law, people automatically obey authority. So much so that obedience has become a value. For example, parents in the past loved to praise their children as “obedient” (listening to words)—now think about it, is being obedient an advantage? Being obedient means having no ideas of your own; it’s the road to mediocrity.

A corollary of the value of obedience is “Attitude.” When you do a task, it doesn’t matter if the actual result is good or not; the key is that the attitude must be good!

Under this attitude culture, people take pride in being busy; it doesn’t matter if there’s merit, as long as there’s “hard work merit” (苦劳). Furthermore, busyness sometimes even becomes a status signal: some people show off how busy they are.

Observe around you; is there a lot of ineffective busyness? For example, with students’ learning, logically you should see what has been learned and whether it can be applied—even being able to pass an exam counts as having learned it—but many people are not learning at all but are putting on a show of learning: repeatedly reading aloud, copying, and memorizing, looking aggressive but actually not using effective learning methods.

If obedience is a form of performance, then attitude becomes ability, and posture becomes achievement.

Another byproduct of strong conformity is “Face Culture.” Deciding what to do doesn’t depend on whether you can get actual benefits, but first considers how others will see you because of it. Everyone else is buying a house, so you must also buy a house; you don’t have much salary, but you get a luxury car first—these seem like striving for progress, but they are actually still conformity.

That child you praised for being obedient since childhood might end up being the one pretending to learn, being ineffectively busy, and forcing you to give him the bride price money.

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What does it mean to see the world through a simple mental model? I recently saw a joke that might be true—

Someone lent a colleague 8,000 yuan. When it was time to pay it back, the colleague only paid back 7,992 yuan. Why 8 yuan less? The colleague said: “You lent me the money via WeChat transfer. When I withdrew the cash, WeChat deducted an 8 yuan fee, and I only got 7,992 yuan. So I can only pay you back 7,992 yuan.”

Do you understand the logic? This colleague treated the outside world as a single entity: I got 7,992 yuan from the world, so I give back 7,992 yuan. Isn’t that very reasonable? He couldn’t understand that lending money is a credit relationship between colleagues, and the fee is WeChat’s business. This is an oversimplified mental model.

Simple models give people linear thinking.

“Effort” is a kind of linear thinking. Parents tell their children to work hard, leaders tell their employees to work hard, and everyone tells themselves to work hard—but in which direction? How can effort be effective? People don’t care about these; as long as I work hard, the world should give me a reward!

Pure effort is actually treating the outside world as a single entity. I work so hard, why do I still earn so little money? Little do you know you haven’t figured out where money comes from at all; you haven’t created wealth. You must have a slightly better model to know what choices to make, in which field, whether there is leverage, how the timing is… You should know there is no deity who gives you a reward just because you work hard.

As soon as people mention Chinese football, they curse the players for not working hard and having no fighting spirit, and compare them with amateur leagues like the “Scottish Premiership” (meaning lower tier), hoping to see “pure football.” Actually, they are all longing for the world to become simple; it’s a Peach Blossom Spring complex. Amateur leagues can be pure, but professional football is complex; you must straighten out many, many things. This is not a matter of returning to the “original intention.”

A corollary of simple mental models is “Indicatorism,” which is doing everything to reach a certain indicator. Learning is for getting good grades and a high degree, while reading books is actually not important because “extracurricular books” have no indicators.

The implication of indicatorism is that since I have reached this indicator, the world should give me corresponding treatment. If I get into a 985 university, I must get a high salary; if I pass the civil service exam, I must have a position that is both stable and promotable… They only know what the world owes them, but don’t think about what they can actually provide to the world.

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Adapting to scarcity, strong conformity, and simple models is not only enough for steady-state survival but also very useful. Don’t you like someone who has been obedient, frugal, hard-working, follows the crowd, never sticks their head out, and is both filial and compliant since childhood? If you were a landlord, you would want your tenant farmers to be this kind of person; if you were a shopkeeper, you would want your waiters to have these qualities; if you were a parent working hard just to make ends meet, you would think any expression of individuality by your children was making trouble. That’s why the Qing Dynasty always “ruled the world with filial piety.”

Others expect you to be low-maintenance, willing to work, and not to cause trouble—others didn’t expect you to flourish. Government-run schools have never been places to teach people how to make money; they are places to train qualified workers and law-abiding residents.

Those qualities are often very good local rationality, but from a global perspective, they are the shackles that trap people in a trap.

The world’s obsession with low-volatility survival is a mountain. But we are now in a high-volatility world.

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Parents who truly love their children should hope that their children are not so obedient, don’t have to work too hard, don’t have to be afraid of group pressure, and even dare to create a little volatility.

You’d better have a sufficiently complex mental model to understand the laws of various things and be able to use scientific thinking tools.

But the prerequisite for all of this is that you must be an “Agent”—you are the person calling the tools. You cannot be someone else’s tool.

Closing Poem

Ancient laws like a lock, Locking away hunger, cold, and unease; The key has long since rusted— Yet you hang it on your chest, As a badge of faith.

Notes

[1] “Cultural Lag.” Wikipedia. Accessed Oct 2025. [2] Hoffman, Moshe, and Erez Yoeli. Hidden Games: The Surprising Power of Game Theory to Explain Irrational Human Behavior, 2022. [3] Chen, Xi. “The Impact of Social Pensions on Intergenerational Relationships: Evidence from China.” China Economic Review working version on PMC (2017). [4] Daatland, Svein Olav, and Ariela Lowenstein. “Intergenerational Solidarity and the Family–Welfare State Balance.” European Journal of Ageing 2 (2005): 174–182.