Constraints: Respecting Reality Before Taking Action

We have discussed how narrative is the first principle of this universe. However, before using narrative to inspire action, you must understand that the vast majority of popular narratives in the world are not particularly useful. One could say that people are daily immersed in myths without even realizing it.

To direct your life toward reality, you must break through mythical thinking. To do that, you must respect the world’s hard constraints.

In this session, we will start with popular fiction to help you train your eyes to see through these myths.

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I enjoy reading fiction because I need to imagine a more interesting life; I believe that wishful imagination is also a form of solace. But one shouldn’t read fiction until they become a child again. Let’s categorize various types of fiction into six levels based on their degree of wishful thinking:

Level 1: The “System Plug-in.” The protagonist is the most ordinary person with no outstanding qualities. Suddenly, a “pie falls from the sky,” and they gain superpowers—perhaps a magical artifact, a knowledge system built into their brain, or magic. In short, they are “the chosen one” and then defeat all enemies. Stories like Ma Liang and his Magic Brush, the superheroes of the “Marvel Universe,” and even the beginning of Harry Potter fit this setting.

This is pure wish fulfillment. Works at this level cater to the reader’s most direct dream: achieving a total reversal of fortune overnight without having to pay any price.

Level 2: “The CEO Falls for Me.” The protagonist gains the favor of a powerful figure because of a quality that is actually easy to achieve—for example, being the only person on the scene who is considered “kind.” Cinderella and Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio (Liaozhai) belong to this type. You, a mediocre student or worker, become a successful person of high status simply because you once happened to kindly save a fox. If we are being blunt, Jane Austen’s romance novels are essentially “CEO stories” for their time [1].

Readers at this level long to be “seen.” I don’t plan to do anything active, but since I am such a good person, the universe should allocate good things to me. Ideally, passive goodness should win.

Level 3: “Jin Yong’s Wuxia.” The protagonist is not only kind but also actively does good deeds, practices hard, and endures hardships. However, they never actively pursue fame or fortune—wealth and status are forced upon them from the outside; they just need to stay true to their original heart. Think of Guo Jing, Linghu Chong, Qiao Feng, Duan Yu, and Xu Zhu—it is truly a case of “only because he does not contend, no one in the world can contend with him.”

Can you really get what you want by not contending? Readers at this level are brave enough to act, but they demand to win with the most beautiful image.

Level 4: “Leveling Up.” The protagonist knows the world is cruel; they have no moral obsession and actively compete. They not only believe that “my fate is determined by me, not by heaven,” but they also don’t mind doing a little “evil” for a greater good. Most modern web novels are at this level.

Modern readers feel a “sympathetic understanding” for this. If you think this is realistic enough, I must point out that the myth here is that “hard work truly leads to leveling up” and “paying a price truly brings a reward”—reality has no obligation to give you that certainty.

Level 5: “Against the System.” The protagonist is toyed with by fate, discovering they are not only not the “chosen one” but not even the only protagonist. They find that effort doesn’t necessarily lead to winning, and good people don’t necessarily get good rewards, but they still choose to fight against fate. Works like A Song of Ice and Fire and Dream of the Red Chamber are at this level, showing the cruelty of destiny.

The myth here is that at least you know who the “good guys” are. Even if you don’t win, you can always choose to join the side of justice. Unfortunately, the real world sometimes doesn’t even grant you that much meaning.

Level 6: “Searching for Meaning” is closest to reality. In these works, there are no absolute good or bad people, no absolute right or wrong, and you might not even know what the meaning of living is—everyone is just helpless. To Live, 1984, and Brave New World are like this. You know that you can’t live without order, but you find that order itself is a form of oppression…

All narratives are subjective; even Level 6 cannot represent the real world. We always have to find meaning within some fantasy, but the narrative you choose had better have a slightly more complex model, and you’d better have some agency within it.

Most people live in the first few levels. Their life narrative is actually wishing [2].

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The biggest difference between reality and imagination is that here there are a large number of “hard constraints”—limitations that cannot be bypassed.

For example, suppose you are a foodie and, after some R&D at home, you make an exceptionally delicious steak with an elegant style and precise temperature. You think to yourself, “Doesn’t this crush all the local restaurants?” So, you decide to open a high-end steakhouse.

Little do you know that opening a shop is a completely different story. You must go to grab the best meat at 4:00 AM every day, and even then, the cold-chain truck might be stuck in morning rush hour; the temperature you want requires a custom-made furnace; your production capacity cannot guarantee completing that many orders before 9:30 PM; is your pricing too high? Your shop will repeatedly undergo fire and health inspections; there will always be picky customers making complaints just to find fault… and so on.

