Original video in Chinese.
Key Takeaway
- “Being yourself” is the most poisonous comfort food of this generation: because 99% of people simply do not have a “self,” only an empty shell completely domesticated by three layers of conditioning from parental expectations, school discipline, and company/platform systems. Looking inward only leads to emptiness and anxiety.
- The self is not discovered, but constructed: the correct path is “building outward” rather than “searching inward.” Through a dual-loop cycle of “taking in heterogeneous worldviews (history, politics, philosophy, first principles) + producing a lot and accepting real-world feedback,” you slowly build the self piece by piece, like stacking blocks.
- The ultimate goal is self-parenting: for the past twenty or thirty years, someone else has been raising you (with their own agendas mixed in). Now you need to raise yourself. The people who can do this are the true newtype (super individuals).
“Being yourself” is the most poisonous and harmful comfort food of this era. Because it is built on a fundamentally false premise:
You have a self waiting to be found.
But the problem is that for 99% of people today, there simply is no “self,” so how can you possibly “be yourself”?
Why is there no self?
Because after decades of being domesticated by the system, that self was either strangled to death, or never had the chance to grow in the first place.
The self you think you have now is actually a compensation created by three layers of shell.
The first layer is the shell of parental expectations.
You must be sensible. You must get good grades. You must find a stable job.
This is the factory default engraved in you by bloodline.
The second layer is the shell of school discipline.
You must obey the rules. You must write the standard answers. You must climb upward in the rankings.
This is the steel stamp put on you by the education assembly line.
The third layer is the shell shaped by companies and platforms.
You must have execution. You must manage upward. You must align at the right level of granularity.
This is the runtime plugin installed by the business machine.
This is your first half of life. You have lived for twenty or thirty years wearing these three layers of shell, gotten used to their existence, and even mistaken these three layers of shell for yourself.
Then one day, you suddenly decide to “find your true self” and start peeling them off.
You think a golden true self will jump out from inside. But in the end, all there is inside is a blank space.
That is why so many people who quit their jobs suddenly not only fail to get the freedom they imagined, but become more anxious than ever before.
Because when they were cursing their bosses inside the company, at least they still had the identity of a “victim” to confirm their existence.
Once they leave the system, no one assigns them tasks, no one sets goals for them, and no one pays them. Suddenly, they have to face that huge blank space alone.
It’s not that freedom is bad. It’s that they were never prepared to take freedom in.
Freedom requires an extremely high level of capacity. A person without a “self” as an entity will be crushed by freedom immediately.
So if looking inward is a dead end, what should we do? My answer is:
Do not search inward; build outward.
Other people’s logic is that the “self” is an a priori existence, long hidden deep in your soul, and you only need to awaken it, realize it, and discover it.
That is religious logic.
My logic is that the “self” is an acquired construct. It does not exist at the beginning. You need to build it through continuous action and feedback, like stacking blocks.
That is engineering logic.
In one sentence: the self is not discovered; it is reverse-defined by the outputs you produce.
First there are outputs, then there is the self.
But there is a trap here. Whose materials are stored in your head?
Still those three layers of shell.
Family tells you what success is; school tells you what correctness is; companies tell you what value is.
If you use this set of materials to produce things, what you produce is still a shell, not you.
So if you want to build a real self, you need new inputs; you need to reinstall a new cognitive system in your brain.
How exactly do you do that? Three steps.
The first step is to recognize the “standard answers” preloaded by those three layers of shell.
This step may require a bit of introspection. Only then can you identify the things you have been used to for twenty years.
My own experience is that after I learned to observe my thoughts, I could become aware at the very first moment of my own state, the actions I was about to take, and the deeper reasons that triggered them.
It was as if there were a third-person version of me watching how “I” was being manipulated by everything.
The second step is input.
You need to take in a large amount of heterogeneous material. For example: history, political economy, philosophy, psychology, first principles.
These are not skill books; they are worldview books.
The key here is not reading a lot, but reading differently.
You must deliberately read things that make you uncomfortable, things that shake your old assumptions.
If, after reading, you feel something loosening inside, then you’re on the right track.
The purpose of this step is only one: to install a new interpretive framework in your brain.
The third step is output, which means actually using that new framework.
Use the new framework to interpret the people, events, and news you see, as well as your own past.
Then write it out, publish it, make it.
Boldly accept real-world feedback. Turn the framework in your head into something that can be tested.
See which explanations hold up, which get slapped in the face, and which make your eyes light up and keep you going.
The place that makes your eyes light up is the place where you are growing.
Input and output are like two interlocking loops:
New input has to be digested through output. If you read a good book but never write it out, three months later nothing will be left.
When you are producing, wherever you get stuck, you can go back and make targeted input. If you keep writing until you can’t go on at a certain point, that means there is a cognitive hole there waiting for you to fill it.
These two loops drive each other, and people slowly grow out of this cycle.
This is not a methodology I came up with; it is the path I myself walked.
Starting in 2010, I tore down and rebuilt everything my family, school, and society had taught me.
I read history, politics, and finance, all in order to understand again how this world actually works.
Then I started writing, started making things, started externalizing what was in my head so it could be tested.
Year after year, I slowly built a self that does not depend on anyone else’s definition.
This process is not fast, but it is solid.
This is the process of raising yourself again.
The previous twenty or thirty years were spent being raised by others, with too much of their own agenda mixed in.
Now your body has grown up, and you also have enough ability and resources to raise yourself.
Stop believing those mystical awakening myths.
Look inward, and you find emptiness.
Act outward, and you get substance.
Don’t search for a self; build one.
Reinstall the system through input; calibrate the system through output.
What I just talked about—raising yourself, transforming yourself—people who can do this are newtype.
The reason I made this channel and built the newtype community is to find people who are doing this.
Not people who are here for courses, and not people who are looking for shortcuts.
People who are already building themselves.
If something in you moved after hearing what I said just now, then we may be the same kind.
OK, that’s it for this episode. If you want to learn about AI, want to become a super individual, and want to find like-minded people, come join our newtype community. See you next episode!