Living a Life Without a Utilitarian Mindset

I first realized this while thinking through 为什么我不能做自己的产品. Whenever my goals were tied to some utilitarian payoff, I’d get trapped in a constant tug-of-war between input and return. It was exhausting, and even left me doubting myself.

I decided to live a life free of that utilitarian mindset. That meant walking away from all those externally imposed, outcome-driven motives—money, fame, status, and other people’s expectations. Doing things purely for the payoff tends to come with two distinct traits:

1. The goal is either not pure enough, or far too pure. For me, when I can’t tell the difference between what I actually want to do and what I rationally think I ought to do, it drives up both the cost of deciding and the friction of acting.
2. You’re constantly calculating “return on investment.” When short-term returns don’t show up, giving up is all too easy.

I’m someone who overthinks everything and executes poorly. Setting a firm principle eliminates an overwhelming number of choices. It cuts down on pointless daydreaming and helps me focus much more effectively on execution.

With that principle in place, a lot of things I used to agonize over stopped being problems:

• Only build products that solve real problems and that I’ll personally use over the long haul.
• Only write about topics I genuinely want to explore and questions I’m currently wrestling with. Publish them on my blog, not on social media feeds.
• Read purely for recreation, rather than dressing it up as “growth” or “learning.” The difference really just comes down to shifting tastes and appetites—you simply become more discerning about the text.
• And being a content creator is no longer a must. It just comes down to whether I can express myself publicly and communicate well.

Putting this principle into practice actually brought an unexpected bonus. During the first half of the year at work, I felt resentful about taking on a pile of extra responsibilities without any pay increase. My go-to response was passive resistance—deliberately slacking off. But that only brought a fleeting rush, followed by long-term emptiness. Once I set that mindset aside, I started proactively discussing problems, researching solutions, and shipping them into production. That brought far more genuine satisfaction.

Recently, I happened to read an essay by Li Xiaolai, a Chinese writer and entrepreneur. After reading two million words across 213 hours in 106 days, he reflected on the utilitarian mindset:

What’s far more understated, yet genuinely indispensable, is that I have no utilitarian mindset whatsoever. I truly don’t read for so-called “self-improvement.” Progress is great, of course, and gaining something can’t help but make you happy. But simply “having good content to read” is already happiness enough in itself—I ask for nothing more. I seem to have been this way ever since I was a kid—and ironically, that’s why I’ve gained the most in return.

In reality, a utilitarian mindset is the most physically draining thing there is… That’s a conclusion recent neuroscience research has repeatedly confirmed. Utilitarian reading forces the brain to constantly calculate whether “return minus investment is greater than zero”—and that kind of judgment burns serious energy…

So living a life without a utilitarian mindset—grounded in interest, curiosity, and personal values, out of a genuine love for life—is probably the single most important reason of all.