【专栏】| Columnists>教育说

In separate incidents that shocked their communities, two highly educated Chinese women died of starvation in their urban rental homes—one in Tokyo (2023), the other in Xianyang, China (2024). These were not fictional scenarios, but tragically real cases.

Like many, my initial reaction was one of skepticism. After verification, however, my shock gave way to a deeper, more somber reflection. While numerous online discussions have circulated about these cases, few have delved into the gradual evolution of their psychological states or what truly transpired between them and their families.

Although the precise causes of their psychological distress may never be fully known, I hope to attempt a preliminary exploration. My aim is to draw meaningful reflections from these tragedies—to better understand the world and ourselves, and ultimately, to make peace with our own complexities. In guiding the next generation, may we learn to nurture resilient, healthy psychological foundations in our youth, so that such tragedies need not be repeated.

At their core, both middle-aged women failed to attain the lives they had envisioned. One left her homeland, persistently striving to integrate into an idealized foreign environment; the other repeatedly attempted the civil service examinations, never succeeding in securing a stable position. Both shared a lack of proactive will to sustain themselves, resulting in financial dependence, and both had severed ties with their families.

In essence, the author argues that their paths amounted to a form of gradual suicide. They did not merely “starve to death”; rather, after a desperate struggle against what might be called “existential emptiness,” they ultimately chose to erase themselves.

Metapathology: A Lens for Analyzing Social Tragedy

The tragic “starvation” of two highly educated women in a context of relative material abundance appears, on the surface, to violate the principle in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs that basic physiological requirements must be prioritized.

Maslow’s theory is often misunderstood as requiring 100% satisfaction of lower-level needs before higher-level ones emerge. However, Maslow himself noted that this sequence is not absolute. For most people, needs at various levels coexist—partially met and partially unmet—and they continually interact and influence one another. For many highly idealistic individuals, those who prioritize spiritual values or possess a strong sense of honor, severe frustration of higher-level needs (such as dignity or self-actualization) can indeed override the drive to meet even basic survival needs. Historical examples, such as hunger strikers or the ancient Chinese allusion to “not eating the grain of Zhou,” illustrate how the pursuit of conviction and dignity can, under specific conditions, transcend the survival instinct.

In his later work, Abraham Maslow proposed that when an individual’s higher-level needs—particularly existential values such as truth, beauty, justice, and a sense of meaning—are persistently frustrated, a severe form of psychological pathology may emerge. He termed this condition “metapathology.”

The choices made by these two women did not simply “violate” Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Rather, they tragically illustrated how the extreme distortion and frustration of higher-level needs—such as love, esteem, and self-actualization—can become pathologically entangled with one’s sense of self-worth, ultimately overriding, and even destroying, the fundamental drive for survival. Their cases reveal how, under specific sociocultural conditions, family structures, and personal psychological traits, the pursuit of excellence can morph into a drive toward self-annihilation.

Human motivation and behavior are profoundly complex and deeply influenced by psychological and environmental factors. Healthy self-actualization should be grounded in an unconditional recognition of self-worth—even in the face of failure—and supported by nurturing relationships, rather than being built upon rigid, narrow, and oppressive definitions of “success.”

The Stranglehold of Perfectionism and Stigma

For many children who climb their way up from the bottom through education, “success” is not merely a personal ambition—it carries the weight of their entire family’s expectations, and even the hope of deliverance. Some university students from underprivileged backgrounds may face significant financial pressure and immense familial hopes. This pressure can morph into extreme perfectionism, where self-worth becomes entirely contingent on the outcome of “success.”

The moment they encounter setbacks, an overwhelming sense of “shame”—the belief that they have become a family disgrace, a symbol of failure—can consume everything. The father of the woman from Xianyang, following local custom, did not allow her ashes to be placed in the ancestral grave. This act may also reflect a form of socio-cultural pressure. The fear and shame of having “no place to return” can, perhaps, be far more unbearable than hunger itself.

Relational Trauma and Self-Punishment

The “disappearance” of the self may represent a final surrender to an internal voice of condemnation. These individuals might have long existed within a relational framework where love was conditional—premised solely on success (potentially rooted in familial expectations or constant social comparison).

