Some Thoughts on Reading and Lying Flat
After attending a sharing session, some thoughts on reading and lying flat.
I recently attended two sharing sessions back to back. The first was by a hermit living in seclusion in the mountains, sharing his life experiences and creative work. The second was by a corporate elite, sharing his life habits and entrepreneurial story. The hermit went first, followed by the elite.
This felt like a microcosm of modern society's two extremes. On one side, the progressives; on the other, the "lying flat" crowd. This is actually quite healthy — a normal society needs people who push forward, and it equally needs people who lie flat.
Perhaps because I lean more toward the lying flat camp, some of the corporate elite's views during his session didn't sit well with me, sparking a desire to express my own thoughts. So I'm recording them here for future reflection.
First, a disclaimer: I don't disagree with everything he said. I actually agree with quite a few points — like Buddhism not being superstition, and not blaming external factors too much. But here I'll only record the views I disagree with and share my own thoughts. Because it's the ideas I disagree with or question that push me to think; the ones I agree with only give me a sense of validation. This is the last bit of stubbornness left in a dissenter.
Because the hermit had mentioned while introducing his unpublished book that it contained some everyday trivialities, feuds, romantic stories, and a touch of pessimism—
The elite opened by citing this point, arguing that people shouldn't read the hermit's book. Later, when sharing his reading habits, he said we should only read eternal classics. Books written by later generations are completely unnecessary. Today's university professors and academic experts, with their published theories, are basically misleading everyone.
I'm not sure if this counts as imposing elitism on reading, or defining reading's purpose too narrowly.
In my view, reading is like chatting with friends. Talking with brilliant friends can elevate you; chatting with ordinary friends can still spark ideas; confiding in close friends fulfills emotional needs.
Reading works the same way. Reading the ancients, filtered by time, reveals more enduring truths. Reading contemporary theory teaches practical modern wisdom. Reading literature offers companionship or a richer understanding of society's complexity. Even reading pulp fiction at least delivers some joy, however fleeting.
Saying you should only read the ancients is like gatekeeping reading — setting an impossibly high bar. If your purpose isn't to learn seemingly eternal truths, then don't bother reading at all. I say "seemingly eternal" because in my view, nothing is truly eternal.
This is devastating to the act of reading. My own habit is to read mostly fiction, occasionally nonfiction, and very rarely secondhand philosophy or social science surveys. But with reading defined this narrowly, I started wondering if I'm not qualified to read.
On reflection, though — I can chat with friends, I can attend this sharing session, so why can't I read a book by an "ordinary" author? Are books by professors, scholars, and famous writers necessarily inferior to a friend's chat or this sharing session? If those authors are misleadingly guiding us, how can we be sure that chatting with friends or attending this session won't mislead us too? And is being "misled" really so terrifying? Is there such a thing as absolutely correct guidance? Is correct guidance singular?
Perhaps his point was specifically about philosophical texts — those should be read from the source rather than secondhand. After all, he mentioned modeling his lifestyle after Murakami Haruki, implying that contemporary literature is still worth reading.
For philosophy scholars, absolutely — rigorous academic research should start from primary sources, tracing every thread and accurately understanding the subject matter.
But for ordinary people, I believe: you can, but you don't have to. For many, grasping even a partial philosophical concept is enough to improve their lives. Trying to independently comprehend those grand, seemingly eternal truths is unimaginably difficult.
Take me, for example: I have a vague concept of "God is dead," "existence precedes essence," and "deconstructionism," but I've never actually read Nietzsche, Sartre, or Derrida — because I can't understand them.
My knowledge comes from Wikipedia and various secondhand writers and bloggers. But this hasn't diminished the tremendous energy these underlying ideas have given me.
And the more common reality is that most people have zero interest in understanding concepts like "existence precedes essence." This is why fiction is so valuable. Like Camus, who transmitted his philosophy through novels and plays — that's an excellent approach. In today's terms, it's movies, TV shows, and music.
The understanding we gain through chatting, watching films, and reading secondhand books will inevitably differ from what the original thinkers intended. But that's what a vibrant society looks like. Some of those deviations, after weathering the test of time, might even be called innovation.
This kind of tangled, networked structure is what a healthy society should look like — not a rigid, top-down tree. Networks allow mutual influence; trees only permit influence flowing downward. Top-down influence eventually constructs a single truth dictated by the top. This clearly clashes with my blog's slogan of "Beyond the One True View," and naturally I can't endorse such a structure.
If we believe in evolutionary theory — that humans are also a product of evolution — then we should allow the "genes" of knowledge to mutate during transmission. Those that survive the mutation clearly fit the environment. If we believe humans were created by Nüwa or Jehovah, then yes, we should believe in a single certain truth, created alongside humanity. I lean toward the former.
