Why are so many smart people in China struggling at the bottom their entire lives?

Cleverness means high sensitivity, without emotional resilience.
Why can ordinary American citizens legally own guns, but body armor is explicitly banned?
In ancient China, every household could own cold weapons, but anyone who dared to privately possess armor would be beheaded.
An old saying on the ancient battlefield goes: "Swords can kill people, but armor can break their spirit." I didn't quite understand how these bulky defensive gear could have such a huge effect, making rulers across time and cultures so afraid.
Until a friend who loves gaming gave me an example: he said in games, full-damage-output marksmen can never beat a full-tank warrior. When the five of you can't take down one opponent, aren't you most inclined to surrender?
In Jin Yong's novels, characters who rely on their wits—like Huang Rong and Wei Xiaobao—all invariably wear a bulletproof vest. Strong defense can quickly dismantle the enemy's combat effectiveness. The end of a battle is marked by one side completely losing the will to fight, and the easiest way to make the enemy lose that will is to make them feel you cannot be killed.
Why do so many smart people live at the very bottom their whole lives? The reason is simple: these people have an innate offensive talent—they can quickly grasp the essence of things and master the laws of how things work. But they often lack defensiveness. Their talent comes with high sensitivity, so they fear failure, fear that efforts will yield no results, and fear the judgment of others.
Boasting without action is the safest for them; armchair strategizing offers the best cost-benefit. So you'll find that today's bottom class is full of smart people who pontificate while eating plain food.
On the flip side, why do some people seem stupid but make a lot of money? Why do you seem smart but can't make money?
It's not stupid to start working as a bricklayer at 18 if you didn't get into college; it's stupid to join a mismatched company after graduation and coast along. It's not stupid to keep asking people questions; it's stupid to toil in silence without even knowing you've made a mistake. So why are smarter people more likely to do stupid things?
In fact, without mental stability, the smarter you are, the more mediocre you become. Forrest Gump was slow, but he never did stupid things.
Smart people often cannot maintain emotional resilience; they constantly try to gain insights from life and seek what benefits them.
My teacher is a professor at a prestigious Japanese university. He came to Japan to start a business earlier than I did. Being an economics PhD, he was very confident in himself, but his company lost money for ten years.
Later, after studying abroad, I also started a company in Japan. As a fearless rookie, I didn't know any economic principles, didn't overthink—just focused on making money and getting clients! My teacher was used to analyzing everything, constantly trying to find larger logic and principles in every trivial event around him.
Reading an article, he'd try to deconstruct the author's universal writing template; buying a green onion at the market, he'd try to find the bargaining logic of the vendor...
But having too many cognitive perspectives led my teacher to hold multiple, often incompatible or even contradictory, views on the same thing. Consequently, he couldn't figure out what was best or most correct. And this is a major reason for low execution—in other words, procrastination.
Successful "foolish" people are not bothered by changes in the world. Smart people have very poor tolerance for mistakes; any little flaw leads them to completely reject the whole thing.
Plans changed? Sorry, let's just call off the transaction. Especially smart people, who are more sensitive and quicker to spot problems, suffer even greater impact.
A well-known secret in the player community: actually, players aren't necessarily good-looking, or even handsome, or rich, or even smooth talkers. But they have one essential trait: the ability to recover from setbacks and take hits.
The essence of dating is a probability game. No matter how good you are, some people won't like you; no matter how bad you are, someone will love you just as you are. So you need to keep trial and error, and filtering.
In this process, if you are highly sensitive and fragile, you'll spend more time crying than dating in a year. After two failures, you'll lose confidence.
To build your own defense system, just remember one rule: never leave the table. That way, sooner or later you'll have a chance to win.
Sima Yi defeated Zhuge Liang and the entire Cao family not because he was smarter, but because he could endure longer than others. Messi became the greatest of all time because he could stand up again after repeated failures.
If you stretch the timeline long enough, you'll find that the ability to compress suffering and simplify pain is the primary factor in whether someone can achieve results. It's the armor that protects you when you face combat in this society, this giant arena. What to do specifically?
Selective ignorance, selective indifference, selective childishness—these are your invincible armor.
In fact, most of the pain in our lives is Schrödinger's cat. If you learn of it, it exists; if you don't, it doesn't.
A friend sent me a private message saying her ex-boyfriend is getting married and invited her. She was torn about whether to go. I thought, "Are you out of your mind?"
Let's imagine: you spend a gift money to eat a low-value meal, during which you'll have to watch your ex and his bride's every smile and gesture. Their wedding vows, VCR—every scene will be imprinted in your mind and become a source of future pain.
In other words, you spend money to buy endless pain. Is it worth it?
If you don't go, for you, who he marries, whether he's happy, whether the bride is pretty—these are all superposition states, with infinite possibilities. Remember, superposition states don't hurt you. Only when you go and the superposition collapses into a concrete, single image does that image hurt you.
The purpose of selective ignorance is to not care about the countless superposition states in life. The world is complicated, but ultimately it's your world.
So if it's outside your field of vision, it doesn't exist. It's like many medical students. A friend told me that in their first anatomy class, when the teacher carried a human cadaver to the dissection table like a piece of pork, many classmates couldn't hold it together before any cutting began—strong nausea and instinctive fear surged. Even less able to cut open the belly and separate everything neatly.
At first, they always felt the person lying in front of them was their own kind, even imagined what the person looked like alive—he was once someone's parent, someone's child. Every cut felt like cutting into themselves.
But after years of study and practice, now even not just cadavers, but a living patient lying in bed is like a car in the eyes of a mechanic, or a phone in the hands of a phone shop owner—just a bunch of parts.
The process of studying medicine is actually the gradual fading of empathy. Only by treating the person in front of you as a machine to be repaired can you truly remain calm, objective, rational, and save lives. If you can't get past this, you can't be a doctor.
So it's not hard to see that doctors in hospitals, when facing patients, remain expressionless and even indifferent no matter how emotional the family gets.
It's not that they have no feelings; once they empathize, it severely affects their subsequent judgment, and they can't cure you.
Police are also indifferent. It's like a suit of armor; the moment you put it on, you become a true warrior. Otherwise, you end up as a compassionate bystander, a passionate keyboard warrior.
If the above two keep life's blades from cutting you, then childishness can keep reality's bullets from even hitting you.
These days, everyone loves to use the term "moral blackmail." Actually, morality itself can't bind anyone. What binds you is the lofty persona you create for yourself. If you want to be a noble and virtuous saint, others will use high moral standards to blackmail and manipulate you. If you want to be a nice guy who gets along with everyone, others will naturally extort you using interpersonal relationships.
Remember, your persona is your weakness, your pursuit is your soft underbelly. The essence of selective childishness is to reject all external blackmail and constraints.
I admit I'm afraid of death, I admit I'm greedy, I admit I'm incompetent, I admit I can't do it.
Make yourself kind yet indifferent, lonely yet confident. Don't care about others' opinions.
As for what you say, that's your business. What does it have to do with me?
That's it. Protect your armor. Remember, remember. You will be invincible.