Zhuangzi: As Soon as Something Is Born, It Begins to Die

“Heaven and earth are a single finger; all things are a single horse.”

I have a habit. Every March I go back and re-read the year-end summary I wrote myself the previous December. After doing this for a few years, I noticed something:

Every year, the things I thought were “good” reveal their “bad” side six months later. The things I thought were “bad” reveal their “good” side six months later.

The project I considered a failure—at the time it felt like the sky was falling. Six months later it turned into a much bigger new project. A relationship I thought would last a lifetime ended; at the time the sky was falling again. Three years later, I’d become a completely different person. A project I once considered a “huge success”—six months later the team was stuck in the very playbook that had won, and that playbook became dead weight.

Every time I think about this, I’m reminded of two lines from Zhuangzi’s Qiwulun: “As life arises, death arrives; as death arrives, life arises” and “Heaven and earth are a single finger; all things are a single horse.”

Good things and bad things keep turning into each other

“As life arises, death arrives; as death arrives, life arises”—the literal reading is: the moment a thing comes into being, it begins to perish; the moment it perishes, something new begins to come into being. Life and death are not two events. They are two faces of the same event.

This sounds like a sentence a literary kid might post on social media. But what Zhuangzi is actually getting at is: “Misfortune” and “fortune” are not two different things. They are the same event, captured in two different time windows.

At a college reunion last year, I ran into a classmate, J, whom I hadn’t seen in ten years. He had just landed an offer at a major tech company, with double his previous salary. Everyone at the table was raising a glass to him.

This March I saw him again. He had just had cervical spine surgery. His wife was filing for divorce. He’d put on twenty pounds since a year earlier, and he took a stomach pill before he started drinking. I asked how his kid was. He thought for three seconds and said, “fine, I guess. I don’t see him much lately.”

We drank until 2 AM that night.

This “good thing” was already turning into a “bad thing.” It just took a year for the transformation to become visible.

If you’d asked J the day he got the offer whether it was a good thing or a bad thing, he’d have said good. If you’d asked him the day after surgery, he’d have said bad. Same event. Opposite answers.

So, ultimately, was it a good thing or a bad thing?

Zhuangzi’s insight: the question itself has no meaning. Good and bad are not properties of an event. They are snapshots taken by the observer. Take the snapshot at a different moment, and you get a different answer.

Categories are man-made

“Heaven and earth are a single finger; all things are a single horse” is Zhuangzi’s more radical move.

On the surface it sounds mystical. In fact it’s saying something simple: every category is a convention. It isn’t a property of the thing itself.

Are heaven and earth literally a finger? Are all things literally a horse? Of course not. What Zhuangzi means is: you only think “heaven and earth are heaven and earth” and “all things are all things” because you’ve accepted an inherited classification language. Swap in a different classification language, and heaven and earth could be something else entirely.

The most vivid contemporary example of this is the tribalism of the internet.

Every few months, the internet erupts into a major team-picking war. Humanities vs. STEM. Stay in the big city vs. go back home. Tiger-parent vs. let kids be. Rational vs. emotional. In every war, every participant is dead certain that their side is “right” and the other is “wrong.”

But zoom out ten years, and the fiercest fights of the moment have basically gone cold within three or four years.

“Traditional media vs. self-media” was once a war to the death. Nobody talks about it today—traditional media has been reshaped by self-media. “PC internet vs. mobile internet” was the hottest topic ten years ago. Nobody splits them anymore because both terms are obsolete. On Douban, “people who read paper books vs. people who read on Kindle” used to draw blood. Today everyone listens to podcasts and scrolls Xiaohongshu. Nobody reads books.

This is what Zhuangzi means by “all things are a single horse”: you think you’re picking a side for “the truth.” Really, you’re picking a side for a temporary classification system. Ten years later, you’ll realize you weren’t fighting for truth. You were fighting for a context that no longer exists.

Not picking a side isn’t neutrality. It’s seeing.

Zhuangzi isn’t saying “therefore we should be neutral.” Neutrality is just another way of picking a side.

He’s saying something one level deeper: only when you see that categories are temporary can you actually see the thing itself.

Last year I argued with a friend L, who works in investing, about whether a certain Chinese EV company was good or bad. I said good. He said bad. We each piled up facts. Halfway through our coffees, we both fell silent and looked at each other.

We realized: my “good” was based on the category “user growth rate.” His “bad” was based on the category “cash flow health.” We weren’t arguing about the same company. We were using different classification languages to look at the same set of data.

Once we saw this, the argument dissolved. What remained was a much more interesting question: what kind of trade-off is this company making between user growth and cash flow?

This question has no “good” or “bad” answer. It’s just a fact. But the fact only surfaces when both of us put down the categories “good” and “bad.”

This is qi wu: the equalizing of things.

Not “all things are equal.” It’s: the category is not the thing.

What modern people lack most: reflexive hesitation

Now, every time I see a topic that makes me want to immediately pick a side, I do a small thing first: I ask myself, which classification am I about to use to look at this? Where did that classification come from?

Most of the time, the answer stops me cold. The classification I’m about to use was usually handed to me by someone else. The Weibo algorithm. The vibe in my friend circle. A catchphrase from some influencer I like. I think I’m thinking. I’m actually just reposting.

Zhuangzi predicted this two thousand years ago. He wrote, “the Way is hidden by petty completeness; speech is hidden by florid ornament.” Real wisdom gets buried under small clever conclusions. Real speech gets buried under beautiful phrases. Modern social media is a machine that turns every situation into a petty-and-florid version of itself, compressing every question into a binary.

After reading Qiwulun, what I came away with wasn’t “open-mindedness.” It was a kind of reflexive hesitation. Every time I’m about to issue a snap “good/bad” verdict, I pause.

Just a pause. That’s enough.