Get rich overnight, and then what?
Living in an Asian society where "everything is inferior except for education", I relied on a little bit of intelligence to be active in this Prussian education system that has not changed for thousands of years, and I was able to get along well.
Looking back on my growth:
Work harder in junior high school, and it will be easy after you get into a good high school;
Work harder in high school, and it will be easy after you get into a good university;
Work harder in university, and it will be easy after you find a good job.
I kept chasing the phrase: "It will be easy after that". Although I was deceived by my elders three times, the overall path seems to be not bad.
After finding a good job, I stepped on the wave of the industry and finally welcomed the so-called "relaxation": financial freedom, early retirement, and became a life winner in the eyes of others who became rich overnight.
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Get rich overnight, and then what?
After retirement, like most people, I enjoy real freedom.
No need to worry about money, sleep and wake up at any time, and you can leisurely go to Xinyi District at noon to see the busy senior workers and feel their hard work.
More importantly, the burst of dopamine has become the highlight of retirement life.
Enjoy yourself! Life is about pursuing happiness and the ultimate in pleasure! This has become my goal of retirement life.
For this reason, I almost always make myself happy: moving to a better location, enjoying high-end restaurants, taking Uber without thinking, making friends generously, buying air tickets like taking a bus, and browsing the tickets for the flight that will take off in 2 hours.
Later, I felt that these were too troublesome, so I just stayed at home and enjoyed the instant dopamine brought by the Internet world: listening to music, watching Netflix, browsing YouTube, calling UberEats when hungry, and sleeping when tired.
The feeling of freedom made me jump out of the concept of time. The rising and setting of the sun and the moon did not feel anything to me. After all, the world is the same when the curtains are drawn.
At that time, I felt that although I could not control the world, I had achieved the ultimate pleasure in the world I could control. I could do whatever I wanted and continue to live my dream life in the future.
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Mencius said: "Born in worries, die in comfort."
As time went on, these instant pleasures and short-term dopamine stimulations taught me a painful lesson - diminishing marginal effects.
As I retired for a longer time, my sense of happiness gradually decreased, and emptiness and loneliness quietly infiltrated my mind.
I did not face these feelings, but continued to increase the intensity of dopamine stimulation to try to fill the void in my heart.
When I finally realized it, I was already like a zombie. Whenever I felt negative, I would force myself to produce cheap dopamine to cover it up.
At this time, I was living in my own imagined perfect retirement, but I was pretending to be asleep and could not be woken up no matter how hard I tried.
My self-loathing grew day by day, and the original source of happiness turned out to be just a way to escape problems.
But sadly, I had fallen into this vicious cycle, constantly paralyzing myself with short-term dopamine, and falling into the protection mechanism of the human primitive brain.
Until my mood became unstable and affected my family, friends and work partners, my mind was full of victim mentality, and I felt that all the mistakes were not my fault.
This mentality messed up my health, interpersonal relationships, investments, and company operations, but I was still unwilling to take responsibility.
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Face yourself and start over
Looking back, I have always been an optimistic and grateful person, but after achieving my life goals, I became the kind of person I was wary of becoming.
This was hard for me to accept, and I began to reflect deeply: What went wrong?
But at this time, I was like a shrunken turtle, with an inflated self-esteem. I would hide in a safe fortress at the slightest setback and continue to deliver the dopamine that was squeezed out.
In addition, I was used to solving problems by myself since I was a child and was not good at asking for help from others, so in the second half of this retirement period, my spiritual world was constantly internalized, and I felt that life was so difficult.
Maybe after watching a chicken soup video, you will be excited to try it, thinking that you have grabbed a life-saving straw. But little do you know that you will be back to square one when you encounter the next difficulty.
It seems that my mind is programmed, and as soon as there is a chance of improvement, it will be beaten back to square one. This cycle repeats for several months, and most of the time I don’t understand why I have to get up.
But I didn’t give up.
I grasped the starting point of each cycle, accumulated experience, and quietly embarked on the road of self-salvation to understand myself and reshape my mentality.
