JM Review | Behind Two Tragedies: A Journey to Making Peace with Oneself

【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:

Flounder Mode｜Kevin Kelly on a different way to do great work

Columnists> About Education

By Brie Wolfson，Colossus，June 2025

Kevin Kelly isn’t known for one “big thing,” and doesn’t aspire to be. He’s as intelligent, hard-working, ambitious, and prescient as history’s most iconic entrepreneurs—only without any interest in building a unicorn himself. Instead, in his words, he works “Hollywood style”—in a series of creative projects. What follows is a sampling of his life’s work.

Kelly was an editor for the Whole Earth Catalog in the early 1980s, helped start WELL, one of the first online communities, in 1985, and co-founded WIRED magazine in 1993. He’s written a dozen books and published hundreds of essays on topics from art to optimism, travel, religion, creativity, and AI (even before it was a thing). Kelly rode a bicycle across the United States in his 20s. He was Steven Spielberg’s ‘futurist advisor’ on Minority Report, and the inspiration behind the famous “Death Clock” on Futurama, after the show’s creator Matt Groening caught wind of the Life Countdown Clock Kelly keeps on his computer desktop. He organizes tightly curated group walks across Asia and Europe, regularly covering ~100km in a week. He sculpts, draws, paints, and photographs. And he’s a longtime friend and collaborator of Stewart Brand (whose famous line, “Stay hungry, stay foolish,” Steve Jobs quoted in his iconic commencement address at Stanford).

To encourage long-term thinking, Kelly is helping build a clock into a mountain in western Texas that will tick for 10,000 years. Brian Eno and Jeff Bezos are active collaborators. He’s a born-again Christian. He’s been married to his wife, Gia-Miin, for 38 years, and they have three children together. He was pivotal to a fringe-turned-mainstream movement to identify and catalog every living species on earth (now owned and operated by Smithsonian). He was early to think and write about the quantified self, which gave rise to products like Fitbit, Strava, Apple Watch, Eight Sleep, and the Oura Ring. Kelly’s idea of “1,000 true fans” practically christened the creator economy with his 2008 insight that “if 1,000 people will pay you $100 per year, you can gross $100k—more than enough to live on for most.”

“ The people who become legendary in their interests never feel they have arrived.”

Kevin Kelly

Naval Ravikant has called him a “modern-day Socrates,” Marc Andreessen has said that “everything Kevin Kelly writes is worth reading,” Eno called him “one of the most consistently provocative thinkers about technology and culture,” and Ray Kurzweil said that “Kevin Kelly understands the direction of technology better than almost anyone I know.”

Kelly’s Hollywood style of working has always resonated with me; it’s the way I aspire to work and largely have since starting my career. Yet now, 15 years in, I’ve become self-conscious about it. Working in Silicon Valley will convince you that starting a company with its sights on unicorn status is the only possible way to make an impact, and the only work worthy of an ambitious individual.

Kelly is a cheerful and enterprising repudiation of that path, and I didn’t get very long into my interview preparations to realize that I wasn’t only writing about a personal hero; I was seeking a way to make peace with my own professional choices. After a day together, I realized that my pilgrimage to meet the man in his element might also grant permission to others in our line of work who are interested in charting a different course to impact.

I started my career at Google selling AdWords to small businesses, and finished my first quarter as the number three seller in North America. Professional opportunities immediately unfolded—early nods for management, trips to global offices to present my “best practices,” my face on slides next to impressive metrics, and attention from more senior leaders.

It’s hard to say why none of that seemed very interesting, but it didn’t. What I did like was starting a campaign to rename the conference rooms and helping my coworker launch his internal content series, G-Chat with Charleton, in which he would interview Google executives while sitting with them in a two-person snuggie. I had earned myself a ticket to the fast career track at one of the coolest companies in Silicon Valley, but climbing the corporate ladder just wasn’t for me.

So I spent the next 10 years chasing what seemed most fun. After 14 months at Google, my work bestie, Jenny, and I left Google together to give the startup thing a try. We went to a mobile gaming company where I learned to make my way around spreadsheets, play Magic: The Gathering, and cash in on a blockbuster ‘pet hotel’ game. Eighteen months later, it was a six-person startup that was known as “the black sheep of Y Combinator.” In my free time, I coached a JV high school soccer team, volunteered at Dandelion Chocolate (all that working on software made me want to make something with my hands), and finished writing a novel.

