As people grow older, their belief in fatalism generally hardens; by contrast, young people, driven by curiosity and a desire to create, rarely believe in fate. As years pass, the repeated positive and negative experiences of long-term life wash over and etch a person's cognition again and again, forming ingrained views and prejudices. By old age, nothing in life seems strange anymore, and people imagine they have discovered unassailable rules. Thus, the life picture that stretches from youth to old age, having shifted from the present into the past, changes from something probable into something inevitable.

Because of this difference, conflicts and assimilation between young people and their elders play out constantly. Often, when a child is born, parents have already imagined a plan for their future from their own perspective: what the child should and should not do must fit within the parents' plan; what the child will and will not do is also tied to the parents' experience. Out of spontaneous curiosity and youthful energy, they clash with parents' maturity and constraints. Who wins or loses is only temporary; mutual defeat is more often the norm. Interestingly, confrontation usually brings assimilation. Even when reluctant to accept it, many young people are surprisingly permeated by their living environment and daily communication, and unconsciously adopt and firmly accept the very ideas they once scorned. So in the end parents may win, or the young may win, or neither persuades the other—but assimilation into existing prejudices is common.

After entering society, they may seem to escape childhood constraints, but they face an even harsher siege. There are countless things one can do in life, yet there are also countless prejudices. Many things are crossed off as "shouldn't do" or "can't do" by value judgments; add to that many "objective" factors—"can't do it now," "objectively unable to do it," "lack the ability," "no time to do it"—and choices each day seem few. Add the deliberate abandonments born of "fatigue" and the "I'll continue tomorrow" postponements, and what appears feasible often reduces to the safest three-point routine: eat, sleep, work. Once the process becomes fixed like this, fate feels inescapable; prolonged, it breeds deeper conviction and is passed down generation to generation.

People are often mired in the mire without realizing it, blind to such simple truths. As the saying goes, there is no greater sorrow than a deadened heart, yet few completely lose all fighting spirit for life. If one still holds even a trace of respect for the goals and ideals of childhood, there remains hope to turn a spark into a prairie fire.

That said, modern society loves to describe young people's breaking of shackles as "freedom," but that term is not always appropriate. Many proclamations of freedom are in fact prisons for others, because freedom itself is a kind of restraint: it is a constraint against infringing on others' freedom. What we need is the shedding of prejudices in the heart, an inner cultivation. If one cannot distinguish the two, one easily falls into traps of arrogance and selfishness, into self-righteousness, and into vain, endless disputes over "political correctness."

I only wish young people would know that prejudices can be discarded. First take off the chains you put on yourself, then shake off the worldly ones. Live more like a young person, and cheer for a world in flux!