The Man Who Keeps Pushing the Boulder
Outside a convenience store at midnight, two people stand under the streetlight: one who just crushed out a cigarette, and one who has never smoked. Their silhouettes look identical. But open their calendars and the difference appears—the first has sworn, on at least ten separate New Year’s mornings, that this year I quit for good.
Every year, the bestseller lists fill up with books on self-improvement, habit-building, and willpower. People buy them like tickets to a brand-new self. The data is merciless. Those who resolve to quit and fail ten times, and those who never start, show nearly identical smoking rates a year later. Human willpower, set against habit, is a single thread trying to hold back a flood.
So the question stands. If human free will is really this powerful, why do we keep falling into the same Sisyphean loop, pushing the same boulder up the same hill?
Two Locks, Welded Shut
Quitting smoking was never a test of willpower.
When someone lights a cigarette, nicotine crosses the blood-brain barrier within seven seconds and triggers a dopamine release—a physiological highway. At the same time, the behavior has already been welded to daily life: the cigarette after the morning coffee, the right hand drifting to the pocket the instant stress hits, the fixed social circle at the office smoking corner.
These are two locks, welded shut. The bottom one is physiological dependence, built from neural circuitry and hormones. The top one is behavioral conditioning, bound to triggers and environment. Both tighten inward at once, resisting any change from outside. This is not emotion, and not weak willpower—it is a precision factory, built and refined over years. In the anxious moment at the desk, the muscle memory in the hand reacts before the mind’s reason ever arrives.
But one man took an entirely different route.
In 1983, the British accountant Allen Carr had smoked for thirty years, up to a hundred cigarettes a day, and had failed every standard method. He finally quit—not by brute willpower, but by understanding. He saw the whole mechanism of why he smoked: nicotine manufactures the anxiety first, then disguises the next cigarette as the cure. Once that loop was laid bare, the cigarette lost its pull on its own. He wrote it into The Easy Way to Stop Smoking, which sold over twelve million copies worldwide. His method never changed: not willpower, but a true understanding of how one’s own behavior is generated.
BaZi and Zi Wei Dou Shu work the same way. They are not prophecy, and not an excuse to sit and wait for fate to arrive. They are a blueprint—the first time you see, clearly, why you always choose this way, why your reaction always lands before your reason does. Reach that understanding, and the unknown future stops being so frightening.
Everyone Ships With a Factory Setting
If behavior really runs on a circuit this stable, then it can be described—and any structure that can be described, given enough data and a long enough span of time, can be predicted.
Psychologists once ran a thirty-year longitudinal study of personality stability (the Big Five). The result: a person’s extraversion or emotional stability at twenty correlates startlingly with their behavior at fifty. We believe we make new decisions every day. Most of the time, we are running the same brain circuit at different ages, reaching the same kind of choice.
This is exactly what the classical text Dītiān Suǐ (《滴天髓》) observed in its chapter “On Disposition”:
「凡局中莫不有性情，觀其情性，可知施為，觀其施為，可知吉凶。」
Every chart contains a disposition. Read the disposition, and you can know the conduct; read the conduct, and you can know the fortune. The ancient observers had already found it: hidden inside every birth chart is an extremely stable disposition. Understand how it operates, and you can infer the conduct a person will take when facing the world—and once the pattern of conduct is fixed, the fortune it bends toward becomes a chain of cause and effect you can trace.
The Heavenly Stems (天干)—your Day Master (日主)—set your base stats, the way an RPG lets you choose whether you are a thick-blooded orc (Wù Earth, 戊) or a nimble elf (Yǐ Wood, 乙). But knowing your race is not enough. The Ten Gods (十神) are your class and playstyle. They are a variable inside a relationship—the same Gēng Metal (庚) is a pressure-dealing assassin (Seven Killings, 七殺) to a Jiǎ Wood (甲) Day Master, but an order-keeping paladin (Direct Officer, 正官) to a Yǐ Wood Day Master.
The Ten Gods are never something you simply have. They are what you are inside a relationship. And here is the strange part: the combination of these relational variables is extraordinarily stable across a life blueprint—stable enough to form the circuit of an entire lifetime.
The Same Command, Running for Fifteen Years
The scene is a conference room in an American tech company. The time is the autumn of 2008, just after the financial crisis flipped the market over.
A thirty-five-year-old manager holds a freshly printed layoff list. Outside the room, frosted glass shows an office floor gone tense, everyone bracing. At this moment, every management book on the market and every board member would point to the same reasonable, smarter choice: share the hardship, trim the headcount, protect the cash flow that’s left. That is the voice of the investors, and the most logical move for self-protection.
He did not sign. He chose to carry the revenue gap himself, drove the team through nights of overtime, and traded his own health for an outcome where no one was let go. The layoff list ended up buried at the bottom of a drawer. The factory stayed open, and the circuit completed one full loop for the first time.
Move forward to 2023. The same person is now the general manager of a traditional domestic manufacturer. That year, global supply chains seized up, raw material prices spiked, and the company’s margin was squeezed to the edge. In the management meeting, the vice presidents and consultants once again raised a flawless plan: shut down the southern production line entirely, outsource the process, stop the bleeding now.
In that room of stainless-steel tumblers and thick reports, the fifty-year-old general manager looked at the figures, the outside pressure heavy and concrete. Again he refused the smartest lean option. He chose to sell off property in his own name, pour the capital into the line, and keep the veteran workers who had followed him for ten years. The same command, in a conference room a different year, executed itself once more in silence.