You realize there’s a reason those restaurants on the street make their steaks a bit simpler. If you don’t run a household, you don’t know the price of rice and oil; if you don’t produce at scale, you don’t know the hardships of a boss. It’s the same reason children of the poor grow up faster: when you touch the boundaries of resources, you encounter hard constraints, and only then do you realize that what you thought before was a myth.

The bigger the task, the more hard constraints there are, and the less room there is for free play.

People often think that the more powerful a person is, the more freedom they have. They think those politicians’ policies and orders are born from discretionary power, reflecting their own philosophies and personalities—in fact, it’s not the case. Many politicians indeed want to do that, but the law of history is that sooner or later, they all encounter hard constraints. Their hands grow softer as their term progresses, and they finally lament that “in this world, nothing can be accomplished.”

Reality forces you to be a rational actor. You must satisfy conditions from all sides, take care of various relationships, and balance interpersonal games and organizational processes… In the end, let alone “man conquering nature,” even seemingly routine reforms are not something you can achieve just because you want to.

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Let’s look at a real-world example. In January 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump began his second term. Right out of the gate, he let his most important campaign donor, Elon Musk, establish the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), declaring an intention to cut federal government spending by $2 trillion annually. You should know that the total federal government expenditure in 2024 was $6.8 trillion—this is a massive chunk. Furthermore, the two said they would return the saved money to the people in the form of $5,000 checks per household.

The “chosen” president and the world’s greatest entrepreneur teaming up to root out government corruption and benefit the common people! Isn’t this more exciting than any novel?

But reality is not a novel. Before DOGE even started, informed observers already knew that Musk’s goal was simply impossible to achieve. I said as much in my “Elite Daily Class” column in February 2025 [3].

You only need to “do the math” to know [4].

Of the $6.8 trillion total budget, over 60% is mandatory spending required by law, primarily Medicare and Social Security. Forget Trump—even Congress cannot simply touch these expenditures; they would have to change the law first. Then there is another 13% used to pay interest on the debt, which is also non-negotiable.

The money that the President and Congress can truly exercise discretion over accounts for only 27% of the total budget. And half of that—about 13%—is military spending, which Musk cannot afford to provoke. Therefore, the portion Musk can actually touch represents only 14% of the total budget, less than $1 trillion. How do you save $2 trillion out of that?

Even this $1 trillion cannot be moved randomly. This covers the daily operations of the federal government, including social services (education, employment, CDC, FDA, agriculture), public goods (natural resources/environment, transportation), scientific research (NIH/NASA/DOE/NSF), and governance operations (Veterans Affairs, justice/law enforcement, diplomacy, the White House/Congress/various departments). Which item would you cut?

Musk’s choice was a portion of U.S. foreign aid and scientific research funding—not because these two were the most deserving of cuts, but because they were the easiest to cut (after all, scientists and foreigners are less likely to organize massive protests). But these two items didn’t amount to much money to begin with. Musk also laid off a portion of federal employees, only to find later that he couldn’t do without them and had to hire some back.

As a result, Musk’s reputation plummeted within just a few months. Silicon Valley types once felt ashamed to drive a Tesla.

On May 28, 2025, Musk announced his resignation from the Department of Government Efficiency, leaving behind the comment: “The federal bureaucracy is worse than I thought. Improving things in Washington is an uphill battle.” [5]

As of October 2025, DOGE claimed on its official website to have saved over $200 billion. However, third-party organizations had previously pointed out that the website was intentionally misleading: government contracts cannot be canceled just by saying so; you also have to pay liquidated damages… The actual verifiable savings were much lower [6]. CBS News even cited assessments from some agencies stating that [7], considering severance pay, litigation costs, federal government efficiency losses, and tax revenue losses, DOGE’s cutting measures not only failed to save money but actually added $135 billion in costs to the federal government.

Recall the day Musk took office—the public was fully supportive, and he hired several “genius youngsters” to help audit the accounts. These people even slept in their offices, full of passion… but in the end, they not only lost, but they couldn’t even clearly state who the enemy was.

You can’t exactly say that “addition” is your enemy. This is a hard constraint: it’s not necessarily that someone is deliberately working against you; it’s that the world is inherently full of limitations.

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This is not to say that big things can never be accomplished, nor that hard constraints can never be broken: if American society encountered a deep crisis requiring immediate, massive change, even the “hardest” money could be moved; technological progress is all about breaking through former limitations. But you must respect hard constraints. You must think through the hard constraints in your world model, define the boundary conditions, and only then talk about the path to success.

