My generation agonises over how to act and what to say. We have to learn to go with the flow | Bertin Huynh

"Like many of my fellow gen-Zs, I am learning the perils of embarking fully into my professional life. My partner and I have spent many nights agonising over career directions, what investments to make and how to map out our next 10, even 20 years. How lucky am I to do so in this age? Never before have we lived in an era with more information, analysis and hot takes. Artificial intelligence scrapes a billion thoughts to create large language models to outsource our therapy, our grieving and decision making."

"There is no shortage of advice to read and follow, and if you're reading this you probably already believe fundamentally in the power of the word to persuade. You might get a rude shock from the Daodejing. The relatively short Chinese philosophy text is credited to the great master Laozi (who probably didn't exist). The way of life portrayed in it, Daoism (or Taoism), isn't a religion in the way of temples and rituals, but more in the way of a philosophy. Living in tune with the natural order is at its heart."

"Take its first par: The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao The name that can be named is not the eternal name You could dismiss this as philosophical gobbledegook but that's perhaps the point. I'm not going to even explain it to you. Do your job! You may yell back at me. But its inscrutability is its power. Perhaps those authors knew 2,000 years ago it would be impossible to perfectly convey anything in words and opted instead for a vibe."

Gen Z faces intense career and life-planning anxieties amid abundant information, analysis, and AI-generated guidance. Large language models increasingly shape therapy, grieving, and decision-making, amplifying the flood of advice. The Daodejing, a concise Daoist text over two millennia old, centers on living in harmony with the natural order, the Dao, and its virtues, the De. The text emphasizes the ineffability of ultimate truth—names and words cannot capture the eternal Dao—and uses inscrutability and poetic vibe rather than explicit prescription. That tension contrasts modern optimization culture with Daoist restraint and acceptance of ambiguity.

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