From thirty-five to fifty, from the financial crisis to the supply-chain crisis, the external events were completely different. But his defense mechanism in a crisis—the choice to take the wound himself rather than abandon his own kind—never wavered. This is not coincidence. This is his Ten Gods setting: a neural circuit carved into the floor of his behavior.
Where Your Lock Is Welded
Everyone carries a near-fixed circuit.
You may not remember when it first switched on. But you remember the moment: you were sure you’d choose differently this time, and you walked the same road anyway. Looking back, you can’t even name the reason—not impulse, not a failure to think it through, just this was the only way it could go.
It doesn’t live in metaphysical jargon. It hides in the three seconds of silence when a boss accuses you, in the first phone number you want to dial after a lover leaves, in the instinct—when an unexpected sum lands in your hands—to think first about how to keep it, not how to spend it. The first reaction, the anxiety that follows, and the final choice all obey a system whose manual you have never read.
If behavior is this hard to change, then what is a reading even for?
The original preface to Zǐpíng Zhēnquán (《子平真詮》) puts it this way:
「人能知命，則營競之可以息，非分之想可以屏，凡一切富貴窮通壽夭之遭，皆聽之於天，而循循焉各安於義命，以共勉於聖賢之路，豈非士君子厚幸哉！」
When a person can know their fate, the restless scrambling can stop, and the cravings beyond one’s lot can be set aside. The point of knowing your fate was never to fight your own factory setting, and never to sit and wait for fate’s verdict. It is to stop the blind self-consumption—the restless scrambling can stop—and to see the edges of your own behavior clearly.
Read this blueprint, and you stop forcing a mage built for ranged damage to tank the front line, and stop forcing a paladin built for steady defense to bet everything on one roll. You don’t have to become someone else. You only have to read your own pattern, move with it, and turn it to your advantage.
When Someone Grabs What’s Already Yours
The RPG character is built. You hold your starting stats and your class manual, and you step out of the rookie village.
The first test is usually not how to go on the offensive and hunt. It is this: when the world walks up with malice, when someone starts seizing the resources that were supposed to be yours, how does your default defense mechanism fire?
Picture a scene that has actually happened in your life. Someone took something that should have been yours. A promotion. An opportunity you spotted first. Or just a sentence in a meeting, lifted out of your mouth before you finished it.
In that instant, the body reacts before the mind. For some people, the first thought is let it go, let them have it. For others, there’s a heat rising from the stomach—not anger, but something quieter and more certain: this isn’t over.
If you’re the second kind, you’ve already felt it.
Some people compromise. Some people back down. But on the system manual, a word is lighting up in bold right now.
That word is Shoulder (比肩)—the peer of equal strength who arrives to compete for what is yours.
Next, we’ll push that door open. We’ll look at whether the “being yourself” you believe in is really free will, or just one line written into the floor of your system long ago and impossible to erase:
Whatever it costs, this time, I cannot lose.
Where This Observation Comes From
Allen Carr — The Easy Way to Stop Smoking
Written after Carr quit in 1983, the book’s core claim is that failing to quit is not a willpower problem but a misunderstanding of the nicotine addiction loop. It has sold over twelve million copies worldwide and been translated into more than forty languages.
The Big Five longitudinal personality research
Long-term tracking studies, spanning more than thirty years, of the five major personality traits (extraversion, conscientiousness, openness, agreeableness, and neuroticism). The results consistently show that personality traits are highly stable in adulthood, with limited response to short-term intervention by environment or will.
Dītiān Suǐ (《滴天髓》), “On Disposition”
A Qing-dynasty classical text, with the Rèn Tiěqiáo annotated edition as the mainstream version. The “On Disposition” chapter examines how a chart’s structure determines a person’s behavioral patterns and tendencies—the structural basis for the argument that conduct can be read from disposition.
Zǐpíng Zhēnquán (《子平真詮》), original preface
Written by Shěn Xiàozhān in the Qing dynasty, a major text in the study of fate. The original preface argues that the purpose of knowing one’s fate is to stop pointless striving and delusion—not to predict fortune or escape it. The basis for this article’s argument on what a reading is actually for.
What These Words Mean
Day Master (日主)
The core symbol representing the person in a BaZi chart, located in the Heavenly Stem of the day pillar. The whole chart analysis is anchored to the Day Master, and its Five Phases (五行) attribute determines how every other element relates to the self.
Ten Gods (十神)
The ten categories BaZi uses to describe the relationship between the Day Master and the other Heavenly Stems: Shoulder, Rob Wealth, Eating God, Hurting Officer, Direct Wealth, Indirect Wealth, Direct Officer, Seven Killings, Direct Resource, and Indirect Resource. The Ten Gods are not static labels but dynamic variables inside a relationship—the same element takes a different Ten Gods identity depending on the Day Master it meets.
Shoulder (比肩)
One of the Ten Gods. An element with the same Five Phases and the same polarity as the Day Master. On the behavioral level, it represents competition among peers, the contest for resources, and the underlying drive to never back down.
Decade Cycle (大運)
A unit of fate measured in ten-year periods, representing the external environment and energy backdrop a person sits in during a given decade, shaping the strength and expression of the Ten Gods in that stage.
Where These Words Come From
Dītiān Suǐ (《滴天髓》), “On Disposition”: 「凡局中莫不有性情，觀其情性，可知施為，觀其施為，可知吉凶。」
Zǐpíng Zhēnquán (《子平真詮》), original preface: 「人能知命，則營競之可以息，非分之想可以屏，凡一切富貴窮通壽夭之遭，皆聽之於天，而循循焉各安於義命，以共勉於聖賢之路，豈非士君子厚幸哉！」
