Original video in Chinese.
Key Takeaway
- On his 40th birthday, the author set two freedom goals for himself: time freedom and relationship freedom.
- The core of time freedom is to take control of the direction of one’s time, using time to create high-value products rather than directly selling time or spending it for others. Improving efficiency is the key to achieving time freedom, as it expands the volume of one’s “time pipeline” and increases the probability of successful exploration.
- The first stage of relationship freedom is to break away from toxic and unconscious relationships, which requires professional help such as psychotherapy to become aware of and process deep influences.
- The second stage of relationship freedom is to actively seek out and build healthy, nourishing new relationship networks that promote continuous personal growth and evolution.
- The author hopes to strengthen his video expression ability, turn himself into a “super node,” filter and connect with like-minded people, and gradually build and develop a “newtype” community.
Full Content
By the time you see this video, I’ll already be forty.
I don’t really look it, maybe because I’ve always kept exercising, kept curiosity, and kept desire.
But even so, over the past year I could still clearly feel my body functions declining. For example, recovery after exercise has slowed down, and my immunity isn’t as strong as before.
That suddenly gave me a sense of urgency: life is really short, and people really do die.
The young and middle-aged stage is the most, most precious. Once you enter old age and your energy declines significantly, even if death is still far away, it’s also not far away.
So on my birthday, I set two goals for myself, both about freedom—not financial freedom. Of course I want financial freedom, but I’m not considering financial freedom.
The first freedom goal is: time freedom.
When I was in my twenties and thirties, I felt like I had plenty of time, so I was especially willing to trade money for time. But looking back now at that phase of my life, I feel it was really stupid as hell.
Because time is our only means of production. Selling your time directly is the most loss-making deal there is.
Think about it: if you sell steel bars or cement directly, how much can you sell them for? If you turn them into houses, how much can you sell them for?
When we’re young, we especially love to hustle in the workplace, and all that hustling is basically about the unit price of our own time. Those seemingly glamorous white-collar workers are actually no different from street vendors, no different from street sweepers—everyone is selling their time, unprocessed or only slightly processed.
So, the first dimension of time freedom I’m talking about is being able to control the direction of time.
Everything we gain in life, whether spiritually or materially, is dug out of our own time or someone else’s time. Stop directly selling your time, and stop using your time to accomplish someone else’s ends. My time has to be used on myself. I’ll use time to create high-value products to exchange with society—that’s simpler than ever in the AI era.
The second dimension of time freedom is endlessly improving efficiency. On this point, I was inspired by Li Xiaolai. In his book, he mentions a very important idea:
Time is a pipeline.
Each person’s lifetime is roughly the same, maybe eighty or ninety years. So the length of everyone’s time pipeline is basically the same. The only difference is the thickness of the pipeline.
Inside this pipeline of time are all the people and things that have happened. The more things you do per unit of time, the higher your efficiency, the larger the diameter of the time pipeline, the thicker the time pipeline, and therefore the greater the total volume of time.
I think this is the ultimate difference between people. It’s also the ultimate meaning of improving efficiency.
No matter what your life goal is, you definitely need to explore. If your efficiency isn’t high enough and your pipeline volume isn’t large enough, then your odds of successful exploration are definitely low.
So time freedom means using time on the things I want to do with extremely high efficiency, and ultimately realizing the meaning of my own life, rather than having someone else occupy most of it.
The second freedom goal I set is: relationship freedom.
Starting last year, I began psychotherapy. Once a week, and so far I’ve already had 65 sessions. This is the investment with the highest return I’ve ever made. I should have started psychotherapy ten years ago.
Just last week, I told my therapist: I feel like this world is basically single-player mode.
Because 99.999% of people are still in a state of ignorance. When you communicate with them, you’re not really communicating—they hear your words as words processed by the brain, all processed by the subconscious.
Everyone lives in their own single-player game. People are not truly communicating with each other, not truly connecting, let alone understanding one another.
So the first stage of my “relationship freedom” is to break away from these toxic relationships and ignorant groups.
Doing this is really hard. Because people are immersed in relationships, and that immersion is very hidden, very hard to notice. For example, if a person is full of anger toward society, the source is very likely hatred toward his father.
And it’s not just hard—it’s also deadly serious. Think about it: if the reason someone sets the direction of their life comes from the influence of a particular relationship, isn’t that extremely serious?
You can’t handle this on your own. You definitely need the help of a psychotherapist. A therapist is like a mirror—a flat mirror, not a concave mirror—faithfully reflecting you back, even showing you things you haven’t noticed. A therapist is also a container, receiving all your emotions and substituting for what your parents and society failed to do.
That’s why I said earlier that seeing a psychotherapist is the investment with the highest return. Up to now, I feel like I’m almost done with the first stage of “relationship freedom.” There are still some finishing tasks left, and I can handle them over the next six months to a year.
The second stage is to look for new, healthy relationships that can nourish me.
The saying that people are products of relationships does not mean, literally speaking, that people are simply the sum of various relationships. The key is in the two words “products.” That is to say, people grow within relationships.
At different stages, people need different relationship networks. Especially after we become adults, once we become aware of all this, we must consciously and proactively build new relationship networks. Only then can we continue to nurture ourselves and continue growing and evolving.
This is the hardest part of “relationship freedom.” I’m not sure whether it can really develop, so I can only leave it to fate. I’m constantly strengthening my video expression ability, and that is part of the consideration as well. AI is just a starting point; there’s a lot more I want to express. Turning myself into a super node, filtering and connecting, slowly building and developing the newtype community, and seeing what it looks like five years from now. I’m pretty excited about it.
OK, that’s all for this episode. I wanted to share some of my thoughts on my 40th birthday. If you want to connect with me, come to the newtype community. See you next time!