The essay ‘We’re Not Going to Make It’ took stock of the inconsistencies of our times: water dropped from the sky onto wildfires whilst villages drink from water tankers, arsonist firefighters, climate summits attended by private jet, influencers held up as role models by the powerful, television news programmes that prioritise Auvergne baguettes over world wars, the organised waste of abundance, and those absurd deaths on the edge of cliffs, mobile phone in hand. It concluded with a diagnosis: contemporary stupidity is not a lack of intelligence, it is a lack of presence. And with a thesis: only the evolution of human consciousness can offer a way out.
But we still need to explain how. Here is a summary for those who do not practise; for those who have personal training, you are already doing the work!
A thesis without a method is merely another opinion, and our age has no shortage of those. The aim of this study is therefore practical: to examine, one by one, the personal disciplines that the Taoist tradition has been proposing for centuries, and to show how each one addresses, step by step, a specific inconsistency in the contemporary world. For this is what distinguishes Taoism from so many forms of wisdom that have become mere slogans: it does not ask us first and foremost to believe; it asks us to practise. It does not offer a doctrine to be defended, but a discipline to be followed—a discipline of the body, the breath and the mind—of which transformed consciousness is the result, not the prerequisite.
One might object that it is strange to look to ancient China for remedies to ills that did not exist at the time: Laozi knew neither social media, nor Canadair aircraft, nor mussel-eating contests. That is true, and it is precisely what makes his account so valuable. The Taoists observed the human mind before it was ‘equipped’, and what they described—restlessness, greed, the need to impress, the fear of emptiness, and the headlong rush forward—is exactly what contemporary technology has industrialised. The machines have changed; the heart that drives them remains the same. That is why practices designed to soothe this heart remain, today, as relevant as ever: they do not tackle the symptoms, which vary over the centuries, but the root cause, which has not changed.
A word on method, finally. The practices presented here are personal: they require neither a temple, nor a distant master, nor a retreat on a mountain top. They find their place in an ordinary day, a chair, a breath, a walk, a meal, a screen that is switched off. It is their modesty that is their strength. The world will not be saved by a grand gesture; it might, perhaps, be saved by millions of tiny, mindful gestures. Water, once again, works no differently with stone.
Before we begin the practices, three concepts, for we can only practise well what we understand. The first is the Tao itself, the Way: not a god, not a law, but the natural course of things, the way the world unfolds when nothing forces it. It cannot be defined; ‘the Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao’, warns the first chapter of the Dao De Jing, but it can be observed everywhere: in the water that flows downwards, in the tree that grows, in the season that comes. In this light, contemporary incoherence takes on a simple definition: anything that claims to free itself from the course of things is incoherent. Watering golf greens in the midst of a drought, air-conditioning a planet we are warming, storing water where it evaporates: these are all declarations of war on reality, and reality, as everyone can see, always wins in the end.
The second concept is ziran, which is translated as natural spontaneity: that which is ‘so of itself’. Every being, every situation has its own inherent nature, its own way of being that needs no correction to be perfect. A pine tree does not try to be a willow. Our age is a machine for tearing beings away from their ziran: the teenage girl must look like a social media filter, the minister must look like an influencer, the tomato must look like a ‘calibre’, and everyone exhausts themselves trying to become the image of what they are not. The Taoist practitioner takes the opposite path: they unlearn, they shed, they let the masks fall away until they rediscover what tradition calls the ‘original face’.
The third concept is wu wei, ‘non-action’, which, it must be reiterated, is not inaction but the refusal to act against. In the Zhuangzi, Ding the butcher cuts up oxen for nineteen years without wearing out his blade, because he never cuts through the bone: he glides through the gaps, following the natural lines of the animal. His knife, he says, ‘has no thickness’. This is the model of right action: effective because it does not force the issue. Almost everything listed in the inventory of inconsistencies is like a knife striking bone—action that wears itself out against the nature of things and which always calls for further action to repair the damage it has caused. The practices that follow are, at heart, all part of one and the same school: that of the interstice.
