Growing up in Singapore in the 1970s, hotpot meant the Teochew version of a mild, clear chicken/pork broth. You put in your ingredients, cook them immediately, and eat them with a mild soy sauce and a bit of sesame oil. The whole point was to taste the quality of the ingredient that went into it. Fresh fish, slices of pork and chicken, and handmade fishballs. If the broth was clean and non-intrusive, everything tasted of itself. Clarity was the dish’s philosophy.

About a decade ago, something from Chongqing arrived and upended everything for those of us used to a milder approach.

Mala hotpot originated in Sichuan, spread across China, and then went global. In Adelaide, restaurants opened for homesick Chinese students. In Singapore, many said mala spots crowded out local Chinese food. I watched, suspicious as someone who identifies as Chinese but finds this cuisine genuinely uncomfortable.

I don’t really like mala hotpot. The heat is relentless. The numbing is disorienting. It overwhelms rather than reveals. You can’t taste the freshness (鲜) of the ingredients. Everything I loved about childhood hotpot seems to contradict everything I love about mala.

And yet, every now and then, I find myself craving it despite my reservations.

Part of this shift may come from my family. My elder son, who grew up here in Australia and has no memory of Singapore hotpot, loves mala completely. He will order it every time, and eat through the heat with the contentment of someone who knows exactly what he’s doing.

So, over time, I’ve tried to understand what this dish is actually doing to us, especially from a cook’s perspective.

The Mystery of the Sichuan Peppercorn

The Sichuan peppercorn is not really a pepper. It shares a botanical family with the orange and the lemon, and nothing at all with chilli or with the black pepper in your grinder. The kinship is close enough that, for nearly 40 years, America banned the import of Sichuan peppercorns, afraid they’d carry a disease that attacks citrus groves.

The numbing compound in Sichuan peppercorns works differently from chilli. Chilli tricks your mouth into feeling on fire. Sichuan pepper tells your mouth it’s vibrating, a gentle electric current across lips and tongue, like a 9V battery we all put on our tongue as children. That’s ma. The numbness is its own sensation.

The la, the chilli heat, comes behind it. And because your mouth has already been altered, the heat feels different from just using chillis. The two sensations don’t cancel each other. They kinda collaborate, like a dance. Hence mala.

What mala produces is “complementary contrast”. The numbing sets up the heat. The heat builds until you stop eating, put down your chopsticks, and breathe. Take a sip of cold beer. In that moment of relief, something happens. The absence of sensation feels strangely extraordinary. Better, somehow, than if you’d never felt anything at all.

There’s a concept in Chinese painting called liubai, of “leaving the white”. The deliberate blank space in a composition makes everything around it more vivid. The unpainted sky makes the mountain more real. In Chinese aesthetics, emptiness is active. What you leave out intensifies what you put in.

Mala is like liubai applied to eating. The numbing is the white space. The flavour within it is enhanced.

The Tao of Hotpot and Horror Movies

Laozi said something about this. Chapter 22 of the Tao Te Ching opens with a paradox: yield and be preserved whole. Bend and become straight. The thread running through Daoist thought is that going through difficulty, rather than around it, is the only way to arrive somewhere real. You don’t fight the heat of mala. You surrender to it. What’s on the other side is only reachable because you went through it.

Maybe this is why we love horror movies. The comparison is less strange than it sounds. When you watch a horror movie, your body responds as if what you see is real. Your heart rate accelerates, your palms sweat, something in your nervous system treats the threat as genuine even as another part of you knows you’re sitting safely in a cinema. The pleasure isn’t just being afraid. It’s knowing that the fear will eventually end. The completion of the cycle.

Eating mala, perhaps, works the same way. Your body treats the heat and numbing as a kind of genuine assault. You stop, breathe, and relief arrives. Then, almost immediately, you reach for more.

Psychologists call this benign masochism. The deliberate seeking of controlled discomfort for the pleasure that follows. Humans appear to be the only species that does this. We ride rollercoasters. We watch horror movies. We eat mala hotpot.

Most intense flavours have to be learned. Fermented fish, bitter melon, the funk of aged cheese, durian, the stink of smelly tofu: You need familiarity before it turns from repellent to delicious. Mala is a bit like that, too.

But Mala carries something the others don’t. Underneath the acquired flavour sits a strange kind of reward. A pleasure, even. The chilli burn triggers an endorphin rush, the body’s own relief flooding in behind the heat. This fires in everyone, from the first bowl to the thousandth, from Chongqing to Adelaide. Durian gives you only the pleasure you learned to expect. Mala gives you that, and a chemical payoff underneath it that you can’t refuse. That is what carried an obscure regional dish around the world in a decade.

Sichuan sits in a deep, humid basin. In traditional Chinese medicine, damp climates call for hot, pungent foods: dishes that generate warmth and expel cold, moist energy accumulated in the body. Mala was a local answer to a local problem. The physiology, however, is universal.

Which brings me back to winter in Adelaide, and a craving I can’t get rid of.

My childhood hotpot experience was about cultural identity. The taste memory and clarity of the broth are what I crave. Mala is about something else entirely: discomfort, contrast, the relief that only the pain makes possible. We didn’t inherit this dish. It found us by a strange route. And despite my resistance, I’ll order it again, and again, and again.

The Basement: Building Your Own Mala Base

If you’ve read my hotpot piece, you know I’m lazy about stock. Packet-based, butane stove, dish-washer finish. For mala hotpot, there’s a whole range of pre-packs that will do the job: Haidilao, Xiaolongkan, Dezhuang. Most are good. Some are very good. If you just want mala on a Tuesday night in July, buy a packet and skip the rest of this.

But a pre-pack is almost always a suspicion. Build your own base once, and you’ll understand what mala actually is. After that, you read the back of the packet to see if that’s what you want to serve up.

What follows is a working framework, not a rigid recipe. Chinese cooking is forgiving, and mala especially so. Cook by smell and taste as you go along.

The two things that make it mala

Everything else is supplementary, if you like.

Dried chillies. Dried chillies. We use two kinds to do two jobs. Er jing tiao for fragrance, colour, and a moderate heat. “Facing Heaven” chillies (chao tian jiao) for a sharper bite. A good handful of each. Snip them, soak them in just-boiled water for fifteen minutes to soften and smooth the heat, then drain. Shake out some seeds if you want it gentler. The seeds carry harshness, not flavour.

Substitutions. The two-chilli logic works like this. For the er jing tiao, the fragrant red one, reach for coarse Korean gochugaru or whole dried Kashmiri chillies. Both give that deep red and gentle warmth without the heat running away from you. For the facing-heaven, any small hot dried chilli will do: Thai bird’s eye or dried árbol. Soak whole dried chillies to reconstitute them, but if you’re using flakes like gochugaru, add them to the oil with the heat off so they do not burn. Avoid generic Indian chilli powder. It’s usually too fine and too hot, which makes the base bitter and cloudy.

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There’s a scene in The Gambler where John Goodman sits across a table and lays out, with terrifying clarity, what it means to be free. It wasn’t wealth, luxury, lifestyle, or a number in a bank account. He talks about being in a place where nobody can make you do anything you don’t want to do.

He calls it the level of fuck you.

I first saw that clip on Instagram some time ago, scrolling late at night the way we all do when we’re too tired to sleep. I watched it several times. Then I thought about it. I realised I might have already stumbled into that sweet spot without realising it. And I hadn’t planned any of it.

The Wrong Question

Most of us spend our working lives asking the same question: How much money do I need before I can stop?

It’s a common question. It’s also a trap.

The number is always moving. You hit it, and the goalposts shift. The market dips, and suddenly you need more. Your lifestyle creeps upward, and the number creeps with it. You talk to a financial planner, and they run projections based on assumptions that make you feel sick. “How much? To retire?” You lie awake at night running your own calculations, and the answer is always “not yet.”

I know of people who earn three times what I ever did and still don’t feel like they have enough. Superannuation balances that would make you blink. Investment properties. Diversified portfolios. And they’re still afraid. Still grinding. Still tolerating what they shouldn’t have to tolerate.

“Enough” isn’t a number. It’s a feeling. And you can chase that feeling for your entire working life without ever catching it.

The question that matters should be: Who has leverage over me right now, and how do I start removing it?

That you can act on. Today. At any age.

How I Stumbled Into Retirement

I spent more than a decade in my twenties and thirties moving from job to job until I landed a position at a little-known automotive dealership. Over the next 10 years, I did good work, increased sales by some 800%, and was well paid for it.

Then we migrated to Australia and started over from zero.

Here, after spending 7 years at a small training and consulting firm, I was convinced that “a job” would never lead to financial independence. At a third of what I used to earn, I could see clearly that the light at the end of the tunnel was an oncoming train. So I decided to start a business, which meant taking on a substantial loan to build and own a commercial kitchen. The restaurant closed after 5 years. But I was lucky with the commercial kitchen we built. It now returns a decent rental yield.

Arse luck, I always say.

What happened in Australia was mostly luck. Through a combination of decisions that turned out better than expected, I came out on this side with very manageable debt and enough passive income to live on. The current trajectory looks good; the grind was over. Nobody had leverage over me.

At 60, I had accidentally stumbled into retirement.

It took me a while to realise it. For a long time, I kept running numbers in my head, awake at night, stress-testing scenarios. What if the property market drops? What if I’ve made a bad purchase? But I realised that the anxiety wasn’t about money. It was about the loss of forward motion. For thirty-something years, earning had been proof that I was still in the game. Without it, I felt vulnerable.

When I finally asked the real question (does anyone have leverage over me?), the answer was obvious. Nobody did. I was free.

I just couldn’t feel it, because I was still stuck in the old mindset.

What I’d Do Differently

Here’s the part that keeps me up at night now. Regret.

If I had my time again, I would have started this at thirty. Maybe earlier. I would have been deliberate about building the position instead of arriving at it by accident. I would have worked backwards from the condition in which nobody has leverage over me, rather than forward to an elusive number that was never going to feel like enough.

I wouldn’t have needed luck if I’d had a plan.

Luck flatters, but it’s unreliable. Too many did everything right by the old rules: earned well, acted responsibly, showed up. Yet they remain trapped and afraid, still working at sixty because they asked the wrong question too late.

I got lucky. They deserve better than luck.

The Framework: Dismantling Leverage

If you’re in your fifties now (or earlier), with ten or fifteen productive years ahead of you, here’s the reframe that could change everything: stop chasing a retirement number. Start auditing your dependencies instead.

Leverage means having something or someone with power over your decisions. It’s not a vague feeling of insecurity; it’s a clear list of forces, relationships, debts, situations, that, if disrupted, would force you into choices you don’t want to make. You can identify them. You can name them. And once they’re named, you can start dismantling them, one at a time.

Income dependency. Does everything in your life collapse if you lose your job? For most people, the answer is yes. One income source. One employer. One decision-maker who could end your financial security with an email. That’s leverage. The question isn’t “how do I earn more?” It’s “how do I build another source of income, even a small one, that doesn’t depend on the same person or institution?” It doesn’t have to replace your salary. It just has to exist. A rental property. A consulting side practice. A digital product. A weekend gig. Something that proves to your nervous system that you have options.

Housing dependency. Does your landlord have leverage over you? Does your mortgage lender? When you rent, someone else controls the roof over your head. They can raise the price. They can sell. They can choose not to renew. When you carry a large mortgage, the bank has leverage. You can’t afford to earn less. You can’t afford to take a risk. You can’t afford to stop. The path toward owning your home outright, as boring and unglamorous as it sounds, is one of the most powerful leverage-removal moves you can make. Nobody can take the roof from over your head when it’s yours.

Lifestyle dependency. Have you built a life that requires peak earning to sustain? This one is sneaky because it happens so gradually. The nicer car. Another car. The private school fees. The holidays that got a little more expensive each year. The subscriptions, the gym membership that you never really use, the upgrades. None of them felt like a big decision at the time. But together they’ve built a life that requires a substantial income to maintain, and that requirement is leverage. The question is: what could I cut now without losing anything that actually matters to me? You might be surprised by the answer.

Debt dependency. Are you carrying obligations that lock you into earning at a certain level? A car loan. A caravan loan. An investment loan. Credit card balances that somehow never quite cleared. Each one is a leash. A link. The kind you stop noticing because you’ve been on it for so long. Every debt you clear removes a link. Every link you remove gives you room to breathe, to choose, to say “fuck you.”

Identity dependency. This might be the most dangerous of all. Have you built your entire sense of self around your job title, your industry, your professional reputation? What happens to you, psychologically, if that role disappears? Replaced by an algorithm? Outsourced? I’ve watched people fall apart not because they ran out of money but because they ran out of identity. The paycheque wasn’t just income. It was proof of who they were. What they’re worth. If you can’t answer the question “Who am I without my job?” you’re carrying a dependency that no amount of money can resolve.

This isn’t a financial plan. I’m not a financial planner. Think of it as a kind of diagnostic. A way of looking at your life and asking, honestly, where are the leashes? Where are the things that have a hold on me, that would force me into a corner?

Name them. Then start working on them. One at a time. Deliberately.

The Paradox

Once you’ve dismantled the leverage, once you’ve reached the position where you could genuinely walk away from anything that has a hold on you, something unexpected happens.

You might not want to leave. Your job. Your situation.

The job that felt like a prison? It becomes tolerable the moment it becomes a choice. The boss who drove you crazy? Less infuriating when you know you could hand in your notice tomorrow and your life would be fine. The grind that was slowly killing you? It’s just work, once it’s no longer compulsory.

The “fuck you” money isn’t really about saying fuck you. It’s about never needing to. It’s the quiet confidence that comes from knowing you have options. And that confidence changes everything: how you carry yourself, how you negotiate, how you respond to pressure, how you sleep at night.

I suspect that many people who reach the position will choose to keep working. Just differently. On their own terms. For their own reasons. Because they want to, not because they have to.

That’s what freedom actually looks like. Not endless days at the beach. Not a golf course. Or Business-class vacations. Just the absence of compulsion.

Start Now

This conversation should start at thirty. Build the structure early, when time is on your side, and the compounding works in your favour. If I could go back, that’s what I’d do.

But if you’re fifty, you have ten or fifteen years. There’s still time. Enough to clear the debts. Enough to build a second income stream. Enough to right-size a lifestyle that may have crept beyond what you actually need. Enough to start answering the question of who you are if you lose your career tomorrow.

If you’re sixty, you have less time but more clarity. You know what matters. You know what doesn’t. Use that.

The worst version of this story is the one where you arrive at retirement age with no position, no plan, and no choice. Still dependent. Still afraid. Still hoping the number will be enough.

It won’t be. Because it was never about the number.

Start dismantling the leverage. One at a time. That’s the art of “fuck you” money. And that’s what The Second Act is about.

There is a scene near the end of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest that I will never forget.

The kraken has come for Captain Jack Sparrow. The Black Pearl is going down. His crew has rowed away in the longboat. Jack has finally worked himself free of the mast he was chained to, and for a moment it looks like he might escape.

Then comes the realisation that there’s no escaping this time.

He straightens his coat and puts on his pirate cap. He looks into the open jaws of the monster rising out of the sea. He draws his sword, says “Hello beastie,” and charges straight into its jaws.

I have thought about that scene often. It is not a heroic finale but more like an instruction for me when my time comes to face my kraken.

The hand that says do not fear

There is a hand gesture that appears across the world’s religions. Right hand raised, palm out, fingers up. In Sanskrit, it is the abhaya mudra. “A”, meaning not. “Bhaya”, meaning fear. It means “do not fear.”

You find it in serene Buddha statues. The Bodhisattva. But you also find it on the wrathful deities of Tibet, figures wreathed in flame, hung with skulls, baring fangs; everything about them was built to terrify. And there, in the middle of all that horror, the same calm hand.

Do not fear.

Why would you visualise a god to look like your worst nightmare and then have it tell you not to be afraid? What did the people who made these understand?

What we are afraid of

If you have read Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, you will see the same idea everywhere. The hero leaves home, crosses the threshold into the darkness, and, before he can return changed, something in him must die.

Hercules goes down into the underworld for his final labour. Odysseus sails to the land of the dead to consult the prophet Tiresias before he can find his way home. Jesus is crucified before he rises. Arjuna, on the battlefield in the Bhagavad Gita, watches his whole sense of who he is collapse, and Krishna has to walk him through to the other side. And the Buddha sits under the bodhi tree, set upon by Mara, the lord of death and desire, wearing every terrifying face of fear.

It is not the body that has to go. It is the self. The old “I,” with all its certainty about who it is, has to die. Campbell called it the hero’s death. Later writers called it “Ego death.”

That is the thing we are afraid of. Not the ending of the body, but the ending of the self. The name, the story, the accumulated sense of being someone. The identity. We say we fear death, but what we cannot bear is the idea of becoming nobody. Nothing. When there is no more “me” to notice that there is no more me.

Contemplate that thought and watch what happens. You will see the terror, the face of Mara, the jaws of the kraken. The mind will not entertain it for long. It reaches for a distraction, for a belief in the afterlife, for faith, God, anything.

That is the fear.

What do the old teachings do with it?

If I return to the image of the wrathful deity, the one made of fire and skulls, but with a single calm hand raised. I think I understand.

This gesture appears at the threshold. At the moment when we are faced with our own mortality. It is not a promise that nothing bad will happen, but that something is about to happen, right before your eyes. The raised hand does not describe the outcome. It is not a consolation. It is a posture. An instruction.

You find the same hand on Shiva, dancing inside a ring of cosmic fire. You find it in the angel at the empty tomb, the one whose face was like lightning, who dropped armed soldiers to the ground in terror, and whose first words to the women were “Do not be afraid.” The messengers of God in scripture were rarely the soft figures of Renaissance paintings. They were so frightening that the reassurance had to come first. Different gods, different centuries, the same instruction at the same moment.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead extensively discusses this. The book was meant to be read aloud to the dying, guiding them through everything they would see as the self came apart. Its instruction, repeated at every stage, was always the same. Do not be afraid. These terrifying things are your own mind. Run from them, and you are lost. Turn and look at them, and you are free.

In Dante’s Inferno, the only way out of hell is to climb down the body of Satan himself, frozen in the ice at the centre of the world. There is no door. No path around. You go over the thing you came all that way dreading. And at the exact centre, clinging to Lucifer’s spine, something changes. Down becomes up. The descent becomes the climb that carries you out, until you come through to the other side and see the stars again.

The way through is the way out.

That is why the god wears the frightening face. The thing you are most afraid of and the thing telling you not to fear are one and the same.

A Good Death

I am sixty now. The crossing that was always in the future is beginning to take concrete shape, and the threshold is closer with each passing day. I have since stopped treating these old teachings as mere superstitions.

Jack Sparrow appeals to me because I think that is what a good death should look like.

I do not want to be absent when it comes. I do not want to be so numbed, so sedated, so turned away that when the most important moment of my life happens, I am not there for it. If I can choose, I will meet the angel of death the way Jack meets the kraken. Awake. Eyes open. Sword drawn. Feeling all the fear and the pain and whatever suffering that comes with it, all the way down, right to the last moment before the self dissolves into nothing forever.

Alan Watts said that faith is not clinging but letting go. By holding his breath, a man loses it. By letting go, he finds it. I think that is right, and I think it is the hardest thing to do. To open the hand and let go.

This is not some technique or exercise that I can give, no breathing pattern, no 5-4-5 steps to acceptance. It is a tempering of the mind, slowly, over whatever years remain. You practise letting go of smaller things so that final letting go, when it comes, is not entirely foreign to you. You turn and look at the monster now, every day, so that you are not meeting it for the first time, on the last day.

A good death, for me, is not a painless, peaceful one. It is a conscious one. Present to the end.

