The flickering flames cast dancing shadows on the faces of the condemned, their expressions a mixture of defiance and despair. Soong Jiang, once a revered leader, now a broken man, raised his gaze to the starless night sky, his final moments mirroring the whimpering downfall of his brethren – the legendary 108 heroes of Mount Liang. Their rebellion against a corrupt empire, a beacon of hope for the downtrodden, had crumbled under the weight of betrayal, their oaths of brotherhood drowned out by the whispers of power and the siren song of self-preservation.

I finally got around to finishing Water Margin, the classic. It's not a particularly engrossing tale for the modern age. But it's one of the handful of stories that came to shape Chinese men for the past thousand years (knowingly or not).

The fate of these characters are easy to recognize. You may be trapped in a suffocating conference room, inbox overflowing with urgent demands, there's similar pang of helplessness – the crushing weight of a system that devours individuality, that reduces you to mere cogs in its relentless machinery. The world outside, a jungle of glass and steel, pulsed with a frenetic energy that both captivates and repels. Was this the modern 江湖 kongwu - this labyrinth of obligations, expectations, and invisible forces shaping our actions?

The allure of Mount Liang lay not simply in its romanticized portrayal of outlaw life, but in its promise of escape from such complexities. The heroes of Water Margin, flawed as they were, embodied a raw yearning for autonomy. James C. Scott's The Art of Not Being Governed argues that such desires are not merely relics of a bygone era. There exists mountain people not left out by civilization, but actively opting out of it. They live in a state of foraging, that some say what humans are meant to live.

Yet, Mount Liang was not entirely unreal. Their rebellion, born of desperation, was fueled by violence and fueled by a precarious existence where the line between justice and brutality blurred with every passing season. This, too, felt familiar. Our own digital age, for all its promises of connection and convenience, felt like a battlefield of its own – a competition for attention, for validation, for a fleeting sense of control in a world spiraling ever faster toward some unknown horizon.

Nation/states, the markets, are representations of our precarious position. Were we not, as individuals, merely cells within a vast, unknowable organism – our destinies intertwined, our agency subject to the whims of forces beyond our comprehension? The thought, while unsettling, held a strange allure. It offered a perverse form of absolution. If we are but cells, then perhaps our individual choices matter little in the grand scheme of things. But this line of thinking is dangerously nihilistic. To relinquish responsibility, to surrender to the whims of the "machine," was to some, cease being human.

The narrative of freedom afforded by outlaws and foragers could well be overplayed. What freedom-to you and I gain from civilization, they gain the corresponding amount of freedom-from by being off the grid. The freedom calculus evens out on both ends.

That we romanticize them could be an anxiety of complexity-collapse, a yearn to simplify, a hope for better control of fate.