History has its quiet rebels — the ones who resist not with weapons or speeches, but with silence. In third-century China, two such men, Ruan Ji and Ji Kang, lived through the collapse of dynasties and the corrosion of meaning. They were poets and philosophers, members of the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, a group that turned away from the courtly pageantry of the Wei–Jin era. Ruan Ji sought refuge in wine and verse; Ji Kang faced death rather than flatter power. Their solitude became a protest — a refusal to let the world define their souls.
Seventeen centuries later, in a smaller apartment half a world away, Jiahao Shen reads their words with a familiarity that feels less academic than personal. An independent history researcher and postgraduate student at King’s College London, enrolled in the postgraduate programme of World History and Philosophy, Shen has spent years tracing how ancient moral struggles echo through modern life. He studied History and Asian Studies at James Madison University, completed a Master of Higher Education at the University of Oklahoma, and now lives quietly in Japan — surrounded by the same hum of work and order that once haunted the Bamboo Grove.
For Shen, Ruan Ji and Ji Kang are not abstractions. They are companions in exile.
In his essay, “Ruan Ji and Ji Kang — The Painful Mind and the Internalization of the Idealized World,” Shen describes the painful mind as the awareness that cannot unsee the world’s contradictions. It is the price of consciousness — the discomfort of remaining awake when comfort demands sleep. For Ruan Ji, this awareness became art. For Ji Kang, it became death. For Shen, it defines what it means to live in an age that prizes adaptation over sincerity.
He writes that the systems of the modern world — economic, bureaucratic, digital — have grown more encompassing than any ancient empire. They demand no open allegiance, only quiet obedience. In this, Shen sees a more refined kind of domination: not the oppression of the body but the colonization of the mind. The individual is invited to participate endlessly — in labour, in consumption, in distraction — until participation itself becomes identity. “They no longer command,” Shen notes, “they absorb.”
The cost of this absorption is the erosion of the inner world — the very thing Ruan Ji and Ji Kang sought to protect. Shen’s answer is not rebellion but reconstruction. He calls for the deliberate preservation of what he terms the idealised inner world — the domain of conscience, sincerity and reflection untouched by the machinery of conformity. Turning inward, for him, is not escape but endurance. It is the quiet act of keeping the mind unconquered.
The painful mind, then, is not a curse but a sign of life. To feel pain in such a world is to know that the self still resists. Shen’s philosophy turns suffering into a form of consciousness — a moral sensitivity to the gap between the world as it is and the world as it should be. In that gap, he suggests, lies the last remnant of freedom.
What gives Shen’s reading of the Wei–Jin sages its force is not detachment but intimacy. He recognizes in their melancholy the same rhythm of thought that runs through his own generation — the sense of being overwhelmed by systems too large to oppose yet too hollow to believe in. The modern worker, he observes, mirrors Ruan Ji’s despair: engaged outwardly, estranged inwardly. The technologies that promise liberation often deepen submission; the endless noise of communication conceals an absence of understanding.
And yet, Shen’s writing never gives way to despair. His tone is meditative, not mournful — a quiet insistence that even within a global machinery of conformity, the mind retains the right to step aside. He speaks of solitude as a form of resistance, reflection as an act of rebellion. Like Ruan Ji’s restrained sorrow and Ji Kang’s final calm, his own response to oppression is not noise but endurance. To preserve the inner world, he writes, is to preserve what remains of humanity itself.
Across continents and centuries, Shen draws the line that binds them: three thinkers, separated by time yet united in their refusal to bow to the logic of power. Their struggle, he suggests, is now ours — a fight not for territory or ideology, but for the quiet freedom of the mind.
In the end, The Painful Mind is not a lament, but a form of hope. It is the belief that awareness, though it may hurt, is still the highest expression of life. That to think — even in pain — is to stay human. And that within the smallest corner of the self, the unconquered world still survives.
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