“Hello, Beastie.”

In the final scene of Dead Man’s Chest, Jack does not defeat the kraken. He does not survive it. What he does is refuse to be taken from behind, refuse to spend his last moment looking the other way. He turns and meets it. With a grin.

That is the whole of it. The raised hand, in its gentle forms and terrible ones, was never promising us we would survive. That there is an afterlife. An everlasting life. To cling to that is to miss the point. It was showing us the only posture worth holding when we cross the threshold.

Do not fear.

Not because there is nothing to fear. But because the fear is the kraken, and the only way through it is to face it, sword drawn, and charge straight into its jaws.

I could tell he was slightly annoyed that I insisted on arriving at the airport two hours early, which was my default, no matter the flight. Blame my “kiasu” side, the fear of losing out. 

So there we were, killing time in one of the world’s fanciest airports, sipping overpriced Pret a Manger lattes and scrolling mindlessly through our phones between gate announcements.

This stretch of stillness marked the beginning of our 30-day adventure in China with my son. His gap year gave him the time, and my wife had the brilliant idea to travel during the off-season. Fewer crowds, lower prices, better weather… and maybe a chance for us to connect as adults. 

Let’s see how it goes.

Visiting our history

This trip is about more than sightseeing and fantastic food (though there will be plenty of that). We’re visiting our ancestral village, a place I only visited six months ago. It carries our family’s story.

My father left China around 1930 when he was just two years old. He never went back, and he never kept in touch with any relatives, if we had any left. Those were turbulent times: civil wars, then the Japanese occupation. His parents (my grandparents) probably thought their boat ride to Singapore was a temporary move. Tragically, they both passed away shortly before the end of World War II when my father was 8.

I don’t know if any relatives are still in China today. All I have is the name of the village we came from. And while I don’t expect a dramatic family reunion, I hope to pass on what little I know to my son. Maybe someday, one of my descendants will pick up where I leave off and start piecing things together again.

But beyond ancestry, this trip is about us two getting to know each other. More specifically, it’s about me getting to know him as a young adult, not just as the child I raised. For most of his life, I’ve only known him through the lens of a father. Now, I want to see who he’s becoming, and maybe even learn from him.

A shared adventure

We’re taking our time. No rushing. Just moving through places with history, meaning, and layers of stories waiting to be uncovered.

Hong Kong

We started in Hong Kong, where he wants to begin. Honestly, it’s a good place for all of us to start. For centuries, Hong Kong has been China’s gateway to the world. Seized by the British after the First Opium War in 1842, it became a symbol of foreign dominance during what the Chinese call the “Century of Humiliation.” Hong Kong remains a powerful reminder to many Chinese: others will take advantage if you’re weak. It always has been that way. It still is. And perhaps, always will be.

Guangzhou

From there, we head inland to Guangzhou, one of China’s most dynamic modern cities and one of its oldest. The area has been inhabited for thousands of years. As an administrative centre, it dates back to 221 BC, when Emperor Qin Shi Huang unified China and established a military outpost called Panyu, the early predecessor of today’s Guangzhou. Over the next two millennia, it grew into a thriving port city and has long served as the heart of Guangdong Province, which was officially established much later, during the Yuan Dynasty, around the 13th century.

Jieyang

Then, we went to our ancestral home in Jieyang, Mashuo Village. This is a small farming community of about 1,000 families, most of whom share our family name, Chen (陈). It’s agricultural, modest, and generations deep. Though I don’t know exactly how far back our roots go, villages like Mashuo have often existed for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

Chaozhou

We continued to Chaozhou, the cultural heart of our Teochew region. Chaozhou has long been known for its traditions. Its cuisine, opera, and tea culture are deeply rooted in history. The city dates back over 1,600 years and was once a major centre of learning and commerce in southern China.

Nanjing, Fujian

We’ll break the journey with a few days in Nanjing, Fujian Province, home to the famous tulou, massive, circular Hakka earthen buildings that have stood for centuries. Some of these structures are over 600 years old, built to protect entire clans within their thick walls. I wanted to show him life in rural China, not just today, but for thousands of years.

Xiamen

We’ll end in Xiamen, a coastal city with a relaxed vibe and a complex past. Once a treaty port after the Opium Wars, Xiamen became a melting pot of Chinese, European, and Southeast Asian influences. Its colonial architecture, island getaways, and vibrant food scene make it the perfect place to recap everything we’ve seen and experienced.

That was fun!

I don’t think he’ll read this right away, if ever. He’s not much of a reader, and he’s not on Facebook. But that’s okay. This is as much for me as it is for him.

I’m writing this because I want to remember. I will be 60 soon. I want to capture the moments and memories for him and me. And maybe, one day, he’ll come across these words and smile at the memory of where we went, what we saw, and who we were when we took this journey together.

More than anything, I hope this trip becomes part of his story, the kind of story he tells his friends or someday shares with his own children or even grandchildren. Not just the sights and sounds, but the conversations over street food, the quiet moments between train rides, the laughter, the frustrations, the surprises.

This isn’t just about China. It’s about connection. To place, to history, to each other.

Thirty days, father and son, and a country full of stories and histories waiting to be discovered.

What an adventure!

My son works in one of the better Italian restaurants in Australia, and he has been teaching me what service really is.

My idea of service has always been an extreme and refined form of courtesy. But I was wrong, or at least I was only seeing the surface of it. He talks about service the way a musician talks about a phrase that sits perfectly, and I couldn’t follow. I’d spent a working life buying meals, treating the food as the event and everything around it as trimming. The waiter takes your order and delivers your food. You barely notice him unless something goes wrong.

We’ve been watching The Bear together. He’s the one who insisted that I watch it, and I understand now why. I felt that there was something he wanted me to see. He’d explain what good service felt like on the floor, on a full night, when it was going right. Watch the show, he’d say.

I think he wanted me to “get it” just like he did.

I watched all four seasons of it. And in there, what he’d been trying to tell me came through.

What is service

There’s a kind of service that many places, especially restaurants, never achieve. Even expensive places. You can feel its absence throughout the evening. The absence that looks like exaggerated courtesy: attentive, quick, apologetic, eager. Bending. Lowering itself in front of you, asking permission with the whole body just to serve you in your evening.

That is not service. That is servility, and the two are quite opposites.

The most servile service I can recall has almost always been in a Chinese restaurant. Even the expensive ones. Staff are courteous to a fault, attentive, fast, and place themselves far too low. Too shy to take command of the room. Which is strange, because the idea of service done properly, the real thing, is Confucian at its core. Somewhere along the line, we stopped living it.

The Servant is the Master

Good service comes from mastery and command.

The host is, if anything, placed slightly above his guest. Not in worth or status but in his role and position. He runs the show. He decides its shape and its pace, when to appear and when to disappear. With a sixth sense, he seems to know what you need before you need it. This elevation is precisely what lets him care for you. Strip it away, and the confidence goes with it, and what’s left collapses back into bowing. A servile man cannot take anyone in hand. He is too busy asking for permission just to be there.

This is the heart of li (礼), the Confucian idea badly translated into “ritual”. Li is the form that makes care possible. You seat your guest in the better chair, you pour before he asks, you serve, giving them the feeling of being taken care of. It is commanding. You are conducting the evening, and the form is what lets the warmth and the hospitality land without spilling into either indifference or grovelling.

The Japanese shokunin (職人) or craftsman gives himself to the craft so completely that the craft itself becomes the service. The sushi chef who has shaped rice for years isn’t “humble” when he serves you. He is delivering the accumulated weight of those decades of practice, and that is a kind of authority no amount of smiling can replace.

You see the same discipline in some Western kitchens, though it looks quite the opposite.

Listen to a kitchen on a full night, and it sounds like chaos, but it isn’t. “Yes, chef! Heard, chef! Behind! Corner! Fire table 6!” Every call is functional, an acknowledgement, a warning, a command timed to the second. The shouting is the discipline. It is a master holding a room together at speed so that out front, in the calm, you never have to know any of it is happening.

The shouting brigade and the silent Japanese counter seem like worlds apart, but they are the same thing, pointed at the same target. Both are aimed at mastery, because only a master can take the guest fully into his hands. The noise and the silence are two languages of the same thing: Like a symphony conductor who becomes so good no one notices the conducting. Just the music.

“Order from the QR Code”

But true service is fading, and I think it’s a tragedy.

When we walk into many restaurants in China today, we are directed to a QR code on the table. You order from your phone. You pay from your phone. No menu. No “today’s special is…”. The ritual becomes a process. The food arrives as quickly as it’s ready, delivered by someone who sets it down and leaves. Minimal interaction. Maximum efficiency. No rapport. No soul.

My son pointed this out when we travelled through southern China last year, and it has since appeared in some Adelaide Chinatown restaurants.

It sells itself as convenience, as the removal of friction. But the friction was never the problem. The friction was the sign that two human beings were actually meeting. Smooth it away, and the relationship goes with it, because they were the same thing all along. Service stripped down to efficiency is service with the human removed. And once you’ve removed the human, the next step is obvious. Robots cooking. Robots serving.

The saddest part is that the culture that wrote the theory of the host is the one that is most eager to delete him. This is not a small loss. It is one of the few genuinely human exchanges we have left, automated away and called progress.

This is my house

If you think about it, we are all service providers. In every occupation, everywhere, far beyond the restaurant.

“This is my house, and you are my guest.” That sentence holds the entire relationship. The host cares, controls, directs, and, when necessary, protects. He is not egotistical, not rude, not indifferent. He thinks about what you want and what is good for you, which are not always the same. He is gentle and firm, the way a good parent is with a child, with family. He is not easily offended, because he knows you are human. But he will not suffer abuse either. Or allow his house (and guests) to be disrespected. He is the master of his house.

Now widen this, and you will see that every profession is a service profession. The surgeon is a servant. So is the nurse, who can only be a good nurse by becoming a service provider, taking the fear off you and your family and carrying it herself. The therapist who eases the ache, physical or otherwise. Even the management consultant, in the end, is offering the same thing: clarity, direction, strategy. The lawyer who takes your fear and confusion, and says, “This is now my problem. Leave it with me.”

That phrase captures the entire nature of service. Leave it with me. You cannot say it convincingly unless you are also very good at what you do. The competence is what gives you the confidence, the right to take someone in. This is why the servant, properly understood, is never the menial figure we visualise. He is the most capable person in the room. He is the true master.

And you are my guest.

The guest has a part to play too.

Service is a performance, and a performance needs an audience. You have to allow yourself to be well served; you have to surrender a little. Let the thing run its course. Let the piece of music carry you instead of beating time over it.

A demanding, suspicious, rude guest breaks the spell, and not only for himself. He wants to pull the host back down into servility, forces the bowing to return, and the evening curdles for everyone at the table. The art of being well served is its own skill, and mostly the skill of trust.

Service, as mastery exercised for another’s benefit, is the heart of what makes us human. More than courtesy. The act of elevating another person through real skill and care.

It demands that the ego step back so the craft can step forward. It cannot be done in fear, or anger, or from beneath those we serve. Only from a place of quiet mastery, by someone secure enough to make another person the centre of the moment. A machine can deliver a meal. It cannot host you. It has no house to welcome you into.

My son understood all this before I did. Maybe he couldn’t find the words for it, so he handed me a television show and waited for me to catch up. That, too, was a kind of service.

I came across a line from Richie in The Bear recently. He said, quite as-a-matter-of-factly just before attending a wedding with Syd:

Everything in life is just for a while.

We all know it. This idea is not new, of course. Every tradition that has thought seriously about the human condition has arrived at some version of it. The Japanese call the bittersweet awareness of passing things mono no aware (物の哀れ), “the bittersweet beauty of passing time.” The feeling you get when something beautiful is also passing away, like cherry blossoms, the end of autumn, or a beautiful sunset.

I often think of life as standing in a queue. It’s moving almost agonisingly slow at the beginning but unbelievably fast towards the end. Over the years, I’ve watched older relatives leave the queue. Friends. Those people are getting closer and closer to my own age.

It feels strange when you start to notice it. It wasn’t dramatic. There was no panic. No single moment of revelation. It’s just like standing in line and noticing that the crowd ahead of you is thinning. The line keeps moving. The end, wherever that is, edges a little closer every day, every single moment.

I’m moving into my sixties soon. This awareness feels more real with each passing moment.

We start keeping our heads and eyes down at around the time when we’re 20.

We call it staying focused. We keep ourselves busy. Our career demanded it. The family depended on it. Decades of discipline built everything around us and gave us what we have. And these habits have a way of growing into us. Nothing wrong with that.

But underneath the busyness, we begin to forget. We want to stay productive and keep our calendar full. We forget that we are in a queue that moves relentlessly forward. Our busyness (or strangely “busi-ness”) becomes a quiet defence against the awareness of our time passing.

And busyness isn’t the only distraction. We also distract ourselves by looking back, replaying better times or reliving old mistakes. Clinging. Regretting. If only I had not said those words. If only I had been more patient. Spent more time. Travelled more. Loved more. Forgive more.

Or we look ahead. Dreaming. Setting goals. Worrying. Planning. Strategising. Worrying. Plotting. When I have this, I will be happy. When the kids have grown up, I will relax. When I have made my millions, I will retire. And enjoy.

These have stolen more living than almost anything else I know. Everywhere but here. Any time but now.

Meanwhile, the queue keeps moving.

The Japanese have a concept called ichigo ichie (一期一会), or “one lifetime, one meeting.” The idea that every encounter, every ordinary afternoon, is singular and will not recur in exactly this form. The traditional tea ceremony is built around this awareness. You’re present with the unrepeatable fact of this tea, this light, these people. The ceremony ends. That’s the whole point of it.

In Parts Unknown (Full Episode - S8 E3), when Anthony Bourdain was looking for the best sushi in the world with Chef Masa Takayama, there was a scene where Takayama explained what I thought was ichigo ichie:

Two great chefs experiencing ichigo ichie during an omakase at Tokyo’s acclaimed Sushi Ko.

Most people live their whole lives getting ready, rehearsing for the real thing. They forget that the rehearsal IS the real thing. It is the only thing.

Cherry blossoms. The Japanese love them with an intensity that I find hard to understand. A week of beautiful blooms, then gone. It passes so quickly that it is painful; you cannot hold it. Or grasp the moment in your hand. Even a video cannot capture its essence.

The brevity of its beauty is the beauty. You cannot separate the bloom from the fall. Life with all its imperfections, its losses, its ordinary, unremarkable days, is the same thing. The ending isn’t what ruins it. The ending is what makes it real and beautiful.

Accepting this is not the same as resigning to it.

Resignation implies hopelessness. Pointlessness. Despair. Everything ends, so what’s the point anyway?

But acceptance, the kind that Zen masters teach, says: everything ends, so this moment is precious. Irreplaceable. Smell it. Taste it. Feel. And live it to the fullest.

Participate. That’s the whole point of it.

I’m trying to learn how to look up. Every day. Every now.

This meal in front of me. This conversation with my wife. The drive to Gary with my cousin. An afternoon of yum cha with my sons. This moment will not come again once it is gone.

Everything in life is just for a while.

So look up. Look around. Now.

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The killing started on Monday.

If you live in Adelaide, you may have driven past Possum Park this week without realising that 585 trees, some of them older than a century, have been marked for removal.

A $45 million golf course redevelopment needs the space.

The Possum Park Protection Platoon has been fighting this since Premier Malinauskas first floated the idea. They held rallies. They tagged trees on National Tree Day. To date, they have gathered more than 42,000 signatures. On Mother’s Day, around 300 people wrapped yellow ribbon around the trees at Montefiore Hill, standing there with their children and their signs, choosing to spend that Sunday with what they are about to lose.

And still the chainsaws rolled in.

This past week, Adelaide City Council voted unanimously to call for a federal investigation into whether the development breaches national environmental protection laws. The Lord Mayor described this as “the last possible” attempt to halt proceedings. She is writing to the Federal Environment Minister today.

This is our last chance.

So what is actually being built here?

The $45 million redevelopment is designed to prepare the North Adelaide Golf Course for the LIV Golf and Australian Open tournaments scheduled for 2028. The North Adelaide Golf Course Act was introduced to fast-track site upgrades for the event and granted planning and building consent for the project before the plans were publicly released. InDaily

Yes. Consent was granted before anyone could see the plans.

The government’s released diagram identifies a Championship Course, a Short Course, and a Driving Range, but fails to identify which trees are earmarked for removal, or where the car parks, maintenance sheds, the new clubhouse, and storage for major event infrastructure will be placed. When the Adelaide Park Lands Association asked the Premier to release the full list of trees to be removed, the government declined. Adelaide-parklands Golf

International golf course designer Peter Dalkeith Scott, himself a LIV Golf supporter, warned that 60% of the park’s trees would need to be removed to build the kind of championship course the Premier has in mind. The government’s official number is 585, or “6.5%.” Both numbers cannot be true. Adelaide-Parklands Blog

And the replacement offer. The government has committed to planting three new trees or seedlings for every tree removed. Premier Malinauskas has repeated this assurance in almost every public statement on the matter. Premier of South Australia

Consider the “tradeoff”.

A 100-year-old River Red Gum is not a seedling. It’s living history. It holds within its branches, trunk, and roots a century of carbon, rainfall, and habitat. Its roots shape the soil around them, its canopy has lowered ambient temperatures in its vicinity for decades, and it is home to numerous species that cannot simply relocate because a politician wants a bigger golf course. You can plant 3 seedlings for every tree you cut down tomorrow, but you cannot get back what you are destroying.

What does the loss of 585 mature urban trees mean?

Mature trees in urban parks function as heat sinks. They absorb solar radiation and release water vapour through transpiration, reducing temperatures by measurable amounts, sometimes several degrees in close proximity. In a city like Adelaide, which experiences heatwaves above 40 degrees, that thermal buffering has direct consequences for the health and mortality of elderly people, children, and outdoor workers. Remove 585 mature trees from a park adjacent to the River Torrens and the CBD fringe, and you increase the urban heat island effect in one of Adelaide’s most densely used green corridors. Nature.com

Citizen scientists have already recorded 127 species in and around Possum Park. Not just birds passing through. They are species whose habitat, nesting sites, food sources, and movement corridors exist within this specific patch of urban parkland. When a mature tree comes down, the species that depend on that tree’s hollows and canopy do not simply find another tree. In a fragmented urban environment, there is often no other tree. Adelaide-parklands

And then there is the question of what gets built in place of the trees. The redevelopment plans include commercial buildings, meeting rooms, restaurants, function spaces and bars operating seven days per week, alongside permanent fencing that will exclude the public from portions of their own park lands during major events. Sign the petition at Change.org

This is public land. Held in trust for all of Adelaide’s citizens. Not for LIV Golf, or only those who can afford a tournament ticket.

What about the other side of the argument?

The government says this is already a golf course, so nothing is being taken that was not already restricted to golfers. They say the redevelopment will improve amenities, make the course more accessible, encourage younger people to take up the sport, and bring economic activity and international attention to the city. They say 585 trees out of 9,000 is a small price to pay. They say the Park Lands will be better for it.

These are not unfounded. World-class sporting facilities do generate economic activity. Adelaide does benefit from hosting major international events. Investment in public recreation infrastructure is broadly a good thing.

But…none of that changes the core problem.

The Lord Mayor Jane Lomax-Smith puts it plainly: the legislation allows the State Minister to override Adelaide City Council entirely if the council fails to act in the direction of the minister, granting the minister the power to act as if they were the council itself. That means, “If the Council doesn’t do what the Minister wants, the Council loses its say entirely.” She called this “a very troubling precedent for how the third tier of government, the closest to the people, will be treated.” InDaily

The government has overridden the municipality. It has granted itself planning consent before releasing plans. It has refused to identify which trees will be removed. It is sending security and police to manage protesters watching their park being felled. And it is doing all of this to host, primarily, a golf tournament backed by Saudi sovereign wealth.