When they failed to meet these external benchmarks, a harsh internal “critic” likely took hold, relentlessly repeating: “You are worthless,” “You don’t deserve to eat,” “You have disappointed everyone.” In this context, self-punishment that escalates into “no longer consuming resources”—and ultimately, self-erasure—becomes the ultimate execution of this inner critic’s verdict. Starvation thus becomes a passive yet total form of self-annihilation.

The Cage of Idealization and Disconnection from Reality

The Tokyo woman’s extreme identification with a specific ideology and her denial of reality were, in themselves, manifestations of being disconnected from the real world and immersed in an idealized one. When an individual anchors their entire psyche to a highly idealized and unrealistic goal—whether it be “absolute fairness,” “unadulterated success,” or a “perfect promised land”—and is met with relentless blows from reality, severe cognitive dissonance can ensue. To maintain psychological consistency, the individual may choose to deny reality—including their own physiological needs—ultimately becoming trapped in a self-constructed cage, unable to seek external help or adopt practical survival strategies.

These two women likely held a particularly narrow and rigid understanding of “success” and “meaning.” For them, success might have been exclusively defined as “securing a government job” or “becoming exceptionally successful abroad.” When this singular, intensely idealized goal proved unattainable, they may have plunged into a profound existential despair and a collapse of their value system, feeling that “everything was over.” The agony born from this total loss of meaning could far surpass the pangs of physical hunger, rendering the maintenance of life itself seemingly irrelevant.

The Nihilistic Abyss vs. The Existential Burden

From the philosophical perspectives of Existentialism and Nihilism, their actions represent an ultimate response an individual may enact when the weight of existence itself converges with a complete vacuum of meaning.

Nihilism is not an active choice of “meaninglessness,” but rather a state of disillusionment that follows the realization that all presupposed meanings are unreliable.

The life trajectories of both women followed a clear, socially endorsed “formula for meaning”:

Years of arduous study → Academic success → Securing a respectable job

→ Fulfilling one’s value/bringing honor to the family.

This formula served as their armor against the void. Yet, reality shattered it mercilessly: For the Xianyang woman, the formula jammed irreparably at the stage of “securing a respectable job.” Repeated failures in civil service exam interviews proved her inability to claim the rewards promised by this “formula for meaning.” The Tokyo woman’s formula was more complex, incorporating elements of “escape” and “speculation” (moving to Japan, cryptocurrency trading), yet it, too, ended in total failure.

Thus, meaning collapsed utterly. They plunged into the abyss of passive nihilism: if following the rules and striving diligently still failed to yield meaning, then was everything inherently futile? Their identity as “top students”—once a core source of value—became worthless in the face of reality, even turning into a form of cruel irony.

Hunger is the body’s most primal cry, a signal that life seeks to sustain itself. But when a person concludes that life itself holds no value, this physiological signal is severed. The act of eating is inherently endowed with meaning—it declares, “I choose to go on living.” And when the reason to live vanishes, eating too becomes meaningless. Starvation, then, becomes a logical endpoint: if life is meaningless, then the activities that sustain it should also cease. This is an extreme act of translating philosophical nothingness into physiological reality—the somatization of “the void.”

Existentialism acknowledges the absurdity and meaninglessness of the world, yet its core is a passionate summons: Even so, you must create meaning with your own hands! And this, precisely, was the weight the two women could not bear.

There is no predetermined essence of being a “top student” or a “success.” Your choices define who you are. For them, this was the most terrifying truth. They had spent the first half of their lives striving to conform to an “essence” (the good student, the successful person), only to discover that this “essence” was an illusion. They were thrown into a state of absolute freedom: You can now choose to be anyone, even an ordinary laborer, a “failure” who returns home. But this freedom did not bring liberation; instead, it induced existential anxiety (Angst). It is like the vertigo one feels standing at the edge of a cliff—it is not the fear of falling, but the fear of the freedom to jump. What they truly feared was this terrifying freedom—”I can choose to be a ‘failure.’”

Philosophers such as Erich Fromm and Jean-Paul Sartre both argued that immense freedom can be terrifying, leading many to seek an “escape from freedom.” The woman from Xianyang, by repeatedly taking the civil service exams, was essentially fleeing the freedom to choose a different life. She preferred to cling desperately to the wreckage of her old formula rather than face the freedom and responsibility of “defining a new self.” Similarly, the Tokyo woman’s immersion in an extreme ideology was, in a way, an act of surrendering her freedom—allowing a new absolute dogma to tell her who she was, thereby escaping the anguish of self-definition.

