3. Escape the Rat Cage

3. Escape the Rat Cage

If the direction is right, success is only a matter of time. If the direction is wrong, no amount of effort will help. In this world there are two kinds of people: landlords and tenant farmers. What does a landlord look like? He wakes when he wakes, goes out to collect rent, picks up something tasty and something fun on the way home. A day passes easily, and his pockets are heavier than when it started. What does a tenant farmer look like? Before

dawn, at three or four in the morning, he has to climb out of bed and rush to the few acres of paddy to inspect the water and the rice shoots, exposed to wind and sun. The bulk of the year’s harvest goes to the landlord; what remains is enough only to keep him fed. The gap between these two kinds of people is not about who is more diligent — the tenant is far more diligent than the landlord — it is about where each stands in the economic structure. The way the tenant teaches his child is: “Come to the field with me and learn to farm, so that one day a landlord will be willing to hire you.” The way the landlord teaches his child is: “Study whatever you want; money isn’t the issue. The point is to serve society.” Between these two educations is not a few generations — it is an entire class. Thousands of years have passed. The names changed; the essence did not. Today’s “landlord” is called the capitalist; today’s “tenant farmer” is called the office worker. When today’s parents say “if you don’t study hard, you won’t get a good job,” that is, at its core, the same sentence the tenant father said two thousand years ago: “If you don’t learn to farm, no landlord will hire you.” Both are training the next generation of laborers. The capitalist’s every day is Sunday — do whatever you want. The office worker’s alarm rings every morning, and no matter how exhausted he is, he drags himself up to clock in. Rich people teach their kids: “Study whatever you want, do whatever you love. Our family doesn’t lack money — you can succeed at anything.” Poor people teach their kids: “Can painting put food on the table? Can a flute put food on the table? Study hard, get into a good school, find a good job.” The difference in educational philosophy is not because rich people are more enlightened — it is because they have standing. People without standing can only push their kids onto the next-generation laborer track. Let me here say plainly the sentence that is most easily misunderstood: 99.999% of people in this world are laborers. Lawyers, accountants, doctors, engineers, every kind of “professional” — as long as you still bend your back for a paycheck, you are a laborer. Even if you become General Manager of TSMC, even if you become a Senior Vice President at a huge conglomerate — if you do not know how to invest, your wealth stops at your salary, and you are a laborer. This is not a slur. A real capitalist is not someone who does not work; a real capitalist is someone who does not bend his back for a paycheck. If you work not for money but for service, for interest, for the life of humanity as a whole — you are a capitalist. If you work only for money, you are a laborer, even if your salary makes others jealous. Please do not confuse a “high-salary laborer” with a “capitalist.” The gap between those two is wider than the gap between a laborer and an unemployed person. So how does the life of an ordinary laborer actually run? Let me deconstruct the mechanism of the “rat cage.” Step one: sell your life at work. Every day you sell your most precious time and energy to your boss in exchange for a paycheck. Of the value you create, most — perhaps 70%, perhaps more — is taken by the capitalist. What is left to you is only the small portion needed to keep you alive so you can come back tomorrow. That paycheck has to carry your mortgage, your car loan, your kids’ tuition, your parents’ medical bills — pressures so heavy you almost don’t dare get sick, don’t dare quit, don’t dare say “no.” The so-called

“sacred mountain that protects the nation” — those top tech companies the media tout as “enviable” — from the inside often feel more like a concentration camp: the alarm rings in the morning and you crawl miserably out of bed, your boss’s harsh stare flashing in your mind; you enter the cleanroom for ten-plus hours; by the time you get home, your child is already at cram school and your spouse is too exhausted to talk. You look like you earn a lot, but your body, your family, and your spirit are all being crushed under that mountain. Step two: pay taxes to the state. Your salary hasn’t warmed up before the government takes a piece. This is a civic duty, fair enough, but you should know that the taxes you pay and the taxes the capitalist pays differ in proportion and in method by an entire dimension. The laborer’s tax is withheld directly from the paycheck — no escape. The capitalist has a hundred legal ways to optimize taxes, and his effective rate is far lower than yours. Step three: repay your debts to the bank. Mortgage, car loan, credit-card installment — the modern financial system has carefully designed countless ways to lend you money so you can consume. You buy a house, take on twenty or thirty years of mortgage, and from that moment you are tightly bound to your job. You don’t dare quit, don’t dare start a business, don’t dare tell your boss “no,” because next month’s mortgage is waiting. A house is a pit — a pit you climb into willingly, and then can never climb out of. You thought you bought an asset; what you actually bought was a set of shackles. Once you own a house you work harder, because if you didn’t own a house you wouldn’t worry so much about whether you have a job; you’d dare to say no to unreasonable demands — and that is precisely what the capitalist does not want. So I want to say one piece of concrete advice to every young person: rather raise a child than raise a house. When the day comes that buying a house is as easy as buying a pair of slippers, then you can live in any mansion you want. Do not pre-mortgage the most precious two or three decades of your life to a concrete box that will leak and crumble. Step four: spend whatever is left. After taxes and debt, the cash in your hand wasn’t much to begin with; add daily living, and there is basically nothing left at month’s end. So you work harder, hoping to earn a bit more, save a bit more. But every time you get a raise, your desires upgrade with it — better phone, bigger house, newer car — consumption rises in tandem with income, always chasing a desire it never catches. And then? Then you go back to step one and keep selling your life. Earn — tax — repay — spend — earn. Day after day, year after year, like a rat trapped in a wheel, running furiously, convinced that if it just runs faster it will reach the finish line, never knowing that the wheel has no finish line. The faster you run, the faster the wheel turns. The harder you try, the deeper you sink. This is the “rat cage” — a carefully designed loop from which you can never escape. Sometimes I half-joke that the laborer is worse off than the water buffalo. The water buffalo plows every day, but during fallow season it has at least two or three months a year off; the grass it eats its entire life is free, the shed is provided by its owner, it doesn’t pay income tax, doesn’t have a mortgage, doesn’t have to put its kids through cram school. The laborer? Three or four decades, seven days a week, ten-plus hours a day, no summer or

