30 Ways of Living

Opening

What is the greatest confusion of our time?

It’s that we respect everything, we want to achieve everything — yet amid all this respect, what do we actually choose?

Can we let our hearts point one way and our bodies follow it?

That’s the dilemma of choice.

So, confusion is not a bad thing.

What I fear most today are young people who are not confused — who feel life is fine, food and clothes are plenty, nothing to worry about.

That means you can no longer live out the vitality that belongs to your generation, the power to reopen life’s meaning.

30 Ways of Living

Hello everyone, I’m Liang Yong’an from Fudan University.

Today, I want to talk about ways of living.

Why do we even have this question?

Because this is the happiness of China’s new generation — the previous one never had such luxury.

Yu Hua’s To Live describes a man struggling on the edge of death, on the line of survival.

But today, we have finally entered an age of how to live.

It’s no longer “all roads lead to Rome,” but rather, “out of Rome, there are countless roads.”

So, what kind of life should we live?

What we lack most today is exactly a way of living.

There’s too much sameness.

Every year my university sends me to Xinjiang to recruit students.

When I look at their applications, almost all list the same “hot” majors — those that seem to guarantee a good job, a good life.

And often it’s not the students but their parents who decided.

So, our society today has far too few ways to live.

I’ve been thinking about this problem lately.

I made a kind of classification — if we really looked carefully toward the future, there could be hundreds of ways to live.

But by major categories, I’ve counted about thirty.

Today, I’d like to talk about six of them — six ways of living that deserve to be experienced deeply.

And the first is the Explorer.

🌏 

The Explorer

Strangeness Is Youth’s Best Friend

In Irish writer Colm Tóibín’s novel Brooklyn, a girl named Eilis leaves a small Irish town for New York.

From Manhattan, across Chinatown, over the Brooklyn Bridge — there lies Brooklyn.

Brooklyn then had two main communities: the Irish and the Italians.

When Eilis arrives, she sees the Irish girls all busy preparing for dances — because dances were where one met a husband.

They lived within a very old tradition.

But after arriving in New York, Eilis discovers the world is not like that.

This great commercial city opens her eyes — in a modern society built on division of labor, people must work, and they must learn in order to do specialized work.

That’s what a refined, modern system demands.

So every evening Eilis goes to accounting classes.

She persists, and eventually becomes the only Irish girl to earn an accounting certificate.

The certificate itself doesn’t matter — what matters is how it changed her sense of life.

Learning gives her ongoing excitement, and also difficulty.

True relaxation only comes after effort.

Many people today seek “ease,” but without meaningful effort, that ease is only consumption — it’s fake.

So when Eilis faces love, she is utterly different from other girls.

She admires men who work, who have dignity in labor.

She’s beautiful and has many suitors, but she chooses Tony, an Italian plumber — because only those who labor can appreciate the beauty of labor.

She hadn’t expected that choice herself.

But labor gave her self-respect instead of dependence; she wanted a life built together through honest work.

In the age of globalization, how do we live?

Exploration breaks old limits — and that’s its value.

When there is no ready-made answer, exploration becomes essential.

You’re all young; you’ll meet many unknowns.

But from my experience, let me tell you — strangeness is youth’s best friend.

When you open the window each morning and everything is new, when uncertainty surrounds you, that’s real freedom — not life bound by rigid lines.

That’s why Eilis loved her life in New York.

💡 

The Enlightened One (The Realizer)

She Suddenly Felt the Sky Vast and the Sun Bright

Another way of living is the Enlightened life — the life of sudden awakening.

A “realizer” is someone who, after many turns and detours, suddenly in one instant sees, “Ah — this is who I am.”

They finally understand what kind of life they truly want.

When I read British novelist W. Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil, I had that feeling strongly.

The heroine Kitty is twenty-five, unmarried, anxious.

To solve the “problem,” she marries Walter, a man she doesn’t love, and follows him to Hong Kong — because in England she felt unbearably lonely.

But when love becomes a “problem” and you treat it like an equation to be solved, you lose yourself.

Kitty’s real self gets buried.

In Hong Kong she meets a charming official, an expert in flirtation.

Inside her burns a fire she’s never released — she falls into an affair, only to realize it’s all emptiness.

Later she follows Walter to Guangxi, where he dies of plague while saving others — never forgiving her.

But by then Kitty has changed.

On the ship back to England, she feels, for the first time, the vastness of sky and the brilliance of sunlight.

At that moment she understands — she never truly loved Walter.

To understand oneself in a lifetime is extraordinarily difficult.

Why is the book called The Painted Veil?

Because life is layer after layer of veils.

Without those layers — the twists, the suffering — you wouldn’t have that one instant of clarity worth all the years.

So don’t fear mistakes; perhaps your destiny is to go through them.

That, too, is a form of courage we need for the future.

🔍 

The Confused One

We Respect Everything, We Want to Achieve Everything

Another way is the life of the Confused.

After World War I, young people were deeply lost.

Why did the previous generation send us to the front?

All young men — who could have been sharing coffee — now killing each other.

So Ernest Hemingway, sitting in a Paris café, wrote for weeks and produced The Sun Also Rises — a book about wandering.

The protagonist, Jake, is wounded by shrapnel in the war; his body is damaged, and he can never have intimacy again.

His future destroyed, he rushes from one festival to another, drinks, wanders, discards all former values.

The book opens with the epigraph: “You are all a lost generation.”

Gertrude Stein had said to them, “You respect nothing, and you’re always drunk.”

But Chinese youth are different.

Chinese parents raise you with immense tenderness — the warmth of agrarian life — while your mind is filled with the knowledge of a technological future.