My resume of under-two-year gigs spooked recruiters, except for one at Stripe. “We’re impressed by how much ground you’ve covered,” was the backhanded compliment I got. I started on the Account Management team in early 2015.

I spent nearly five years at Stripe, but the lily-padding continued—only this time it was all under one roof. A year into my tenure, I was given the choice between management or a nebulous role focusing on projects that would impact company culture. Like evolving our tradition of work anniversary celebrations, standing up company planning, establishing Stripe as a carbon-neutral company, getting non-developers to participate in our annual hackathon, defining our version of the “bar raiser” interview, and printing and distributing a book (which eventually became Stripe Press). With very little pressing, I learned this nebulous role had emerged from the growing pile of projects that the former McKinsey consultants on the Business Operations team were avoiding.

Guess which role my friends and parents thought I should choose? Guess which one I chose.

Kelly would say it’s good to have an “illegible” career path—it means you’re onto interesting stuff.

I started to take pride in this “cool girl” approach to work. I joked about having never been promoted, but could feel my scope, impact, and relationships with colleagues growing. I remember rejecting a (well-meaning) manager’s suggestion to build out a five-year career plan. I scoffed at people who cared about titles, did things for money, and had professional headshots on their LinkedIn. I mocked MBAs, bragged about “staying off the org chart,” and being good at “giving away my LEGOs.” I became the person you asked to have a coffee with when you wanted to quit your job and do something weird. Once I mentioned “enjoying working in the wings,” and a (well-meaning) executive suggested I “keep that to myself if I wanted to be seen as a leader.” I ignored the advice.

And then, I’m not sure when the switch flipped, but I started to have a sinking feeling that I had it all wrong the whole time. I looked around and felt I was being outpaced by my colleagues—specifically by the MBAs and the people who chased titles, promotions, money, and building teams. And it wasn’t just a vanity thing. They genuinely seemed to be focused on bigger, more interesting problems. And they were having more impact. They were mentoring young talent, influencing top lines and bottom lines, and had their fingerprints on all kinds of cool industry-recognized work. They seemed to always have invitations to exclusive gatherings and job offers in their inbox. Several started companies, and rumor had it that some had term sheets before investors even opened their decks. I didn’t only feel jealous of their work; I felt unqualified to do it. That stung.

I started to reflect on my own trajectory with fear that it didn’t mirror my ambition, work ethic, or deep care about the role of work in a life. Had I pointed my ambition in the wrong direction? What did I have to show for all my effort? Had I made some irreversible, unforced error with my career? How much money had I left on the table? Would the people I respected respect me back for much longer? Despite working my butt off for a decade, I had no expertise and no line of sight into where I was going. I felt immature for placing such a high value on “fun” and “bouncing around,” and full of regret about not picking a lane (or even better, a ladder). It had become hard to explain what I was good at—most importantly to myself. My sister had recently made partner at a prestigious law firm, and it seemed easier for my parents to be proud of her than of me. I couldn’t really blame them.

Kevin Kelly would say it’s good to have an “illegible” career path—it means you’re onto interesting stuff. But I wasn’t so sure anymore.

I pull up to Kelly’s Pacifica, California studio—the last house at the very edge of Vallemar off Route 1. It’s a big, barn-looking structure pressed up against a steep hill, which is covered in wild flowers and towering trees. It was overcast and smelled like the ocean and eucalyptus. The only way I knew I’d come to the right place was the very small sign on the door that read “kk.org,” on which I’ve spent dozens of hours over the years.

Stepping inside, I felt like I’d time-traveled back to the early 1990s and entered my little brother’s dream bedroom. There were huge LEGO towers, K’nex sculptures hanging from the ceiling, and a massive wall of books spanning two floors. Most of the books were faded from use or sunlight, the dust jackets bent, and they were all stacked and tilted in a way that suggested they’d actually been read. There were knickknacks piled up everywhere, and even more haphazardly tucked into bins or captured in jars.

It was hardly the image of a futurist’s office, and in sharp contrast to the Japandi workspaces you see going viral on X. Yet despite the sheer amount of stuff lying around in Kelly’s haven, nothing appeared like junk. Every object seemed to vibrate with meaning, begging you to ask, “What’s this for?” or “Where’d you get that?”

