You’re exhausted, aren’t you? All that hustling, goal-setting, and relentless self-improvement, yet somehow you still feel like you’re running on a treadmill going nowhere. What if I told you the ancient Taoists figured this out thousands of years ago? They watched people exhaust themselves chasing success, happiness, and perfection, and they said something radical: stop trying.
Sounds counterintuitive, right? We live in a world obsessed with optimization. Five-step morning routines, productivity hacks, life-changing courses. But Lao Tzu put it simply: “Those who rush ahead don’t get very far.” The more we force things, the more we struggle. The more we try to control life, the more it slips through our fingers.
The Problem With Trying Too Hard
Let me explain what I mean by this. When you’re constantly trying to improve, you’re actually working against the natural flow of life. The Taoists called this swimming upstream. You’re putting in maximum effort for minimal results, and worse, you’re making yourself miserable in the process.
We create these elaborate systems to understand the world. We categorize everything into good and bad, success and failure, beautiful and ugly. But in doing so, we lose sight of reality itself. Lao Tzu wrote that “five colors blind the eye, five notes deafen the ear.” By organizing everything into neat little boxes, we limit our actual experience of life.
You see this everywhere. We make endless rules to feel in control. We build moral codes and social expectations that become prisons. Sure, the intentions are good, but we end up conforming to artificial standards that have nothing to do with who we naturally are.
Where We Go Wrong
Let me share three ways we waste our energy trying when we should be flowing.
First, we try to fix everything. You know those people who think they need to save the world? They often create more problems than they solve. History’s full of ideologies that started with noble intentions and ended in disaster. The communists wanted equality and brought brutality instead. When you try to force your vision of “good” onto others, you’re just using their flaws to showcase your moral superiority. The world isn’t broken in the way you think it is.
Second, we chase happiness like it’s a destination. You tell yourself you’ll be happy when you hit that income goal, when you get that promotion, when you finally achieve that thing. But you won’t be. You’ll just find a new goal to chase. We exhaust ourselves pursuing wealth, status, and recognition, never realizing that the pursuit itself is what’s making us unhappy. You’re treating your body and mind like machines that need constant upgrades, when really, you just need to be present.
Third, we try to be someone else. Everyone’s comparing themselves to some impossible standard. You want different skin, different hair, different talents. The centipede envies the snake, the snake envies the wind, and the wind has its own limitations. Nature made you exactly as you are for a reason. When you try to change that, you create imbalance.
The Art of Not Trying
So what’s the alternative? The Taoists call it wu wei, which means “effortless action” or “non-doing.” It’s not about being lazy or passive. It’s about moving with life instead of against it.
“Do you want to rule the world and control it? I don’t think it can ever be done. You will only make it worse if you try.”
Take the middle path. Don’t stretch yourself beyond your natural capacity. Stay centered. Conserve your energy. Stop adding more knowledge, more beliefs, more rules to your life. Instead, unlearn something every day. Let go of the rigid ideas you’ve built up about how things should be.
When you stop trying to force outcomes, something magical happens. You reach a state of inner stillness. The Taoists called this “fasting of the heart.” It’s emptying yourself of all those shoulds and musts until you feel genuine contentment. Not the temporary pleasure of achieving a goal, but real, lasting peace.
Your Move
Problems often solve themselves when you stop meddling. The universe has its own rhythm, and when you align with it instead of fighting it, life becomes so much easier. You don’t need another course or framework or productivity system. You need to do less, try less, force less.
Stop exhausting yourself. Stop trying to be someone you’re not. Stop thinking you need to fix the world or chase the next achievement to finally be happy.
Just be. Let life flow. You might be surprised by what happens when you finally stop trying so hard.
If this post sparked a thought, shifted your mindset, or gave you something meaningful — don’t let it end here.
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