Survival, Competition, and Freedom

Most people have fantasized about one particular scenario: what would I do once I achieve financial freedom?

Some imagine wine and revelry, some want to read in peace, some want to take on a project they’ve long set aside, some would simply keep doing what they’re already doing, and some choose to teach. The answers are all over the map, but I want to push this question one layer deeper.

A Framework of Three Stages

Financial freedom is a concrete phenomenon, and its essence is a state in which both body and mind are free, after you have escaped survival pressure and exited social competition.

In Just For Fun, Linus Torvalds said that the things people do go through three stages: for survival, for social standing, and for fun. These three stages correspond to three circumstances—survival, competition, and freedom.

In other words, the things a person chooses to do in a state of freedom are essentially an expression of the need for entertainment—and what a person chooses to entertain themselves with is precisely a projection of their true values, answering most directly the question of “what do you actually want to do, and who do you actually want to become.”

By no coincidence, more than a century ago, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche described three metamorphoses of the spirit: the camel, the lion, and the child.

The camel kneels down, waits to be loaded with the heaviest burden, and then carries it into the desert. Its motto is “Thou shalt”—shouldering its mission in meek submission. This is exactly the metaphor for the survival stage: there is no need to question meaning, only to endure.

The lion must slay the dragon named “Thou shalt” out in the desert. Its slogan becomes “I will”—seizing freedom back for itself, breaking loose from the established order of values. But Nietzsche pointed out deliberately that the lion can only destroy the old; it cannot create the new. This aligns startlingly with the logic of the competition stage: you fight fiercely on the track, proving you are stronger than others, but the track you run is still one drawn by someone else.

The child is innocence, forgetting, a new beginning, a wheel turning on its own, a sacred yes. The child is merely at play, yet it can bring forth new values out of nothing. This corresponds exactly to what Linus called “for fun”—the hardest thing in the freedom stage is not having money or having leisure, but being able to play once again like a child.

How Goals Are Generated

From the individual’s perspective, each of these three stages has its own way of generating goals.

In the survival stage, goals are outsourced to physiological instinct. When you’re hungry you must eat, when you’re cold you must clothe yourself; your body decides your next move for you. A young graduate burdened with rent and credit-card debt needs no one to tell them what to do—the bills will figure it out for them. During the three years of natural disasters, no one agonized over the meaning of life; in an era of fleeing famine, no one discussed self-actualization. Survival pressure is the most powerful goal generator: crude, clear, and beyond dispute.

In the competition stage, goals are outsourced to the rivals on the same track. You think you’re struggling for yourself, but in fact you’re only responding to a coordinate system set by others. A student at Hengshui doesn’t need to wonder “why am I studying”; the entire environment speaks with a single voice: move your ranking up one more spot. A young employee at a big tech firm doesn’t need to wonder “what is my life’s goal”; the 361 performance rating will define excellence and elimination for them. Phone makers are even more so: if a competitor has a 100-megapixel camera, you have to go to 200; if a competitor charges in 30 minutes, you have to do it in 15. The spec sheet is the track, and benchmark scores are the referee.

The community you belong to will automatically generate a set of benchmarks. In China, the priority is “higher, bigger, more,” and after that “more economical, faster, younger.” From showing off your kids on WeChat Moments and the silent salary contest at a class reunion, to a city’s GDP ranking and the corporate market-cap race, it’s all essentially the same thing: measuring your own life by someone else’s scale. The root of many a chain of contempt lies precisely here.

These two stages share one comfort: the goal is clear, and the direction is given.

The Wilderness of the Freedom Stage

Yet when a person truly enters the freedom stage, they face an open wilderness instead. There is no instinct urging them on, no rival ahead; the goal must be set by oneself.

There are two possible endings in the wilderness. One kind of person gets lost in a place with no coordinate system; another walks with unshakable certainty because they carry their own compass. The two figures below are the most telling case studies.

Charles Zhang: A Wilderness Without Values

Charles Zhang is one of the most dazzling names among China’s first generation of internet entrepreneurs.