As I was scanning the lower rungs of the bookshelf, Kelly materialized on the indoor balcony and invited me upstairs to talk. He was wearing socks that were way too big—the spaces where his toes should have been were empty and flopped around in front of him—and his pants were stained from actual paint (i.e., not in the Rag & Bone way).

As I walked up the stairs, I asked him what the oldest object in the studio was, but he immediately deflected. No interest in nostalgia from the futurist, I guessed.

I slowed down as I walked by the second-floor wall of knickknacks and started scanning. Kelly caught me doing so, pulled some leather doohickey about the size of my hand off the shelf, and handed it to me.

“What do you think this is?” he asked. I twirled it around and desperately wanted to answer correctly, but figured that wasn’t the point. Still, I fumbled around nervously and couldn’t even eke out a guess. Probably sensing my anxiety, Kelly jumped in. “It’s a leather cap for an eagle.” He got it in Mongolia where there’s a tradition of using eagles to hunt, he explained. Now things were feeling looser. I got the feeling I could pull this thread about the Mongolian eagles or get another story. Kelly made my decision for me when he directed my attention to a small jar containing a little creature’s bones. “This is from a bird that flew into that window,” he said, pointing to a window over his desk. I nodded along with enthusiasm. “I freeze-dried them!” he said proudly.

We strolled over to his desk, where he asked me to try to lift a small but dense ball that was sitting on the floor next to it. I could barely get it above my ankle. Kelly told me it was made out of tungsten. “It has a similar density to gold,” he continued. “Now every time you see a criminal in the movies running away with a bag of tungsten, you’ll know how unrealistic it is.”

“Greatness is overrated. It’s a form of extremism, and it comes with extreme vices that I have no interest in.”

Kevin Kelly

It was so much fun connecting with Kelly over these random little objects—I felt I was learning something about him I couldn’t through his books and blog posts; like I was getting to the real spirit he brings to his life and work. But before I could think too much, we were onto the next.

There was a train track running along the wall, just below the ceiling, and I asked if it worked. I half-expected him to yell, “Alexa, start your engines!” Instead, Kelly walked over to his desk and picked up a controller and turned it on. Nothing happened. He replaced the batteries, gave the controller a smack like it was a Nintendo 64 cartridge, and tried again. The train, looking like something my dad might have built at the model shop down the street in the 60s, immediately started choo-chooing around the room. Kelly stood and smiled proudly again as he watched it go. Eventually we took our seats next to his desk to talk.

I started off by asking him whether there is a unifying theme to his seemingly diffuse life’s work, which has included old-school magazines and books, bleeding-edge technology, conservationism, photographing Asia, and teaching. “Following my interests,” he said simply.

It sounded awfully cutesy for someone so accomplished. I said that there is an idiosyncratic magic to the way he follows his interests, which is that they’re not just an input; Kelly turns his interests into an output that he can share with others. When I asked if I was onto something, I learned that Kelly doesn’t think in outputs. For him, doing is part of learning. “I don’t really pursue a destination,” he said. “I pursue a direction.”

I asked him the difference between “following your interests” and being scatterbrained or having shiny object syndrome, like I sometimes worry I do. “The people who become legendary in their interests never feel they have arrived,” he said. When he talked about the power of passion and obsession in that process, I asked him if passion is enough. “Enough for what?” he asked, somewhat rhetorically. He had an impression of what I meant. “I think one of the least interesting reasons to be interested in something is money,” he said, and cited Walt Disney. “We don’t make movies to make money. We make money to make more movies.”

Money isn’t actually what I meant, but I appreciated that he took the conversation there. I let the silence hang for a minute before he continued. “What I’m talking about is taking your interests seriously enough to have the courage to stay moving. You can give stuff away. You can abandon things. You can tolerate failure because you know that tomorrow there is more.”

I asked Kelly about the tradeoffs of focusing on a single thing if you want to be great (which is what I had been getting at before). “Greatness is overrated,” he said, and I perked up. “It’s a form of extremism, and it comes with extreme vices that I have no interest in. Steve Jobs was a jerk. Bob Dylan is a jerk.”

The way Kelly approaches work differently was starting to come into focus.

Accounts of people pursuing their life’s work often include phrases like “maniacal focus” or “relentless pursuit.” I hear investors say they’re looking for founders with “a chip on their shoulder.” Facebook’s iconic “Little Red Book” from 2012, which still serves as a pillar for peak tech culture, features a full-page spread that says “Greatness and comfort rarely coexist.”

