Getting rich overnight, and then what?
In an Asian society where "all professions are inferior, only reading is noble," I relied on a bit of cleverness to thrive in this unchanging Prussian education system, managing to navigate it quite well.
Looking back on my growth journey:
Work hard in middle school, get into a good high school, and then it gets easier;
Work hard in high school, get into a good university, and then it gets easier;
Work hard in university, find a good job, and then it gets easier.
Chasing after a saying: "Then it gets easier." Although I was deceived by my elders three times, the overall path didn’t seem wrong.
After finding a good job, I rode the wave of the industry and finally welcomed that so-called "ease": financial freedom, early retirement, becoming the envy of others who see me as a winner who got rich overnight.
Getting rich overnight, and then what?
After retirement, like most people, I enjoyed true freedom.
No need to worry about money, waking up whenever I wanted, leisurely going to Xinyi District at noon to see busy high-end workers and feel their hustle.
More importantly, the release of dopamine became the highlight of my retirement life.
Live for the moment! Life is about pursuing happiness and the ultimate pleasure! This became my goal in retirement.
To achieve this, I was almost always making myself happy: moving to a better location, enjoying fine dining, mindlessly taking Uber, making friends generously, buying plane tickets like taking a bus, browsing tickets for flights departing in two hours.
Later, I found all this too troublesome, so I simply stayed at home, enjoying the instant dopamine brought by the online world: listening to music, watching Netflix, scrolling through YouTube, ordering UberEats when hungry, and sleeping when tired.
The feeling of freedom made me lose track of time; the rising and setting of the sun felt meaningless to me, after all, the world behind the curtains was the same.
At that time, I thought that although I couldn't control the world, I had reached the ultimate pleasure in my controllable world, doing whatever I wanted, and I could continue living my dream life in the future.
Mencius said: "Born in worry and die in comfort."
As time went on, these instant pleasures and the temporary dopamine rush taught me a painful lesson — diminishing marginal utility.
As retirement stretched on, the sense of happiness gradually decreased, and emptiness and loneliness quietly seeped into my mind.
I didn’t confront these feelings; instead, I kept seeking stronger dopamine stimulation, trying to fill the void within.
When I finally realized it, I had become like a walking corpse, squeezing out cheap dopamine to cover up my negative emotions.
At that moment, I was living in my imagined perfect retirement, yet I was like a person pretending to be asleep, unable to be awakened no matter how much I called.
My self-loathing grew day by day, and the source of my original happiness ultimately became just a way to escape problems.
But sadly, I had already fallen into this vicious cycle, continuously numbing myself with fleeting dopamine, falling into the protective mechanism of the primitive human brain.
Until my unstable emotions began to affect my family, friends, and work partners, I was filled with a victim mentality, believing that all the mistakes were not mine.
This mindset ruined my health, relationships, investments, and company operations, yet I still refused to take responsibility.
Facing myself, starting anew
Looking back, I had always been an optimistic and grateful person, yet after achieving my life goals, I became the very kind of person I had once warned myself never to become.
This was hard for me to accept, prompting deep reflection: where did things go wrong?
But at that time, I was like a turtle retracting into its shell, my self-esteem inflated, and I would retreat into a safe fortress at the slightest setback, continuing to pump out that forced dopamine.
Additionally, having been used to solving problems on my own since childhood, I was not good at asking others for help. So, during the latter half of my retirement, my mental world was in constant internal conflict, feeling like life was so difficult.
Perhaps after watching some motivational video, I would excitedly try something, thinking I had grasped a lifeline. But little did I know, encountering the next difficulty would bring me back to square one.
It felt as if my mind had been programmed; any sign of improvement would be met with a setback, cycling through this for months, and most of the time, I didn’t understand why I had to get out of bed.
But I didn’t give up.
I seized every starting point of the cycle, accumulated experiences, and quietly embarked on a path of self-redemption through self-discovery and mindset reshaping.
免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。