Here is what you can do today

The Possum Park Protection Platoon is the community group at the heart of this fight. Join them on Facebook or contact them through the Adelaide Park Lands Association at exec@adelaide-parklands.asn.au. The petition has over 42,000 signatures as of this morning. If you have not signed it, sign it.

If you are a South Australian, write to Premier Malinauskas. Ask him to release the full list of trees to be removed. Ask him why planning consent was granted before plans were made public. Ask him what species-level environmental assessment was conducted, and when, and by whom.

And if you are not a South Australian, share this. Because a state government deciding that public green space has more value as commercial infrastructure than as open, living land is not unique to Adelaide. It is happening everywhere throughout Australia.

The killing started on Monday.

Let’s do something about it.

Sign the Petition

If you found this piece useful, consider sharing it. The Possum Park Protection Platoon needs more voices, not just more signatures.

This article was inspired by a spoken-word piece on the Heart Sutra by the Taiwanese channel AI巷仔內 (”AI Alley | Awake Living”). The creator, who also runs a small oden shop in Taipei called 彼岸 (”The Other Shore”), used the metaphor of a child’s lump of clay to make one of Buddhism’s most impenetrable texts feel like something you already knew.

I hope this piece does justice to the beautiful lyrics.

I misunderstood the word “emptiness” for years.

I thought the Buddha wanted us to hollow ourselves out. To strip away all attachments, all feelings, every messy human impulse until we became cold and untouchable, like a stone that the world could no longer hurt because it could no longer feel.

It made enlightenment sound like emotional anaesthesia. If the goal of spiritual practice is to stop caring about anything, then what exactly are we living for?

Then I came across a Taiwanese piece about the Heart Sutra. Set to ambient folk music, the creator reframed the whole concept with a single image that moved me, and has stuck with me since. So simple, yet so completely right.

Emptiness is the “you” that existed before you became who you are now.

A child’s lump of clay

Watch a child play with a lump of clay.

She shapes out a dinosaur, grins at it for half a second, then smashes and starts over again. No regrets. No hesitation. She doesn’t cling to the clay dinosaur because she understands something that adults don’t: the dinosaur was never the goal or the purpose. The playing and creating were.

The block of clay in the box has no fixed shape. In a technical sense, it is “nothing.” But that nothingness isn’t a void. It’s potential. It could become a dog, a castle, a flower, or a lopsided thing that only makes sense to its creator. The absence of a fixed form is exactly what makes every form possible. It is what makes the lump of clay fun.

In Buddhist philosophy, this is what Anatta (or “non-self”) points to. Not this, not that. You are not the dinosaur. You are not even the hands that shaped it.

The shape we mistake for ourselves

The trouble starts when we forget.

As we grow up, life moulds us into different shapes. Useful ones, mostly. We become The Father. The Provider. The Employee. The Boss. The One Who Must Succeed. These shapes serve us. They give us identity, a way to move through the world.

But over time, we begin to confuse the shape with the clay. We start to believe the role is who we are. And once we believe that, and cling to it, everything becomes a threat. Losing your job becomes an existential crisis. A breakup feels like proof that you’re unlovable. The shape must be protected at all costs, because if it breaks, you break.

The creator of that piece told his own version of this. He spent over a decade in advertising, moulded into the shape of a Creative Director. When that title eventually disappeared, he felt shattered until he realised that what broke was only the shape. The clay hadn’t lost a single piece.

He went on to open a small oden shop in Taipei, which he named 彼岸, meaning “The Other Shore.” The name comes directly from the Heart Sutra’s closing mantra. A man who once built his identity around a senior title in advertising, now ladling broth in a six-seat izakaya, and somehow feels more whole than before.

It’s a story about clay remembering what it is.

What was your face before your parents were born?

There is a Zen riddle (koan) I share in many conversations:

It’s designed to stop the thinking mind in its tracks. But it’s also a genuine question. Before anyone named you. Before you were moulded into a son or daughter, a high achiever or a disappointment, a somebody or a nobody. What were you? What is underneath all the faces you’ve put on?

The question, or riddle, is meant to sit with you until the answer surfaces on its own. But the clay metaphor helps me answer it: your original face is the clay before it had a shape.

Not blank. Not empty in the cold, hollow sense. It’s you that existed before the roles began, the unrestricted potential before life started pressing it into different forms. The Heart Sutra calls this śūnyatā, emptiness. Zen calls it your original face. They’re both pointing at the same thing.

And here’s what makes it reassuring rather than frightening: that face hasn’t gone anywhere. It didn’t dissolve when you got your first job or your first heartbreak. It’s still there, underneath every shape you’ve worn since. You’ve just forgotten it’s there.

What the Heart Sutra is saying

The Heart Sutra is one of Buddhism’s most revered texts, and one of its most misunderstood. Many recite it without fully understanding it, tattooing its lines onto their skin. But when you use the clay metaphor to explain its most famous passages, they stop being mystical and start to make sense.

“Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.”

This doesn’t mean your life is an illusion or that your roles don’t matter. It means your current shape, although real, is not permanent, and it is not the deepest truth of who you are. Underneath every role you play, the soft, adaptable clay remains. Don’t forget that.

“No birth, no death; no stain, no purity; no adding, no taking away.”

Shapes are born, and shapes die. You get hired, you get fired. You fall in love, you fall out of love. But the clay, the essence of who you are beneath, neither begins nor ends. It can’t be stained because it was never contaminated in the first place. Every time a shape breaks, it’s not a loss. It’s a return to the place where you start over again.

“The five aggregates are empty.”

The five aggregates (form, sensation, perception, ideas, and consciousness) are Buddhism’s map of the entire human experience. Saying they are “empty” is not an instruction to stop seeing, feeling, or thinking. It’s a reminder that none of those experiences defines you permanently. They are NOT you. Once you stop clinging to who you think you must be, you become less afraid of being hurt. Not because you’ve stopped feeling, but because you’ve stopped mistaking your feelings for who you truly are.

Emptiness is the lack of fear about losing what cannot be lost.

The softer you are, the harder it is to break.

We spend enormous energy building fortresses around our identities: titles, reputations, carefully managed self-images. And things. We think rigidity equals safety. But rigidity is exactly what makes things brittle. A ceramic vase can be destroyed easily. A lump of clay, however, absorbs the impact when it falls.

The Heart Sutra’s promise is not that you’ll stop suffering. It’s that suffering loses its permanence when you stop treating each shape as your final and permanent form. You can grieve the dinosaur. You can miss the Creative Director you once were. But you don’t have to lie down next to the broken pieces and believe that you, too, are broken.

You are the clay. You were always the clay.

Gate, gate, pāragate, pārasaṃgate, bodhi svāhā

The Heart Sutra ends with a mantra that sounds like a dare. A challenge!

Go, go, go beyond. Go completely beyond. And awaken!

Go out. Love fiercely. Live fully. Get moulded and broken and moulded again. Day after day, life after life. Don’t be afraid to change, because you are not your shapes, past or present. You are what remains when all the shapes fall away.

Emptiness was never about having nothing.

It is about knowing you are free to become anything.

I was scrolling through Instagram the other night when an ad caught my attention. An artisan chilli oil. Slick, catchy, great packaging. And expensive, by chilli oil standard.

The ad copy goes something like this:

Established brand Lao Gan Ma (LGM) vs Small Local Business (Artisan)

The ad says LGM is mass-produced, while Artisan is hand-made by a passionate chef. What does “hand-made” really mean? Did you skip the food processor? It’s still produced, just in smaller batches.

LGM uses pre-fried ingredients that supposedly taste “old.” Does that mean they aren’t fresh? Artisan claims to use “fresh” ingredients, but you actually have to pre-fry fresh ingredients to keep them from spoiling. Besides shallots (and maybe garlic), which are sliced and then pre-fried, chilli flakes and spices are already dry, so are they “old” too? And honestly, it’s hard for small-batch producers to get good-quality dried chilli flakes outside China, which are key to good chilli oil.

LGM is fast and cheap. Artisan is slow-cooked and expensive.

LGM is famous because it is “accessible”. Artisan is not because it is “exclusive”.

LGM is at the bottom. Artisan is at the top.

If you’ve only ever had LGM, you can only go up the quality ladder.

The ad truly annoyed me.

I do not think that Artisan’s chilli oil is bad. In fact, I had wanted to try it since following their Instagram page. Having made my own chilli oil when I ran a restaurant, I have no doubt it probably tastes good. What annoyed me was the arrogance and presumption of it all.

It left a bad aftertaste.

So I’d like to share a bit of history about the “Godmother,” the woman behind Lao Gan Ma chilli oil.

The Godmother

Her name is Tao Huabi (陶华碧). Born in 1947, the eighth daughter in a poor family in Meitan County, Guizhou Province, one of the poorest regions in China. Tao never learned to read or write.

During the Great Chinese Famine, when she was just a teenager, she survived by digging up wild vegetables and learning to make flavours from roots and wild herbs. Years of poverty taught her that spice and fermentation could turn simple ingredients into delicious meals, a lesson that later became the foundation of her billion-dollar company.

She married young but soon became a widow, left to care for her two young sons.

She left her factory work in Guangzhou and opened a street stall in her hometown in Guizhou, selling liangfen (凉粉) and cold noodles (冷面). Then, in 1989, she opened a tiny shop in Guiyang called 实惠食堂 (meaning Affordable Canteen). It was a simple, working‑class eatery serving inexpensive home‑style Guizhou dishes and staple carbs (rice, noodles), with her signature chilli oil on the side.

It was the chilli oil that customers loved.

She gave discounts to students who couldn’t afford full meals. She gave extra food to those who looked like they needed more. Soon, they started calling her Lao Gan Ma (老干妈), which translates commonly as “Godmother.”

Note: In Chinese, Lao (老) doesn’t really mean “old” the way English uses it. It’s a word that carries respect, familiarity, and seniority. Your teacher is Lao Shi (老师). Your boss is Lao Ban (老板). When you call a close friend Lao plus their surname, like Lao Chen (老陈), it’s a term of warmth and familiarity.

And Gan Ma (干妈) actually means “honorary or adoptive mother”, someone who is like family but has no biological relations. This is unlike the Christian concept of godmother via baptism.

So Lao Gan Ma isn’t “Old Godmother.” It’s closer to something like “the adopted mother we all know and love.”

At that point, it wasn’t a brand yet. Lao Gan Ma was an affectionate nickname, earned through her generosity towards students and working-class customers.

Three Million Bottles a Day

By the mid-nineties, truck drivers passing through Guiyang were buying her sauce in bulk.

Long-haul truck drivers in China often cook their own meals while travelling. Usually, it’s just plain boiled noodles, maybe with some pickled vegetables—just enough to fill up. But a spoonful of Tao’s chilli oil could turn those simple roadside meals into something special.

That’s the power of a good condiment.

At her restaurant, customers wouldn’t eat the noodles if the chilli oil ran out.

So Tao stopped selling noodles and focused on selling her chilli oil instead.

In 1996, she rented a village committee house, hired forty workers, and started bottling her chilli oil in small batches.

Today, the company produces three million bottles a day and sells in over 160 countries. Tao never took the company public or borrowed money to expand. She built everything based on her instinct, a focus on quality, and a refusal to compromise on quality.

The Big Mistake

In 2014, Tao stepped back from running the company and let her sons take over. They followed typical business school advice.

They optimised.

They replaced the high-quality Guizhou chilli peppers, which are grown at high altitudes and have a special depth of flavour, with cheaper peppers from Henan province.

While margins improved, the taste changed.

And customers noticed.

Revenue fell from 4.5 billion yuan to 4.3 billion yuan. Online forums were full of complaints that it didn’t taste the same anymore. Tao’s sons treated a heritage product like any other business, thinking they could optimise it without considering its impact.

In 2019, at age seventy-two, Tao returned. She brought back the original Guizhou peppers and ordered 500 tons of chilli oil, worth over a million yuan, to be destroyed because it didn’t meet her standards.

By 2024, revenue had climbed back to 5.39 billion yuan.

Customers came back because the chilli oil was back to its original recipe.

The “Better” Product

Now, let’s return to the Artisan chilli oil.

LGM’s success opened the door for Western brands to enter the market. Brands like Fly By Jing, Momofuku, Bowlcut, and many “passionate chefs” have jumped in with their own “better versions” of LGM. You’ll find these names in the premium aisle of supermarkets, usually with higher prices.

Some of these can be quite good.

But here’s the thing: if you’re proud of what you’ve made, just say so. Tell me about your peppers, your process, your awards, even your grandmother’s secret recipe. That’s great. There’s room for more than one bottle on the table.

You don’t have to prove yours is good by putting down someone else’s.

But that’s how many brands market themselves. Look at the language: “Clean ingredients.” “No MSG.” “Artisan.” “Original.” “We use only fresh, hand-selected peppers.” “We never pre-fry our ingredients.” “Small batch, never mass-produced.” “We focus on quality, not quantity.”

Every single one is a comparison dressed up as a statement. They’re telling you what someone else doesn’t.

The message is clear. LGM, the Chinese-made, mass-produced, five-dollar bottle, isn’t clean, isn’t fresh, isn’t careful. Western markets have a long history of framing Asian food in certain ways. They often suggest that traditional means unrefined, or that low cost means low quality.

Being the Better Product

This isn’t really about who can make the best chilli oil. Anyone can make a better chilli oil. The real question is what we mean by “better.”

You can use fancy ingredients (hand-cut Spanish organic shallots), design a beautiful label, write clever marketing copy that positions your product as the “better” choice, and charge more for it.

None of that is difficult.

What’s truly hard is what Tao Huabi did. She built something so connected to who she was that you couldn’t separate the product from the person. She couldn’t read her own contracts and tasted every batch herself because that was the only way she knew to ensure quality. She earned the name “Godmother” by feeding students who couldn’t pay, year after year.

It’s not hard to make a better product. It’s hard to be a better product.

I probably think about this more than I should. I’ve worked in marketing for most of my life, helping people tell better stories about their products. I know how the game works, and I know how easy it is to mix up style with substance, assuming that better packaging means better everything.

Then I am reminded of Tao Huabi, who built a billion-dollar company without being able to read or write. She didn’t have a content strategy or focus on optimisation. She just showed up every day and let her product speak for itself.

That’s something worth knowing and remembering.

Australians lost $31.5 billion on gambling in a single year. That is more than the federal government spent on aged care. It is approaching what we spend on the entire National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). And it works out to roughly $1,527 for every adult in the country, including the four in ten who do not gamble at all.

We are, by a comfortable margin, the heaviest gambling losers per capita on earth. No other country comes close.

But this is not an article about morality. People can spend their money however they want. This is an article about mathematics and probability. Because the math behind gambling tells a story the gambling industry does not want you to know, and it is this: the system is built to take your money. Not just sometimes. Not just by bad luck. It is set up this way on purpose, and it always works this way.

What the “house edge” means

Every casino game has a built-in advantage for the casino called the house edge. It is not a secret. It is simply the percentage of every dollar bet that the casino expects to keep over time.

In European roulette, the house edge is 2.7%. In American roulette, the house edge is 5.26%. In pokies, it ranges from about 5% to 15%, depending on the machine. Even blackjack, the best game for players if you play with perfect strategies, still has a house edge of about 0.5%.

These numbers sound small. They are not.

Here is what a 5% house edge actually means. If a casino’s roulette tables collectively take $1 million in bets on a Friday night, the casino expects to give out about $950,000 as winnings and keep $50,000 as profit. Every single Friday. Without fail. The players as a group will always lose. Individual players may have good nights and/or bad nights, but the house does not need luck. It just needs you to keep playing.

The roulette illusion

Roulette is the clearest example of how the house edge works, because the math is obvious.

A European roulette wheel has 37 pockets: numbers 1 through 36, plus a single green zero. If you bet on red, you cover 18 of those 37 pockets. Your chance of winning is 18 out of 37, which is 48.6%. Not 50% (Red or Black). The green zero is the house’s edge. It looks like a tiny difference. It is not.

If the game were truly fair, a bet on red would have a 50% chance of winning, and the payout would reflect that. But the zero means the casino wins slightly more often than it loses, on every spin, forever. You are not playing an even game. You are playing a rigged game that feels even.

American roulette adds a second (double) zero, pushing the house edge from 2.7% to 5.26%. The payout stays the same. The casino simply takes a bigger slice. Most players cannot tell the difference.

Why do you lose more than you think

Here is the part that most gamblers never grasp. The house edge does not apply to the money you walk in with. It applies to the total amount you wager. And those are very different numbers.

Say you sit down at a roulette table with $200 and bet $10 each spin. At about 30 spins an hour, you are betting $300 every hour, even though you only brought $200. How? Because you keep using your winnings to bet again. You win some, lose some, and keep playing. Over three hours, you might bet $900 in total. With a 5.26% house edge, the casino expects to keep about $47 of that. But you only brought $200. You have lost almost a quarter of your money, not just 5%.

This is how a small house edge turns into a steady way for the casino to take your money. The longer you play, the more you bet. The more you bet, the more the house edge eats away at your money. The casino does not need to win in one big moment. It just needs you to keep playing.

The one game you can beat (and why it doesn’t matter)

Blackjack is the single casino game where a skilled player can genuinely shift the odds in their favour. Card counting, the practice of tracking which cards have been dealt to estimate what remains in the deck, can flip the house edge from -0.5% to roughly +1% for the player. It is not illegal. It is not cheating. It is simply having an exceptional memory and paying close attention.

Teams of card counters, most famously a group of MIT students in the 1990s, refined this into a system and reportedly made millions. Spotters at separate tables would track the count and signal a big player to join only when the odds were favourable. It worked. For a while.

But here is what the blackjack story actually teaches us. Even with a genuine, proven, mathematically real edge, the advantage was so small that it required thousands of hands, perfect discipline, a large pooled bankroll, and a team of people executing flawlessly under pressure just to grind out a modest return. Most of them could have earned more per hour in a regular job.

And the moment the casinos identified the pattern, they changed the rules. More decks. Faster shuffles. Facial recognition. Shared databases between venues. The industry spent millions engineering the edge away, because a beatable game is an existential threat to a business built on the certainty of the house edge.

Now consider someone who says he can count cards at the local casino and does quite well. It might be true. But even professional counters with years of experience cannot distinguish their skill from a lucky streak over a small number of sessions. The edge is so slim that it only becomes visible across thousands of hands. A weekend at the casino is not thousands of hands. It is probably anecdotes for a weekend BBQ.

This is also the deeper trap. Not just in gambling, but in life. We are wired to attribute good outcomes to our own skill and bad outcomes to bad luck. Someone who picked a winning stock is a genius. Another who lost money was unlucky. The poker player on a hot streak is reading the table. The one on a cold streak just got bad hands.

The truth is, over small samples, you cannot tell the difference between skill and luck. And most of the samples we use to judge our own performance are nowhere near large enough to draw any conclusion at all.

The lottery: You have no chance.

If casino games are unfair, lotteries are worse.

In Australia, the odds of winning Division 1 in Saturday Lotto are 1 in 8,145,060. That is a 0.0000123% chance per game. To put it in perspective, if you bought one ticket every week from the day you were born, you would need to live roughly 156,000 years to have a statistical expectation of winning just once.

Buy two tickets? Your odds are now 2 in 8,145,060. You have technically doubled your probability, and it is still essentially zero.

