What a 2,300-year-old philosopher taught me about luck, effort, and the wind that carries us all.

The Wind You Mistook for Your Own Wings

No one is self-made.

I’m writing this from Rimini, with the Adriatic flat and silver outside and the smell of someone’s espresso drifting up the stairwell. And I want to start with a confession that sounds strange coming from a man whose whole brand is two words shouted in capital letters — NEVER GIVE UP. Here it is: I am not self-made, and neither are you.

That sentence used to scare me. It doesn’t anymore.

Let me tell you why — and let me warn you first that I’ve simplified a knot of ancient Chinese philosophy and a bit of physics so it fits in your coffee break. Purists, forgive me. The shape of the idea survives the shrinking.

The Story We Tell Ourselves

We love the idea that we get what we deserve.

It’s a warm idea, honestly. If the good are rewarded and the lazy fall behind, then the world makes sense, your effort matters, and your suffering has a receipt attached. The essay that set me thinking this week — Christine Abigail L. Tan’s piece for Aeon — calls this the necessary illusion that people get what they deserve, the story we need to keep getting out of bed.

That story has a name: meritocracy.

At its core it says social and economic differences are fair when they reflect individual effort or talent. Those who rise deserve to rise; those who fall behind should try harder; everyone should pull themselves up by their bootstraps. (A tricky manoeuvre, I’ll admit, when you can’t actually reach your boots.)

The word itself is young — Michael Young coined it in the 1950s, and he meant it as a warning, not a compliment. The idea underneath it is ancient. To see its bones, you have to travel back about 2,500 years, to a teacher named Confucius and the dusty courts of a China at war with itself.

Soon, I’ll show you why that ancient quarrel is sitting in your inbox, your pay slip, and your gym’s motivational posters.

Confucius and the Beautiful Trap

Confucius lived in a violent, fractured age, and he had a tender hope.

He believed the chaos around him came from moral failure — and that moral failure was fixable. Through education and self-discipline, a person could refine their character, and from refined people you’d build a calm, well-ordered society. The promise sounds gorgeous, like cool water: you can make it if you try.

And the starting point is almost radically fair. Confucius and his successor Mencius held that we’re all born roughly equal in moral capacity — everyone carries the seed of goodness, and the path of self-cultivation stays open to anyone, no matter where they’re from.

I felt that promise in my own skin. I was born in Albania in 1986, carried to Italy in 1991 for treatment, and somewhere along that road I absorbed the idea that effort was a key that fit every lock. Study hard, push harder, and the door opens.

So far, so lovely. Here’s where the trap snaps shut.

If we all start equal, then unequal outcomes must come from unequal effort. The Confucians had a word for the people who’d cultivated themselves — xian, the “worthy.” And they argued that economic and political inequality is justified when it mirrors this moral inequality. Authority and resources should flow to the worthy, because — as the philosopher Xunzi put it — those who carry greater responsibility simply need and deserve more.

Confucius said it plainly in the Analects: there are sprouts that never flower, and flowers that never bear fruit. Translation: some of you just didn’t try hard enough.

Swap the vocabulary — virtue becomes productivity, cultivation becomes performance — and you’re reading a LinkedIn post from this morning. The grammar hasn’t changed in two and a half thousand years.

The next voice in this story refused to accept any of it. And he did it with a turtle.

Enter Zhuangzi, Dragging His Tail in the Mud

About a century after Confucius, a Daoist named Zhuangzi laughed at the whole arrangement.

Offered a powerful government post, he pointed to a sacred turtle shell kept in a royal temple — honoured, polished, dead. Would the turtle rather be venerated after death, he asked the king’s envoys, or alive and dragging its tail through the warm mud? Alive, they admitted. “Then go away,” Zhuangzi said. “I too will drag my tail in the mud.”

I love him for that. There’s mud under his nails and freedom in his grin.

His real target wasn’t unfairness inside the system. It was the deeper claim that moral worth can be the stable foundation for any hierarchy at all. And to attack it, he wrote a scene so wild it reads like dark theatre.

The Sage and the Cannibal

Picture Confucius walking up to Robber Zhi — a notorious bandit — to reform him.

Zhi, in this telling, is calmly munching on a human liver. (I told you it was theatre.) Confucius speaks the silky language of virtue and righteousness, urging the bandit to become xian. And Zhi, far from cowed, turns the whole moral vocabulary back on him like a Socratic blade — the same move I wrote about in why the Socratic method still outsmarts us.

You arbitrarily decide what’s right and wrong, Zhi tells the sage, and then you lead the whole kingdom astray. You and the rulers you serve do exactly what I do — take from others — except you do it on a grand scale and dress it in lofty names.

One steals goods. The other steals names. Zhuangzi makes the bandit and the saint into mirror images, and the only difference between them is technique and scale.

What sticks with me is the warning underneath the comedy: chasing worthiness can quietly eat you alive.

When Virtue Becomes a Currency

Here’s the part that hit me in the chest.

Zhuangzi argues that the drive to become worthy invites you to live for an abstraction — reputation, purity, a sagely ideal — and to treat your own body as raw material to spend on it. Your flesh becomes a tool for something immaterial. The warm, breathing animal of you gets fed to a number.

He lists the famous Confucian heroes: men who starved themselves rather than serve an unjust king, one whose heart was cut out for speaking too boldly, another whose loyal corpse was thrown into a river. Everyone praised them. Zhuangzi calls them tragic figures “trapped in the net of reputation and names,” destroyed by the very virtue they pursued.

Once you can rank human beings by worth, you build a machine that rewards self-exploitation.

We’ve just rebranded it. We call it “rise and grind.” We call it “hustle culture.” We post sunrises with motivational captions while running on four hours of sleep and a protein bar, and we call that discipline. Zhuangzi would recognise it instantly — virtue turned into capital, and capital demanding to be extracted from your own skin.

