After finishing Anna Karenina, I wrote a 6,500-character reflection on the novel. The book has stayed with me so powerfully that even today, I find myself wanting to write again—this time about the relationship between thought and reality.
Once I learned about Leo Tolstoy’s life and considered the values and philosophical reflections carried through his work, I could not help asking a question. How could a man so incisive in condemning false values and praising true ones—a man capable of writing so many life-affirming reflections and pursuing the ultimate question of life’s meaning—make such a wreck of his own life?
Tolstoy eventually fled home because he could no longer bear the troubles bound up with the aristocratic life he had known since birth, and he fell ill and died away from home. His marriage, too, was full of bitter conflict, even though his wife had copied the manuscript of War and Peace by hand for him time and again.
Why?
If we devote too much of ourselves to constructing an inner life and too little to shaping the life we actually live, our ideals may be exceedingly noble while our reality lies in ruins, contradicting everything we claim to believe.
Consider someone who talks but never acts. He knows he ought to love everyone around him, yet when he returns to real life, he will not reach out to the person beside him who needs help. Real people are not ideal. Their human weaknesses and flaws are genuine. They resist our ideals and, to someone with lofty convictions, may even appear sordid and impossible to approach.
In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky distinguishes the abstract love of humanity from an active love for particular people. What does that mean? It means admitting that people are flawed and the real world is imperfect. Helping others will not bring us an uninterrupted sense of spiritual elevation. It may also torment us, especially when we realize that nothing may ever repay what we give.
In a word, talk less and do more. Talking more is fine if we also do more, but we must act. We must take a greater part in our own lives and in the lives of those around us, instead of endlessly constructing an inner world with no ground beneath it.
The inner life is a good thing. It reveals the purest side of the human soul. But we must find a proper mean between spirit and reality, favoring neither and giving each its rightful place.
Farmers may not know the phrase “live in the present.” They may not know that when we attend to the present, our energy moves away from anxious self-consumption and our lives grow less troubled. They may not know the idea, but they know how to live it. So it is right to talk less and do more. It is also right to act without first understanding everything. Farmers may know less, yet sometimes they live with greater clarity than people who know more.
Sometimes our intellectual output merely reflects a problem in our real lives. A person suffers from bad luck, for example, and arrives at all sorts of insights about fortune. He writes them into an essay and publishes it online. His understanding of luck may be extraordinarily precise, but that is precisely because he has not been lucky. An endless stream of thought can sometimes be nothing more than compensation for the imperfections of the real world.
Being able to say something does not mean we can live it. We all know that we ought to make peace with fate, but the phrase is nearly empty. How are we supposed to do it? It offers no mathematical formula that we can follow step by step until reconciliation arrives.
Making peace with fate still requires us to enter fully into real life: to feel more and experience more. Only a hopeful cast of mind and a wealth of lived experience can finally loosen our grip on the desire to control fate.
Put plainly, it is something we have to come to for ourselves.
The greatest distance in the world is not the distance between the Mariana Trench and Mount Everest. It is the distance between knowing and doing.
Knowing shows that we want to become better. Doing requires us to take an active part in real life, offer those around us whatever goodness we possess, and let time remain our lifelong companion in insight and growth.
Zhengyang Yao
Beijing, August 2, 2026
Comments
True greatness lies not in how much we understand, but in how much we can actually do in an imperfect world. Recognizing that reality is imperfect can sometimes close much of the chasm between ideals and reality, keeping us away from a particular danger: a breakdown brought on by the gulf between the two.
Nietzsche possessed a noble inner world—an extraordinarily noble one—yet the imperfections of reality broke him. I would not presume to judge whether this happened because he took too little part in real life, or to say where he went wrong, because the right to pass judgment belongs to neither you nor me.