A recent xeet from Reid Hoffman reads, “If a founder brags about having ‘a balanced life,’ I assume they’re not serious about winning.” Jensen Huang says he wants to “torture people into greatness.” When I was on the job hunt many years ago, an investor was pitching one of his portfolio companies by saying, with a wink, that the founder would do “whatever it takes to win.” I genuinely didn’t know what he meant by that, but it sent a shudder down my spine. Once I heard a serial founder say he started his second company “out of chaos and revenge.” I heard about another prominent CEO that looks in the mirror every morning and asks himself, “Why do you suck so much?” I read a biography of Elon Musk; he seems tortured. There’s some rumor floating around about how Sam Altman was so focused on building his first startup that he only ate ramen and got scurvy. According to Altman, “I never got tested but I think (I had it). I had extreme lethargy, sore legs, and bleeding gums.”

Compared to this, Kelly’s version of doing his life’s work seems so joyful, so buoyant. So much less … angsty. There’s no suffering or ego. It’s not about finding a hole in the market or a path to global domination. The yard stick isn’t based on net worth or shareholder value or number of users or employees. It’s based on an internal satisfaction meter, but not in a self-indulgent way. He certainly seeks resonance and wants to make an impact, but more in the way of a teacher. He breathes life into products or ideas, not out of a desire to win, but out of a desire to advance our collective thinking or action. His work and its impact unfold slowly, rather than by sheer force of will. Ideas or projects seem to tug at him, rather than reveal themselves on the other end of an internal cattle prod. His range is wide, but all his work somehow rhymes. It clearly comes very naturally for him to work this way, but it’s certainly not the norm.

If this is a way of living and working that’s available to all of us, why do we fetishize the white-knuckling and pain?

I know I’m not the first person to have the brilliant idea that we can do better work when we like it. I know that the whole “find your passion” movement fell flat in its naivete. But I think somewhere along the way, the message about what it feels like to be great has become a bit perverted.

A few years ago, I forced myself to try and write down a professional goal. After several hours of forced meditation on the topic, all I could muster was “have a good day, most days.” And don’t get me wrong, by “good day” I don’t mean sitting by a pool drinking an Aperol Spritz. I feel alive when I launch something exciting, close a big deal, or build an elegant model. I enjoy the feeling of caring so much about something that it wakes me up in the middle of the night (it happened multiple times writing this piece). And yet, I imagined sharing my ambition to “have a good day, most days” in a job interview—and decided to keep it to myself, because it probably doesn’t speak well of me.

But there I was, in front of a personal hero, whose most striking quality is that he seems to be having a nice day, most days. Why can’t we work and enjoy it? And I don’t mean in the masochistic sense.

I thought I was here to go deep on working Hollywood style, but as I sat there with Kelly in a room of what are best described as his toys, I realized that the most interesting thing about him is that he seems happy. At ease in the world and in his skin. I wasn’t there with Kelly for permission to work Hollywood style. I was there for permission to work with both ambition and joy.

If this is a way of living and working that’s available to all of us, why do we fetishize the white-knuckling and pain?

This shouldn’t make us defensive or self-conscious, but it does. I, like many others, want to be great. I want to feel commitment and camaraderie and work hard and be my best and impact top and bottom lines. But I don’t want to also feel tormented or be tortured into greatness or look in the mirror and wonder why I suck. But what does that say about me?

I want more role models like Kevin Kelly. People that proudly whistle while they work. Who have boundless energy and healthy gums. Whose enthusiasm is contagious. Who are well-adjusted and emotionally regulated. Who have solid relationships and happy families. Who are hungry and impactful and care deeply, without being jerks. And I want more people to talk about these qualities with respect and reverence.

I have never been a billionaire or built a unicorn, so I can’t speak with any conviction about what it requires. I won’t be eulogized anywhere important and no one 300 years from now will talk about what great things I did. But I want to live in a world where you can have an impact and be happy. Maybe that’s naive, but I’m sticking to it.

All of this occurs naturally to Kelly, and he doesn’t have complicated feelings about it. I’m hoping to get there myself by channeling him more. “The more you pursue interests,” he told me on the good day we spent together, “the more you realize that the well is bottomless.”

Edited by Jas