I know this temptation personally. There were years — between 2011 and 2018, through a brain implant put in and then taken out, through surgeries I’d rather not relive — when I measured my worth by how much pain I could productively ignore. The grind nearly grew its own roots in me.

The future Zhuangzi is pointing toward asks a quieter question: what if your life isn’t raw material for anything?

The $50 Crime and the $50 Trillion One

Now strip away the morals and look at how power actually behaves.

Zhuangzi notices something brutally simple: a small thief gets arrested; a great thief becomes a ruler. And reality keeps proving him right. In 1983, a man in Alabama named Alvin Kennard stole $50.75 from a bakery and was handed a life sentence — he walked free in 2019, after 36 years.

Meanwhile, the people behind the 2008 financial crisis erased an estimated $50 trillion in global wealth and drove nearly 10 million American families out of their homes. One mid-level banker went to prison — for 30 months, for mislabelling securities … and that was the whole reckoning.

Read those two numbers again and tell me the scales of accountability are weighing virtue.

The great thief, Zhuangzi says, is just the thief with enough power that his taking sets the rules for everyone else. Luck, circumstance, and privilege decide who ends up on top far more than moral cultivation ever does. And once you’ve won, the story gets rewritten backwards — your dominance becomes “proof” you deserved it.

Confucianism assumed worth comes first and authority follows. Zhuangzi flips it: authority comes first and then decides who counts as worthy. Power doesn’t reflect virtue — it manufactures the appearance of it. The winners write the dictionary that defines winning.

That’s the machinery humming under every “they earned it” you’ve ever heard. And it survives because it organises hope — it whispers that suffering is temporary, sacrifice is rational, and the future will pay you back. Walking away from that whisper takes more courage than staying.

Ziran: The Wind That Carries the Bird

So is there a way out that isn’t just bitterness? There is, and it’s the most beautiful idea I’ve met all year.

Zhuangzi tells of Liezi, a mythical sage who rides the wind — gliding through the air, weightless, apparently free. Then he points out the catch with a grin. Liezi still depends on the wind. His freedom is borrowed. Cut the breeze, and the great flyer drops like the rest of us.

What looks like self-propelled success, Zhuangzi says, is always carried by currents no single person authored. The meritocratic dreamer mistakes a favourable wind for personal flight.

His word for this is ziran — usually translated “naturalness,” but closer to “the so-of-itself.” It means your actions don’t spring from a sovereign little captain inside your skull. They arise from the whole situation: your relationships, your habits, your language, your health, your fears, the ordinary uncredited labour of a thousand people you’ll never meet. To act, he writes, is to be moved as much as to move.

Whenever you say “I deserve this,” you’re really saying “I authored the action that produced it.” Zhuangzi hands every such claim an invisible plural.

What Physics Whispers Back

This is where my two loves shake hands, because physics has been muttering something similar for a while.

When we ask whether a person was ever truly free to act otherwise, we’re asking about counterfactual worlds — the lives that didn’t happen. I find a strange comfort in the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics: the suggestion that the roads we didn’t take aren’t moral failures, just other branches. And the arrow of time reminds us that every present moment is downstream of conditions we never chose and can never rewind.

You didn’t pick your country, your year, your body, your first language, the parents who held you or didn’t.

I certainly didn’t pick dystonia, or the wheelchair, or the medical odyssey that dropped a five-year-old Albanian boy into an Italian hospital ward smelling of antiseptic and floor wax. None of that was effort. None of it was reward. It was wind.

The next time someone hits a milestone, watch how fast the world reassigns the credit to their character alone. Ziran asks us to notice the wind first.

So Where Does “Never Give Up” Go Now?

You’re probably wondering how a man who built a whole science community on NEVER GIVE UP swallows a philosophy that says you’re not the author of your wins.

I wondered too. For a few days it felt like the floor tilted. If merit is mostly luck and circumstance, why push at all — why not just drag my tail in the mud and call it enlightenment?

Here’s where I landed, and it changed the words without changing the volume.

“Never give up” was never a bootstraps slogan. It was never “you alone can overcome anything if you grind hard enough” — that’s the hustle gospel Zhuangzi tears apart. My version means something gentler and tougher at once: keep showing up to the wind. Keep your sail open. Stay responsive to the conditions instead of fighting to dominate them.

Agency, for Zhuangzi, is responsiveness rather than imposition — and I find that more honest than any superhero story.

I changed my mind once before, in public, about robots versus humans in space, and I learnt that updating a belief isn’t weakness — it’s the sail catching a new gust. This is the same move. I’m not giving up “never give up.” I’m finally understanding who’s actually carrying me when I refuse to.

A better world, Zhuangzi hints, stops sorting people by how much they’ve achieved and starts asking what conditions let anyone flourish at all — care, support, the removal of the obstacles that decide the race before the starting gun. That’s not a faraway utopia. That’s literally why FreeAstroScience gives away knowledge for free, and you can read why we do it here.

The Cruel Fantasy We Can Finally Drop

Let me end where the Aeon essay ends, because she says it better than I can.

The deepest gift in all this is being freed from one cruel fantasy: the belief that your place in the world is a reliable measure of your worth as a human being.

It isn’t. It never was.

You are a node in a vast network of conditions that co-produced who you are — and so is the banker, and so is the bandit, and so am I, espresso steam rising past my screen as I type this with hands that don’t always obey me. None of us flew here alone. Every one of us caught a wind.

So here’s my open question to you, and I mean it sincerely: whose wind has been carrying you — and have you ever stopped to thank it?

Drag your tail in the mud with me. It’s warmer than the temple, and you get to stay alive.

Never let your mind sleep.