Tradition and modernity are strangely fused in you.

So our confusion is unique:

we respect everything, we want everything — but what, among all that, will we choose?

Can we align heart and body?

That’s our dilemma of choices.

Therefore, confusion is precious.

I fear only those who aren’t confused — who feel life is fine, no problems — because then they won’t open new spiritual space for their generation.

How do we find ourselves within confusion?

Like a photographer — at first you want to shoot everything; later you discover what truly moves you: something from your own wound, your own longing.

That is where resonance lies — and that is what deserves your life’s devotion.

Because life is short; you can only do one thing with it.

🏃‍♀️ 

The Wanderer

I Came to Know the World

Another way is the life of the Wanderer.

In ancient China, society could not accept wanderers.

Why?

Because in an agrarian world, everywhere was the same — everyone farmed.

Wandering had no value.

A few lines of The Analects could “govern all under heaven.”

Knowledge was finite, the world complete.

We emphasized harvest — “spring sowing, autumn reaping” — the reaping part mattered most: what do you achieve?

Our ideals for scholars were “establish virtue, establish merit, establish words” — you had to accomplish.

But wandering is process.

Its philosophy is one of becoming.

Students often ask me, “Should I go to graduate school?”

I say, think about this:

One way is to imagine yourself at seventy — sitting in your big house, with a luxury car, in one city your whole life, grinding and grinding for stability.

Another way: you’ve roamed the world — through wind and rain, joy and sorrow — you’re seventy, with little money and a simple home, but endless memories, countless moments that opened your life.

You can say, “I truly knew the world.”

That, too, is value.

Both are precious.

But no one can live both lives.

Looking at Chinese history, we’ve always lacked wanderers.

In the future, happiness will be “I have wandered the world.”

Think of Yann Martel’s novel and Ang Lee’s film Life of Pi.

Why is the boy named Pi?

It’s symbolic.

Usually π = 3.14 — most people live at “about 3.14,” “good enough.”

But human freedom lies beyond — in 3.141592… an infinite string of digits.

We now have 8 billion people; every one of us can fit into those decimal places.

The question is: do you have the courage to experience the world — that infinite world where anything is possible?

The future lacks not resources, but difference.

Your value lies in what sets you apart — in the story only you can tell.

When the world sees only white swans, can you see a black one?

That’s your self.

The self isn’t pre-defined — it’s formed through experience.

To wander is to unfold the full dimension of one’s life.

🍞 

The Simple One

What Is Life’s Greatest Happiness?

And then there’s the Simple life — simplicity itself.

How hard it is to stay simple.

The American Jewish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, a Nobel laureate, wrote a short story called Gimpel the Fool.

Gimpel is an orphan, a bit slow-witted.

People send him to learn baking — thinking he’ll never marry, so night work suits him.

But at eighteen or nineteen, a town elder comes, saying a beautiful girl, Elka, wants to marry him.

He can’t believe it — he’s overjoyed.

Three months after the wedding, Elka gives birth.

Even Gimpel feels something’s off — “So soon?”

Elka snaps, “God only looked at the Virgin Mary once and she conceived — I’m slower than that!”

Gimpel nods, “True, true.”

They live twenty years and have six children.

When Elka is dying, she confesses: “None of the six are yours.”

Gimpel, kind and simple, says, “That’s all right. I’ll care for them as my own.”

After she dies, he keeps baking.

One night, suddenly, his mind clears — he sees the truth and feels humiliated.

Everyone has deceived him.

He decides to take revenge: he kneads new dough, mixing in a bit of his urine — he’ll make everyone eat “pee bread.”

But as he works, the bread smells oddly sweet — and suddenly, Elka’s ghost appears.

She says, “Gimpel, don’t do it. That is a sin that sends you to hell. I learned after death — you can deceive anything, but never yourself.”

Gimpel is stunned.

He returns to his foolish, innocent self, throws out the tainted dough, and bakes a new batch — the best bread of his life.

So, what is goodness?

Goodness is the greatest force toward the future.

Simplicity is the greatest happiness.

To be kind is to think a little more for others — in an age obsessed with profit, that’s hard.

But even if it looks foolish, even if it costs you, it is wisdom.

To live with warmth in your heart — that’s the most precious human strength, and the one most easily lost.

A normal person must think about money, identity, gains and losses — and soon gets trapped in calculation.

We talk so much about algorithms — but what do we really calculate?

Often, the algorithm ends up consuming us.

Toward a Creative Future

So how should today’s youth face the future?

There are many ways to live — but living is never about consumerism.

Living is creation.

In the next era, countless new forms will emerge.

Chinese youth culture is vibrant, alive.

We must not waste our youth by conforming too soon.

A “way of living” is the act of lifting your own soul — it is dignity itself.

Besides the six ways I mentioned — the Explorer, Enlightened, Confused, Wanderer, Simple, and others — there are still many more:

the Imitator, the Hesitant, the Independent, the Traveler, the Reflective, the Pure-Hearted, the Possessor, the one who seeks essence, or happiness, or freedom, or nature, or true love, or equality, or the one who resists vulgarity, who meets evil with evil — all kinds of lives.

In the future, our youth must hold a broader heart, and step half a meter farther than their time.

That half-meter is directional — difficult to take — but it’s where new life begins.

For the first time in history, we have this privilege: we’re no longer trapped by hunger or survival.

We finally have space to explore, to open ourselves.

That is the good fortune of our generation.

Today, I wanted to share this feeling with you —

so that together, we can face the future,

and create a vibrant, colorful society filled with countless new ways to live.

Thank you all.