Hexagram 58: 兌

You know the difference between mandatory fun and the real thing. The pizza party for shipping code versus what actually happens at 2AM in a university computer lab when someone's sorting algorithm suddenly runs in O(n log n) instead of O(n²) and three other people lean over to see. One feels hollow. The other—that's joy with a foundation. The classical text is sharp about this: 'True joy must spring from within. But if one is empty within and wholly given over to the world, idle pleasures come streaming in from without.' You feel this viscerally. Forced collaboration, team-building exercises, management trying to inject morale from outside—it doesn't work because there's no firmness underneath. Just surface performance. Here's what the lakes-replenishing-each-other image means practically: isolated work tends toward exhaustion and narrow perspective. The self-taught person grinding alone hits walls and stays stuck. Collaborative work with people operating at your level tends toward renewal and breadth. Not because collaboration is virtuous in the abstract—because it's functionally more effective. You see approaches you wouldn't have found alone. You explain things and thereby clarify your own thinking. You get unstuck faster. But the foundation has to be firm. The work has to be real. The teaching assistant stays three hours past closing not from institutional loyalty but because watching someone finally get their wireframe cube to rotate smoothly is genuinely more interesting than going home. You can't manufacture this through ritual. Mandatory collaboration sessions, forced pair programming, scheduled "innovation time"—if you're trying to create joy artificially, you've already failed. The doubled lake configuration means: real depth calls to real depth. Simulate the depth and you get the simulation.