Sartre termed this escape “Bad Faith” — a self-deception in which one pretends to lack freedom and believes one must live according to the expectations of others. Yet when even this “bad faith” becomes unsustainable—when exams end in total failure or speculation collapses completely—they were left confronting existence in its raw, unadorned form, stripped of all excuses, and were ultimately crushed by its weight.

Existential creation of meaning demands that the individual assume total responsibility—a profoundly isolating undertaking. One’s meaning cannot be proven or borne by anyone else. By severing all social ties (blocking family, cutting off contact), these two women were not only retreating under nihilism but also making an existential refusal: they rejected any further role-playing—as a daughter, as an elite—and renounced the absolute responsibility of creating meaning for their own existence. In this extreme isolation, “self-erasure” became the final release—no longer an act of “choosing what to become,” but one of “choosing to no longer become at all.”

From the perspectives of Existentialism and Nihilism, the underlying logic of these two tragedies unfolds as follows: Nihilism dismantled their old world, revealing the falsity of the meanings they had once lived by, and plunged them into the void of “what to live for.” Existentialism then presented them with the terrifying freedom and burden of constructing a new world—a task for which, standing amidst the ruins of the old, they possessed neither the courage nor the strength.

Thus, “starvation” becomes a philosophical act. It is a final rejection of false meanings (“I refuse to play this game any longer”) and a total abdication of the burden of freedom (“I also relinquish the need to choose how to live”). This tragic, ultimate “non-choice” is the body’s final, resonant echo of a soul that has ceased to breathe in the vacuum of meaning.

Making Peace with Oneself, Tighten the String of Life

The author concurs with the view that “life inherently possesses no predetermined meaning,” holding that existence is, in essence, a process of self-definition—an active seeking and bestowing of significance.

In Shi Tiesheng’s novel Strings of Life, an old and a young blind man, both wandering minstrels, sustain themselves through storytelling and song, clinging to a deeply held belief: once they have snapped a thousand strings of their instrument, they will obtain a prescription to restore their sight. Yet, when the old master finally breaks the thousandth string, he discovers that the promised “prescription” is merely a blank sheet of paper. His hope shatters completely; “the string of his heart snaps.” He realizes the purpose he has pursued his entire life was emptiness itself.

He sits for days, withered, before the pharmacy. He lingers in a small inn until his savings are exhausted. Then, he remembers his apprentice—the young man who never truly loved storytelling and yearned only to see the wider world. The old master finds his way back to his disciple. When asked if he has taken the medicine from the secret prescription, he replies, “I remembered wrongly. It wasn’t a thousand strings; it was twelve hundred.” Knowing his own remaining time is short, he instructs his apprentice to keep playing and telling stories, sealing the new “secret prescription” inside the young man’s instrument.

At that moment, a sudden understanding dawns upon the old master. He recalls the final words of his own teacher: “Our destiny lies upon these very strings.” And once more, he speaks to his apprentice: “Remember, a person’s life is like this string. It must be pulled taut to make music. And making music is enough.”

“A person’s life is like this string.  It must be pulled taut to make music, and making music is enough.”  Regrettably, the two women mentioned earlier were unable to tighten the strings of their lives, and it seemed no one had sealed a “secret prescription” within their instruments to grant them the will to carry on.

While their cases are extreme, reality also presents vastly different life trajectories.  Consider the woman who supported herself as a courier while studying, eventually earning a Ph.D. in Hong Kong;  or the man who, graduating from a lesser-known private college, worked as a security guard at Peking University while relentlessly studying for a decade, ultimately passing the bar exam to become a lawyer…  These proactive seekers, though also individual cases, represent a far more common and resilient path.

It is undeniable that amid the pains of social transition, many face pay cuts, the loss of once high-paying and respectable jobs, or prolonged unemployment.  Some, tragically, choose to end their lives (as seen in cases like the woman in Shanghai’s finance industry or a senior engineer at a major tech firm).  Yet many more choose to confront these challenges directly—for instance, transitioning from white-collar to blue-collar work to provide for their families.

When external labels and societal formulas are stripped away, do we possess the courage to create and steadfastly uphold meaning for our own lives?  Can the “edifice of meaning” we construct withstand the storm of disillusionment?

Ralated: