The Chaos Who Died from Kindness

We live in a world obsessed with optimization. We track our steps, our sleep, our calories. We use apps to manage our time and our habits. We feel a deep-seated urge to fix, improve, and systematize everything, including ourselves. We believe that with enough data and effort, we can engineer a perfect life, smoothing out all the messy, unpredictable parts of being human.

The Zhuangzi tells a strange myth about this. The ruler of the South was named Shu (Sudden). The ruler of the North was named Hu (Abrupt). They often met in the land of the central ruler, Hundun (Chaos). Chaos was incredibly kind and treated them with great hospitality. Wanting to repay his kindness, Shu and Hu said to each other, “All men have seven holes to see, hear, eat, and breathe. He alone has none. Let’s try drilling some for him.” So, every day they bored one hole. On the seventh day, Chaos died.

This fable comes from the Zhuangzi, from the Warring States period (c. 475–221 BCE).

Our desire to help, to improve, to make things “better” can be a violent impulse in disguise. We try to drill holes into the beautiful, functional chaos of our own nature, believing we are helping. The Daoists valued the uncarved block, the state of 朴 (pǔ) — a natural simplicity that is complete and perfect in itself, before we start carving it into something we think it should be.

What part of your natural chaos are you trying to fix — and what might you be losing in the process?