A slim 2022 booklet known alternately as The Mathematical Principles of Natural Living and Neo-Pythagoreanism was, at least in one version of reality, briefly considered worthy of canonical recognition before collapsing back into a Schrödinger-like state somewhere inside its creator’s mind. Its ambition is modest and absurdly grand at once: to use the simplest possible mathematics to make everyday decisions less chaotic. A few surviving fragments are enough to suggest the method.
The square-root ordering rule
As hygiene standards rose, the traditional shared-dish meal began to look vulnerable. More and more people became comfortable with individual portions instead. But a civilization with strong collective instincts and a lingering taste for romance found a compromise: each diner gets one set of communal utensils and one personal set. The communal pair exists only to transfer food from shared plates to one’s own dish; the personal pair is reserved for sending the food onward to the mouth. Cleanliness is preserved, while the pleasures of variety and convivial dining survive.
That improvement, however, only sharpened another strategic problem: how many dishes should a group actually order?
Too many dishes signal status, generosity, and waste all at once. In some places there are even records of hosts stacking food-laden plates into towers as a theatrical display of hospitality. Too few dishes, on the other hand, send an unmistakably bleak social message. After repeated trials, one practical equilibrium emerges: the number of shared dishes should equal the number of diners plus the square root of that number, rounded by the rule “round 4 down, 6 up, and 5 to even.” Under those conditions, the meal tends toward a Nash equilibrium. There is usually enough food for everyone, but not so much that the table descends into obvious excess.
A common real-world version works like this: each guest effectively claims one dish, and the organizer adds the square-root portion. Individual desserts, cold starters ordered privately, and staple foods such as rice are not included in the count. Meat and vegetables should be balanced at 1:1; if the ratio would fall below 1, then no meat should be ordered. Solids and liquids should run 3:1; if the ratio falls below 1, skip the liquid dish. Cold to hot should be 1:3; again, if it would fall below 1, omit the cold dish.
A sample set for a three-person meal would be:
- Guobaorou
- Steamed perch
- Large mixed salad
- Stir-fried greens
- Tomato soup
- One serving of rice per person
Once host and guests implicitly understand the rule, ordering becomes much less chaotic. If the meal is fully individual rather than shared, of course, the theorem collapses into a much simpler one: order exactly what you want to eat.
The one-year, ten-square-meter leasing law
The “one year, ten square meters” rule began in marketing, but its consequences spread far beyond commerce and into the basic shape of everyday life. Its earliest form was “once per year”: any good used no more than once annually was judged to have little retail value and mainly rental value. Then came a period of modernization pains—population growth, environmental decline, longer lifespans, family structures breaking apart and reforming, and human mobility rising as high as 77 percent. It was in that era that the fuller doctrine took shape.
The stable personal slice of space-time available to any social individual was reinterpreted as just one year and ten square meters. Anything beyond that domain belonged to the social realm. Government, under this model, existed to guarantee the absolute safety of each person’s one-year-ten-square-meter zone and the orderly functioning of all remaining shared space-time.
This was also when “hive” architecture appeared. Whether or not a person formed a family, each would retain a ten-square-meter protected space. Designers obsessed over how to optimize it; masters of the form emerged, and along with them a whole way of organizing hive-dweller society.
Yet the original once-per-year commercial logic may have been the more influential inheritance. Rental centers proliferated. Manufacturers of goods used less than once a year went bankrupt in waves or were absorbed by others. Data from the Internet of Things made a blunt truth harder to ignore: furniture was often just a burden. Buying many objects amounted to little more than moving them into one’s home. Outsiders barely noticed them, owners barely cared, and yet they still required maintenance every year.
So community-based specialized storage facilities began to appear. Evening dresses, wine, even live-in butlers—anything infrequently needed could be rented instead of owned. When the time came, one only had to switch on the home’s augmented reality system, and the ten-square-meter room would convincingly present the desired setting.
Indoor walking systems stretched the felt size of those ten square meters even further. A person could map that area onto a simulated scene of up to ten thousand square meters and run as much as they liked without ever physically leaving the original footprint. Floors and ceilings were fitted with AR and VR modules, making the environment difficult to distinguish from reality unless one was unusually sensitive.
This naturally invited backlash. Many denounced such technologies as a betrayal of instinct and of the senses nature had given us. But the counterargument was brutally pragmatic: the satisfaction of human happiness matters far more than the metaphysical purity of whether an experience is “real.” If well-being is what counts, why become doctrinaire about authenticity?
The practical use of the one-year, ten-square-meter decision rule is to strip every object down to exchange value divided by its useful time or lifespan and by the personal space necessary to keep it. Suppose a smart terminal is typically replaced every three years. Its cost can then be averaged into an annual expense, and that figure becomes the baseline for deciding whether buying it makes sense. Prices orbiting that baseline are the most rational reference points.
But size matters too. If the object occupies more than one-tenth of a person’s essential living area, then moving costs have to be considered. The same applies when special demands—materials, construction, or other nonstandard requirements—make relocation more expensive. In an age shaped by individualism, this method is especially valuable for people who live alone, because their own needs form the starting point for almost every decision.
A proof that coupons must exist
Lower prices reliably attract more potential consumers, and a larger customer base feeds back positively into production. For that reason, the retail price of consumer goods has never really been the average transaction price in the market.
Yet lower prices also squeeze profit and can trigger destructive competition. So merchants generally converge on two kinds of pricing alliance: an explicit one and a latent one. The explicit one is the public retail price. The latent one hides inside promotional tactics—price matching, lowest-price guarantees, and all the various discount mechanisms that appear to signal vigorous competition. In reality, these methods also defend an industry-wide floor beneath which prices are unlikely to fall. The strategy looks fair, but it doubles as a tacit pact to preserve minimum profits.
Nearly everyone understands, at some level, that the sticker price is inflated. The problem is that uncovering the true floor price often requires an exhausting amount of work. Under the condition that human energy is limited, the sensible consumer strategy is to put a price on one’s own time as well.
If your output is worth 20 yuan per hour, then any shopping tactic that saves less than 20 yuan is, for you, a losing proposition. It is not worth the effort. That hidden effort cost is one of the largest contributors to merchant profit.
This is why the people who devote themselves to intricate coupon systems, threshold discounts, and stacked promotions usually fall into one of two categories: either their time is not especially expensive, or they are experienced enough not to care much about the absolute difference while treating the game itself as routine. In both cases, merchants still do well. At the other end of the spectrum are high-priced sellers who never discount at all; their potential customers are paying more attention to brand value, and merchants do well there too. A lone consumer, generally speaking, does not beat an entire industry.
So in a purely price-theoretic sense, a coupon exists for every product. But for any given individual, many coupons are themselves a cost. That is not an accident of bad design; it is a structural feature of the larger merchant-consumer game, and one of the enduring sources of commercial profit. Seasoned veterans can compress the thinking time dramatically and get close to the latent alliance price with remarkable speed, but even that hard-won experience is itself a kind of accumulated cost.
These three fragments alone hint at a system with 101 ways of decoding how society operates. Whatever else one calls it, it is a mathematics meant less for blackboards than for the dinner table, the apartment lease, and the checkout page.