The first practice is the simplest and the most radical: sitting. Tradition calls it zuowang, ‘sitting in oblivion’, after the passage in the Zhuangzi where the disciple Yen Houei announces to a stunned Confucius that he has made progress:
he has forgotten the rites, then the music, and then he has ‘sat in oblivion’—oblivion of the body, oblivion of knowledge, union with that which permeates all things. It would be wrong to see this as a mystical feat reserved for hermits. The gesture is within the reach of anyone who has a chair or a cushion: to sit, motionless, with a straight back, and do nothing. Add nothing. Let thoughts pass like clouds that one neither holds back nor chases away.
What this practice heals can be deduced from what the assessment identified: a lack of presence. Modern man cannot last three minutes without stimulation; studies have shown that some people would rather receive mild electric shocks than be left alone with their thoughts. The entire economy of attention rests on this inability: every notification is a hand reaching out to a person who is running away from themselves. Zuowang is the exact opposite kind of training: staying put. Staying put when boredom sets in, when the urge to check one’s phone becomes almost physical, when the mind begs to be given something to chew on. Those who learn to stay put discover something that no amount of talk can teach them: restlessness subsides of its own accord when one stops feeding it. This is chapter fifteen of the Dao De Jing: ‘Who can, through tranquillity, gradually clarify murky water?’ You do not clarify water by stirring it. You let it settle.
Daily practice can be modest: twenty minutes in the morning, before the world switches on its screens. Sitting, one focuses one’s attention on the breath, on the body’s points of contact, on the silence between sounds. When the mind wanders, it will wander a thousand times; one brings it back, without comment, just as one brings back a child who has strayed. That is all, and it is immense. For what is being cultivated there, session after session, is precisely the faculty that our times are destroying: the ability to choose what we are present with. The man who has meditated in the morning views the one o’clock news differently: he sees the set-up, the twelve-minute segment, the war dispatched in forty seconds, and he sees that they are trying to pick his attention clean. It is not easy to manipulate a man who knows where his attention lies, because only the distracted can be properly robbed.
The Zhuangzi calls the culmination of this work xinzhai, the ‘fasting of the heart’: clearing the mind not of things, but of the inner clamour that prevents one from hearing them. ‘It is emptiness that welcomes,’ says the text. A room is only usable because of its empty space; so too is a heart.
The second practice is even more subtle: breathing. The Taoist tradition has turned breathing into a complete science, tu na, ‘spitting out the old, welcoming the new’, the principle of which is summed up in a sentence from the Zhuangzi: ‘The true man breathes from his heels; the common man breathes from his throat. ’ Breathing from the heels means breathing deeply, slowly, through the abdomen, as an infant sleeps; breathing from the throat is what the modern man does from morning to night, in short, shallow, rapid gasps, holding his breath whilst checking his emails. Yet the breath is no mere accessory: it is the only vital process that is both automatic and voluntary, the sole lever through which consciousness directly influences the body. Whoever slows their breath slows everything else – the heart, thoughts, fear.
What this practice heals is the constant sense of urgency, that acceleration which fuels all the inconsistencies we have identified.
You don’t flick a cigarette butt out of the window when you’ve got time; you don’t post that insult you’ll regret, you don’t buy that dress you’ll return on Thursday, you don’t rush towards the cliff for a selfie. Foolishness is almost always a result of haste. Between the stimulus and the reaction, there is a space, and that space is the length of a breath. The person who has got into the habit, a hundred times a day, of letting a full breath pass before replying, clicking or honking, has built a hundred little barriers into their day against their own foolishness. This isn’t heroism; it’s inner plumbing.
Here again, the practice can be incorporated anywhere: three abdominal breaths before opening your email, a full breath before speaking in a conversation that’s getting heated, five minutes of slow breathing, a few seconds on the inhale, a little longer on the exhale, when the day gets out of hand. Contemporary physiologists confirm what the Taoists knew from experience: a long exhalation soothes the nervous system better than any self-talk. The body believes what the breath does, not what the mind says.
Next comes the body in motion. Taoism has never looked down on the body: it has made it its laboratory. The practices of Daoyin, Nei Gong, Qi Gong and Tai Chi Chuan – which share this spirit – offer something that has become impossible to find elsewhere: moving slowly. Broad, continuous movements, coordinated with the breath, repeated without haste, where the aim is neither to win, nor to burn calories, nor to beat anyone – not even oneself – which deeply baffles the modern athlete.