Buy ten tickets every week for fifty years? That is 26,000 tickets across 2,600 weekly draws. Your total chance of winning at least once over those fifty years is about 0.3%. You would have spent over $75,000 for a 99.7% chance of winning nothing. And none of those draws remembers the last one. Each week, your chances start over. Ten tickets gave you ten shots at a 1-in-8-million target, and then the slate is wiped clean. Next week, the same. For 2,600 weeks straight.

If you prefer Powerball, the odds are 1 in 134,490,400. You are more likely to be struck by lightning twice in the same year and survive. What does that mean? It means that if you won Powerball today, the statistics say you would have to start buying your weekly ticket 2.6 million years ago. Every week.

Unlike a casino game where you can at least choose how to play, a lottery offers no decisions, no skill, no strategy, no edge. You have exactly the same chance of winning whether you have been playing for thirty years or thirty seconds. The lottery is the purest expression of a system where your preparation is completely irrelevant to the outcome.

The pokies: Australia’s disaster

They are everywhere.

Australia has less than 0.5% of the world’s population but nearly 20% of its poker machines. Let that sink in for a moment.

Pokies account for more than half of all gambling losses in Australia. In the 2022-23 financial year, Australians fed almost $150 billion into electronic gaming machines (including winnings) and lost $12 billion (in total). These machines are engineered to create a sense of near-misses and small wins that disguise the steady mathematical drain on your balance.

The house edge on pokies typically ranges from 8% to 15%. But the real damage is the speed. A poker machine can run a game every three to four seconds. That is over a thousand games per hour. Even a modest bet per game, multiplied by that frequency, produces enormous total wagering and therefore enormous losses.

This is no longer just bad luck.

The gambler’s fallacy

Perhaps the most dangerous idea in gambling is the belief that past results influence future outcomes. That a roulette wheel that has landed on red six times in a row is somehow due for black soon. That a pokie machine that has not paid out in hours is closer to hitting the jackpot. Soon.

Wrong.

Each spin, each draw, each game is independent. The roulette wheel has no memory. The poker machine does not know what it did five minutes ago. The odds reset to exactly the same unfavourable number every single time.

And here is where the law actually makes things worse.

In Australia, every poker machine is required by law to return a minimum percentage of all money wagered back to players. In South Australia, that figure is 87.5%. In Queensland, it is 85% for pubs and clubs. In Victoria, 87%. These all sound reassuring.

They are not.

Because the return is calculated over the lifetime of the machine, not while you are there on a Tuesday at 8 p.m. The lifetime of a poker machine is millions of spins, sometimes billions. Over that vast stretch, the maths always average out.

You are not playing for the lifetime of the machine. You are playing for a few hours on weekends. And in that time, the machine can take every cent you have without violating its legal obligation. A hundred players in a row can walk away with nothing, so long as one player eventually hits a payout that pulls the long-term average back into line.

This is why the gambler’s fallacy is so persistent and so profitable for the house. People hear “87.5% return”, and they think the machine owes them something. They think that after a long, cold streak, the payout must be coming. It is not. The percentage is honoured only across a timeframe that no individual player will ever experience.

The government did not legislate these percentages to protect you. It legislated them to guarantee the house its cut. The law says the machine must return at least 87.5 cents of every dollar wagered. That means the law has enshrined your loss at a minimum of 12.5 cents on every dollar.

It also means that if you could somehow sit at a single (87.5% Return to Player) machine and play it for its entire lifetime across millions or even billions of spins, you will still lose 12.5% of everything you wagered.

That’s programmed into the machine, and protected by law.

Then why do people still gamble?

Because gambling feels like a possibility. “IF I win this…”

A near-miss on the pokies feels like you almost won, not the fact that you have lost. A winning streak at the roulette table feels like you are on a roll, not the fact that you are just seeing normal ups and downs that will even out eventually. The lottery ticket in your pocket feels like hope of a new life, not the fact that it is a piece of paper with a 99.9999877% chance of being worthless.

The gambling industry understands this. The sounds, the lights, the free drinks (and free food), the loyalty rewards, the near-miss animations on the pokies, all of it is designed to amplify the feeling of “that was so close...” while obscuring the reality of “mathematical probability”.

And gambling advertising in Australia is relentless.

On free-to-air television alone, gambling ads run hundreds of times a day. Online, they are everywhere. The message is always the same: this could be you. What the ad never says is: it almost certainly will not be you because the math, the house edge, guarantees it.

The real cost

The $1,527 lost per Australian adult each year is an average. Among regular gamblers, the real figure is far higher. The Productivity Commission estimated that Australians who frequently gamble lose, on average, $21,000 per year. For context, that is more than most Australians spend annually on electricity, gas, and fuel combined.

But the real cost of gambling is not just about money. Problem gambling is linked to broken relationships, mental health problems, and, in the worst cases, loss of life. These are not just unlucky side effects of a leisure activity. They are the expected results of a system built to take money from people who believe they can win, even though the facts say otherwise.

The uncomfortable truth

The previous article in this series introduced a concept called luck as a strategy. The idea is simple: you cannot control when luck arrives, but you can build the conditions that allow you to recognise it and act on it when it does. You can acquire skills, build health (and wealth), develop relationships, exercise patience, and manage risk. Each of these things genuinely and measurably increases the probability that good things will happen to you.

Gambling is the opposite of luck as a strategy. It is a system where nothing you do, no skill you learn, no self-control you use, no patience you show, changes the outcome in the slightest. The house edge is set. The lottery odds are set. The poker machine’s random number generator is set. And they are all stacked against you.

The house always wins. It is designed that way right from the start.

There’s an older man I know who buys a lottery ticket every single day. I used to see him most mornings when I stopped by the local butcher to pick up ingredients for my takeaway business. Just recently, I spotted him again, waiting outside the same shop where he still buys his ticket.

I’ve never asked him about it, but he once told me that he spends $10 (sometimes $20) a day for years. I imagine he gets a thrill each week when he checks if he’s won the big prize. Maybe he has, but I really doubt it.

I wanted to write about luck because I think it’s a topic worth exploring. After six decades of experiencing both good and bad luck, I think I have some helpful insights to share.

Luck is a position, not an event.

Like my old friend, many people think luck is random. It seems to fall from the sky like rain, soaking whoever happens to be outside at the right or wrong moment. Some believe certain people are just born luckier than others.

This way of thinking can be comforting because it removes personal responsibility. If success is only about (good) luck, then failure is just bad luck, and neither really depends on how we live our lives.

But if you watch how things really happen, like in careers, relationships, wealth, and in the lives of people who always seem lucky, you might see a different story.

Think about people you know who always seem lucky. They find the right opportunities, meet the right people, and are often in the right place at the right time. You might notice they have habits that aren’t just about chance.

They notice what’s going on. They get ready. They put themselves where things are happening. They’re in the right place. Usually at the right time.

They are lucky.

But I suspect luck isn’t all random. There’s a pattern to the lucky, and we can learn how it works.

The anatomy of a lucky break

Think about someone who gets the career opportunity of a lifetime. From the outside, it looks like pure luck. They met the right person at the right time and were available when the job opened up. Everything seemed to fall into place.

But if you look closer, maybe that person spent years building skills that made them right for the job. They join groups where opportunities are and nurture relationships without seeking rewards. When the chance came, they were ready for it.

This pattern shows up everywhere. The person who found the right partner wasn’t just waiting. They did the quiet work of becoming someone “attractive”. Maybe they were healthy, emotionally mature, and financially stable. The meeting might have been a coincidence, but being ready was no accident.

Conditions, not predictions

A common mistake is trying to control where luck will show up. Some people focus on just one outcome, like a certain job or deal, and feel unlucky if it doesn’t happen. Others chase every new opportunity, never sticking with anything long enough to get good at it.

Both approaches lead to the same result. It’s not about lacking talent or effort, but about not putting yourself in the right position for luck. Not being well-placed.

The real strategy is to focus, and not to get stuck on one outcome, like my friend who buys lottery tickets year after year.

Focus means working hard to get ready and staying open to opportunities that might come from unexpected places.

Think of it as probability. You can’t know which opportunity will change your life, but someone with the right skills, good health, strong relationships, financial discipline, and a sharp mind will see more opportunities than others. More importantly, they’re ready to act when those opportunities arrive.

Luck comes to everyone, eventually. But it sticks around for those who are ready to receive it.

The conditions that matter

If luck favours the prepared, the next question is: how do you get prepared? It comes down to a set of habits that, together, make it much more likely for you to get lucky.

Self-control is a starting point. It’s the steady ability to manage your emotions, such as anger, arrogance, laziness, etc. Self-control means staying calm and clear-headed even when emotions are strong, because letting emotions take over often leads to poor choices.

Foresight also sets good positioning apart from mindlessly reacting. It’s the ability to read your surroundings, know what’s rising and what’s fading, and put yourself in the right place. Foresight isn’t predicting; it’s about paying close attention so you can spot where things are heading before others do.

The ability to delay gratification is an important extension of foresight. The degree or skill you work for helps open doors. Early-morning workouts, instead of sleeping in, condition your body and mind. Saving money diligently each month lets you take advantage of opportunities when they come. You delay immediate gratification for bigger, better rewards in the future.

A growth mindset keeps you from being stagnant. The willingness to be bad at something before you are good at it, to treat failure as information or knowledge, and to keep learning through multiple failures. Luck tends to find those who are still moving, still building, still open to what they do not yet know.

Finally, the willingness (and courage) to take risks is the last key. You can be prepared, patient, disciplined, and smart, but if you never take a chance, never “pull the trigger”, then having all the luck in the world won’t matter. Taking risks is the final act that turns preparation into a lucky outcome.

Luck goes both ways

Bad luck is real, too. Illness can come out of nowhere. An economic crash can end a career. A relationship can fail even if you did everything right. No amount of preparation can make you immune to bad luck.

But strategies of being prepared change how bad luck affects you.

Someone with savings handles losing a job better than someone living paycheck to paycheck. People with strong relationships get through tough times differently from those who are “difficult”. Good health helps you recover faster than if you’ve ignored your health for years.

Getting ready for luck isn’t just about catching good breaks. It’s also about surviving the bad times. If you build enough resilience and strength in your life, bad luck won’t knock you out. You’ll still be in the game, and that gives good luck a chance to find you.

The will it takes

None of this is easy.

Getting ready for luck means working even when there’s no immediate reward in sight. It means sticking with your plan when others are taking shortcuts. It means having a plan. It means investing in yourself during the slow times, when nothing seems to work and quitting feels tempting.

It takes determination to keep preparing when there’s no sign it will pay off. You have to keep building skills before anyone asks for them, and stay healthy and focused even when it would be easier to let go and give up.

The final truth about luck

If you think about it, great success almost always involves good luck. The right door opens at the right time. The right person showing up. The right conditions converged in a way no one could have planned it.

Lucky people are prepared. They’ve spent months, years, or even decades building the habits, the conditions, that let them spot the right door, get there in time, and walk through it.

You cannot control when luck arrives. But you can control what it finds when it does.

Recently, I watched The Last Dance, a Hong Kong film set in the world of funeral work, centred on Po Di Yu (破·地獄). The literal translation of Po Di Yu is “Breaking (the gates of) Hell.” I see it as a kind of “jail-break.”

I didn’t quite expect the movie to have such a strong impact on me.

I used to be dismissive of Chinese funeral rituals. I saw them as noisy, superstitious, and unnecessarily dramatic. This prejudice changed as I grew older, and watching this film now, I feel something stirred inside me. There is wisdom embedded in Po Di Yu, not just a commercial performance for the dead. It is a structured way for the living to mourn and deal with the shock of losing a loved one.

The movie follows Dominic, a wedding planner whose life was turned upside down during the pandemic and who ended up taking over a funeral parlour. He clashes with a traditional Daoist priest, Master Man, because Dominic approaches funerals like an event to be managed, while Man treats them as a sacred rite with strict rules. Over time, it becomes less about the business and more about what rituals do for the living: giving grief a form, and families a way to act when they feel helpless.

I’m not writing this as a movie review. I’m writing because it moved me, and poses the question: when someone dies, what can we, the living, do for them?

That’s where Po Di Yu comes in.

If you want to watch it, there’s an official trailer on YouTube. As for where to watch it: in Australia, it’s currently available on SBS On Demand and can also be rented or bought on Apple TV or YouTube.

Death comes to us all.

Death is traumatic as it is disruptive.

In the immediate hours, there is usually a lot that needs to be done. Practical stuff, like calls to make, relatives and friends to inform, arrangements that need to happen while you are still trying to digest what just happened.

The truth doesn’t sink in immediately. They’re gone. Forever. The person you have loved for so long is no longer here.

It feels like something from you has just been ripped out. Violently. Just a sudden…end. Like hitting a brick wall as you turn a corner.

Grief is often described as sadness, but in the first moments, it feels closer to helplessness. You want to do something, but you cannot.

This is where a Cantonese Daoist funeral rite offers something strangely practical: Po Di Yu (破地獄), or “Breaking the Gates of Hell.”

It’s a rite performed for the dead, a spiritual intervention meant to free the departed soul from the underworld, Di Yu (地獄), and help guide them toward reincarnation.

But it also gives the living a sense of agency at a time when they feel most helpless.

What happens when a person dies

In the Chinese worldview, death marks a transition, not an end, unfolding in stages.

Traditional beliefs hold that the spirit has three aspects after death. The earthy (po, 魄) soul remains with the body in the grave. The ethereal (hun, 魂) soul settles in the ancestral tablet for family veneration. A third aspect, sometimes referred to as the spirit (shen, 神), journeys through the Ten Courts of Hell (Di Yu) before reincarnation.

That underworld journey typically unfolds over forty-nine days, marked by weekly milestones.

The seventh day, Tou Qi (头七), carries special weight. The spirit is believed to return home. Families keep the lights on for them. They’re also told to stay in their rooms and not come out to meet the spirit because attachment can make it difficult for the departed to move on.

These beliefs offer a clear sequence to navigate the haze of “after”, transforming death from a sudden void and shock into a predictable process, one that even the living can participate in at every step. This is the classic function of mythology in Joseph Campbell’s traditions.

Di Yu, a bureaucracy of the afterlife

Di Yu isn’t framed as the eternal damnation in the Western sense of Hell.

It’s closer to a bureaucratic purgatory, a system where souls atone for the wrong they’ve done before they are allowed to re-enter the cycle of rebirth.

A common way Di Yu is described is the Ten Courts of Hell, a kind of underworld bureaucracy, each court presided over by a Yama King, a judge who listens, weighs, and decides.

The first court is a kind of pre-trial. A reckoning in which the life lived is exposed. The good and the evil, what was done out of kindness, what was done out of bad intentions, what was left undone. The soul arrives disoriented and vulnerable, and the journey begins with the unveiling of truth.

The middle courts are where consequence takes form. These courts are corrective and punitive, to extract a punishment for the wrongs one has committed while alive. In Buddhist tradition, one will be punished BY one’s sins, not FOR one’s sins, so that ultimately, you are also the judge of the life you live. Everything has to be accounted for, and debt has to be paid. And the spirit moves from chamber to chamber, through judgments and suffering that are meant to cleanse.

The Naihe Bridge marks the threshold, a slender crossing from the known world into the unknown. It captures the image of a loved one departing for a place where we cannot follow. It is the final letting go.

Then comes Meng Po’s soup of forgetfulness. A reset. For rebirth, the soul must release its hold on its past life; no grudges, no yearnings, no bonds can follow into the next life. The soup grants complete severance. A clean slate.

So, death and the journey through the underworld aren’t all horrible.

It’s a process of letting go and moving on. Not to pass away but to pass from one life into the next.

What the Daoist priest is doing in Po Di Yu

Po Di Yu is often treated as the main spiritual rite in a Cantonese Daoist funeral. On the surface, it’s about helping the deceased, guiding the soul out of Di Yu and toward reincarnation. At the same time, it gives the family some structure to hold onto when the shock of death makes everything feel unreal.

It is also a very physical ritual.

The space is set up to represent the underworld. A fire basin is lit at the centre, commonly described as the “Furnace of Hell.” Around it, usually 9 ceramic tiles are arranged, representing the gates of Hell.

When the Nam Mo master (喃呒师傅) enters, he is doing battle. He is there to jailbreak.

He carries a ritual sword and uses it throughout the rite, but the sword is not “his” power in the personal sense. In Daoist ritual logic, he acts under a borrowed authority (from the gods), granted through ordination, lineage transmission, and the celestial bureaucracy he is licensed to invoke.

A properly ordained priest receives registers (lu, 箓) that function like credentials. These registers link him to a named lineage and, in many traditions, list the divine officials, generals, and spirit soldiers he can lawfully petition or command during ritual. Without that ordination framework, the actions are unauthorised.

That is the background for why he “dares” to do what he does in Po Di Yu. When he swings his sword, he is not claiming personal dominance over the underworld. He is issuing orders as an agent of higher powers, backed by the gods and ancestors of his tradition, and by the ritual office he has inherited and maintained through training.

Scholarly descriptions of Daoist ritual practice are explicit about what the sword signifies in this context: it is a key implement used to convene spirits, mobilise divine agents, subdue harmful forces, and, in mortuary settings, to “break open the prisons of hell” and help liberate the dead.

So when the sword cuts the air, it is a visible sign to the family that the priest is acting with divine authority and, within the ritual’s protocol, opening the way for the deceased to move forward.

The first major action is the breaking.

The Nam Mo master moves in a circuit around the fire, chanting and working with his sword. Then he strikes the tiles one by one, breaking them. This is the “破” in Po Di Yu, a physical act that represents smashing through the gates of hell, so the deceased is no longer trapped.

After the tiles are broken, the rite shifts into the “guiding” phase.

The master takes up the deceased’s memorial tablet (荐位 or 牌位), holding it close as he leads the spirit through the threshold. At the pivotal moment, he whispers to the tablet, loud enough for the family to hear, “跟住我” (Follow me!), giving the deceased a clear instruction as he spits alcohol at the flames, then makes a dramatic leap across the flames to the other side.

In the common explanation, that jump is the “crossing over,” the embodied claim that the deceased is being led out of hellfire and away from bondage. The symbolism is clear and psychologically assuring: the passage has been opened, and the dead are being brought through it.

Why does it matter to the living

Po Di Yu assumes that the dead do not always move easily from one state to the next. A soul can get stuck, held back by the weight of karma, fear, confusion, or unfinished business. In that context, passages can be obstructed.

Without intervention, the spirit may remain trapped, unable to cross the Naihe Bridge and reach Meng Po’s soup of forgetfulness, and enter reincarnation. The 49-day underworld journey can last forever.

So the Daoist priest becomes an envoy. He isn’t a grieving family member. He acts as an agent, trained, authorised, and “registered” within the ritualistic system, someone who can enter the underworld to do a mission. He does for the dead what the family cannot do, no matter how much they love the deceased. He “breaks the gates”, clears obstacles, and pushes the journey forward.

But if you look closely, the emotional centre of Po Di Yu is family and loved ones witnessing the rescue.

Death also creates a kind of hell for the living. It takes away agency. It turns you into a helpless witness. You can only watch while someone you love becomes unreachable. There is nothing you can do to change the fact. That helplessness is often what people are really reacting to in the early days of grief. That helplessness is hell on its own.

Breaking the gates of hell also serves to free the living, to help them move on.

It gives structure to the tragedy that affects them. It provides a mythical sequence of actions to guide the psyche out of emotional turmoil. It creates the sense that love can still be expressed as a duty, and that duty can still be carried out even after the person is gone.

The bond that continues after death

A lot of modern advice circles around the idea of “closure,” as if the goal is to shut a door and move on. But many people don’t experience grief that way. A more accurate phrase from grief psychology is “continuing bonds”: the idea that the relationship doesn’t disappear but changes form. You don’t stop loving the dead. You learn how to live with them differently.