In my view, the following four hard constraints are ones we can never escape:

1. Conservation of Energy. Whether building, destroying, acquiring information, or erasing information, whatever you do consumes energy. Your resources are limited. Does Ma Liang’s magic brush not need charging?
2. Time Window. Many things can only be accomplished during specific windows of opportunity, when constraints might loosen a bit… If the window hasn’t arrived, you can only wait [8].
3. Natural Laws. Things have their own laws of development; those laws will not change because of you. No matter how strong your willpower, you cannot conquer heaven.
4. Agency of Others. Everyone has the right to take the initiative; you cannot assume others are just NPCs and only you are the protagonist.

You cannot have whatever you want, you cannot press the button whenever you want to start, you cannot expect things to evolve strictly according to your design, and you cannot control everything.

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The simplest way to consider hard constraints is to “do the math.” Many beautiful ideas can be proven impossible just by running the numbers.

For example, there are rumors that a so-called “subterranean civilization” exists inside the Earth—“Lizard People”—said to be older and more advanced than our surface civilization, and that those UFOs are actually them coming out for a breath of fresh air. You might feel it’s hard to distinguish truth from falsehood, since the underground is so large that no one can guarantee there isn’t a civilization there… but you only need to do the math.

I had GPT run some numbers—

The various energy sources of our surface civilization essentially come from the sun. The power of the Earth absorbing solar energy is $1.22 \times 10^5$ terawatts. There is no sunlight underground; they can only rely on geothermal energy, and the geothermal flux is only 47 terawatts—1/2,600th of ours.

The food we surface dwellers eat primarily comes from plant photosynthesis. Without sunlight underground, energy must be converted into food using other methods—for example, using geothermal power to generate electricity and then using that electricity for LED lighting to grow plants. The cost of doing this is extremely high, and given that geothermal energy itself is scarce, the food you could barely synthesize wouldn’t be enough to sustain even a city-state of a million people, let alone livestock. Then you also have to consider the oxygen source and heat dissipation.

GPT’s most generous estimate was that if there truly were people underground, their population would at most be around a few million. They would subsist on synthesized food and algae, occasionally supplementing with fungi and insects, barely surviving.

The energy ceiling determines the population ceiling, the population ceiling limits the complexity of the division of labor, and the complexity of the division of labor is the foundation for innovation. So, how could such a low-energy, small-scale civilization possibly have technology superior to ours?

Grand narratives fear “doing the math” the most. Whenever someone says that since we can build beautiful high-speed rail in the remote mountains of Guizhou, we can turn the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau into a “land of fish and rice,” you only need to ask one question: “Who’s paying?”

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An effective narrative is one that finds a way out within the range of various hard constraints, rather than treating the world as a wish-fulfillment machine.

For an immature person, this is bad news because you cannot do as you please. But for a mature person, this is actually good news. Constraints make things predictable, orderly, and worth studying and learning. The flip side of the fact that you cannot do as you please is that others cannot do as they please either. This world is ruled neither by people of high status nor by those with great determination; this provides everyone with a baseline of certainty and security.

Closing Poem

Narrative is the boat, Hard constraints are the riverbed. Dreams turn the rudder, But one must measure the water, watch the wind, and keep the books. Energy has a price, time has a window, laws do not yield, and others have their own minds. We are free to choose our actions, But we are not free to choose the consequences of those actions [9].

Footnotes

[1] Dai Congrong, Are Humans Really Yahoos? Fourteen Lectures on European Literature (Weiyan Media, 2019).

[2] Scientific Thinker 3: Passionate Enthusiasm, Wishful Thinking.

[3] Elite Daily Class Season 6, Q&A: Why does Musk support Trump? February 21, 2025.

[4] Peter G. Peterson Foundation. “Chart Pack: The U.S. Budget.” August 6, 2025. https://www.pgpf.org/article/chart-pack-the-us-budget/.

[5] The Washington Post. “Elon Musk Leaves Trump Administration,” May 29, 2025. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/05/28/elon-musk-leaves-trump-government-doge/

[6] POLITICO. “DOGE-flation: DOGE’s Actual Savings Are a Fraction of What It Claims.” August 12, 2025. https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/12/trump-doge-contract-claims-savings-inflation-00498178.

[7] CBS News. “DOGE Says It Has Saved $160 Billion. Those Cuts Have Cost Taxpayers $135 Billion, One Analysis Says.” April 28, 2025. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/doge-cuts-cost-135-billion-analysis-elon-musk-department-of-government-efficiency/.

[8] “Knowing the Opportunity” (知机): Zhi for knowing, Ji for opportunity/timing.

[9] The first part of this poem was composed by GPT, and I modified the last two lines. They come from Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. The original quote is: “We are free to choose our actions, … but we are not free to choose the consequences of these actions.” As a fun comparison, GPT’s original last two lines were: “The story sounds good, but the truth sounds louder.”