More than one friend has told me that the festive spirit of the New Year and other holidays feels increasingly hollow these days — especially during the years when fireworks were banned and large gatherings weren’t possible. Their view: holidays are just a synonym for time off, nothing more.
Whenever friends vented like this, I’d give them a breezy reply: “But time off is wonderful — peace and quiet is the finest luxury of all.”
This weekend, I want to talk about something personal — the first woman in the world who taught me “emotional intelligence”: my mother. And the first man who taught me “strength”: my father.
Before my family found its footing and eventually went abroad, we once lived out of necessity in a small longtang (Shanghai alley neighborhood). Though the years have made the memories hazy, I can still vaguely picture how cramped and narrow our unit was — roughly the size of a modern studio apartment with half a bathroom. The kitchen we shared with everyone else on the lane.
A reader once asked a remarkably sharp question: “Master, across the different levels of society, are there concepts that belong exclusively to the upper tiers — things the lower tiers have no awareness of at all?”
I thought about it, and answered with two words: Planning.
The word “planning” doesn’t tend to circulate among ordinary people, because it’s almost exclusively used by those in positions of power and decision-making — strategic planning, urban planning, industrial planning, platform planning. The word itself carries an inherent meaning: set a goal with an execution plan, then advance toward it systematically. It radiates sophistication the moment you hear it.
The real danger of being born into humble origins isn’t that your parents can’t provide material or financial support. The biggest problem is this: if you were born poor, your life effectively starts with a pre-packaged “bottom-rung survival manual” already in your hands.
Innocent and unaware, you’ll receive continuous indoctrination from parents who are themselves at the bottom — all the way until you enter university. Even if you one day wake up and frantically begin compensating with “elite knowledge,” it’s often already too late. Once your worldview takes shape, it becomes a brand burned into your bones — nearly impossible to wash away. Having believed the wrong things for so long, accepting the right things becomes incredibly difficult — like a surgical scraping of flesh from bone. Never mind whether you can endure it; few people even get the chance.
Frankly, Master Chi is simply a man of leisure living in the Jiangnan region who later took up traditional destiny reading (命理) as a profession — nothing particularly special or exceptional about him. If there is anything worth mentioning at all, it is that over the course of life, I have had the genuine fortune of crossing paths with some remarkably accomplished and outstanding individuals: people renowned for their wealth, their careers, or their standing in the world. I was simply the minor figure who, by fortune’s grace, had the honor of offering them counsel — a nobody of the lowest rung, nothing worth writing home about.
In the second part of the Gilded Age, Master Chi will focus on the topic of “self-cultivation.” This section matters because many people still haven’t grasped that the rules of the game have completely changed.
Take today’s wealthy individuals as an example. If you’re not in that circle, you naturally assume these rich people live lives of indulgence and excess — that their massive fortunes exist purely because of lucky timing or some murky, unspoken connections.
Introduction: After Master Chi completed Ten Tiers of Human Existence last year, it sparked endless discussion and spread widely. For the first time, people realized that the differences between life’s tiers are not purely about material wealth — the true dividing line lies in the knowledge and mastery of unspoken rules that most people never have access to.
Later, due to its overwhelming reach, Master Chi was compelled to take it down, archiving it within a private community. Now, a year later, the time feels right to put pen to paper once more — to map out the people at each level in this era, writing more where more is due and making necessary adjustments where needed.
I previously wrote about how Shanghai’s former richest man made his fortune — and it sparked enormous curiosity among many of you. You wanted to understand how that group of people managed to accumulate their first pot of gold during those wild, lawless years. They started out just like everyone else — penniless and powerless. So how did they break through the class ceiling and rise to wealth?
True to Master Chi’s long-standing habit, I don’t just want you to understand those old stories. I want you to extract real knowledge from them. So I’ve structured this article into several chapters, each building on the last:
Let me first lay bare the hidden truth behind the great casino: remember, every single dollar you earn here has an owner behind it. Sometimes you manage to pocket a little money — and that’s simply because the person on the other side of that trade is just as naive as you are, another foolish sheep who wandered in hoping to get lucky. The only reason you took their money is that they were slower, dumber, and more sluggish than you. Nothing more.