A New Interpretation of “Morning Three and Evening Four”: People Don’t Believe Facts, They Believe Stories

Zhuangzi told a story about a monkey keeper in the state of Song who, facing a food shortage, decided to reduce each monkey’s daily ration. He started by giving them three acorns in the morning and four in the evening—which threw them into a rage. Then he reversed it: four in the morning and three in the evening—and they were perfectly content.
It shows the monkeys’ short-sightedness: they only see the present moment, the morning, never the evening.
Any human doing the math knows 3 + 4 equals 7, just as 4 + 3 equals 7.
We hear the story and laugh, unaware that humans laugh at monkeys while being monkeys in the story themselves.

We ourselves are inside that same story.

You think monkeys can’t see their total daily intake of seven acorns? Can humans really see their lifetime total income? Consider many engineers who peaked around 2021, bought a house at the top of the market, kept their spouse at home, and enrolled their kids in international schools. Did they ever wonder whether their income wouldn’t keep climbing forever?

Weren’t their bosses just like the Song monkey keeper—redistributing the acorns (salaries) they’d normally pay later, after age 35, to instead front-load them before age 35? The con is no harder to pull off than fooling monkeys. People, like monkeys, lack an internal value system: there’s no absolute sense of worth, only relative comparison.
A monkey gets one extra acorn in the morning compared to the evening and thinks it’s won a bargain. A person temporarily over-extends leverage against the future and assumes income will rise forever—never imagining the distant day he’ll be “graduated” (laid off) and shoved back out into the general labor pool.

Give every employee a typical 5% raise while inflation runs at 10%.

Real purchasing power actually falls.

What do the employees think?

They’ll parse the situation into separate pieces: price hikes are society’s fault, or the Fed’s fault, or whoever’s in charge—but the raise deserves praise for the boss.

He gave me a raise! Am I more motivated? Doesn’t that make me want to spend more?

I got a raise—it proves I’m valuable, things will keep getting better, so I can leverage up and buy, buy, buy.

People are just as “three in the morning, four in the evening” as monkeys: they see the raise but not the inflation on the other end.