Chinese ancestral practices make that idea visible through rituals.

This is why many families maintain a small shrine or altar at home, why there is incense on certain days, food offerings on festivals, visits to the cemetery, and the careful keeping of a tablet. On one level, it’s devotion. On another level, it’s practical. It gives the relationship a place to live after death, so the dead are not sealed away as “the past,” and the living are not forced into “closure”, or pretending the bond has ended.

Po Di Yu fits into this same idea.

The rite frames the deceased not simply as “gone,” but as someone still on a journey that can be supported. That framing does real work. It turns grief from loss into responsibility and care. It gives love somewhere to go, in a form that feels legitimate.

In a Confucian frame, filial piety doesn’t stop at death. If anything, death makes duty more explicit, because you can no longer rely on everyday acts of care. Maintaining the shrine, remembering dates, performing rites, and offering incense are ways of staying accountable to the people who came before you, and by extension, to the standards they represent. You answer them.

This is why small actions matter so much in these settings. Lighting incense is a way of keeping a presence. Offering paper money is to provide, it is the same impulse as packing food for a parent or paying a bill when they no longer can. Standing close enough to witness the Nam Mo master “break the gates” is not passive observation; it’s a kind of participation. It’s saying: I am still here, and I am still doing what I can for you.

For many, when you love someone, your duty to them does not end at death. It continues in the form of these rituals.

Writer’s note

You don’t have to share the metaphysics of Di Yu or reincarnation to understand what this ritual is doing. I invite you to recognise the humanity underneath it: when someone dies, love continues. Po Di Yu is one traditional answer to that continuation.

This is a follow-up article.

In my last article, The Fire Horse Returns, I explored why the Bing Wu year is important in Chinese history.

Since publishing that article, just before the end of the Chinese New Year, the US and Israel took military action against Iran during ongoing negotiations. It seemed nearly timed, as if the Fire Horse was waiting for this moment. I nearly said, “I told you so.”

In this article, I want to look at the bigger picture. The Fire Horse and its partner year, the Fire Goat (Ding Wei), matter not only in Chinese history but also in world history. These years show up across societies and continents over the past thousand years. While difficult events can happen at any time, I believe the pattern during these two-year periods warrants attention.

The message here is: be prepared. History teaches us that periods of extreme pressure tend to arrive in clusters, and the people who come through them best are those who saw them coming and took steps early.

The “Red Horse and Red Goat Calamity”

As I explained in The Fire Horse Returns, the “Red Horse and Red Goat Calamity” (赤马红羊之劫) means the two-year period of Bing Wu followed by Ding Wei. Both years are linked to fire energy. Together, they create a time when things get very intense, and weak systems are likely to break.

A Thousand Years of Upheaval

1066–1067: The Norman Rupture

On 14 October 1066, two armies met at Senlac Hill, near Hastings, in what became one of the most consequential battles in Western history.

King Harold II of England had already fought one battle that month. On 25 September, he defeated a Norwegian invasion force under Harald Hardrada at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in Yorkshire. It was a decisive victory, but it left his army exhausted and depleted. When news arrived that William of Normandy had landed on the southern coast, Harold force-marched his troops over 400 kilometres in roughly two weeks to meet him.

The battle itself lasted most of the day. Harold’s forces held the high ground with a tight shield wall, and for hours, the Norman cavalry couldn’t break through. But late in the afternoon, Harold was killed. The exact manner of his death is still debated by historians, though the famous image of an arrow striking his eye comes from the Bayeux Tapestry, produced years after the event. What is not debated is the result: with Harold dead, the English defence collapsed.

William’s coronation on Christmas Day 1066 was only the beginning. Over the following years, he dismantled the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy and replaced it with a Norman ruling class. Land was redistributed. English was pushed out of courts and governance in favour of Norman French. The legal system was restructured. Castles were built across the country as centres of control.

The English language itself was changed, taking in thousands of French words that are still used today. The system of lords and land that William established became the model for England’s governance for hundreds of years.

1066 was a Fire Horse year. And it changed the history of England forever.

1126–1127: The Jingkang Catastrophe

I covered this in an earlier piece, but it bears a brief mention here for context. The Jurchen-led Jin dynasty breached the Northern Song capital of Kaifeng, captured two emperors, and forced a dynastic fracture that reshaped China’s demographic and economic centre for generations. It remains one of the most traumatic events in Chinese collective memory and is considered the prototype for the “Red Horse/Red Goat” prophecy.

1246–1247: The Mongol Consolidation

By the mid-1240s, the Mongol Empire was the largest land empire the world had ever seen. But it had a succession problem. Ögedei Khan, the son of Genghis, had died in 1241, and for nearly five years the empire drifted under the regency of his widow, Töregene Khatun. She was politically astute, but the lack of a confirmed Great Khan created uncertainty across the empire’s vast territories.

In August 1246, a grand assembly was convened near the Mongol capital of Karakorum. Güyük, Ögedei’s eldest son, was formally elected as the third Great Khan. The event drew envoys from across Eurasia. Among them was Giovanni da Pian del Carpine, a Franciscan friar sent by Pope Innocent IV, who became one of the first Europeans to travel deep into the Mongol heartland and leave a written account of what he saw.

Güyük’s coronation stabilised the succession at a critical moment. Under his brief reign (he died in 1248), the empire reasserted its administrative reach and continued its expansion westward. The Mongol military machine, which had already devastated Eastern Europe in 1241 and 1242, remained the dominant force on the continent.

Meanwhile, in Europe, the old order was cracking. The Babenberg dynasty in Austria, which had ruled for over 250 years, came to an end when Duke Frederick II was killed in battle against the Hungarians in 1246. His death left Austria without an heir and triggered a decades-long struggle over who would control one of Central Europe’s most strategic territories. That vacuum was eventually filled by the Habsburgs, a family whose rise would change European politics for the next 600 years.

1366–1367: The Fall of the Yuan

By the 1360s, the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty, which had ruled China since Kublai Khan’s conquest, was falling apart. Decades of flooding along the Yellow River, repeated outbreaks of plague, ruinous inflation from over-printing paper currency, and widespread famine had pushed the population to breaking point. Rebellions had been erupting across southern China for years.

Zhu Yuanzhang, a former peasant and novice monk who had risen through the ranks of the rebel Red Turban movement, had by this point consolidated control over much of the Yangtze River basin. In 1363, he fought and won the Battle of Lake Poyang against his rival, Chen Youliang, in what is considered one of the largest naval battles in history, with hundreds of thousands of combatants on both sides.

By 1367, Zhu launched his northern campaign against the Yuan capital of Dadu (modern Beijing). His forces swept through the north with remarkable speed. Dadu fell in 1368, and the last Yuan emperor, Toghon Temür, fled to the Mongolian steppe. Zhu proclaimed the founding of the Ming Dynasty and took the reign name Hongwu.

Zhu, a man who had been orphaned and destitute and had begged for food at a Buddhist monastery as a teenager, became the founder of one of the greatest Chinese dynasties, lasting nearly 300 years. The Ming Dynasty brought the restoration of Chinese cultural identity after a century of Mongol rule, major infrastructure projects, including the reconstruction of the Grand Canal, and eventually the maritime expeditions of Zheng He.

1426–1427: National Liberation in Southeast Asia

In 1407, the Ming dynasty invaded and occupied Đại Việt (Vietnam), dissolved its government, and absorbed it as a Chinese province. For nearly two decades, the Ming rule imposed Chinese administrative systems, Confucian education, and heavy taxation on the Vietnamese population. Resistance movements were suppressed with force.

In 1418, Lê Lợi, a wealthy landowner from Thanh Hóa province, launched the Lam Sơn uprising against Ming occupation. The early years were brutal. His forces were small, poorly equipped, and repeatedly defeated. Lê Lợi spent years hiding in the mountains, at times reduced to eating wild plants to survive. But he persevered, and his movement gradually attracted broader support.

By the mid-1420s, the tide had turned. Lê Lợi’s forces won a string of decisive victories, and in 1426 and 1427, the uprising reached its climax. The Battle of Tốt Động–Chúc Động in 1426 defeated a major Ming relief army, and in late 1427, after the decisive Battle of Chi Lăng–Xương Giang, the remaining Ming garrison surrendered.

What followed was unusual for the era. Lê Lợi chose not to humiliate the defeated Ming forces. Instead, he provided the retreating Chinese army with supplies, horses, and ships for their journey home. It was designed to preserve future diplomatic relations. In 1428, he formally proclaimed the Lê dynasty, restoring Vietnamese independence after 20 years of occupation.

The Lam Sơn uprising is remembered in Vietnam as a founding national story. Lê Lợi remains one of the country’s most revered historical figures, and the legend of the restored sword at Hoàn Kiếm Lake in Hanoi (where he is said to have returned a magical sword to a golden turtle after the victory) is part of Vietnamese cultural identity to this day.

1486–1487: Stability and Discovery

The 1486 Fire Horse year saw Europe emerging from one of its bloodiest periods. In England, the Wars of the Roses, a 30-year dynastic conflict between the Houses of Lancaster and York, had finally been settled by Henry VII’s victory at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. Henry’s marriage to Elizabeth of York in January 1486 united the two warring houses and established the Tudor dynasty.

This was more than a royal wedding. It was a political settlement that ended a generation of civil war, usurpation, and instability. Henry VII proved to be a shrewd administrator who rebuilt the Crown’s finances, reduced the power of the nobility through legal and financial mechanisms rather than force, and laid the foundations for one of England’s most consequential dynasties. His son, Henry VIII, and granddaughter, Elizabeth I, would change England’s religious, cultural, and geopolitical identity.

Meanwhile, on the other side of Europe, the Portuguese were pushing the boundaries of the known world. In 1487, King João II appointed Bartolomeu Dias to lead an expedition south along the African coast to find a sea route to the Indian Ocean. Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope in early 1488, becoming the first European to do so. He didn’t reach India (his crew forced him to turn back), but the route was now proven. A decade later, Vasco da Gama followed Dias’s path and reached Calicut, India, opening sea trade routes that would transform global commerce and shift the centre of economic power toward maritime European nations.

1546–1547: New Tsars and Dead Kings

On 16 January 1547, Ivan IV was crowned as the first Tsar of Russia in a ceremony at the Cathedral of the Dormition in Moscow. He was 16 years old. The title “Tsar” (derived from Caesar) was a deliberate claim to imperial legitimacy, positioning Moscow as the successor to both the Byzantine Empire and Rome. Ivan’s early reign was marked by genuine reform: he convened the first Zemsky Sobor (a national assembly), revised the legal code, reorganised the military, and significantly expanded Russia’s territory, including the conquests of Kazan and Astrakhan. His later years earned him the name “Ivan the Terrible” for the oprichnina, a campaign of domestic terror that devastated the Russian boyar class. But the centralised state he built would endure.

In the same year, two of Europe’s most powerful monarchs died within weeks of each other. Henry VIII of England died on 28 January 1547, ending a reign that had cut England from the Catholic Church, dissolved the monasteries, and altered the relationship between the Crown and religion. His legacy was a country in religious turmoil, with a nine-year-old heir (Edward VI) and decades of instability still to come.

Francis I of France died on 31 March 1547, closing a reign defined by Renaissance patronage, the Italian Wars, and a long rivalry with the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Francis had invited Leonardo da Vinci to France and built the foundations of the French Renaissance, but he also left behind mounting debts as well as unresolved religious tensions that would erupt into the French Wars of Religion within a generation.

1606–1607: The New World Order

The year 1606 opened with one of the most dramatic trials in English history. On 27 January, Guy Fawkes and his co-conspirators were tried for the Gunpowder Plot, the failed attempt to blow up the House of Lords during the State Opening of Parliament on 5 November 1605. The plot, hatched by a group of English Catholics frustrated by continued persecution under James I, aimed to assassinate the King and much of the Protestant establishment in a single explosion.

Fawkes was executed on 31 January 1606. What happened after changed English politics. Laws against Catholics became even stricter, and the event became part of English national identity (the yearly Bonfire Night is still celebrated). More generally, the Gunpowder Plot strengthened Protestant control in England and deepened the religious divisions that would later lead to the English Civil War.

In the same year, the Virginia Company received its royal charter from James I, authorising the establishment of colonies in North America. The first permanent English settlement, Jamestown, was founded in Virginia in May 1607. The colony nearly failed multiple times (the “Starving Time” of 1609-1610 killed the majority of settlers), but it survived and became the template for English colonisation of North America.

Also in 1606, the Dutch ship Duyfken, under the command of Willem Janszoon, made the first known European landing in Australia, landing on the west coast of Cape York Peninsula. It would be another 164 years before James Cook mapped the east coast, but the first European visit to the southern continent had happened.

Three events in two years: the end of a Catholic conspiracy in England, the beginning of English America, and the first European sighting of the Australian continent. Each is a significant event in the fabric of modern history.

1666–1667: The Great Fire and Plague

London in the mid-1660s was under siege from nature itself.

The Great Plague of 1665 killed about 100,000 people in London, around a quarter of the city’s population. Lists of deaths were published every week, showing the extent of the problem. The rich escaped to the countryside. The poor, who could not leave, died in their homes, which were boarded up and marked with red crosses.

Then, on 2 September 1666, a fire started in a bakery on Pudding Lane. Over the next four days, it burned down 13,200 houses, 87 churches, and most of the buildings in the City of London, including the old St Paul’s Cathedral. The fire left about 70,000 of the city’s 80,000 residents without homes.

The destruction, although catastrophic, was also a kind of “cleansing”. The plague, which had been concentrated in the densely packed medieval streets and timber-framed buildings, effectively ended after the fire. The rebuilding effort, overseen by Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke among others, replaced the medieval city with wider streets, brick and stone construction, and improved sanitation. Wren’s new St Paul’s Cathedral, completed in 1710, became one of London’s defining landmarks and a symbol of the city’s resilience.

The “Double Catastrophe” of plague and fire was London’s destruction and rebirth compressed into two years. The Fire Horse burned the old city down. What rose from the ashes was the foundation of modern London.

1786–1787: Revolutions and Nature’s Fury

In the newly independent United States, the excitement of defeating Britain was turning into a crisis over how to run the country. The Articles of Confederation, the first attempt at a national government, created a central government so weak it could not collect taxes, control trade, or maintain a regular army.

In 1786, the cracks became visible. In western Massachusetts, Daniel Shays, a former Continental Army captain, led a rebellion of indebted farmers who were losing their properties to aggressive tax collection and debt enforcement. Shays’ Rebellion was relatively small in military terms, but its political impact was enormous. It demonstrated that the new nation’s government was incapable of maintaining order or responding to grievances. George Washington, in retirement at Mount Vernon, wrote in a famous letter to James Madison dated 5 November 1786, that the republic was on the verge of anarchy.

The rebellion catalysed the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in Philadelphia, where delegates, including James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and Benjamin Franklin, drafted the United States Constitution. The document that emerged, with its system of checks and balances and federal authority, replaced the failing Articles and became the foundation of American governance. Without Shays’ Rebellion exposing the weakness of the existing system, the political will for such a radical overhaul may not have existed.

1846–1847: Expansion and Famine

In May 1846, the United States declared war on Mexico after a series of border fights in Texas. The Mexican-American War was, in many ways, a fight to take land. Over the next two years, US forces took Mexico City, and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) gave about half of Mexico’s land to the United States, including what is now California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming. The discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in California in January 1848, just nine days before the treaty was signed, sparked the Gold Rush and accelerated changes in the American West.

At the same time, the Great Famine of Ireland, caused by the potato blight that destroyed the staple crop of the Irish poor, killed roughly one million people between 1845 and 1852 and forced another million to emigrate. The British government’s response was inadequate and callous. The famine reshaped Irish society permanently: Ireland’s population, which had been over 8 million before the famine, would not return to that level (and as of today, the Republic of Ireland’s population remains below it). The Irish diaspora created by the famine, particularly in the United States, Canada, and Australia, became one of the most significant migration events of the 19th century.

1906–1907: Redefining Disaster

At 5:12 a.m. on 18 April 1906, a massive earthquake struck San Francisco. The tremor itself lasted less than a minute, but the fires that followed burned for three days, destroying over 80% of the city. Roughly 3,000 people were killed, and more than half the city’s population of 400,000 was left homeless. The rebuilding of San Francisco became a defining story of American resilience, with the city largely reconstructed within a decade.

The following year, the Panic of 1907, triggered by a failed attempt to corner the copper market, caused a cascading bank run that threatened to collapse the American financial system. J.P. Morgan personally intervened, organising a consortium of bankers to shore up failing institutions. The crisis exposed the fragility of a financial system without a central bank or a lender of last resort. The direct result was the creation of the Federal Reserve System in 1913, the institution that still governs American monetary policy today.

1966–1967: Ideology and Middle East Transformation

In Southeast Asia, the Vietnam War got much worse. By the end of 1966, the US had almost 400,000 troops in Vietnam, and the bombing of North Vietnam had grown much stronger. The war was becoming the main political and social issue for a whole generation, leading to protests that would change American politics and culture.

In June 1967, the Six-Day War completely changed the borders of the Middle East. Israel attacked Egypt, Syria, and Jordan first, and in just six days took over the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights. The land changes from those six days are still at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict almost 60 years later. The war made Israel the strongest military power in the region and set up the political map that shapes the Middle East today.

2026: The Pattern Repeats

Now here we are again. Bing Wu, 2026. And the pattern has already started.

The conflict between the US, Israel, and Iran feels like just the kind of sudden change this cycle has brought before. Iran’s gradual wear-down of its enemies over time aligns with the long-term struggles that often occur in these periods. The risk of the conflict getting bigger, possibly involving Europe, Russia, and China, is real. The similarities to 1967 are worrying.

I want to be clear: I’m not saying Chinese astrology controls world events. What I am saying is that history, over a thousand years and across many cultures, shows a pattern of significant stress, sudden change, and transformation during the two-year periods of the Fire Horse and Fire Goat. Whether the reason is astrology or just cycles, the lesson is the same.

Be prepared.

Navigating the Inferno

So what does “be prepared” actually look like?

Move with intention, not panic.

The Fire Horse moves quickly. Things are happening faster and faster, and it is natural to want to react to everything. Try not to do that. Panic leads to bad choices. The events happening around the world are shaking things up, yes, but they are also signs. Notice what they are telling you about where the world is going, and act based on that.

Let go of what no longer works.

Every single historical example above has one thing in common: the old structure failed, and something new replaced it. The Anglo-Saxon aristocracy. The Northern Song court. The Yuan dynasty. The Articles of Confederation. The medieval city of London.

If something in your life, like your job, your money plan, or your beliefs about how things work, is only continuing because it has always been that way, this is the year it will be challenged. It is better to change by choice than to have change forced on you.

Build what can survive the furnace.

As I wrote in my previous article: 真金不怕红炉火. Real gold does not fear the furnace. Focus on building things that can withstand extreme pressure. Skills that remain valuable regardless of economic conditions. Relationships grounded in trust rather than convenience. Financial positions that can absorb shocks.

This applies to nations as much as it applies to individuals. The civilisations that emerged strongest from these periods were those that had invested in real capacity, competent governance, genuine social cohesion, and systems designed to endure extreme shocks.

Take care of each other.

The Horse archetype is independent by nature, but history has shown that those who survive these periods lean into community. London was rebuilt because its citizens rebuilt together. The American Constitution was written by a group of people who disagreed on almost everything but recognised that the alternative was collapse.

If there’s one takeaway from a thousand years of Fire Horse and Fire Goat history, it’s this: extreme pressure reveals one’s true nature. In governance, in institutions, and in people. The heat will come. What matters is what we do with it.

