Are you feeling anxious this year?
You feel like you’ve missed out on everything.
Someone else bought blue-chip stocks six or seven years ago and now lives comfortably off the dividends. Someone else bought a small apartment in Beijing or Shanghai four or five years ago and is now perfectly content doing nothing. Someone else started making videos three or four years ago and is raking in side income on short-video platforms. And someone else — who simply pushed themselves relentlessly for three years — has now earned a place among the core inner circle at their company, with resources and privileges to match.
You look at them. You look at yourself. You look out the window at the world beyond — and suddenly feel a crushing wave of pressure. You feel like you can’t compare to anyone. Everyone seems to be doing better than you.
What’s worse: every morning you wake up to find people younger than you — people who started with less than you — surpassing you one by one.
Because in this era, news travels fastest between social circles.
There was a time when you wouldn’t have immediately known that a former colleague had landed a high-paying, cushy position. You wouldn’t have quickly found out that your high school best friend married into a wealthy local family and now lives a life of leisure. You wouldn’t have heard that the kid from next door got rich off some cryptocurrency windfall and vaulted into a different class entirely.
But now? Your own parents might hear this gut-punch news before you do, simply because they follow the gossip.
And you tell yourself you don’t care — but inside you’re utterly conflicted. Because you don’t know where you fell behind, or what exactly you did wrong.
And so, in the endless cycle of self-doubt, the anxiety grows heavier and heavier inside you.
Just a couple of days ago, a long message came through my inbox that was hard to read — the anxiety was so thick you could almost feel it dripping off every word.
The message came from a woman working at a foreign company. Thirty-four years old. Unmarried. No assets, no property. She added, half-joking, that she had a face and figure that were decent enough — but nothing more.
In her message, she said that over the past six years, her life had actually been quite comfortable and enjoyable. Her monthly salary was more than enough to fund her life as a white-collar professional in a major city — the fine dining, the polished lifestyle, the metropolitan pleasures. Before the pandemic, she even flew abroad twice a year for holidays at luxury hotels in exotic destinations. She felt she had reached the peak of life.
But four years ago, her best friend — a girl she’d grown up alongside since middle school — seemed to become a completely different person. They’d once been cut from the same cloth: both polished urban women who spent what they earned and never saved a thought for tomorrow.
Then, starting sometime four years ago, her friend’s personality changed dramatically. She was still warm and sociable as ever — but suddenly purposeful. In her relationships with men, she was no longer chasing fleeting romance or one-night excitement. Instead, she began carefully evaluating the men around her and openly discussing marriage with suitable matches.
At work, she stopped coasting through tasks to satisfy her boss and began paying careful attention to detail, seriously upgrading her professional skills — even though her income was already quite good at the time.
She even started turning down vacation invitations, saying: “Sorry, but I’d rather put that money toward a home in Shanghai for myself. Once the big things are sorted, we’ll travel together.”
Now, years later, the woman who wrote to me is still the same picture-perfect carefree girl — but without assets, without property, without a partner to care for her.
And her friend? She owns a compact apartment in a new Shanghai development district on her own. She sits at the core of a long-established foreign tech company. Her husband’s family background includes a vice president of one of Shanghai’s major hospitals.
The gap is vast — visible to the naked eye.
What struck me as strange, though, was a particular passage in this woman’s message: “I had a deep conversation with her not long ago and found out that she had been quietly following you for four years. She even had you do a full destiny reading (命理) for her. That’s when everything in her life became so clear and purposeful — and so profitable. Honestly? I really resent you for existing. You gave her such a head start over me!!!!”
Well — since she brought it up — I want to use this article to talk to her, and to all of you, about what to do when anxiety takes over.
First: be honest with yourself about what you’re actually feeling — is it anxiety, or is it just impatience?
Most people are anxious because they want to see results too quickly, without wanting to pay the corresponding price.
The truth is, almost every problem in life — no matter how hard or complex — ultimately comes down to one formula: know your direction + commit consistently. That’s it.
I often receive rambling, half-formed messages in my comment section — the kind of thing only someone with poor communication skills and shallow thinking would write. They say things like: “Master! My friend makes so much money livestreaming! Can you teach me how to do it?!” Or: “Master! My old coworker got rich off crypto! Can I do that too?!”
They see only the outcome. They never see what went into it.
That livestreaming friend probably spent years laying groundwork — perfecting her delivery, developing her material, curating products, managing her emotional presence on screen — every detail polished to a fine edge before today’s success was even possible.
