Why Hank Green Understands Wuwei Better Than 99% of People
Effortlessness is Earned
When I was a chudlet academic weapon, scholastically mogging my peers hither and thither, I had the misfortune of coming across a little diddy called wu wei1.
I was fascinated, and gobbled the lore like peepaw at the all-you-can-eat poom-poom buffet. The usefulness of a useless tree. The ferryman of Goblet Deeps. My absolute goat the dextrous Butcher Ding2.
Little did I know, this little maneuver would become Baby’s First Spiritual Bypass™3, and take decades to unravel.
Here’s the issue: I was identifying with effortlessness. Butcher Ding carved his oxen the way I sliced through my exams; his knife became a pencil in my hands, both of us masters in the Way Of Sharpness—he was “literally me”.
But I was no master. I was 14, riding on the coattails of fortunate karma, mistaking the fruits of my life for something I’d earned. It would take years before realizing that wu wei didn’t come for free, and that the pursuit of it can lead to deep self-knowledge.
In the intro to the video that inspired this essay, Tekson Teo cuts like I’ve rarely seen:
Effortlessness is a result. Descriptions of wu wei describe what it looks like from the outside; they don’t explain what makes it possible.
This is the simple truth behind the ease of ballerinas; we see the ease, we do not see the grueling hours of study and practice upon which the ease dances.
Put differently, ballerinas don’t become ballerinas by “just”… moving gracefully. Moving gracefully is a byproduct of a process of cultivation. It is earned. Same with the swordsman’s cleave and the sage’s peaceful gaze. You understand this already.
Unfortunately, I missed this crucial memo while reading about wu wei. My “effortlessness” in early life was less earned than it was bestowed by disposition and educated parents4.
I had much in common with people who smoke too much weed and color block their cookie monster snapbacks with cookie monster pajama pants; we both loved to read about wu wei because a brainlet understanding of it permisses laziness and shitty lifestyle choices.
My mistake was natural, though it ran deep.
Even the subtext of my very first Substack post was “How can I get a more effortless life?”. I was still grasping for ease on some level.
However,
The ballerina does not cultivate effortlessness by saying “okay, today i will wuwei all up on my shit, i will do nothing, i will take no action, any action i do take will be the easiest most effortless one, like the great masters”.
No.
The ballerina eats a stalk of celery, throws it up, goes to class, mutilates her precious precious feet, teacher screams at her til he goes tomato mode, she tears her muscles over and over, she screams, she cries, she sacrifices everything else and at the end of all that, effortlessness comes out.
It begs the question: if you can’t get effortlessness by trying to mimic effortlessness, then how do you get it??
The answer is clear: you earn effortlessness with a shitload of effort.
Sorry habibi. Believe me I’ve tried to find another way. But it’s not all bad news. In fact, if you decide to chase after effortlessness, you’ll find your life transformed.
Here’s exactly how and why:
No Effort is Wasted
In a recent video, Hank came dangerously close to saying the based part out loud:
No effort is wasted.
He drew a parallel to a sunfish ejaculating hundreds of millions of eggs out into the ocean, but with only a dozen or so ever reaching adulthood.
The sunfish cannot get away with laying a dozen eggs; statistically speaking, none of them would survive.
The sunfish MUST squirt 300 million of them thangs to get just a handful of survivors5.
The effort clearly seems overblown; yet none of it is wasted.
Life is the same. Every single drop of your sincere effort counts. Even if it feels like it doesnt.
However, not all effort is created equal. Spending 30 minutes playing songs you already know on guitar is very different from spending 30 minutes learning a new one.
The effort that stretches, expands, frustrates, and pushes boundaries into new territory. That’s the flavor of effort that always counts, no matter what, even if “results” don’t blossom from it.
“Your life is not about getting a f*cking task done. It is about building a you.”
To recap:
Effortlessness is earned.. by spending effort
No effort is wasted—but be careful about what “effort” means
The winning flavor of effort stretches, expands, and frustrates
Don’t Aim at Effortlessness; Aim at Frustration
To earn wu wei, to get that sweet sweet graceful effortlessness, aim at frustration. When you’re doing something worth doing, do it until it gets frustrating, and then keep doing it. Do it until you brush up against a threshold and poke through the other side. Do it until you can do something you’ve never done before, until the things you know become second nature.
The felt-sense of cultivating effortlessness is frustration.
“But C-Cuckfucius you friggin b-baka that sounds hard.. I’m more into like lovin myself and shiii”
How can you love yourself if you don’t know yourself? If you don’t invite yourself? How can you love yourself if, when a part of you comes around, you do everything you can to shut the door in its face?
Invite it. Greet it like your greatest ally and benefactor. It is Building you, it is part of you, it is welcome and beautiful.
Don’t be a masochist. Celebrate joy when she blesses you with a visit.
But if you wish to expand, seek out the edges, seek out frustration, then make friends and walk together with it.
Genuinely, try to arrive here, and then celebrate when you do because you’ll know you’re on the right track:
And when I say “Building you” I mean in a very literal sense.
