Life is meaningless, the things you love are a con, and anger takes strength

Three sentences that sound like defeat, put next to each other, turn out to be a working worldview: uncover the floor, call the furniture a forgery, then admit you cannot lift it. Six thoughts at night, with a short film in the Chinese version.

Essay Nov 4, 2026 6 min LB 中文

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In one line: meaninglessness is not bad news, and neither is the con. What has to be budgeted is strength — anger is physical work, and there is less of it every year.

1. Uncover the floor first#

Figure 1 — one bulb over one pile of beans at a night market, everything else left in the dark — tap to enlarge

Life has no meaning, and it arrived by accident. Saying that out loud is no longer rude; ten years ago it would have annoyed me, as if the speaker were looking down from a height with a cigarette in hand.

I have since decided that meaninglessness is just the ground colour. You buy a pound of beans at the market; the beans have no meaning either, they simply happened to grow there and happened to be bagged by you. People are not much nobler than beans. The difference is that beans do not think about this at three in the morning.

Most people hear “life has no meaning” as bad news because the next thing they do is find a meaning to fill it in with. That is a risky repair. A meaning is a house you build yourself: the fuller you pack it, the harder it falls. Someone moves everything they own into “I will make something of myself”, and one day at forty the floor gives and they drop from the second storey to the first. Whoever admitted there was no meaning was already living on the ground floor and has nothing to fall out of. So the useful part of the sentence is about living conditions.

2. “A con” is a compliment#

Figure 2 — a bowl of noodles steaming under a lamp; the sauce is not the noodles, but without it the noodles eat dry — tap to enlarge

If the ground colour is empty, what are literature, painting and music? I once heard a rather unkind answer: all cons.

At first it sounded harsh. Then it sounded accurate. None of them supplies meaning, answers, or rescue. They do something else: they make a stretch of time that has no purpose somewhat easier to sit through. They are the spoonful of sauce on the noodles. The sauce is not the noodles, and you can eat without it, but you eat dry.

The problem is not art. It is our order form. People eat, and food supplies no meaning either, yet nobody calls food a con, because we ask little of it: hot, salty, filling is enough. With literature and music we suddenly ask it to carry the soul, the sublime, “the last redoubt of the human spirit”. Of course it cannot carry that. It gives way, and a thing that gives way under too heavy an order looks exactly like a con. So “con” describes our greed, not their nature.

Figure 3 — scenery past a coach window: it does not get you to the stop, but it makes you think about jumping off less often — tap to enlarge

I prefer a plainer word for it: pastime. Life is a long coach with no terminus, and these things are the scenery outside the window. Scenery does not deliver you anywhere, but it makes you think about jumping off less often. Call that self-comfort if you like. Self-comfort is a basic skill, like tying your shoelaces.

3. Anger is physical work#

Figure 4 — half a glass of water on a balcony rail: after the anger you drink, sit down, stand on the balcony a while — tap to enlarge

Now anger. This is the part I only admitted to in recent years: anger costs strength.

In my twenties I had more strength than I knew what to do with. One unpleasant sentence could keep me up to midnight, rearranging what the other person said, finding the most poisonous half, drafting a reply, being satisfied with the reply, then falling asleep. Anger was tap water. You turned it on. Nobody sent a bill.

Then it started rising in price. At forty I still got angry, but afterwards I needed water, a chair, and a few minutes standing on the balcony. Later still, halfway through being angry I would lose focus: after this anger, will I sleep tonight, will I get up tomorrow? Anger became a consumable, one use fewer each time, and I began choosing my targets.

I have done the arithmetic. A decent anger will take, roughly, the sleep that night, the appetite for that meal, and the attention left in that half-day. In your twenties the sum is invisible. After forty it is legible: you spend the anger and a whole day is gone, with nothing added to show for it.

Which is why some older people, when they do lose their temper, look gentler than the young. Usually it is a budget.

4. Anger alone is childish#

For a while I refused this one; it sounded like advice to give up.

Then I noticed it says something else: anger is a response, not a capacity. It tells people what you refuse; it says nothing about what you can do. Being angry when someone steps on your foot is not a skill. Dogs have it. The hard part is the thing that goes beside the anger — you can write, or draw, or build, or count, or organise, or wait. Something you can put on the table next to the anger.

With that thing beside it, anger starts to be interesting. It goes from “I disagree” to “I disagree, and here is the other thing I made”. The first is a sentence. The second is an object.

I have watched people who were incandescent in their twenties go quiet in middle age. Quiet comes in two kinds: one has thought it through, the other could not think of a way. From the outside they are identical, both sitting with a cup and saying nothing. Only they know which one they are.

5. Only anger left is ugly#

Figure 5 — one window in a locked room, an empty yard outside, and the same knocking every day — tap to enlarge

The ugliest position is having nothing left but anger.

When you cannot do anything else, anger becomes the only proof that you are still here. The comedy of that position is that it knows it is useless and has no other exit. A man locked in a room with a single window, an empty yard outside, and he still goes to the window every day and knocks, loudly, for nobody.

Stay there long enough and it deforms. Anger becomes a career. “I care” gets written down as “I did”. Refusing to learn anything new gets relabelled as having a backbone. It is a very cheap self-respect: cost zero, revenue is being moved by yourself.

If anger solved problems, the loudest man in town would be the mayor.

6. The time that is left#

Laid out end to end, these sentences read like advice from someone who has been at it a while: do not wait for meaning to fall from the sky, do not expect your hobbies to save you, do not expect anger to change anything. What is left is time, so find one thing you can do, finish it, and go to sleep.

If there is a regret, it is that strength is the one thing that will not negotiate. Spend it all on anger while you are young, and by the time you understand which work mattered, what remains is enough for a short anger and no more.

These sentences began as a remark by Chen Danqing. I only carried them further. Thank you.