I've always preferred calling it "evolution" rather than "progress-olution" (in Chinese, the term "进化论" literally implies "progress"). That's because "progress" seems to prescribe a direction of advancement from the start, while "evolution" sounds more aimless, without inherent right or wrong. In my view, the "progress" in evolution is a result, not a predetermined purpose. Using it as a name feels a bit off. But of course, the meaning of any name shifts with what it represents — that's another story. Calling it "evolution theory" is just a small personal habit and a tiny stubbornness of mine.
Moreover, many ancient texts were themselves secondhand compilations by disciples. Given their level of abstraction that ordinary people can't grasp, in an era where systems, culture, lifestyle, and even language have undergone radical transformation — can anyone truly and independently understand the manuscripts left by the ancients? I'm skeptical. I'm equally skeptical that ancient thought is eternal and perfectly applicable to modern society.
Going back to Nietzsche's "God is dead" — in my view, the ancients and many of their theories are themselves gods.
Compared to all the "you should do X" prescriptions, I prefer the "you don't have to do X" kind. Many ancient theories clearly fall in the former camp.
From "God is dead" to "existence precedes essence" to deconstructionism — it's a progression from not knowing what to do, to being free from having to do anything, to being free to do anything.
Because I deeply believe in these ideas, I've concluded that it's perfectly fine to skip the original texts and start with secondhand works. The reverse is equally valid, of course. The difference is just whether you go from shallow to deep, or deep to shallow.
I'm not sure if this counts as going off the deep end.
The progressive camp naturally considers the lying flat crowd's behavior escapist — it doesn't solve problems. So he argued that young people shouldn't pursue pleasure and should make contributing to society their mission.
As a card-carrying member of the lying flat camp, I obviously can't agree. Let me mount a defense.
First, myself, the "lying flat" people I know, and this hermit — none of us are truly lying flat, sleeping all day. That lifestyle belongs to a subset of trust-fund kids who have always existed, not the recently fashionable lying-flat movement.
What many lying-flat people do is trade low-desire living for more free time, using that time to explore more possibilities.
Even if my perspective is biased by my own social circle — even if most lying-flat people are literally doing nothing — I'd still consider it a normal social phenomenon, not deserving of excessive criticism.
If we cut ourselves with a knife, it hurts. Should we decide our body is too fragile and order it not to feel pain, waiting until we unknowingly bleed out?
Necessary pain alerts us to problems. A brief pause allows us more time to think.
I salute those who push society forward. But I sometimes wonder: what's the purpose of our progress? If I can't enjoy the fruits of progress, who am I progressing for? Does this progress have an endpoint? Will there ever be a day when it stops?
Follow this train of thought, and it starts to feel like we're Sisyphus pushing a boulder uphill. Some people can enjoy the process of pushing — great for them. But shouldn't those who can't enjoy it be allowed to step aside and rest? After all, the boulder will never reach the summit. What's wrong with pausing for a moment?
Besides, some people push the boulder in running shoes, others in flip-flops, and some barefoot. Applying one standard to everyone is clearly unreasonable. (The speaker had parents who funded his startup right out of college — while entrepreneurship is incredibly difficult and risky, that starting point already exceeds the vast majority.)
At the end of his session, he posed several questions: Why do people become unhappier as material wealth increases? Why are children having more psychological problems? Things like that.
I've been pondering similar questions ever since AI became a hot topic and many started worrying about losing their jobs. AI was supposed to reduce our workload and give us more time for other things — so why does it feel like it's going to starve us instead?
The Industrial Revolution, the internet boom — same story. Steam engines and the internet were supposed to increase efficiency, yet the result was that we became busier, even spawning the "996" work culture.
Setting aside the universal catch-all of "capitalist exploitation," my conclusion is that our desires created this outcome. And the most terrifying desire of all is the desire for progress. We get something good and want something better — that's progress.
It's a double-edged sword. Managed well, it genuinely improves your life and brings you closer to your ideals. Managed poorly, or left unsatisfied, it breeds self-doubt.
Worse, this desire called progress can never be sated. It seeps into your environment, dragging everyone around you into the same pursuit — children included. Kids attend multiple extracurricular classes they have no interest in, with barely any time for play. It's hard to say whether psychological problems find them, or whether their environment and parents deliver them to the doorstep of psychological problems.
Of course, having zero desire isn't viable either — you'd lose even the will to live. So finding the right balance is incredibly difficult, and most of what we do in life is calibrate that balance. But total progress with zero rest is clearly overdoing it.
In a world that universally craves progress, advocating for rest is certainly politically incorrect. But a society that can embrace the "non-progressive" is the one that's truly progressed.
Many people have their hands full just living their own lives well. We need to take care of ourselves first. If we have surplus energy, then we can talk about pushing society forward — not sacrificing everything personal for the sake of societal progress. Those of us scrambling at the bottom can barely take care of ourselves, yet we're told to move the world. Never mind whether we have the ability or platform — the demand itself is already deeply unfair. Though I also know that fairness was never a given.
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