你为什么会浮躁

Why Are You Restless?

> By Li Xiaolai · 2007-06-03 · [Original (web archive)](https://web.archive.org/web/20111113100737/http://www.lixiaolai.com/archives/95.html) (Chinese)
> Our translation from the Chinese original.

Today at the Agricultural University, a student said to me, "……Why do I feel so especially restless? Looking around me, it seems people are all like this too…… I want to be steady and down-to-earth too, but I always feel myself getting restless without being able to help it. What exactly is going on?"

==================================

For roughly the ten years from seventeen or eighteen to twenty-seven or twenty-eight, most people are in a restless state. If you happen to be like this, it shows only one thing: you are perfectly normal—it's that line again: believe me, you are not alone.

The first reason for restlessness is that [people at this stage are, in most cases, in a state where their self-satisfaction is going from bad to worse](http://www.lixiaolai.com/archives/46.html). [Translator's note: the original repeats 处 (处处于, "at at"); translated once]

> ……
>
> From around age 15, the level of satisfaction begins to decline continuously. This should, by and large, be caused by no longer being ignorant and therefore fearless. One slowly realizes that one is insignificant and of no account in this world; one suffers all day between so-called ideals and twisted reality.
>
> Only around age 45 does the curve begin to rise. A long thirty years. With an ordinary person's mind, observing, feeling, understanding, pondering, practicing, reflecting, until suddenly seeing the light or going astray, takes thirty years.

When people don't feel good about themselves, it's hard not to be restless.

Another reason people are often restless comes from an incorrect—or at least not entirely correct—mindset: people always want definite results right away—what the common saying calls "being too eager for success."

People always try, before deciding whether to learn something, to work out "is this thing actually really useful?" This seemingly reasonable idea is actually very stupid. The first thing to know is that everyone's mind is necessarily limited to some degree. So before you have learned a certain skill, it's hard to know to what degree learning it is actually useful. Conversely, by the time you see some person who has a skill and judge that the skill is very useful, it's often already too late—[because learning a skill and becoming proficient at it often takes 5 to 10 years](http://www.lixiaolai.com/?p=212). [Translator's note: the original writes 看到人们某个人 ("see people some person"), a slip; translated as "see some person"]

Restlessness arises like this:

1. Is this thing useful or not? After asking yourself this question, what you finally choose is not what's really useful, but what feels useful.
2. As you go on doing it, you find that what originally felt useful now feels useless again.
3. Give up.
4. Look at the people around you; there's always someone better than you, so you're very distressed.
5. Repeat the above cycle every day.
6. You know perfectly well you're agitated, yet are powerless to do anything about it……

So the first step to entering a "steady, down-to-earth" state is to be clear about one thing: [the real pleasure of learning is not that it's useful, but that the process of learning itself is interesting](http://www.lixiaolai.com/?p=204). The correct answer to "Is learning this useful?" is not "Useful!", nor "Useless!". The correct answer should be "**I don't know what use it has……**"

To sum up the cause of this awkward predicament: too many people's worldview has a problem: they keep trying, of all things, to find a permanently certain solution in an uncertain world—obsessed with a state that simply doesn't exist.

The killer is that they not only want to know the definite result, they need to know it right away—which is even more absurd. While I'm at it, I'll put here [a passage Han Han wrote recently mocking some people's thinking](http://blog.sina.com.cn/u/4701280b010009us) (it describes it very accurately):

> [Translator's note: quoted by the author from Han Han's blog; not Li Xiaolai's own words.] ……
>
> China's special situation is that many parents don't allow students to date—many parents oppose dating even at university—but as soon as university is over, all parents hope that someone excellent in every respect, and preferably with an apartment, will immediately drop from the sky to fall in love with their son or daughter, and get married too. Nice dream.

This passage seems to have nothing to do with the topic we've just been discussing. But look at the root behind it, and you'll find that it is, surprisingly, an absurd idea produced by those people using exactly the same pattern of thinking.

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