Fire as Purification and Hope

I’ll end with the same conclusion as my previous article.

Fire doesn’t only destroy. It reveals. It shows what is solid and what is fragile, what is real and what is fake. The Fire Horse year is a stress test for the world and for each of us individually.

History shows that when systems fracture, people rise. From the ashes of London came a modern city. From the failure of the Articles of Confederation came the US Constitution. From the fall of the Yuan came the Ming Dynasty. From the devastation of 1906 came the Federal Reserve and a new San Francisco.

We can’t always control the fire. But we can choose whether to be consumed by it or to build something from what it leaves behind. Stay safe. Remain grounded. And trust that careful, sincere actions will lead toward a more truthful and resilient future.

The cycle turns for a thousand years. But on the other side of every Fire Horse, there has always been renewal.

I was born in 1966, a Bing Wu (丙午) year, the Year of the Fire Horse.

As a Catholic, then, regarding myself as a “Fire Horse” was considered superstitious. It was just something “heathens” believed in. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve noticed that this ancient Chinese wisdom points to a deeply profound collective experience that should not be ignored.

This year, 2026, is one of those years. Not just because the world already feels so unstable. For people born in 1966, it’s also a return point in the traditional 60-year cycle. The sign returns, offering a perspective of warning and opportunity.

The 60-year cycle

The Chinese see time as cyclical. The sexagenary cycle (干支) combines ten heavenly stems and twelve earthly branches into sixty pairs, so that a full cycle is 60 years.

(If you’re wondering why not a 120-Year cycle, there’s an explanation at the end of this article.)

In the traditional system, Bing (丙) is Yang/Fire, often compared to the sun: direct, visible, forceful. Wu (午) is the Horse branch (also fire by nature) tied to noon and midsummer. Together, you get what the Chinese call “double fire,” intensity on intensity.

A Warning for those in power

One of the most cited “volatility” frames is the “Red Horse and Red Goat calamity” aka 赤马红羊之厄. It refers to the two-year span of Bing Wu (丙午) followed by Ding Wei (丁未). In our context, this is 2026 and 2027.

Bing and Ding are both fire stems, linked to “red.” Horse and Goat are adjacent branches. This does not mean that calamity is inevitable, but that when the heat is high, weak governance and fragile social structures get tested to the extreme.

Chinese history is filled with such examples and lessons from the red “Horse and Goat” periods.

1126–1127, Northern Song: Jingkang Incident 靖康之变

The Jingkang Incident was not a single “bad day.” It was a rapid sequence that exposed just how unprepared the Northern Song Dynasty was for a steppe war from the invaders of the North.

The trigger was the rise of the Jurchen-led Jin dynasty, founded in 1115, which turned on the Northern Song after the Song had allied with the Jurchen against the Liao. From 1125, the Jin launched a full-scale war against the Song, and by December 1126, they besieged the Song capital, Kaifeng (then called Bianjing).

Facing an inevitable invasion, Emperor Huizong abdicated, and his son, Emperor Qinzong, inherited a collapsing empire. The city’s defences included early experiments with gunpowder weapons (not decisive in the modern sense, but notable as an early recorded battlefield use), yet no effective relief force arrived. Kaifeng fell in mid-January 1127.

What followed was remembered as humiliation as much as defeat: looting and destruction, mass atrocities, and the seizure of the imperial house. Emperor Qinzong and his father, Huizong, were taken prisoners, along with large numbers of court officials and members of the imperial clan. Qinzong remained captive until his death.

The political consequence was immediate and permanent. With the capital lost and both emperors captured, the Northern Song effectively ended, and Qinzong’s half-brother, Zhao Gou, escaped south and reestablished the dynasty in 1127 as the first emperor of the Southern Song (Gaozong). The dynasty survived, but with vastly reduced territory, while the north remained under Jin control.

The human consequence was just as profound: 靖康 also helped trigger one of China’s great north-to-south population shifts, often compared to the earlier 4th-century flight south after the Yongjia-era upheavals, as officials, elites, and families moved into the Yangtze basin and the southeast, accelerating the long-term drift of China’s demographic and economic centre toward the south.

That is why the Jingkang Incident endures in Chinese memory: it’s not just a military loss. It’s a moment when a state’s strategic misjudgments, fiscal and military weaknesses, and inability to mobilise effective defence were exposed under extreme pressure, and the cost was a dynastic fracture that reshaped China for generations.

1846–1847, late Qing: pre-Taiping unrest

The 1840s were a turning point for the Qing Dynasty. In 1840, the First Opium War broke out, opening a new era of foreign pressure and internal crisis for China. By the mid-1840s, the dynasty was already under tremendous structural stress: rural hardship, local security problems, and a growing gap between central authority and what counties could actually control. Guangxi in particular was a combustible region facing sharp resource pressure and social conflict, where poor farmers, miners, charcoal workers, and migrant communities were vulnerable to banditry and clan violence.

This is the backdrop for why 1846–1847 matters.

The Taiping story begins with Hong Xiuquan, a failed civil service exam candidate who developed a syncretic Christian-inspired doctrine and a mission to purge “evil” from society. His schoolmate Feng Yunshan was the organiser. In 1844, Hong and Feng preached in Guangxi; Hong returned home, but Feng stayed behind to build what became the God Worshippers’ Society (拜上帝会) among impoverished communities in Guangxi.

In 1847, Hong rejoined Feng in Guangxi and was accepted as the society’s leader. This was the moment the movement became organised and formidable, with a shared doctrine and a growing base.

From there, things escalated quickly. When Qing troops attacked the God Worshippers in July 1850, open rebellion broke out. Within months, Hong proclaimed a new dynasty, the Taiping Tianguo (太平天国, Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace), and assumed the title Tianwang (Heavenly King).

The war that followed (1850 to 1864) was one of the deadliest conflicts in human history. Britannica estimates about 20 million deaths, and other modern historians estimate up to 30 million deaths, reflecting uncertainty and the huge proportion of deaths from famine and disease tied to the war.

So 1846–1847 earns its place in history because it captures the moment when the fuse is lit: hardship is rising, local governance is weakening, and a movement with both a spiritual claim and a social program acquires leadership, structure, and a mass base, setting the stage for an explosion a few years later.

1906–1907, late Qing: reform scramble and social shocks (leading to the fall of the Qing)

In these years of the Fire Horse, the turmoil in China was institutional in nature. After the shocks of the late 19th century, the Qing court tried to modernise rapidly enough to survive, but the effort satisfied no one. Conservatives saw reform as surrender. Reformers saw it as too slow. The result was a growing legitimacy crisis, playing out in public view: a dynasty still wearing imperial robes but increasingly forced to speak the language of constitutionalism.

This matters because 1906–1907 also marks the end of the empire’s final break. By 1911, a chain of political and financial missteps, including the railway nationalisation crisis and resulting unrest, helped trigger the tipping point. On 10 October 1911, the Wuchang Uprising broke out, an event widely treated as the formal start of the Xinhai Revolution.

Provinces declared separation from Qing rule, power fractured, and negotiations reshaped the state. On 12 February 1912, the child emperor Puyi abdicated, ending China’s last imperial dynasty and opening the Republican era.

1966–1967, modern China: the Cultural Revolution as rupture, and the long runway to reform

The Cultural Revolution did not begin as a vague mood shift. It began as a political decision, with a date you can put on the timeline.

Many historians treat 16 May 1966 as the moment the movement was declared, when a key Party document warned of “bourgeois” infiltrators inside the system. Mao then formally launched the Cultural Revolution at the Eleventh Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee in August 1966, and the country moved rapidly into mass mobilisation and institutional breakdown.

Mao pursued his goals through the Red Guards, mobilising urban youth to attack “bourgeois” elements and the “Four Olds.” Schools were shut, public struggle sessions spread, and violence escalated with little oversight. Key leaders were purged early, most notably Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, who were removed from power during the initial phase.

By January 1967, the movement shifted from symbolic denunciation toward the overthrow of provincial Party committees and attempts to build replacement power structures. Through 1967, factional conflict worsened, including armed clashes between rival Red Guard groups, and Mao called on the PLA to intervene, which did not stabilise the situation but deepened the chaos.

The Cultural Revolution ran on until 1976 (and was officially declared over later), leaving the economy disrupted and the political system traumatised.

After Mao’s death in September 1976 and the fall of the Gang of Four in October 1976, the internal conditions changed. In the years that followed, Deng Xiaoping emerged as the central figure who restored domestic stability and pushed China toward economic growth. Scholars frame Deng’s legacy specifically as restoring stability and growth “after the disastrous excesses of the Cultural Revolution.”

In other words, the Cultural Revolution is not “the beginning of reform,” but it is part of the reason reform became politically and economically necessary. It burned through the old system, and the post-1976 leadership had to rebuild a workable model for the country.

Bing Wu can also mark golden years

Chinese history also remembers the Fire Horse years as periods of extraordinary competence and cultural bloom. A golden age when those in power got their act together.

646, Tang Taizong: Zhenguan Good Governance

This Bing Wu year sits near the mature end of Tang Taizong’s reign, inside the period later praised as the Zhenguan era of good government. What makes it more than a nostalgic label is that we can point to specific state capacities: tax relief for disaster-stricken regions, relief granaries to buffer famine, and a countryside described as enjoying low prices and general prosperity.

But “flourishing” in the late 640s was not only about domestic administration. It was also visible in how the Tang Dynasty projected confidence outward. In 646, Tang forces defeated the Xueyantuo, turning them into Tang vassals, part of a wider expansion of Tang influence across the north and into the Tarim Basin. This mattered because it stabilised corridors that promoted trade, diplomacy, and the sharing of knowledge.

This was expressed in the Capital Chang’an (Perpetual Peace) as a key eastern terminus of the Silk Roads and, under the Tang Dynasty, a major trade hub with a “surprisingly diverse” population, including many from Sogdiana, the Central Asian merchant culture whose networks connected Eurasian routes into China.

UNESCO notes that one of the few surviving Tang structures that reflects these Silk Road exchanges is the Big (Giant) Wild Goose Pagoda, built to house the scriptures brought back by the monk-scholar Xuanzang. The pagoda’s construction, dated to 652, is a sign of the prosperity and stability of the Zhenguan era, which created the stable, wealthy capital where large scholarly projects like Xuanzang’s translation work could be protected and scaled.

1726, Yong Zheng: the reform furnace

This Bing Wu year sits inside Yong Zheng’s reign (1722–1735), which historians consistently describe as a period of hard, technocratic consolidation. Yongzheng is remembered less for glamour than for a governing style that tightened control, attacked corruption, and rebuilt state revenue. He checked corruption, enforced laws, and reorganised finances, thereby increasing state revenue.

Rebuilding fiscal legitimacy by changing how taxes are assessed
One of Yong Zheng’s hallmark reforms was expanding the policy commonly known as tanding rumu (摊丁入亩), folding the head (poll) tax into the land tax. Yongzheng extended and rolled this out nationally beginning in the mid-1720s, shifting taxation away from counting people and toward taxing land, easing burdens on landless peasants while improving state control over revenue and reducing tax evasion.

Reducing “informal extraction” by making local finance more rules-based
Another major Yongzheng era move was to rationalise the messy world of local surcharges and hidden fees that encouraged corruption and instability. A recent quantitative study of Ming-Qing fiscal revenue describes Yong Zheng’s attempt to legitimise extra-legal conversion surcharges (huohao) into official revenue, including the well-known yanglian silver (养廉银), often treated by scholars as a hallmark of rational fiscal reform because it aimed to fund local administration more transparently and reduce the incentive for predatory fee-taking.

Therefore, in 1726, the “fire” horse was not chaotic. It was the concentrated heat that purified governance, pushed reforms that hardened the state: tightening discipline, rationalising fiscal flows, and rebuilding trust in the administration’s ability to function competently.

Bing Wu can become an accelerator that amplifies both weakness as well as strength.

“Great changes unseen in a hundred years”

Chinese President Xi Jinping’s phrase “great changes unseen in a hundred years” (百年未有之大变局) resonates well in the Year of the Fire Horse in 2026 because it captures something that’s almost impossible to miss: the world’s old structure is failing, and everything is shifting. One key reason is that, over the past several decades, China has shown it can plan ahead, marshal resources, and deliver results at scale.

As of 2025, China has about 50,000 kilometres of high-speed rail, the largest such network on Earth. In energy, China’s clean-power capacity recently surpassed its fossil-fuel capacity, and the International Energy Agency now calls China the main global driver of renewables.

On the human side, the World Bank estimates that nearly 800 million people in China were lifted out of extreme poverty in 2020, accounting for the largest share of global poverty reduction. This was no small feat for a country of 1.4 billion people. As of 2021, China is focused on consolidating its gains and preventing a return to poverty.

In technology, China’s space program has hit major milestones, like bringing back the first samples from the far side of the Moon with Chang’e-6 in 2024, a mission that demonstrates serious depth in engineering and project discipline.

None of this means China is perfect or without problems. But it’s clear that when China sets its mind to something, it can make things happen, and fast. That’s part of why this Bing Wu feels like an accelerator: the familiar routes are gone, new ones are opening up. Change is here.

What the Fire Horse means for us

The Fire Horse year is best understood as a stress test.

Fire doesn’t only destroy. It reveals. It shows what is solid and what is fragile, what is real and what is fake. There’s a Chinese saying: 真金不怕红炉火, real gold does not fear the furnace. Extreme heat reveals our true nature.

That’s a useful way to welcome the Year of the Fire Horse. It accelerates. Weak structures will collapse. Empty slogans will fail. But competence will compound. Good systems will earn trust. People with real skill and steady values gain an edge because they will pass the test.

The question isn’t whether the year is “good” or “bad.” It’s whether we will survive the heat. Focus on building what can pass the furnace test: skills that endure, relationships that hold, institutions that are legitimate, and projects that will leave a useful legacy behind.

Bing Wu will turn up the temperature. And when the temperature rises, the strong become recognisable, in the world, and in ourselves.

Note: Why 60 and not 120?

The reason the sexagenary cycle consists of 60 unique combinations instead of 120 is due to the mathematical concept of the Least Common Multiple (LCM) and a structural restriction known as the “parity rule”.

Why only a 60-year cycle?

The ten Heavenly Stems and twelve Earthly Branches are paired sequentially. Because 10 and 12 share a common factor of 2, the two cycles do not produce every possible mathematical permutation. Instead, the sequence restarts as soon as it reaches the Least Common Multiple of the two numbers:

LCM(10, 12) = 60

After 60 pairings, the sequence returns to its starting point (Jia-Zi), leaving half of the theoretical 120 combinations unused.

The Parity Rule (Yin and Yang)

Metaphysically, the cycle is governed by the law that Yang and Yin elements cannot pair with one another. Every stem and branch is categorised as either Yang or Yin based on its position in the sequence:

• Yang (Odd-numbered): Stems 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 and Branches 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11.

• Yin (Even-numbered): Stems 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 and Branches 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12.

A Yang Stem will only ever pair with a Yang Branch, and a Yin Stem will only ever pair with a Yin Branch. This restricts the total number of valid pairings to:

(5 Yang Stems X 6 Yang Branches) + (5 Yin Stems X 6 Yin Branches) = 60

Consequently, combinations such as a Yang Stem with a Yin Branch (for example, Jia-Chou) never occur in the traditional calendar. This completed 60-year cycle is often referred to as a Jiazi, figuratively meaning a full human lifespan.

Happy New Year! Time seems to move so quickly.

January often brings a sense of hope and anticipation. We think about new habits, new routines, and higher goals. Our resolutions are full of plans to improve what is already stretched thin. We want to do better, do more, and keep improving.

But underneath that optimism, there is a familiar tiredness. It becomes more common as we get older. It’s not a sharp fatigue, but a steady, dull exhaustion that comes from doing everything right and still feeling worn out.

We tell ourselves we’re tired because life is hard and moves quickly. The world is always changing, and work and life are demanding. All of this is true, but it leaves out something deeper and more uncomfortable.

Most people aren’t tired because they’re failing. They’re tired because they’re too useful.

If you’re reliable, people depend on you. If you’re good at your job, you get more tasks. If you stay calm, others will bring their problems to you. Being capable rarely leads to rest. Instead, it just means more keeps piling up.

This is the trap. Being good at what you do doesn’t always protect you. It just creates more demand. The better you perform, the more it costs you, and it never seems to stop.

So maybe this year doesn’t need another promise to be more productive. Maybe it needs something older and less common, a kind of survival wisdom. The skill of being a little less useful. Not lazy, just not always perfectly helpful.

The Equation We Rarely Question

From a young age, we are taught a simple formula: worth equals usefulness.

Our parents tell us to be useful to society. School rewards those who do well. Work promotes people who get results. We’re encouraged to do more than what’s required. Over time, being useful becomes part of who we are. I’m valuable because I’m needed.

Being useful makes you stand out. That creates expectations, and those expectations lead people to ask more of you. What starts as recognition soon becomes an assumption. An obligation: you’ll handle it, you’ll step up, you always save the day.

At work, the most capable and cooperative people are often the first to burn out. Not because they’re weak, but because systems will shift more tasks their way. Responsibilities pile up without discussion. There’s no relief, because nothing seems wrong on the surface.

The Peter Principle is often seen as a joke about people being promoted until they can’t do the job. But it also shows that being good at your work leads to more demands, not more support. The system keeps asking for more until someone reaches their limit.

When you show how useful you are, the world doesn’t protect you; it just asks for more. The reward is more roles, more responsibilities, and more demands added to what you already do.

The system never asks if you should keep going. It only asks if you can.

The Twisted Tree

Long before performance reviews and email, a Daoist philosopher told a story about a tree.

Zhuangzi described a tree with twisted, uneven branches and wood full of knots. Carpenters walk by without stopping. Nearby, straight trees stand tall and useful. They are cut down young and turned into beams, planks, and tools.

The twisted tree survives.

The twisted tree survives not because it’s impressive, but because it’s seen as useless. No one wants to cut it down or use it, so it stays. It keeps growing, provides shade and habitat, and outlives the useful trees.

Zhuangzi wasn’t telling people to be lazy. He was showing the risk of being too useful. When everything is judged by usefulness, those who aren’t as useful are the ones who last.

In this way, being useless acts as a disguise. The world doesn’t destroy what it can’t easily take from. It just ignores it.

According to Arendt, unlike those who participate in a culture focused solely on relentless productivity, the twisted tree is not trying to compete but instead opts out of a system where the most industrious often experience burnout first.

The ‘straight trees’ are always available, always responsive, and always working to improve themselves. They organise their schedules, build their skills, and handle emotional work. They try to make every interaction as smooth as possible.

This makes them highly useful and, as a result, more easily taken for granted. In modern society, human activity is increasingly centred on labour, emphasising usefulness above all else. When usefulness becomes a person’s defining feature, their time and energy may be claimed by others before they even realise it. Your energy is used up without your say. Over time, you stop feeling like a person and start feeling like just a function.

That’s why exhaustion often shows up without a clear reason. Nothing dramatic happened; you just kept saying yes, kept working, and kept taking on more.

Then one day, you might have a heart attack, and everything stops.

“Yes, he was a very good employee. Too bad he had to go like this.”

The real danger isn’t being useful, it’s becoming nothing but useful.

Hannah Arendt warned that a life reduced to endless labour becomes cyclical and disposable. Valuable only as long as it continues to perform. Once it pauses, it is replaced.

And you are always replaceable.

Being inconvenient

This way of thinking isn’t about being irresponsible. It doesn’t encourage giving up or abandoning your commitments. It’s not about becoming useless.

It’s about understanding the need to take care of yourself.

Instead of always being useful, try being strategically inconvenient. Be a little slower, not always available, and sometimes a bit inefficient or selfish if it helps protect your well-being.