For this is the inconsistency that this practice challenges: our era has turned even self-care into a competition. We run with a stopwatch on our wrist that records our performance and shares it; we show off at the gym; we eat four kilos of mussels to applause; we queue at the summit of Everest. Even rest has become an Olympic discipline, with meditation apps ranking users by the number of consecutive days. Qi gong defies classification in this world, and that is its virtue: there is nothing to win, nothing to show off, nothing to post. A man slowly rotating his arms in a park at daybreak produces no content. He produces something else: health, a sense of being grounded, and that quality which tradition calls the ‘vital principle’ – which we cultivate rather than expend.
Slowness is the key to learning here. By moving slowly, one feels one’s points of support, one’s imbalances, one’s tensions – everything that speed masks. The hurried man goes through life like a tourist passing through Venice: he was there, but he saw nothing. The slow-moving person discovers that their own body is a foreign land they had never visited. And this rediscovered sensitivity extends beyond the session: those who sense their tensions release them before they turn to anger; those who sense their fatigue stop before an accident occurs; those who inhabit their bodies no longer need to prove it by hanging from a ledge for a photograph.
Chapter forty-four of the Dao De Jing asks: ‘Fame or the body, which is more precious?’ The age has answered overwhelmingly: fame. The cliffs deliver their verdict every summer.
Non-action is not confined to the meditation cushion; it is, first and foremost, a way of life, and it is in everyday life that it has its most tangible effects. To practise wu wei in daily life is to get into the habit, when faced with every difficulty, of asking a preliminary question: am I following the natural course, or not? A surprising proportion of our daily efforts consists of acting against it— against sleep, which we fend off with screens and then chase away with pills; against hunger, which we suppress and then provoke; against time, which we try to compress and which takes its revenge by slipping away. Modern man lives like those motorists who accelerate towards a red light: a great deal of energy, yet no progress.
In practical terms, the practice involves identifying, every day, an opportunity not to push ourselves too hard. Not replying straight away to an irritating message: the night, as the ancients said, is an excellent prime minister. Not filling the silence in a conversation: it works better than we do. Do not correct another’s mistake straight away: half of all mistakes correct themselves, and the other half were just waiting for our intervention to make matters worse. The Zhuangzi offers here its most useful parable, that of the empty boat: if a boat collides with yours in the middle of the river and a man is steering it, you shout; if it is empty, you do not shout, yet the impact is the same. All the anger in the world lies in this difference, and a growing proportion of our boats are empty: the algorithm that shows you inflammatory content has nothing against you; it is simply optimising. Training yourself to see the empty boats means withdrawing your anger from the market, and anger is the raw material of the digital economy.
Wu wei also has a direct ecological significance, which links it to the very heart of inventory management. ‘Not acting against’, when applied to the land, means letting what grows, grow: the Taoist gardener does not water at midday, does not force tomatoes to grow in January, and does not mow what feeds the bees. Applied to consumption, this means letting desire pass: any urge to buy, observed calmly for three days, reveals its true nature — most die a natural death, without a coffin or regret. The moderation that politicians preach without practising need not be imposed: it is what remains once we have stopped running away from ourselves.
Chapter sixty-seven of the Dao De Jing sets out the only ‘programme’ that Lao Zi ever allowed himself: ‘I have three treasures that I hold and cherish: the first is love, the second is frugality, the third is not daring to be first under heaven. ’ Three treasures, and one will note that they correspond, point for point, to the three driving forces behind contemporary incoherence: harshness, greed, vanity.
Love—which some translate as ‘empathy’—is the first, and Lao Zi specifies that it is this which makes one courageous. Not the courage of records and cliffs, but the courage that protects: ‘he who loves can be brave’. In practice, this treasure is cultivated through an exercise of disarming simplicity: before passing any judgement, to regard the other as one who is asleep rather than an enemy. The arsonist, the influencer, the dancing minister – the list has mocked them, and satire has its place; but the practitioner cannot stop there, for contempt is still a way of striking at the core. Compassion is not indulgence: it is lucidity that has ceased to be bitter. It alone enables one to act in the world without adding one’s own violence to it.
