by Dr Rahim Said
Most of us spend our lives running — not in the way that our ancestors did, chasing prey or fleeing predators, but on invisible wheels of ambition, expectations, and social convention.
We chase diplomas, promotions, mortgage approvals, and milestone anniversaries, believing each will bring us closer to some elusive destination called fulfilment.
But what if the destination is an illusion? What if the wheel never stops, and we were never meant to arrive?
The story of Min Hengcai, a former e-hailing driver from China, is a quiet rebellion against this relentless motion.
Disillusioned by the monotony of work and the burdens of debt, Min abandoned the life script so many of us recite without question. He traded his job and aspirations for a 50-square-metre cave, calling it his black hole, his entire universe.
There, without the artificial markers of success — no career ladder to climb, no suburban plot to fence in a manufactured dream — Min cultivates vegetables and reads. He exists, simply and quietly.
At first glance, his choice might seem tragic or foolish, a man surrendering to circumstances. Yet, beneath it lies a philosophical provocation: What is the purpose of our striving? Is the pursuit of property, titles, and wealth a path to meaning, or a distraction from it?
Modern society equates arrival with acquisition. You are taught that you have made it when you hold the keys to a semi-detached home, a car on hire purchase, and a job title with multiple syllables.
Yet, the irony is cruel — by the time many arrive, they realise there was no there. The house comes with a mortgage, the job with exhaustion, the marriage with its own quiet, unspoken negotiations. Life’s victories often come dressed as burdens.
Philosophers from Diogenes in ancient Greece to Thoreau in the forests of Walden have warned of this. They spoke of simplicity, of stripping life down to its essentials, not as a retreat but as a reclamation. Not to escape life, but to encounter it unmediated, without the numbing comforts of routine and consumerism.
Min’s cave is not a rejection of society, but a reflection of it. It reveals the absurdity of a system that demands one trade time — the most finite of currencies — for symbols of security that never truly satisfy. His debt still exists, his family still lives beyond the cave, the economy still spins, but in choosing solitude, he has exposed the myth at the heart of modern living: that contentment lies at the end of acquisition.
Perhaps the lesson isn’t to retreat to a cave, but to question the wheel we’re on. To ask whether the dreams we chase were ever really ours, or quietly inherited from the anxieties of a world afraid of stillness.
Because maybe — just maybe — fulfilment is not a destination we arrive at with the right job or postcode, but a way of being, wherever we stand.
And in that sense, Min Hengcai may not have escaped life. He might, in his lonely cave, have finally found it.
(The views of the writer are entirely those of his own)