Don’t answer every message right away. Wait. Let someone else take the lead sometimes. Don’t volunteer for every task you could do. Allow small problems to exist instead of fixing everything.

This is how you stop yourself from being used up all the time.

The safest place isn’t at the top of the usefulness list. It’s on the edge, where expectations are lower. You’re respected, but not pushed to your limits. Your value isn’t easy for systems to measure or exploit.

Like the twisted tree, you might not stand out, but you stay whole.

A Resolution for the Twisted

Straight trees don’t last long. The ones seen as useless are the ones that last.

As 2026 starts, maybe the goal isn’t to do more, learn faster, or work harder. Maybe it’s to avoid burning out.

The old philosophers weren’t telling people to be useless. They were teaching them not to let themselves be used up.

Maybe this year, that’s enough.

AGI headlines are often in the news. Forecasts, often from brilliant people, that humans are running out of time, create a sense of fear and hopelessness. Bigger models, more parameters, rising capabilities, and a mood that sometimes feels like a countdown to doomsday. The drama is that AI is coming for us.

This fear rests on a simple assumption. If a machine processes information faster than we do, it must be more intelligent than we are. And therefore better than we are.

I disagree.

Speed is a single trait inside a large and complicated idea. The argument that AI will replace humans outright stems from a narrow way of measuring intelligence. Whoever produces the most, remembers the most, or moves the fastest, wins. Those measures are designed for tools. Humans operate quite differently.

Measuring the wrong things

When people compare humans to AI, they usually measure speed and volume. LLMs give complex answers instantly. They generate staggering amounts of text in seconds. They sort patterns that take us days to complete.

From that point of view, AI can seem scary. But look at the simple calculator. It beats every mathematician on the planet in calculating, yet no one confuses that with intelligence.

AI is a similar type of tool. It works quickly and handles scale; it is a sophisticated prediction machine, and prediction is not the same as understanding. AI is narrow power. It sees patterns, not meaning. Tokens, not lived experience.

We reinforce this misunderstanding by treating intelligence as if it lives only in the brain. It is why people talk about “downloading” themselves onto a computer chip, as if storing memories captures what intelligence really is. It leaves out most of what makes human intelligence unique and “not artificial.”

Intelligence that we do not take into account

When people predict that AGI and, subsequently, ASI will surpass human intelligence, they are usually focusing on the academic slice of intelligence: logic, knowledge, analysis, memory, and calculation. These are useful, but not the source of what makes life meaningful. The richer forms of intelligence sit elsewhere.

Emotional Intelligence

It highlights what matters and directs our attention. It helps us read people and understand context.

Love creates loyalty, patience, sacrifice, and the instinct to protect. It pulls us together for companionship and meaning.

Fear keeps us alert to risk. It shapes caution, vigilance, and self-preservation. It also sparks courage when something matters enough to act anyway.

Joy fuels creativity, play, exploration, and the desire to share experiences. It reinforces behaviours that lead to fulfilment.

Anger signals that a boundary has been crossed. It pushes us to defend ourselves, correct an injustice, or reclaim a sense of control.

Sadness deepens empathy and reflection. It helps us release what cannot be held and recognise what we value.

Desire creates ambition, curiosity, attraction, craving, and personal growth. It is often the beginning of change.

Hope allows us to persist through difficulty. To push against mathematical odds and give meaning to effort, turning imagination into action.

Shame shapes our social behaviour and cultural norms. It encourages alignment with shared values and motivates course correction. It helps build societies and communities by moderating social behaviours.

Guilt prompts accountability. It tells us when our actions have harmed someone or conflicted with our own standards.

Awe opens the mind to new possibilities. It expands perspective and inspires learning, creativity, and humility.

Trust lets us build relationships, share responsibilities, and rely on one another.

Curiosity drives exploration, experimentation, and discovery. It pushes us to take risks and into the unknown in search of understanding and new horizons.

All these are unique to us as humans, and our emotions work with us and within us all the time. These are faculties that AI lacks.

Biological Intelligence

Your senses are a magical and highly developed suite of high intelligence. Sight, sound, touch, smell and taste, each interlinked with each to create an exclusive symphony of sensations that makes us truly human.

Sight

Vision gives us reach beyond our physical form. It lets us take in the external world instantly when we open our eyes. The simple act of seeing a sunset, admiring a landscape, or watching our children play involves layers of perception that evolved over millions of years.

Our eyes reach out and touch the world without our conscious effort. We notice posture, expression, movement, colour, and subtle changes in someone’s face. We sense tension in a room before a word is spoken. Sight ties memory to physical detail and helps us anticipate what might happen next.

AI sees pixels, can analyse only pixels, but cannot see. We can improve the resolution of a camera, but AI has no “point of view” and no lived context behind a Hi-Res image.

Hearing

Sound carries layers of meaning long before logic enters the picture. Tone, pace, breath, and hesitation tell us as much as the words themselves. A slight tremor in someone’s voice can signal fear or excitement. A quiet pause can say more than a sentence. Hearing grew out of our need to sense threat, comfort, sincerity, and intent. It also gives us rhythm and music, the emotional architecture of human culture.

If you have ever listened to Beethoven’s Fifth and felt tears rise without knowing why, you would have recognised the power of that terrible language in music. Music speaks beyond words, and your mind understands it instantly.

Our hearing is tied to our memory, instinct, and emotion. It lets us feel the world, not just register it. AI can transcribe audio, but it cannot hear.

Touch

Touch is one of the oldest forms of intelligence we have. It signals safety, comfort, pain, texture, and temperature. It shapes our memories and emotions. A firm handshake, a shaky grip, a gentle caress from a loved one, the sudden chill of a breeze. Touch anchors us in our bodies. It defines boundaries and regulates our nervous system. Much of our instinctive behaviour comes from signals we feel, not the thoughts we form. AI has no tactile world or bodily feedback.

Smell

Smell is a wonderful (and often forgotten) thing. It reaches straight into memory and emotion. A familiar scent can bring back a moment from long ago. The sharpness of smoke, the sweetness of jasmine, the salt of the ocean, the perfumed hair of a lover. Each carries signals from across the span of time and space. Smell alerts us to danger before our mind catches up. It influences appetite, attraction, comfort, and instinctive avoidance. It is one of our human brain’s earliest guides, tying place, time, and experience together. An AI model cannot experience scent or the flood of memory it releases.

Taste

Taste informs our appetite and enriches our culture. It shapes our habits and memories around meals shared with people we love. Taste teaches caution and pleasure. It helps us understand what nourishes and what harms. It connects us to our tradition and to a sense of belonging.

AI can describe flavours, but cannot experience them like we do. The taste of something that reminds us of grandma’s cooking instantly connects us to a personal, invisible world that AI cannot replicate. It processes only the representation, but not the reality itself.

Subconscious Intelligence

Our subconscious is a working mind of its own. It sorts through fragments of memory, emotion, and experience without asking for our attention. While we sleep, shower, or walk, it threads ideas together and reaches conclusions that conscious effort cannot force. We sense danger before you can identify it mentally. We recognise a face we have not seen in decades. None of this is guesswork. It comes from patterns we have absorbed across a lifetime.

This same quiet machinery fuels creativity. New ideas often arrive when we stop trying to find them. A melody forms during a commute to work. A novel peeks its head while we are cooking. A solution shows up just as we think the problem is insurmountable. The subconscious blends memory, emotion, curiosity, and experience into something our conscious mind could not produce on its own.

These moments are signs of a highly advanced form of intelligence that is not available to AI.

AI has no subconscious, no personal history, no emotional memory, and no hidden layers of experience shaping its output. It can draw on human knowledge, identify and remix patterns, but cannot tap into an inner world because it does not have one.

Human intuition and creativity grow from this “unconscious” part of the mind, which no model can replicate.

Aspirational Intelligence

Our aspirations are a form of intelligence. They pull us toward a future that does not yet exist. They shape our choices and guide how we interpret possibilities. Aspiration is the part of the mind that lets us start a journey without knowing where it will end. It is the force behind every ambitious project, every invention, every work of art.

Aspirational intelligence is what enabled humans to build the Great Wall, cross oceans, and explore the universe. It is also how we created AI. None of these began with certainty. They started with imagination, hope, and a kind of stubbornness that refuses to settle.

Aspiration gives shape to meaning. It influences how we read opportunity and how we carry responsibility. It moves our decisions even when the logic is unclear. It provides us with a sense of “tomorrow” and a reason to pursue our dreams.

AI cannot aspire. It does not imagine its own future. It does not care about outcomes. It has no pride, no fear of failure, no hope, no longing, no concept of legacy. It does not begin anything for reasons beyond the prompt it receives.

Aspiration belongs to us. It is one of the deepest forms of intelligence, and it is the reason we continue to build, explore, and create beyond the limits of what we can see.

AI is powerful, but incomplete

People often imagine AI as a machine that thinks like us, wants like us, and reasons like us, only with more power behind it. That picture does not match the systems we have today, or the direction current models pursue.

AI does not live in the physical world. It does not have a body. It cannot feel relief, longing, anticipation, or dread. It cannot miss someone. It forms no intentions and sets no goals. It values nothing.

It simulates. It predicts. It imitates. It extends what we can do, faster and larger, but it does not touch. AI does not know the colour red like we do, or feel the embrace of our children like we do. There is nothing beyond its ability to answer a prompt.

The real risk

Fearing AI for the wrong reasons distracts us. The danger is not that machines become too intelligent. The danger is that we underestimate our own intelligence and forget what a piece of work we are!

So where does this leave us?

AI is here to stay. It is valuable and transformative. It will reshape work and industry. It should. But it does not reduce, cancel or overtake human intelligence. It reminds us of our human intelligence.

It pushes us to reclaim capacities we stopped noticing, the ones rooted in emotion, intuition, creativity, conscience, humour, and connection.

This is where our value lies. This is where our real intelligence lives.

If you enjoyed this reflection, you may like my other Substack, The Intelligent Playbook, my newsletter about AI, human capability, and the tools that help us work smarter. It is written for people who want to understand AI without the hype and use it to strengthen their own creativity and judgment.

You can subscribe and learn how to make AI a partner rather than a threat.

Last weekend, a friend said, quite out of the blue, that she “could not, in good conscience, continue buying from Temu.” I was curious because I was the one who introduced Temu to her. She said that because things are so cheap, it must involve forced labour and inhumane working conditions. I explained, as I usually do in such situations, that it’s the business model and efficiency that allows them to bring the price down. I talked about how factories work in China, and about work culture, etc.

“Well, I guess then I can go crazy on Temu again.”

The message was clear: Temu and Shein equals forced labour, exploitation, copyright theft, and environmental harm, all tied to the idea that “things shouldn’t be that cheap unless something ‘immoral’ is happening behind the scenes.”

This is not new to me. I’ve heard versions of the same statement from almost everyone I’ve known in Australia since we moved here in 2009.

No matter what the topic is: shopping apps, TikTok, Chinese cuisine, culture, history, it eventually loops back to topics like Tibet, Xinjiang, genocide, human rights abuses, authoritarianism, communism, or whatever the latest ABC headline happens to be propagating.

Last weekend was just the latest version of a 16-year ordeal.

Before responding to any of the moral claims, I want to start with something simpler: why Temu can sell at such low prices and how its business model actually works.

How Temu Actually Works

Temu sits atop a very different supply chain structure. Traditional retailers like Big W, Kmart, and Target, as well as Amazon, move a product through several layers before it reaches the customer.

The path looks something like:

Manufacturer → Exporter → Importer → Distributor → Warehouse → Store → Customer

Every step takes a cut. Every step adds cost. These costs are built into the structure. It’s how the business model works.

Temu removes nearly all of it.

It goes straight to the factory

Temu uses a Consumer-to-Manufacturer (C2M) model. Instead of buying through wholesalers, the app collects orders and sends them directly to a factory. No inventory, no retail rent, no layers of distributors.

It holds no stock

Traditional retailers face constant pressure to predict what customers will want weeks or months in advance. When they get it wrong, they’re stuck with unsold inventory. That leads to clearance bins, fire sales, and wastage, all of which are built into the final retail price.

Temu’s model removes that risk entirely. The platform doesn’t carry inventory. Factories produce only after orders are placed, which means production is tied to actual demand rather than forecasts. It’s a form of just-in-time manufacturing that significantly reduces overproduction and the waste caused by incorrect predictions.

Temu sets the price, and manufacturers decide whether to accept the margin

Manufacturers do not set the retail price on Temu. The platform does. Temu adjusts prices based on demand, promotions, and competition, then offers manufacturers a margin. The supplier chooses whether to accept that margin in exchange for access to a global market they could never reach on their own.

In this model, manufacturers are price takers. It’s similar to how restaurants work with Uber Eats. The platform controls pricing, visibility, and customer flow. The supplier participates because the volume and reach outweigh the lower margins.

This is why something that sells for five dollars on Temu might cost twenty-five dollars at Kmart. For decades, retailers quietly protected their margins. Temu stripped out the middle layers and revealed how much of the final price was markup rather than manufacturing cost.

Manufacturers aren’t exclusive to Temu

It’s also worth saying that Temu’s suppliers are not locked into the platform. Many of them sell the same products on AliExpress, Alibaba, Amazon, TikTok Shop, or their own online stores. Some even run small local retail outlets. Temu is simply one channel among many, but it is the channel that brings them the most significant volume of international orders. That volume is why manufacturers accept the margin Temu offers. The trade-off is global reach.

The “missing” costs

When you remove:

• retail rent

• warehousing

• storage

• forecasting

• transport

• staff

• importer markup

• wholesaler markup

• retailer markup

…the price drops. Often significantly.

Cheap doesn’t automatically mean unethical. Sometimes it just means efficient.

The factories themselves are diverse

Many Australians (and Westerners) imagine every Chinese factory as a vast industrial complex. In reality, Temu works with hundreds of thousands of suppliers, from full-scale operations to family-run workshops and village clusters.

Many westerners do not know this, but it explains Temu’s pricing structure and business model.

The Reality of Small-Scale Manufacturing

When friends here jump to the conclusion that low prices must involve forced labour, they’re drawing from a narrow image of what “factory work” looks like. But much of China’s manufacturing is flexible, informal, and deeply embedded in community life.

I’ve seen it firsthand in Fujian during our visit to my wife’s relatives. Oyster shucking in Zhangzhou is big business. Large oyster farms rely on small groups of families to process oysters by hand, which are then distributed to restaurants, markets, and even exported to places like Australia.

The work is paid by weight. Not by hour. Not by formal contract. Women gather in sheds outside their 3-storey houses, talking, gossiping and laughing while they shuck millions of oysters. Retirees, housewives, and aunties earn supplemental income in the hours when children are at school or when there’s nothing else to do.

There is no award wage. No paid leave. No overtime. No staff benefits. No employer-funded insurance.

Imagine doing a workplace audit on a factory like this. You will be led to think that this is your classic Dickensian sweatshop. Low wages. Forced-labour. Slavery.

Except it isn’t.

It’s flexible piecework that fits around family responsibilities and local rhythms. These women are not victims. They are not trapped. They are not living in fear. They choose to do it because it supplements their household income, gives them company, and fills their day with purpose.

The government covers healthcare, so they are not dependent on employer benefits the way workers in Western countries often are.

Temu’s supplier base includes tens of thousands of small operations like these, making slippers and T-shirts. And coffee mugs. In Jieyang, I came across a martial arts school that also makes paper packaging materials during the day (kung fu lessons at night). I had met the owner at a noodle shop where she invited my son and me to visit her school. Her husband is a kung fu teacher.

Manufacturing in China is not as neat or regulated as an Australian factory, but it is not a hidden empire of slavery either.

I remember helping my mother sew buttons onto dresses, paint miniature plastic toy animals, and even bake CNY cookies to sell. We would do this after school for a few dollars a day back in the 1970s. Slavery? No, just extra money to feed a family of 8.

Most Australians, including my friends at lunch, have never seen how small-scale production works in Asia. And when you don’t understand something, you fill the gap with dark assumptions.

When the Same Thing Happens in Australia, We Call It Something Else

Before anyone condemns informal or low-paid work in Asia, it’s worth looking at what happens here in Australia.

A few years ago, a neighbour found out that a local farm was employing workers from Vanuatu. She was shocked to see the workers eating vegetables that had been thrown out, cutting off the rotten bits. She thought the farm was neglecting them and wanted to call the authorities.

The workers begged her not to.

They explained that the farm gave them meal allowances, but they wanted to save every dollar to send home. Eating discarded vegetables was a choice. If we complained, and the farm got into trouble, they could lose the only income that allowed them to support their families back home.

Australia’s agriculture sector relies heavily on arrangements like this, with Pacific Islanders, backpackers, and Vietnamese migrants all working long hours for low pay. Farmers themselves are squeezed by supermarkets, which push prices down to keep groceries affordable.

And Australians, we enjoy the benefit from that system every time we buy fruits and vegetables on special.

We don’t call this “forced labour.” We call it “keeping cost of living affordable.”

So why is informal work in Australia understood as an economic reality, while similar work in China is framed as exploitation? The answer must inevitably be racism.

Moral Judgement Without Understanding

I don’t expect everyone to know the details of Temu’s business model and supply chain. Most people haven’t seen the workshops I’ve seen or the informal networks that make up a large part of China’s grassroots economy. What I hope for is a desire to understand before making a judgment.

When someone looks at a five-dollar item from Temu and jumps straight to the “forced labour” narrative, the accusation doesn’t land on the company alone.

It lands on the people who make the products. It lands on the culture behind them. And whether intended or not, it lands on people like me.

After sixteen years here, this is familiar to me. The topics vary, but the assumptions don’t: China is bad, dangerous, suspicious, untrustworthy; “I don’t buy Chinese crap”, you often hear.

Anything cheap must be morally compromised; anything efficient must be exploitative; anything unfamiliar must be sinister. Communist. Authoritarians. Dictators. “You Chinese people.”

It wears you down.

I recommended Temu because I thought it was a good place to find value. But that turned into another round of the same: if it comes from China and it’s cheap, it’s unconscionable. There must be something wrong. And by sharing Temu, I must be naive at best, complicit at worst.

Temu (and Shein) is not flawless. No supply chain is. Not in China, not in Australia, not anywhere. But the world is more complicated than a headline, and prices do not tell the whole story.

If someone wants to talk about Temu’s model, I welcome that conversation.

Start with how it works. The business model.

How costs are stripped out. How informal labour functions in different cultures. How much of Western retail pricing is built on massive markups?

Don’t just reduce an entire group of people to the darkest assumptions without pausing to understand.

When a discussion starts from curiosity, we can talk and learn. When it starts with an accusation, it goes nowhere. And we remain ignorant.

That’s why I’m writing this: not to defend a shopping app, but to open a space for learning. Maybe next time, the conversation can begin with a question rather than an accusation.

There is an old story about a monkey who sneaked into a farmer’s garden.

He saw a bunch of grapes hanging low on the vine. Delighted, he plucked a handful. But as he went further, he saw apples gleaming in the sun. He dropped the grapes and grabbed three apples, one in each hand and one clenched in his mouth.

Then he spotted pineapples. They were harder to reach, so he dropped the apples and struggled until he managed to tear two free. Just as he began to feel proud of his haul, he saw watermelons, big, green, and impossible to ignore. He dropped the pineapples and strained to carry two, but they were too heavy. He decided to take one just as the farmer appeared with a gun. The monkey fled in panic, bruised and empty-handed.

We, most of us, live life the same way. Surrounded by endless options, we grasp for more, then change course when something shinier catches our eye. We want it all, and in the process, we scatter our attention, our energy, and sometimes our joy.