That coworker in crypto probably had a long-term strategy in place from the start. Even as a predator in that space, they built their persona, their story, their tools with meticulous care before reaping any reward.
Everything in this world can deceive you. Your hard-earned skills cannot.
Take my ability to evaluate real estate — just that one skill alone. I’ve personally inspected at least a thousand properties. Every single one. I researched each one thoroughly: city, location, floor plan, quality, year of construction, surrounding resources — annotated every detail. Over a thousand properties, and my notes alone run to over a hundred thousand Chinese characters. That process is what gave me the eye I have now — at minimum, I don’t step into traps.
That is what it means to respect hard skills and take professional mastery seriously.
Once you understand this, you’ll naturally straighten out your thinking and begin to build yourself up, one careful step at a time.
Remember: anxiety does nothing for you — except erode your mindset and waste your time and energy.
Second: anxiety is not entirely a bad thing.
It’s not just a sign that you’ve recognized a real gap and are warning yourself from within. If you use it correctly, it can become a relentless, powerful source of motivation.
When I was young, I got lucky a few times and made some small money. I thought I was extraordinary — dismissive of everyone, insufferably arrogant. Anxiety? Never heard of it.
But as I matured and saw more of the world, anxiety slowly began to take root. Because I started meeting truly remarkable people — people with talent, wisdom, and depth of experience that genuinely impressed me. That’s when I realized I had been a frog at the bottom of a well.
From that point on, anxiety became the driving force that pushes me forward — inch by inch, every single day.
Third: stop comparing yourself to others. Compare yourself only to who you were yesterday.
To the woman who wrote to me, I later replied: your friend’s success today — perhaps a small part of it was my contribution. But you know as well as I do that the reason she was able to marry into that kind of family, and undergo that kind of profound transformation, owes a great deal to her own foundation.
Her parents are senior figures in Shanghai’s medical community — well-known names in the field. The guidance and education they gave her throughout her life carried real weight.
You, on the other hand, come from a perfectly ordinary working-class family. The fact that you’ve achieved what you have is already remarkable.
It’s true: ice three feet thick is not frozen in a single night. Three generations of accumulated advantage cannot be closed in ten years.
How high others can climb is their business. If you see something worth learning, watch and learn from it.
But never put yourself in their shoes as a direct comparison. You have no idea how much their family foundation quietly lifted them. As long as you are genuinely working to improve yourself each day — that alone is already extraordinary.
Fourth: don’t sink into the depths of anxiety. Set yourself a plan, then climb out — one step at a time.
I want to turn a question back to the woman who wrote to me: you resent your friend so much — but have you actually decided to catch up?
Have you considered adjusting your approach to work, to be as serious and invested as she is?
Have you looked honestly at your social circle and started, like her, identifying the men truly worth spending a life with?
Have you taken the time you spend on leisure and travel, and redirected even some of it toward building a side income or making investments?
If, with all that resentment and envy, you still can’t bring yourself to make these changes — then I can only tell you: the gap between you two is entirely as it should be.
The life she built through enormous effort and discipline — to claim it should be equivalent to yours would be an insult to everyone who truly works hard.
I’ve seen many young people with unbalanced mindsets. They complain endlessly about the pressures of life and the unfairness of fate — and every complaint is heartfelt.
Yet they take no action whatsoever. They lie flat, let themselves go — and justify it all with righteous conviction.
The truth is, anxiety isn’t hard to defeat. Because anxiety is just a mountain built up from countless small problems.
To dismantle that mountain, you don’t need talent, brilliance, or cleverness. You need endurance and consistency.
If others learn something in one day, take two. If others solve something in one try, take three.
Once you actually get moving, you’ll find that the mountain of anxiety is still large — but it really is shrinking, little by little, until years later it disappears entirely.
And when I interpret someone’s destiny chart for them — did you think I was simply offering a few quick answers? Telling them at what age they’d get rich, get married, move into a bigger house — and then they could go home and watch dramas on the couch?
Of course not. What I gave that friend — and what I give to you — is a complete blueprint for building a life.
Where to navigate risk. What not to waste energy on. Where an opportunity absolutely must be seized. How to update and upgrade yourself, one step at a time.
That is the answer I give you: simple on the surface, complex in its depths. But follow it — and three years from now, you will regret that you didn’t wake up sooner and climb out of that abyss.
Finally: I don’t want to wish you an escape from anxiety. I want to wish you the strength to defeat it — to conquer it entirely.
Just dare to take that first step forward, and everything will slowly get better. I promise you that.