Frugality is the second treasure, and Laozi links it to generosity: ‘one can be generous whilst being frugal’. This is the exact opposite of the contemporary economy, which is wasteful towards itself and miserly towards the world — a third of food ends up in the bin, water from Fiji sold in bottles, dresses worn just once. The practice here is the most tangible of all: eating simply and without a screen, savouring what one eats; using objects until they are worn out and repairing them, not out of moralism, but out of respect for what they have cost the world; shopping slowly, at the pace of a carefully considered desire. The frugal Taoist is no sad ascetic: he is a connoisseur of the little things. He has discovered the best-kept secret of our times, set out in chapter forty-six: ‘ There is no greater misfortune than not knowing how to be content.’ Knowing how to be content is not giving up happiness; it is ceasing to seek it where it has never been.
The third treasure—not daring to be first—is the most counter-cultural of the three, in a world entirely organised around rankings, followers, views and popularity contests. ‘He who stands on tiptoe cannot stand firm; he who puts himself forward does not shed light,’ says chapter twenty-four, which seems to have been written for social media twenty-five centuries ahead of its time. The practice: to do, every week, one thing well that nobody will know about. To repair, to help, to plant, to tidy up — without a photo, without a story, without a witness. This voluntary anonymity is a form of withdrawal: it teaches the ego to do without an audience, and one then discovers that the unseen act has a flavour that the posted act never had. It is perhaps the most subversive gesture one can perform in 2026: something beautiful, without proof.
The ancient Taoists practised meticulous dietary regimes, convinced that we become what we take in. They spoke of food; it falls to us to expand the table, for contemporary man takes in far more through his eyes than through his mouth every day. Every notification, every video, every scroll through outrage is a mouthful, and the average diet is frightening: hours each day of attention-fast food, salted with anxiety and sweetened with distraction, served by algorithmic chefs who know our weaknesses better than we do. Chapter twelve of the Dao De Jing foresaw this: ‘The five colours blind the eye; the five notes deafen the ear; the five flavours spoil the palate; racing and hunting unsettle the heart.’ What would it have said of the endless scrolling, which is the five colours, the five notes and the hunt all rolled into one?
The solution presents itself: fasting. Not fleeing the world—staying informed remains a duty—but choosing one’s meals. Timings: information twice a day, at fixed times, like a meal, rather than constant snacking. Sources: few, slow, carefully chosen; a long, nourishing article is better than a hundred anxiety-inducing headlines that fill us up without nourishing us. Real fasts: one screen-free day a week, the first few of which will be difficult, as with any withdrawal, but which you’ll then look forward to as eagerly as a day of celebration. And in the evening, what tradition calls ‘keeping calm’: the final screen-free hour, for the mind, like water, clears at night if it is not agitated at bedtime.
The effect goes beyond personal comfort. Attention is the only resource the digital economy extracts, and each of us is the sole owner of our own mine. Reclaiming one’s attention means practising, on an individual level, exactly what the global inventory called for in vain on a global scale: to stop feeding the machine. The 1.00 pm news may well devote twelve minutes to the baguette: but it still takes eyes to watch it. Millions of eyes quietly looking away, without petition or anger – this is a revolution that no authority knows how to deal with; it is non-action turned into political power.
There is a Taoist practice so unspectacular that we forget to count it: living in rhythm. The Taoist tradition has observed the world as a breath – yin and yang, night and day, winter and summer, the ebb and flow of the tide – and has derived from this a fundamental rule of well-being: a person thrives when their rhythms align with those of the world, and destroys themselves when they go against them. Rising with the light, reaching one’s peak with the day, slowing down with the evening, sleeping with the night; eating more when the body is working, less when it is resting; expending energy in spring, storing up in autumn, withdrawing in winter. Nothing could be more commonplace, and nothing is more systematically violated.
For our age is, quite literally, a machine for disrupting rhythms. It has abolished the night with screens that mimic midday even in our beds; abolished the seasons with strawberries in January and heating on terraces; abolished weekly rest with notifications that pay no heed to Sundays. Modern man lives in a perpetual midday, a perpetual summer, a perpetual Monday, and is surprised to find himself exhausted.