He graduated from Tsinghua’s physics department in 1986, earned his PhD from MIT in 1993, returned to China in 1995 with his first round of venture capital, and founded Itansoft (the predecessor of Sohu) in 1996. Sohu was formally established in 1998 and went public on Nasdaq in July 2000. At 35, he appeared on Time magazine’s list of “global technology leaders,” alongside Bezos and Page.

It was an era of high spirits. He climbed to Everest Base Camp, dove the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, appeared frequently across entertainment headlines, and was called “China’s first generation of celebrity entrepreneurs.”

Then, around 2011, everything began to collapse.

By his own repeatedly told account—insomnia, anxiety, something near depression. He couldn’t work, couldn’t hold a normal conversation, often sat up in bed staring into space until dawn. He described that period: “I had everything; I could buy whatever I wanted, but I was just in unbearable pain, pain enough to make me want to kill myself, except I was afraid of the hurt.”

What followed was nearly two years of seclusion. He moved between New York, India, and Shenzhen, shutting himself away. He read Buddhist scriptures, practiced vipassana, studied Tibetan Buddhism, tried all sorts of counseling, and studied neuroscience. At one point he threw himself into meditation, at another he was fascinated by neuroimaging, but none of it solved the problem.

What ultimately pulled him out of the mire was cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). The core insight he summarized afterward is simple but extremely important:

The human brain is a super computing and association machine. Starting from any tiny negative signal, it will automatically associate, amplify, and generalize, then drag you into an infinite loop of an abyss of pain. You must have a set of values to manage it, or the brain will turn around and devour you.

This is precisely confirmation of the proposition that “in the freedom stage you must generate your own goals.”

In the survival stage (studying abroad, returning to start a company) and the competition stage (wrestling with Sina, NetEase, and Tencent), Charles Zhang was never lost—the goals were given, the coordinate system clear. But once Sohu had gone public, the company had stabilized, and his personal finances were fully free, the entire external coordinate system was removed, and with no new internal anchor to take its place, the surplus computing power began to turn on itself.

After his comeback he did several very interesting things. He kept to 5 hours of sleep a day plus an extremely regular routine; starting in 2021 he livestreamed physics classes on Sohu Video, teaching from the most basic mechanics all the way to special relativity, and by now has given several hundred sessions; he ran English-corner livestreams; and he kept up long-distance running.

The common feature of these things is that none of them come from an external benchmark. The physics classes don’t make Sohu’s stock price rise; running doesn’t make him more “successful.” But they are all things he chose for himself, things that let him settle down. In effect, in his fifties, he relearned from scratch “how to walk in a wilderness where no one tells you the direction.”

He is a cautionary case, and also an expensive living textbook: financial freedom does not automatically become spiritual freedom. If values have not been established, freedom can torment you even more than survival and competition do.

Elon Musk: Values Are the Engine

If Charles Zhang is the counterexample of “losing one’s anchor after freedom,” then Musk is the positive example of “values anchored deep enough to ride out even hell.”

His financial freedom actually came very early. In February 1999, Zip2 was sold to Compaq, and his personal share was about $22 million; in October 2002, PayPal was sold to eBay, and he netted about$180 million after tax. At 28 he could have retired and done anything he wanted.

If he had followed Charles Zhang’s script, he could perfectly well have bought an island, gone skiing, written an autobiography, become an angel investor, and then fallen into a crisis of meaning. But he didn’t.

Within just a few months of the PayPal sale, he poured the vast majority of his cash into two new companies: SpaceX (May 2002) and Tesla (joining as the largest investor in February 2004). Neither was about making money—one was about making humanity a multi-planetary species, the other about pulling the entire world out of fossil fuels.

The Hell of 2008

And 2008 was the darkest year of his life.

