Survival, Competition, and Freedom
Most people have fantasized about this scenario: what would I do after achieving financial freedom?
Some want to party and indulge, some want to read quietly, some want to tackle long-shelved projects, others would keep doing what they’re already doing, and some choose to teach. The answers are endlessly varied, but I want to push this question one layer deeper.
Financial freedom is a concrete phenomenon. Its essence is a state of complete liberation — mind and body — after escaping survival pressure and exiting social competition. Linus Torvalds wrote in Just For Fun that people go through three stages when doing things: for survival, for social status, and for fun. These three stages correspond to three conditions — survival, competition, and freedom. In other words, what a person chooses to do in a state of freedom is essentially an expression of their need for entertainment — and what a person chooses for entertainment is precisely a projection of their true values, the most direct answer to “what do you actually want to do, and who do you want to become?”
From a personal perspective, each of these three stages has its own way of generating goals.
In the survival stage, goals are outsourced to biological instinct. Hungry? Eat. Cold? Get dressed. Your body decides your next move. A fresh graduate buried under rent and credit card debt doesn’t need anyone to tell them what to do — the bills figure it out for them. During China’s Great Famine, nobody agonized over the meaning of life. In times of exodus, nobody discussed self-actualization. Survival pressure is the strongest goal generator — brutal, clear, and beyond question.
In the competition stage, goals are outsourced to rivals on the same track. You think you’re fighting for yourself, but you’re really just responding to a coordinate system set by others. Students at Hengshui High School don’t need to ask “why am I studying” — the entire environment speaks with one voice: move your ranking up one more spot. Young professionals at big tech companies don’t need to ask “what’s my life goal” — the performance review system defines excellence and elimination for them. Phone manufacturers are the same — if your competitor has 100 megapixels, you need 200; if they charge in 30 minutes, you need to do it in 15. The spec sheet is the track, benchmarks are the referee.
Your community automatically generates a set of benchmarks. In China, the priority is “higher, bigger, more,” followed by “cheaper, faster, younger.” From showing off kids on social media and the silent salary wars at class reunions, to city GDP rankings and corporate market cap competitions — it’s all the same thing: measuring your life by someone else’s ruler. The root of many pecking orders lies precisely here.
These two stages share one comforting trait: the goals are clear, the direction is given.
Yet when someone truly enters the freedom stage, they face an open wilderness. No instinct is urging them forward, no rival stands ahead — goals must be set by themselves.
Charles Zhang (Zhang Chaoyang) is a classic cautionary tale. As one of China’s earliest internet moguls, he fell into severe anxiety and depression after achieving success. He said he had everything, could buy anything he wanted, yet was unbearably miserable. Around 2012, he retreated for nearly two years, traveling between the US and India, searching for answers from Buddhism to neuroscience. He eventually recovered through cognitive behavioral therapy, arriving at a core conclusion: the human brain has extraordinary computational and associative power, and it must be managed by values — otherwise, it will spiral into endless suffering.
Those who walk steadily through the wilderness have all found their anchor of values.
After selling PayPal for $180 million, Elon Musk bet his entire fortune on SpaceX and Tesla. In 2008, three rockets exploded in succession, Tesla was on the brink of bankruptcy, he went through a divorce simultaneously, and was so broke he borrowed money from friends to pay rent. Everyone told him to pick one; he refused — “It’s like having two children who are about to starve — I can’t give up either one.” The fourth launch succeeded, he landed a NASA contract, and saved everything just hours before Christmas Eve. Making humanity a multi-planetary species — this conviction gave him the courage to go all-in even in his darkest hour.
Lei Jun’s story is another kind of wilderness disorientation. In 2007, Kingsoft went public and he achieved financial freedom, yet felt unprecedentedly hollow. He said that as he approached forty, he woke from a dream and realized that despite his childhood dream of building a great company, he felt he had accomplished nothing. Many mocked him for being out of touch, but in his own coordinate system, he wasn’t benchmarking against financial figures — he was measuring himself against Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. This restless dissatisfaction drove him to start over at 40 and found Xiaomi.
Zhang Xue is the purest example. At 14, he got on a motorcycle and knew he’d never leave it behind. Mechanic’s apprentice, stunt rider, heading to Chongqing with just 20,000 yuan, founding Kaiyue Motorcycles, then walking away from everything to start from scratch in pursuit of a self-developed engine — 25 years doing one single thing. In March 2026, Zhang Xue Motorcycles won the World Superbike Championship, breaking decades of European and Japanese brand dominance. When asked for the secret, he said: if you truly love it, truly want to do it, and are willing to put in the work — how could you possibly fail? He never needed to search for direction in the wilderness. The direction was always there.
The stories of these four people outline every possibility of the freedom stage: freedom without values is a painful cage; freedom with values is the most powerful engine.
Taste and values — they are the only compass in the wilderness.