winter vacation, no fallow season, no “owner to backstop me.” So compare seriously — are you really not much different from an ox? You’re probably more tired, more anxious, less free than the ox. This is not contempt for people; it is to make the absurdity of the whole thing clear. The laborer’s condition is not natural and proper. It was designed. To understand “being designed,” you only have to look at the origin of the school system. After the steam engines roared in the late 18th century, capitalists faced a new problem — who would operate the machines? They needed a group of people who were obedient, punctual, and followed instructions. So the “modern school” was invented in Prussia. Its true goal was not to cultivate independently thinking citizens, but to train every person into a “qualified laborer who enters the factory on time, leaves on time, eats on time, and does not complain about overtime.” This system was copied around the world, and a few generations later it became “common sense” that you, I, and our children “would never question.” All of capitalist society is, in essence, The Truman Show — you think you are choosing freely, living freely, when in fact, from the moment you were born, the script was already written: study hard, find a good job, buy a house and a car, marry, have children, pay taxes and mortgage, collapse a few years before retirement, die a few years after. That is the script. That is the Truman world. As long as you have not been told that this is a script — you will spend your whole life believing it is real life. So the first step in “escaping the rat cage” is never technique; it is awareness. It is recognizing that the road under your feet is a circle. It is seeing the “door” painted onto the wall. Only once you see it does walking out become possible. Let me do the math for you. An ordinary office worker — what is the annual salary? How much is the annual raise? Save and save, and how much can you accumulate in a lifetime? The answer is: if you do not invest at all, and rely only on labor income, you will likely not even accumulate $200,000 USD in your entire life. That sounds like something, but at today’s price levels, what can it do? Barely a down payment on a house. So the money you earn with labor is fundamentally insufficient to support the life you want. What you trade your time and your life for is only the resources needed to keep you alive so you can keep working. That is exactly what the rat cage is. Now look at a more macro example. TSMC is one of the most important semiconductor companies in the world; its technology, its engineers, its production capacity prop up the global tech industry. But whose is TSMC? On the surface, TSMC is a Taiwanese company, building fabs in Taiwan, hiring Taiwanese engineers. But if you look carefully at its shareholding structure, at who its customers are, at where the profits flow — you find that the true beneficiaries of TSMC are the capitalists of Europe and the United States. Taiwan’s engineers spent more than a decade in school, earned master’s and doctorate degrees, and work ten-plus hours a day in cleanroom suits, creating enormous value — but most of that value flows across the Pacific to the capital holders. The Taiwanese are doing labor; their bodies are in Taiwan but at heart they are still working for Europe and America. This is not just one person’s rat cage; this is an entire country’s rat cage. When a country pours

itself into building fabs and training engineers but does not hold capital, that country is a tenant farmer in the global economy. So how do you escape this rat cage? The answer is actually simple — let money do the work, not you. This doesn’t mean you don’t need to work; it means the purpose of your work should change. You work not to earn that paycheck but for service, for growth, to fulfill life’s mission. What truly makes you wealthy is not your labor, but your capital. Even if you put aside only $300 a month for investment, over the long run that may become a million dollars in retirement assets. If you put aside $1,000? Then it may be tens of millions. And tens of millions soon compound into hundreds. This is not fantasy — this is the power of compounding, the best gift capitalism gives you. I retired in 2004, at the age of forty-two. But I have not stopped working a single day since. Every morning I get up and answer emails, help students with their spreadsheets, record videos, study markets. I work very fully, very happily — but this work has not earned me a single cent. I haven’t even turned on YouTube monetization; on the contrary, I pay for tools and services out of my own pocket. And I spend gladly, because my work is not for money; it is for service. Once your financial foundation is solid, work changes from a forced means of subsistence into an active life choice. You can do what you truly want to do, help the people you truly want to help, live the life you truly want to live. This is the fundamental difference between landlord and tenant. The tenant trades his body for money; the landlord lets money grow money. The tenant is bound to the land; the landlord walks freely between heaven and earth. Which one you become depends on the choice you make today. If the direction is right, success is only a matter of time. If the direction is wrong, no amount of effort will save you. And the right direction is exactly one: stop trading life for money, and start letting money work for you. The moment you understand how capitalism actually runs, send your money to work — let the money work hard while you don’t have to work too hard — and let your own work be for service and for living, then you have already escaped the rat cage. You have changed from tenant to landlord, from laborer to capitalist. This does not require any special background or ability. It requires only one decision: I am no longer going to be the rat. ───────────────────────────────────────

Key Points

One, the rat cage is a carefully designed loop — earn, pay tax, repay debt, consume, and earn again. Inside it, most of the value the laborer creates is taken by the capitalist, the government, and the bank; what is left to him is just enough to keep him surviving and working. The mortgage is the most critical shackle: it ties you willingly to your job and makes you afraid to resist, afraid to change.

Two, even a top-tier enterprise like TSMC is essentially a “tenant farmer” in the global capital structure — most of the enormous value Taiwanese engineers create flows to capital holders in Europe and the United States. What is true of the individual is true of the country: without capital, you are always working for someone else. Three, the only way out of the rat cage is to let money work for you. Even a modest monthly investment grows, through compounding, into substantial wealth. When you no longer depend on labor income but live on capital income, you have completed the transformation from tenant to landlord — work becomes a choice rather than a compulsion, and life becomes free.

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