In the shopping mall, a three- or four-year-old boy rushed forward after getting off the elevator, leaving his parents far behind.
Mom and Dad were in a hurry and asked him to slow down. Without looking back, he shouted, “I’m in a hurry!”
Mom and Dad cried back, dumbfounded, “Where are you going in a hurry? Are you going to kindergarten?” The
boy immediately stopped. , shook his head desperately: “No—go—!”
I, who happened to pass by, couldn’t help laughing, and a recent hot word popped into my mind: Lie down.
You may say that people know that they are in a hurry at a young age, and they are completely out of line with lying flat!
What I saw was the whole process of “laying down”—first the anxiety of time, then the confusion of the goal, then the fear of the result, and finally the loss of meaning.
Such a small child, where does anxiety come from? Obviously, from the psychological “inheritance”. Parents and the entire era, let the young life have no time to experience the joy of living in the subtleties of growth, and they hurriedly got involved in the wave of catching up. But chasing what? Success, wealth, happiness… It seems that everything needs to be chased, but everything is constantly disillusioned in the process of catching up, distant and blurred. When you wake up, all certainties may become uncertain, and no matter how hard you try to catch up, it seems that you can’t escape “going to kindergarten”, and there is no better result waiting for you. So, I stopped and began to wonder: what is the point of catching up?
More than ten years ago, when I taught the course “Cross-Generation Management” to many companies, leaders born in the 60s often sighed to me: “I used to think that the post-80s were difficult to manage, but now the post-90s have discovered: it is even more difficult! Why are they so Lazy?” I joked: “Maybe it’s not lazy, it’s the difference in philosophy of life: the philosophy of the post-60s is ‘walk the way others tell me’; the post-70s go a step further and say ‘walk your own way and let others talk’ ;The post-80s thought, why can’t they ‘take the road of others, and let others have no way to go’; after the post-90s, they thought further: Why do you have to walk so hard? Isn’t it good now? Can you? If you leave, you won’t leave!” The leaders often clapped their hands and laughed, saying, “That’s right! That’s it!” I would go on to say, “Actually, the environment in which each generation grows is created by the previous generation. When we complain that the next generation is too lazy, maybe we need to reflect: What did our elders do to make them become what we don’t want? Are there things that we need to collectively reflect and adjust?”
Luckily for me, the leaders I met were all humble—they not only listened carefully, but also acted by themselves. They really acted immediately, driving the entire enterprise from cross-generational complaining to cross-generational learning, and using psychological management methods to promote enterprise and employee satisfaction. Develop together. I also often share with them the book “Indecent Society” written by the Japanese scholar Miura Kan. “Low society” is a term coined by Miura to describe a group of middle-class people who no longer strive to move up and are willing to move down. They have no worries about food and clothing, their income is not high but stable, and they generally lack enthusiasm for life and a strong will to move upward. At that time, I said, “This phenomenon may be common around us in ten years. When the young people want to lie down, it is the day when the elders must change.”
Where to change? I came up with “desire management”. Unmanaged desires produce excess rather than gratification. Excess can only make people lost and tired, and only when they are satisfied can they enjoy the fun of upward growth. In fact, a contented person is “flat” even if he does not lie down; a person who is flustered is not “flat” even when he is lying down.
If I had to give a definition of desire management, I would like to borrow “Wabi-sabi” from Japanese aesthetics – it comes from Chinese Zen and is integrated into life. Between the light and shadow of light and shadow, between the gains and losses inside and outside, between the presence or absence of movement and stillness, with a heart that can simultaneously perceive the beauty of the moment and the elegance of the years, I wander freely in the world. It is not an escape from life, but an approach to life.
As a human being, I have a “Eight Character Mantra” to share with all my friends who lie down or not: if you don’t move, go all out.
