The Dao of Living Well

  7 min read You’ve ticked all the boxes, and somehow that’s the problem. What if the anxiety chasing you isn’t a sign you’re failing, but a sign you’re succeeding at the wrong game? Drawing on a 2,000-year-old Daoist story and the hard-nosed logic of Stoic philosophy, this post shows you how to break free from performance exhaustion and build a more durable kind of sanity. We’re living through a quiet epidemic of  Performance Exhaustion . If you’re a millennial or Gen Z professional, you know exactly what this means. Your worth is tied to a digital scoreboard that never resets. You wake up and check your notifications, feeling a micro-dose of dopamine if a post performed well, or a pang of dread if a “high-priority” email landed at 11 PM.  We’ve turned our lives into a series of metrics to be optimised, from our “personal brands” to our sleep cycles. The pain points multiply fast. There’s  Validation Addiction : a lukewarm performance review or a lack of likes on a ...

  6 min read You've built the life you were supposed to want — and yet, some mornings, you wake up feeling like a stranger wearing your own name. What if the weight you're carrying isn't failure, but memory itself? Drawing on a strange and overlooked story from the Daoist classic Liezi, this post explores why identity can become a trap — and how the ancient art of forgetting might be the most underrated skill of our time. Modern life places enormous weight on achievement and identity. We're encouraged to build a coherent life story: a career trajectory, a personal brand, a narrative of progress and success.  Yet classical Daoist texts often ask whether this constant self-definition actually traps us. We spend our lives trying to 'find' ourselves. But what if the secret to real peace is learning, occasionally, to lose ourselves? A fascinating passage from the  Liezi  illustrates this tension through the strange case of Huazi of Yang-li, in the state of Song.  His...

8 min read If AI can draft your proposals, plan your holidays and summarise your emails, what exactly are you still for? In this post, we explore what a 4th-century BCE Daoist text reveals about the limits of artificial intelligence — and why your most irreplaceable qualities are precisely the ones that cannot be coded. The anxiety is real, and it is spreading. According to Resume Now's 2026 AI & Job Security Outlook Report, more than half of surveyed employees fear automation threatens their livelihoods.  Researchers at MIT have identified ' cognitive debt ' which is the phenomenon where outsourcing your thinking to AI gradually erodes your critical thinking and long-term memory. The question is not whether AI is changing work. It is. The question is: what do you have that AI cannot replicate? Interestingly, a 4th-century BCE Daoist text called the  Liezi  contains what might be the world's first science fiction story, written precisely to explore this question. T...