Tao Yuanming Drunk Among the Apricot Blossoms

Tao Yuanming lived around 365-427 CE, during one of China's most chaotic political stretches. He was a minor government official — the kind of post that today we'd call middle management in a collapsing ministry. One day, famously, he was told to dress up and bow to a visiting inspector. He quit on the spot. His line, roughly translated: "I will not bend my back for five bushels of rice." Five bushels was his salary.

He went home to the countryside, planted chrysanthemums, drank wine, and wrote poetry that Chinese readers have loved for sixteen hundred years. No palace drama, no conquests. Just a man choosing a thatched hut over a silk robe.

This stick's image is him drunk under the apricot blossoms, annoyed that a songbird woke him from his nap. That's the whole scene. A person who has traded ambition for peace and is guarding that peace fiercely. For Western readers, think Thoreau at Walden, but with better wine and worse government. The poem isn't celebrating laziness. It's asking what you're actually working so hard for — and whether more would even make you happier.

Average grade on wealth, with Tao Yuanming as the face of it, is an unusual combination. It's saying: your money situation is fine. Genuinely fine. Money comes in, money goes out, nothing dramatic either direction. The question this stick is really asking is why that feels like a problem to you.

Because for a lot of people reading this, it does feel like a problem. There's a quiet voice saying you should be further along. Your college friend just bought a flat. Someone younger got promoted. Instagram keeps showing you people your age on yachts. The stick is pointing at that voice and asking where it came from.

Take Marcus, 34, a graphic designer in Melbourne we spoke with last year. Steady freelance work, paid his rent comfortably, had savings. But he kept chasing "passive" side hustles — courses, templates, a newsletter he didn't want to write. Each one drained his real income because it stole his attention from clients. He was working harder and earning less, all to escape work he actually liked.

That's the Tao Yuanming warning in modern form. The stick favors steady, earned income right now — your craft, your clients, the treasury you've slowly been filling. It does not favor shortcuts, speculative routes, or get-rich-quick paths dressed up as smart moves. Honestly, anything promising a faster escape is probably the songbird waking him from the nap.

There's also a spending question worth sitting with. Average wealth sticks often expose a pattern where money leaves the house to buy status, reassurance, or the appearance of success. Dinners you didn't enjoy. Gifts that were really about being seen as generous. Subscriptions you forgot about. None of it is ruinous. But none of it is building anything either.

Our take: this stick isn't a verdict on your earning ability. It's a mirror held up to your relationship with enough. If you can answer "what is enough, for me, actually?" — the average grade starts looking like a quiet kind of wealth most people never reach.

Between now and the end of autumn, do one honest audit of where your money actually went over the last three months. Not a budget — just a look. Notice which purchases made you feel more like yourself and which were buying someone else's approval.

Guard your core income like Tao guarded his nap. If a shortcut scheme lands in your inbox before the lunar new year, let it pass. This isn't your season for that.

Raise your rates or ask for what you're worth if you've been sitting on it — Average grade means the ground is stable enough to push on. Before winter, have one conversation you've been avoiding about money: a client, a partner, a family member. That conversation is the real practice here.