The you that exists as a narrative of distinct memories in your head grows when new memories are formed. The brain encodes memories more deeply during heights of emotional intensity, with a bias toward “negative” emotion. But it’s a double whammy—every time you seek frustration through learning, you are not only adding a deep memory to your sense of self; you are adding a deep memory during a moment of learning. Forming a deeper memory during learning ====== learning better.
This thesis on effort is why I sometimes do things like write for 9 hours a day or try to speedrun kundalini psychosis or learn how to recite Temperature by Sean Paul at tempo with no mistakes.
Sometimes, it’s for “results”. But more and more, I just want to meet the frustration, invite it in, and make friends with it. See if there are any other parts of me out on the edges that need a little love~
So if you ever come across a little diddy called wu wei, don’t be fooled. If you see a video of sadhguru and think “damn, I want the inner peace he has”, just remember that effortlessness is the result. The way, for better or worse, is filled with frustration. But walking it, you will meet yourself.
Along all these lines, I am loving the videos from this creator6. One embodied example will help it click really well:
Thank you for reading as always, may your wussy be wei’d and your road to Tenlightenment short and swift (＠＾◡＾)
-C
P.S. you may be interested in this recent experiment where I wrote for 9 hours a day:
P.P.S. or this one about speedrunning kundalini psychosis (yes really):
P.P.P.S. i’m gonna be in Nepal for July, hmu if you’ll be there also~!
Cook Ding was cutting up an ox for Lord Wenhui. As every touch of his hand, every heave of his shoulder, every move of his feet, every thrust of his knee — zip! zoop! He slithered the knife along with a zing, and all was in perfect rhythm, as though he were performing the dance of the Mulberry Grove or keeping time to the Jingshou music.
“Ah, this is marvelous!” said Lord Wenhui. “Imagine skill reaching such heights!”
Cook Ding laid down his knife and replied, “What I care about is the Way, which goes beyond skill. When I first began cutting up oxen, all I could see was the ox itself. After three years I no longer saw the whole ox. And now — now I go at it by spirit and don’t look with my eyes. Perception and understanding have come to a stop and spirit moves where it wants. I go along with the natural makeup, strike in the big hollows, guide the knife through the big openings, and following things as they are. So I never touch the smallest ligament or tendon, much less a main joint.
“A good cook changes his knife once a year — because he cuts. A mediocre cook changes his knife once a month — because he hacks. I’ve had this knife of mine for nineteen years and I’ve cut up thousands of oxen with it, and yet the blade is as good as though it had just come from the grindstone. There are spaces between the joints, and the blade of the knife has really no thickness. If you insert what has no thickness into such spaces, then there’s plenty of room — more than enough for the blade to play about it. That’s why after nineteen years the blade of my knife is still as good as when it first came from the grindstone.
“However, whenever I come to a complicated place, I size up the difficulties, tell myself to watch out and be careful, keep my eyes on what I’m doing, work very slowly, and move the knife with the greatest subtlety, until — flop! the whole thing comes apart like a clod of earth crumbling to the ground. I stand there holding the knife and look all around me, completely satisfied and reluctant to move on, and then I wipe off the knife and put it away.”
“Excellent!” said Lord Wenhui. “I have heard the words of Cook Ding and learned how to care for life!”
Spiritual bypassing is the tendency to use spiritual ideas, beliefs, or practices to avoid confronting or processing painful emotions, psychological wounds, and everyday human realities
not to mention one workaholic parent with an immigrant background. having good parents instilled a sense of curiosity & support early on, which snowballed into not having to work too hard most of school. monkey paw curls
it is only now striking me that humans also shoot 100 billion of them thangs to get our offspring goin, interesting
as an homage to him, i took a page outta his book and wrote this essay in a single 9 hour block while fasting. though of course the thoughts have been percolating for a while. whatever you probably won’t even see this and if you do i bet you won’t even comment about it, b-baka (⇀‸↼‶)
I'm gonna be in Nepal in July, if anyone's there holla at me!
my bull friend, i agree with your overall message here. i’ve learned driving a stick, drifting a car, programming, competitive fps games, etc and def in everything that i did that looked “effortless” definitely had a shit ton of effort and pain and suffering needed to get to that point. I do not dispute that.
when I think of wu-wei, i think about it differently though . instead, my experience of actually dissolving my nicotine addiction seemed through wu-wei. when I tried to fight it using willpower and effort, i was never able to quit it. In fact, the harder I tried and the more effortful I put, the more it seemed to not work. I was just fighting myself. Perhaps it was still useful and valuable for me to try so hard until I would realize I can’t do it through effort alone.
At a certain point, I let myself smoke. and the dissatisfaction of it, the not really needing it, and the disgust of it started to creep in (as well as seeing through the root of my cravings and psychological needs was also necessary). what dissolved my addiction was not effort but giving up effort. it was the lack of effort so that awareness can cut through where otherwise the mind would get in the way of the seeing.
today I do not have any effort to not smoke. I am just as indifferent to it as watching a particular color of paint dry. Could be fun or not, but there is no need to do it or not do it - I just don’t care.
imo, anyone who dissolved their addiction without effort really gets wu wei experientially. Many many who did AA have done it too and they attribute it to god’s grace (that’s how it felt to me as well). Like swimming with the flow - of course it’s effortless.