Modern life offers freedom that previous generations could not imagine. But freedom can become its own trap. The more we can choose, the more we fear missing out, and the more we risk losing what we already hold.

This abundance often feels like a kind of captivity in endless possibilities. The modern mind is overwhelmed by the abundance of choices. Every decision feels like a test, every missed opportunity like a tragic loss. Psychologists call it choice overload, but it is really an emotional exhaustion born of endless freedom.

Choice is meant to liberate us, yet without focus and clarity, it becomes a burden. The monkey in the garden could not decide what mattered most. And that, perhaps, is the quiet tragedy of our time. With so much to choose from, we have forgotten how to choose well.

The Modern Problem of Too Many Choices

The modern world celebrates freedom of choice as the highest expression of progress. We can choose our career, our partner, the city we live in, what to eat, what to wear, and even the brand of water we drink. On the surface, this feels like empowerment. Yet beneath it runs the fatigue of constant decision-making.

Psychologist Barry Schwartz called this the paradox of choice: the more options we have, the less satisfied we feel. Too many paths create hesitation. We spend hours comparing, researching, scrolling through reviews, convinced that one perfect choice will deliver happiness, the right job, the right person, the right life. And when it does not, we blame ourselves. And others.

Every decision now carries the fear of missing out on something better. Even after choosing, we second-guess ourselves. Did I make the right call? Should I have waited? What if I regret this later? We are surrounded by opportunities, yet haunted by what we think we might have lost.

Choices have become a constant demand for self-justification. From what to eat for breakfast to a lifelong career, it becomes a mirror of our worth and identity. No wonder we are tired.

Why We Struggle to Choose

Choice, for all its promise, exposes our deepest fears. Every decision is a small declaration of who we are and what we value, and that is precisely what makes it hard.

We hesitate because choice means responsibility. Once we choose, we can no longer hide behind possibility. We have to own it and live with the outcome. And in a world that tells us we can be anything, we quietly fear becoming the wrong thing.

We struggle because we want certainty. We want to make the right decision, the one that guarantees success, happiness, or peace. The perfect choice. But life does not work that way. No amount of research or comparison can predict how things will unfold. The illusion of a perfect choice traps us in endless analysis.

Then there is fear of missing out. Each yes carries a dozen invisible nos. Choosing one path feels like closing all the others, and we mourn the imagined lives we did not live. In the age of social media, this pain is amplified. We see the filtered highlights of other people’s choices and wonder if ours fall short.

And finally, there is perfectionism, the voice that says, If you can’t do it perfectly, don’t do it at all. It disguises itself as wisdom, but in truth, it is fear: fear of failure, fear of regret, fear of not being enough.

Our problem is not that we have too few choices. It is that we have lost the courage to choose.

How to Choose Well

If too many choices can paralyse us, the way forward is not to yearn for less, but to learn how to choose better. Good decisions are not born from perfect information or endless analysis. They come from clarity, knowing what matters most and trusting yourself enough to act.

Simplify your options

Not every decision deserves equal attention. Reserve your energy for what truly shapes your life, your values, your relationships, your health, and your purpose. Let small things be small.

If you are choosing a meal, a shirt, or a show to watch, remind yourself: It does not have to be perfect, it just has to be enough for now. But if you are choosing a job, a partner, or a direction in life, ask whether it aligns with what you care about most. A simple filter like this, “Does it matter in five years?” can reduce the noise instantly.

Simplifying is not about settling. It is about clearing away what distracts you from what truly counts.

Knowing what matters most

When every path looks tempting, pause and ask: What do I want to stand for? What kind of person do I want to become?

If you are torn between two jobs, one with status and one with meaning, remember that no spreadsheet can weigh fulfilment. If you are choosing between comfort and growth, ask which choice your wiser, future self would thank you for.

The world offers infinite options, but clarity comes from within. Choices made from values rarely lead to regret, even when the road is uncomfortable.

Let go of perfection

No choice is perfect. Every option carries uncertainty and trade-offs. The pursuit of perfection often hides fear: fear of being wrong, fear of judgment, fear of missing out.

Think of someone who keeps waiting for the perfect partner — someone without flaws, doubts, or disappointments. That search never ends, because people are not perfect. Love, like life, is not about finding the flawless choice, but about committing to the one you have chosen with care, patience, and heart. “Forsaking all others...”

Decide, then make it right

Clarity rarely comes before action. Often, understanding arrives only after we begin.

You may choose a career and later find that it is not what you imagined. You may move to a new city and feel lost at first. That does not mean the choice was wrong. The meaning of a decision grows from how we live it.

Once you have chosen, stop asking whether it was right or wrong. Instead, ask how you can make it right. Make it better. Make it work. Pour yourself into it. Learn, adapt, and let commitment transform uncertainty into direction.

Accept trade-offs

Every yes implies a no. Maturity is accepting this without resentment.

If you choose to build a family, you will have less personal freedom. If you choose independence, you may have fewer roots. Both are valid, but you cannot live both lives at once.

Peace comes when you stop trying to. Let go of what might have been and be fully present in what is. The joy of choosing lies not in endless possibility, but in wholehearted commitment to what you have chosen.

When You Make the Wrong Choice

Even with the best intentions, we sometimes make poor choices. We misjudge a person, a job, a path. What matters, then, is not the mistake but what we do next.

If you can correct course, do it quickly. Change direction, apologise, start over. The quicker you act, the lighter the consequence. If you can.

But not every mistake can be undone. Sometimes we have to live with what we have chosen, the career that did not fit, the opportunity we let slip, the words we wish we could take back. In those moments, acceptance becomes wisdom.

Accept the loss, and then make the best of where you are. Every wrong choice carries a lesson if you dare to face it honestly. Use it to grow.

Good judgment is earned, choice by choice, mistake by mistake.

The Gift Hidden in the Burden

Choice demands courage. It asks us to step forward without guarantees, to take responsibility for what follows, and to live with imperfection. But in that burden lies its gift.

Each decision, no matter how small, is an act of authorship. It says: This is my life, and I will shape it. To choose is to participate in your own becoming. It is how we turn possibility into reality, how we move from dreaming to doing.

When we stop chasing every option and begin choosing purposefully, something remarkable happens: peace returns. Freedom no longer feels like chaos, but clarity. We realise that meaning does not come from having every path open, but from walking the chosen path fully.

We will never make all the right choices, but we can make our choices right by living them deeply, learning from them honestly, and holding them lightly.

The burden of choice is real, but it is also a privilege. It means our lives are still ours to shape.

I think we toss the word “Hope” around too carelessly.

“I hope things improve for you.” “Hopefully, everything will work out.” “Let’s hope for the best.” In everyday speech, hope sounds soft, insincere, and almost fragile.

I think hope deserves a far greater place in our lives.

Hope is not a polite wish. It is a force. It is what carries us through the darkest nights when nothing else will. Hope whispers softly that the sun will rise again. It gives us something to aim for, something to care for, something to hold on to when we feel hopeless.

At its core, hope is a conviction, the stubborn belief that we WILL overcome, even against impossible odds. History is filled with people who endured horrors not because they were the strongest, but because they simply refused to give up hope.

Science confirms what the human spirit has always known: hope is not a sentimental notion. It is essential. It changes how the brain works, how the body endures, and how the heart keeps beating when everything seems lost.

It is fierce. And it is the reason we survive.

What Science Says About Hope

One of the most important discoveries in neuroscience is neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to rewire itself by forming new connections. For decades, scientists believed that the adult brain was fixed, but research shows otherwise. “Throughout life, the brain forms new connections … psychological resilience also develops as the brain copes, heals, and adapts to challenges” Journal of Experimental and Clinical Neurosciences, 2021.

This is where hope comes in. A hopeless person gives up and stops trying. A hopeful person keeps moving, and each attempt creates new neural pathways. Hope is the spark that fuels neuroplasticity, enabling us to shift from destructive thought loops toward healthier, more resilient ones. As Psychology Today put it, the brain’s plasticity makes it possible to “transform negative thought patterns into positive ones through repetition and practice” (2025).

Hope also lights up the dopamine system, the network that drives motivation and reward. When we believe something good is possible, even before it happens, dopamine is released. That chemical surge energises us to take the next step. Without hope, the dopamine system goes quiet, and so do we.

The reach of hope extends beyond the brain. Studies show that it lowers stress hormones, steadies the heart, and strengthens the immune system. People with a hopeful outlook tend to recover faster and respond better to treatment than those who despair.

Hope, then, is not sentimental. It is survival biology. It rewires the brain, steadies the body, and strengthens our capacity to endure. To hold on to hope is to engage the very systems that evolution built for our resilience.

Why Hope Matters in Hard Times

It is easy to speak of hope when life is comfortable. The true test comes when darkness closes in, and there seems to be no way forward.

China’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, which lasted from 1931 to 1945, was such a test. It cost an estimated 35 million Chinese soldiers and civilians their lives.

In late 1937 and early 1938, as Nanjing fell, the scale of cruelty committed by the invading Japanese forces shocked the world. The Nanjing Massacre saw hundreds of thousands of deaths, mass rape, and the slaughter of prisoners and civilians. It was a time when despair could easily have been the only response.

Yet even in that darkness, people clung to hope. In Shanxi province, children as young as 8 to 12 formed regiments to resist the Japanese invaders. One boy, Xiao Jianghe, just 10 years old, led a group of 32 child soldiers who carried out guard duties, passed intelligence, and even exposed a spy (China Daily, 2015). He was part of the 7000 child soldiers who took up arms because “everyone else was dead”. They did not expect victory; they just wanted survival. And because they hoped to make a difference, however small.

This kind of hope is not soft or naïve. It is defiant. It is the mule that digs in and refuses to give ground. Psychologists remind us that hopelessness narrows vision until people can no longer see options. Hope does the opposite. As C. R. Snyder’s Hope Theory describes, hope creates “pathways” thinking: the ability to imagine alternatives and persist, even when the road is blocked.

Hope matters most in the very moments when it feels least possible. It is the ember that survives in the ashes, the strength that emerges from weakness, the quiet defiance that says, I will not give up.

Hope in Everyday Life

The hope that sustained people in wartime, even children who stood against impossible odds, may feel distant from our lives today. Few of us will face the terror of invasion or massacre (though some still do). Yet the same stubborn spirit of hope is still required in quieter, yet no less tangible, ways. We face losses, illnesses, setbacks, and doubts that can leave us paralysed. Hope is what keeps us moving when despair tells us to stop.

So how do we cultivate that kind of hope in the ordinary struggles of daily life?

Take one step at a time

Hope is not always about grand goals. It is about refusing to stay down. Do what you can, with what you have. If you cannot move forward, at least hold your ground. Get up. Make your bed. Take a walk. Go for a run. These may seem trivial, but they are acts of defiance. Each step, however small, says, “I am not giving up.”

Look for the light at the end of the tunnel

Unless you can picture a way out, it is hard to sustain hope. This is not the casual “manifestation” tossed around on social media. This is active visualisation, imagining a better future and holding faith that it will come, even if you will not live to see it. Hope requires imagination strong enough to see through the darkness.

Find comrades in hope

No one carries hope alone for long. In wartime China, even children huddled together to resist, leaning on one another for courage and strength. We need the same. Find companions who share your hope. Lean on them when your own strength falters. Hope multiplies when it is shared, and often someone else’s belief will carry you when yours runs thin.

Practice practical optimism

Reframing does not mean ignoring pain. It means shifting perspective. Ask, “What else could this mean? What can I learn here?” This is practical optimism: not pretending everything is fine, but choosing to look for angles that help you endure and act. Like a mule that stumbles, gets up, and keeps walking, practical optimism refuses to stay down.

Cultivate gratitude, one piece at a time

Gratitude pulls attention away from what is broken and directs it toward what remains. Another day. Another chance. Another breath. Gratitude does not erase hardship, but it insists, “Not everything is hopeless.” Even small sparks of thankfulness feed the mule of hope, giving it the strength to carry on.

Hope does not always arrive like soaring eagles. More often, it trudges like a mule, carrying us step by step through difficult terrain. Its strength is endurance.

The Stubborn Mule of Hope

Hope is not fragile. It is written into our biology, rewiring the brain, fuelling motivation, and steadying the body under stress. History shows us that people endured the darkest times not through strength alone but because they refused to let despair have the final word.

We see the same in our own lives. Each time we rise after a heavy night, each time we take one step forward when fear tells us to stop, hope is at work. It may not look like triumph. Often, it seems like survival, standing firm when everything else is falling apart.

Hope is stubborn, mule-like, unyielding. And that is why it carries us, through war and loss, through illness and doubt, through the darkest nights into brighter mornings.

In the old fairy tale of Rumpelstiltskin, a young queen is trapped in an impossible bargain. Her freedom and the life of her child depend on discovering the name of a strange little goblin who can spin straw into gold. When she finally speaks his secret name, “Rumpelstiltskin”, his power over her is broken.

It is a fairytale we are all familiar with, but hidden inside is a truth that reaches beyond the story. The unnamed has a power over us. What we cannot define, we cannot confront. What we cannot speak, we cannot master.

This is the essence of the Rumpelstiltskin Principle. When we name our monsters, whether they are fears, worries, or anxieties, they lose their hold on us. The vague, shapeless dread becomes something we can point to, describe, and eventually take steps to overcome. Naming the monster does not make it vanish, but it takes away its mystery and, with that, its power.

What Is the Rumpelstiltskin Principle?

The Rumpelstiltskin story embodies a belief prevalent in many cultures: that knowing a name is believed to hold power over it. Naming is more than a label. It defines, contains, and brings the unknown into the open.

In the 1970s, Dr E. Fuller Torrey described what he called the ‘Rumpelstiltskin Principle.’ In his book, The Mind Game, he observed that when a patient’s suffering was given a name, something happened. A diagnosis or even a simple description made their distress feel less chaotic and more definable.

Researchers found that when we put our feelings into words, the thinking part of the brain begins to calm the alarm system that triggers the fear response. The act of naming is not a cure in itself, but it creates space. It interrupts the cycle of dread and restores a sense of control.

In short, the Rumpelstiltskin Principle is the simple yet powerful idea that naming our fears strips them of some of their power. What is hidden frightens us most, like a dark closet or under the bed at night. Turn on the lights, and look at it, and the bogeyman vanishes. What is spoken out loud loses its hold.

Why Naming Works

Fear thrives in the shadows, the unknown. When we leave it undefined, our imagination makes it enormous and uncontrollable. Naming changes that. Once a fear is given a name, a label, we can begin to look at it directly rather than let it lurk in the background.

Naming puts a boundary around the fear. It contains it. It is almost like saying, ‘Oh, I know you. I know the likes of you.’ The shapeless dread becomes a thing. And once it is specific, its power to overwhelm is restricted.

Naming also creates distance. Saying ‘I am anxious’ feels heavy and hopeless. But if you say ‘I notice the anxiety’, you change the relationship and distance yourself from it. The anxiety is still there, but it is no longer fused with your identity. It becomes something you experience, not something that you are.

All these give us perspective. A vague feeling of dread can feel like a disaster waiting to happen. However, instead of “I am suffering from anxiety”, when you recognise it as ‘I am worried about tomorrow’s meeting’ or ‘I am afraid of failing this task,’ it becomes a defined challenge. You can do something about it. Challenges, unlike shadows, can be prepared for and met with.

The simple act of naming does not eliminate fear, but it makes it visible and manageable. And once something is visible, you can take aim at it and begin working with it.

How to Apply the Rumpelstiltskin Principle

The Rumpelstiltskin Principle is straightforward, but its power lies in practice, which involves building habits that naturally reframe the anxiety you experience. Here are a few ways to use it when fear or anxiety shows up, along with the science that explains why they work.

Mindful naming

When you notice a surge of fear, pause and say, ‘This is anxiety,’ or ‘This is fear.’ Neuroscientists call this “affect labelling”. Brain scans show that when people put emotions into words, the prefrontal cortex (the reasoning part of the brain) lights up, while the amygdala (the alarm system that fuels fear) quiets down. The act of naming literally helps the brain regulate itself.

Externalising the fear

Give the fear a nickname or an image. Call it ‘The Worry Weasel’ or ‘The Fortune Teller.’ Therapists in narrative psychology use this technique to help people separate themselves from their problems. Once the fear is externalised, it becomes an object you can observe and question, poke at, dissect, strangle, rather than a force that defines you. It is the difference between ‘I am anxious’ and ‘It seems Anxious Annie is visiting me today.’

Journaling

Writing down your fears is another way of using the Rumpelstiltskin Principle. Studies in expressive writing, led by psychologist James Pennebaker and others, show that turning emotions into written words reduces their intensity and improves both mental and physical health. It helps you ventilate. Gives your fears shape. A vague cloud of dread becomes sentences on a page, and once it is on paper, you can think about it more clearly and respond to it more practically.

Talking it out

It also helps if you speak to someone you trust. Psychologists call this social buffering. When emotions are shared, stress hormones like cortisol drop, and the nervous system calms down. This is why talk therapy is powerful, even before specific techniques are used. Saying aloud “I am afraid of failing this project” or “I am worried about my health” strips the fear of its secrecy. In the open, it feels smaller.

This principle is also at work in recovery communities such as Alcoholics Anonymous. At the start of a meeting, participants introduce themselves by name and say, “I am an alcoholic.” It is not meant as a label of shame, but as a way of taking ownership. By naming the struggle in a safe space, they bring it out of the shadows and reduce its power. Secrecy isolates; speaking aloud creates connection and accountability.

Reframing self-talk

The way we speak to ourselves shapes our perception of reality. Instead of saying, “I am a failure,” you can step back and say, “That is The Critic speaking.” Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) refers to this as thought labelling. It is a way of identifying common distortions such as catastrophising (“everything will go wrong”) or mind-reading (“they must think badly of me”).

By giving the thought a name, you change your relationship with it. It is no longer a fact about who you are, but a mental habit you can observe. Naming turns it into one story among many rather than the whole truth. That distance restores perspective and allows you to choose which story you will believe and act on.

Naming a fear does not instantly destroy it, but it defines it and makes it more manageable. And once something is defined, you can at least begin to work on it.

When Naming Becomes Misnaming

If naming can disarm a fear, it can also be misused. Words have power not only to define but also to confine. The same principle that shrinks a monster can, in the wrong hands, be used to shrink a person.

Think of the names people sometimes throw carelessly: ‘You are just overreacting.’ ‘Oh, you drama queen.’ ‘This is only in your head.’ These labels do not clarify. They belittle. Instead of helping someone face their fear, they lock them into a small, demeaning box.

Psychologists call this mislabeling or trivialising, and it is often a form of bullying. When someone else names your experience in a way that strips it of its reality, it exerts power over you. You are left not only with the fear itself but also with the sting of being dismissed.

We need to be alert to this abuse. Naming should help restore dignity and agency. It should draw a boundary around fear so that it can be faced. But it can also be used to hurt others, to erase, minimise, or ridicule. That kind of naming must be recognised for what it is: bullying.

The Rumpelstiltskin Principle, then, is a double-edged sword. Name your fears to shrink them, but resist labels that others try to place on you. The right kind of naming sets you free. The wrong kind imprisons you.

Closing

Fear thrives when it remains vague and unspoken. Naming it makes it smaller, visible, and easier to face. This is the heart of the Rumpelstiltskin Principle. It reminds us that what we can describe, we can begin to master.

So when fear rises, call out its name. Write it down. Say it aloud. “Rumpelstiltskin!” Because the moment you name it, you take back the power it claimed over you.

Further Reading

Rumpelstiltskin: the magic of the right word

Emotional Naming – Name it to tame it; helps regulate intense feelings.

Neuroscience: Decoding the neurologic basis of emotions