The Dao of Letting Go (or Not Trying) | Big Think

Wu wei is an early Chinese term that means literally no doing or no trying. But I think a better translation is effortless action. And it's the central spiritual ideal for these early thinkers I look at: the Confucians and the Daoists.

What it looks a little bit like is flow or being in the zone as an athlete. So you're very effective. You're moving through the world in a very efficient way—social world and physical world. But you don't have a sense of doing anything. You don't have a sense of effort. You don't have a sense of yourself as an agent. You kind of lose yourself in the activity you're involved in.

And you're not only efficacious in terms of skill in the world. You also have this power that the early Chinese call—unfortunately the Mandarin pronunciation is duh, which sounds kind of funny. But it's often translated as virtue. It means like charismatic power, charismatic virtue. It's this energy you kick off, an aura that you kick off when you're in a state of wu wei.

And this is why these early thinkers want wu wei because for both of them, the Confucians and the Daoists, it's the key to political and spiritual success. So if you're a Confucian, getting into a state of wu wei gives you this power, duh. And this allows you to attract followers without having to force them or try to get them to follow you. People just spontaneously want to follow you.

If you're a Daoist, it's what relaxes people, puts them at ease, and allows you to move through the social world effectively without harm. So everybody wants this because it’s very—it's the key to success. But they're all involved in this tension then of how do you try to be effortless? How do you try not to try?

So the first strategy is the early Confucian strategy, which I refer to as the carving and polishing strategy. This strategy essentially means you're gonna try really hard for a long time. If you do that, eventually the trying will fall away and you'll be spontaneous in the right way. You practice ritual, you engage in learning with fellow students, and eventually somehow, at some point, you make the transition from trying to having internalized these things you're learning and being able to embody them in an effortless way.

The second strategy, the uncarved block or going back to nature strategy, is the Daode jing or the primitivist Daoists. They essentially think the Confucian strategy is doomed. If you are trying to be virtuous, if you're trying to be a Confucian gentleman, you're never gonna be a Confucian gentleman. Anyone trying to be benevolent is never gonna actually be benevolent. They're just gonna be this hypocrite.

So their strategy is to undo all this learning that you've been taught. Get rid of culture, get rid of learning, and actually physically drop out of society. They want you to go live in the countryside in a small village. It looks a lot like kind of the 1960s hippie movement, you know. Back to nature and get rid of technology. Get rid of all the bad things that society has done to us.

There are good points to this strategy, too. One of the main insights I think of the Daoists, these early Daoists, is a way in which social values and social learning can corrupt our natural preferences. We're—body images in advertising teach women that they have to be anorexic if they're attractive. We're taught that we always need to have the latest iPhone.

So, you know, we have a perfectly good iPhone, but then we see the new iPhone, and suddenly our old iPhone isn't good anymore. There’s a lot of good literature on this in psychology on the hedonistic treadmill. We're never quite happy with what we have. As soon as we get it, we want the next thing. The Daode jing thinks Confucianism encourages that.

The solution to get off that hedonistic treadmill is to just stop, go back to nature, and be simple. So that's the uncarved box strategy. And probably which strategy is the best varies by the situation. It probably varies from situation to situation what your particular barrier to spontaneity is in the moment. And it also probably varies...