In chronological order:

• March 2006 — The first launch of Falcon 1; 41 seconds after liftoff, a fuel line leaked and caught fire
• March 2007 — The second launch of Falcon 1; second-stage fuel slosh spun out of control
• August 2008 — The third launch of Falcon 1; during stage separation the stages collided—three failures in a row
• At the same time, the Tesla Roadster ran severely over budget, the financial crisis hit, and the company didn’t have enough cash on the books to make it through year-end
• That same year, divorce negotiations with his first wife, Justine, turned into an open feud with all correspondence made public
• His personal cash was nearly drained dry by the two companies. He later admitted in interviews that during this time he borrowed money from friends (including Larry Page) to pay his rent
• SpaceX had money left for one last rocket, and Tesla had a window left for one last round of financing

Nearly everyone around him urged him to pick one of the two: save SpaceX and give up Tesla, or save Tesla and give up SpaceX. His reply later became widely known:

“It’s like having two kids on the verge of starving to death; I just couldn’t bring myself to abandon either one.”

So he did something that looked nearly insane to outsiders—taking his last roughly $40 million, he split it evenly between the two companies and went all in.

Two Miraculous Moments

On September 28, 2008, SpaceX put Falcon 1 on the launch pad for the fourth time. This time it succeeded. It was the first vehicle in history to send a payload into Earth orbit on a liquid-fueled rocket built by a private company.

On December 23, 2008, within a few hours on Christmas Eve, two things happened at once: NASA announced it was awarding SpaceX a $1.6 billion ISS resupply contract (COTS); and Tesla secured the life-saving final round of financing, with just enough money on hand to make it through the weekend.

He later said himself, “If that day had come even a few hours later, both companies would have died.”

Why He Dared to Go All In

Because his goals did not come from an external coordinate system.

SpaceX was not about “beating” Boeing and Lockheed Martin in the aerospace industry (even though, as it turned out, it did), and Tesla was not about “surpassing” Toyota in the auto industry (even though, by market cap, it did in 2020). He had been thinking about these two goals back when he was in college in the 1990s—what problems would humanity face in the future, and was there a way to nudge them forward within his own lifetime.

Making humanity a multi-planetary species, and accelerating the transition to sustainable energy—these two values were the compass he carried on his back from the competition stage and brought with him into the freedom stage.

Precisely because the compass came from within, no matter how chaotic the external environment got, he would not lose his way. He didn’t lose his way when Falcon 1 blew up three times in a row, he didn’t lose his way during the divorce and borrowing money to pay rent, and he didn’t lose his way when all of Wall Street was shorting him.

This is what freedom with values looks like: everyone outside says you’re crazy, but you yourself know exactly what you’re doing.

Comparison and Conclusion

Placing the two stories side by side, you see a particularly clear contrast.

Both of these men are case studies of supreme intelligence and top-tier ability; the difference lies in just one place: whether, upon entering the freedom stage, they held a compass of their own.

Financial freedom does not automatically become spiritual freedom. After you escape survival pressure and exit competition, the first thing exposed is not a material problem, but the fundamental question—“who exactly are you, and what exactly do you want”—that could otherwise have stayed forever drowned out by external noise.

Freedom without values is a painful prison; freedom with values is the most powerful engine.

Taste and values are the only compass in the wilderness. This is not something to start thinking about only on the day freedom arrives—it’s best to begin brewing it in the survival stage, keep calibrating it in the competition stage, so that when you truly reach the wilderness, you won’t be devoured by your own brain.

References

• Linus Torvalds, David Diamond. Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary. HarperBusiness, 2001.
• Friedrich Nietzsche. Also sprach Zarathustra. E. W. Fritzsch, Leipzig, 1883.
• Charles Zhang: It Took Me Five Years to Climb Out of Depression. Sohu Finance interview, 2017.
• Walter Isaacson. Elon Musk. Simon & Schuster, 2023.
• Falcon 1 Flight 4 — Mission Press Kit. SpaceX, 2008. www.spacex.com/static/images/press/Falcon%201%20Flight%204%20Press%20Kit.pdf
• NASA Awards Space Station Commercial Resupply Services Contracts. NASA Press Release C08-069, 2008. www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-awards-space-station-commercial-resupply-services-contracts/