Sleep scientists are now documenting, with figures to back it up, what the Taoists took for granted: a living being who rejects their natural rhythms pays the price, and that price is called insomnia, anxiety and burnout. The caricature of this is the modern practice of nocturnal ‘doomscrolling’: stirring up the murky waters of the world at the very hour when they ought to be settling.
The practice is disarmingly simple, yet genuinely difficult: giving structure to one’s day. A regular bedtime, treated as an important appointment—because it is one—with oneself. Waking up before turning on any screens, so that the first hour belongs to the body and the breath, not to the clamour of the world; the ancients called dawn the hour when yang is born, and found it too precious to give over to worries. Meals at fixed times, the seasons eaten from one’s plate — the August tomato, the December soup, not out of purism, but because it is the most everyday way of inhabiting the real world rather than the air-conditioned one. And one day a week that is unlike the others: slower, emptier, without plans, a weekly winter.
Those who rediscover their rhythms make a discovery that never ceases to amaze: the energy they sought in stimulants, they found in regularity. The Dao De Jing puts it in its own way in chapter twenty-three: ‘A gust of wind does not last the whole morning; a downpour does not last the whole day.’ Even the sky does not force itself upon us; who are we to live in a perpetual storm? Regularity is not the enemy of freedom: it is its foundation. One can only dance well on a floor that holds firm.
Then there is the ultimate master: nature itself. The Taoist sages lived on the edges of mountains and rivers not out of a taste for the picturesque, but because nature is the only spectacle that teaches the Tao by demonstrating it. There, water seeks out the low-lying places; the crooked tree of Zhuang Zi lives to a ripe old age precisely because it is of no use to carpenters; the seasons arrive without haste and without delay. There is nothing to ‘like’, and everything to understand.
Walking is the oldest practice in the world: walking. Walking aimlessly, without a watch, without headphones, in the nearest patch of nature – a park is enough, a tree is enough, the sky above a street is enough for those who know how to look up. Walk until your pace slows of its own accord, and then look: the changing light, the insect at work, the water that always finds its way. That very gaze is the perfect antidote to ‘last-chance’ tourism. The modern world flies across the planet to photograph glaciers it will never have looked at; the practitioner takes the opposite journey, described in chapter forty-seven: ‘Without stepping outside one’s door, to know the whole world.
’ This is not a eulogy to seclusion, but a theorem on attention: those who do not know how to see will view Venice as they view their own neighbourhood—that is to say, not at all—whilst those who do know how to see will find in a puddle of water enough to meditate upon for a month.
Sitting under a tree once a week, without a phone, and bringing nothing back from it: that, in essence, is the final test of this entire study. Whoever achieves this with pleasure is healed of what matters most.
At the end of this journey, the unity of the practices becomes apparent: sitting, breath, slow movement, non-action, the three treasures, fasting from attention, the school of nature are not seven techniques, but seven doors to the same house. They all teach the same thing through different paths: returning. Returning to the body when the age lives in images, returning to the present when it lives in urgency, returning to simplicity when it lives in accumulation, returning to reality when it lives in representation. ‘Returning is the movement of the Tao,’ says Chapter Forty; the civilisation of headlong flight has simply forgotten the path home, and Taoist practices are nothing other than this path, marked out step by step.
We shall not claim that these disciplines will be enough to put out the fires, replenish the water tables or shorten the news report on the baguette. That would be to fall back into the magical thinking that this text has mocked in others. But we shall maintain this, which is more solid: no external solution will hold as long as the people who ought to uphold it remain hasty, greedy and vain sleepwalkers; recent history demonstrates this on a daily basis. Ecology has failed as a collective ethic; it remains to be tried as a form of inner discipline. A person who is fully present wastes little, takes justifiable offence, consumes slowly, and needs neither to put on airs nor to escape: they are, without effort or slogans, what all the climate conferences implore humanity to become.
And that is why the path is open to everyone from this very evening, without waiting for any decree or summit: twenty minutes of sitting upon waking, three breaths before looking at any screen, slow, mindful movements, a desire that one lets pass, a beautiful deed done in private, a day without screens, a tree. None of this will make a sound. It is precisely in this silence that we will recognise that it is working, for everything that truly saves us in this world has always worked like water: without forcing, without showing off, without stopping.
This is what everyone you know must practise. You know what to do!
