Jiahao Shen and the Pain of the Mind: Between the Idealized World and the System of Oppression

When dynasties collapsed in third-century China, two thinkers refused to surrender their integrity. Ruan Ji and Ji Kang, remembered among the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, turned away from the official world as corruption became the cost of survival. Ruan Ji transformed despair into poetry; Ji Kang met death with serenity rather than betray his conscience. Their resistance was quiet but absolute: the defence of an inner truth against a collapsing order.

Seventeen centuries later, Jiahao Shen, an independent history researcher from postgraduate programme of World History and Philosophy at King’s College London, finds himself drawn to the same moral horizon. Having also studied History and Asian Studies at James Madison University and completed a Master of Higher Education at the University of Oklahoma, Shen has spent years tracing the fragile continuity between ancient ideals and modern existence. For him, Ruan Ji and Ji Kang are not distant relics but kindred spirits — guides through a world that once again threatens to exhaust the life of the mind.

In his essay “Ruan Ji and Ji Kang — The Painful Mind and the Internalization of the Idealized World,” Shen explores what he calls the “painful mind”: the consciousness that arises when a person refuses to accept comfort bought at the price of truth. To live with that awareness is to endure a particular kind of suffering — the tension between what the world demands and what the spirit knows to be right. For Ruan Ji, that tension became poetry; for Ji Kang, it became defiance. For Shen, it has become the defining condition of modern life.

He argues that the systems shaping today’s societies — economic, bureaucratic, technological — are more encompassing than any empire of the past. They govern not only work but thought, measuring worth by compliance and efficiency. They no longer ask for allegiance; they require participation. And in this quiet, global machinery of productivity, the most fragile freedom — the inner life — is the one most at risk.

Shen’s response is philosophical rather than political. He does not call for escape but for endurance — for the deliberate preservation of what he calls the idealised inner world. This is not an imaginary refuge but a moral necessity: the space where reflection, sincerity and conscience remain uncorrupted. It is the world that Ruan Ji and Ji Kang built when the public realm could no longer sustain truth. Shen sees in their example a model for survival in an age where distraction has replaced tyranny, and conformity has taken the place of faith.

Pain, in this philosophy, becomes the mark of authenticity. The painful mind does not numb itself to contradiction; it feels it deeply and continues to think. To suffer, Shen suggests, is to remain conscious — to preserve the sensitivity that modern life tries to dull. In enduring that pain, the individual protects what is most human.

This vision gives Shen’s writing both moral seriousness and quiet optimism. His reflections move beyond any single country or culture, describing instead a global condition — a civilisation that prizes productivity but neglects meaning, that celebrates innovation yet erodes thought. Across continents, he sees the same pattern repeated: a world rich in comfort but poor in reflection. Against this backdrop, the ancient sages of China become unexpectedly modern figures, their solitude transformed into a philosophy of resistance.

Shen’s own intellectual journey — from East to West and back again — has convinced him that the boundaries between cultures no longer protect against the pressures of conformity. The structure of control has become universal, operating through institutions, technologies and habits of attention. Yet his faith in the inner world remains unwavering. If truth cannot survive in public, it can still survive in thought; if conscience cannot act, it can still endure.

Through his study of Ruan Ji and Ji Kang, Jiahao Shen reminds us that the defence of the inner life is not nostalgia but necessity. The mind, he writes, must become its own sanctuary — not as retreat but as resistance. In a civilisation that measures success by how well we adapt, Shen offers a different measure: the quiet, painful, sustaining act of remaining sincere.

The centuries between Ruan Ji, Ji Kang and Shen himself dissolve into a single moral continuum — the unbroken effort to live truthfully in a world that asks for surrender. In that effort lies the most enduring freedom we possess: the freedom to think, to feel, and to refuse to kneel.