Against the Quick Path: Why Internal Cultivation Requires Time, Effort, and Depth

Practitioners of meditation, qigong, and Taijiquan face a challenge that is uniquely modern. We live in a culture increasingly shaped by speed, convenience, and immediacy. Information is compressed into fragments. Attention is fragmented into seconds. The slow processes of reading, contemplation, and deep analysis have been steadily displaced by short-form videos, oversimplified explanations, and the pervasive attitude summarized by the now-common phrase “tl;dr.”

The integrity of the Old Path is crucial to proper development

This cultural shift has consequences. As attention spans shrink, so too does the willingness to engage in any practice that requires patience, discipline, and sustained effort. Many people now desire the results traditionally produced by long-term training—but without the time, struggle, or personal refinement required to earn them.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the modern fitness industry.

The Illusion of the Fast Result

In fitness culture, the promise of “quick results” has become the dominant selling point. One cannot browse online without being assaulted by frantic, fast-paced videos proclaiming the newest "secret" guaranteed to deliver transformation with minimal effort. These clips are rarely grounded in sound exercise science or nutrition. They are designed instead to exploit shortened attention spans and widespread lack of foundational knowledge.

What has been lost in this environment is understanding—the calm, rational study of how the body actually adapts over time. True functional training requires consistency, intelligent progression, recovery, and patience. These principles are not exciting in the short term, so they are discarded in favor of novelty, hype, and entertainment.

The creators of this clickbait culture are not solving the problem; they are deepening it. By prioritizing branding and engagement over substance, they train people to expect results without investment and to abandon practices the moment progress slows.

This mentality does not remain confined to fitness. It inevitably spills into other disciplines—especially the internal arts.

Internal Cultivation Cannot Be Rushed

When it comes to meditation, qigong, and Taijiquan, the consequences of this mindset are even more severe. These are practices of internal cultivation, not external performance. Their effects are subtle, cumulative, and dependent on correct method practiced over time.

As these arts have grown in popularity, a troubling trend has emerged. Some instructors, consciously or not, have begun to adopt the same short-form, clickbait-driven model that has degraded the fitness industry. Promises of health, relaxation, or “energy activation” with minimal effort are increasingly common.

This approach is fundamentally incompatible with traditional training.

Even the term “Kung Fu”, now used casually to describe martial arts, literally means time and effort. It does not mean talent. It does not mean secret technique. It means the patient accumulation of skill through consistent work. There is no shortcut embedded in the tradition, because shortcuts do not produce the internal qualities these arts exist to cultivate.

Any path that claims to be short is not the path.

Cultivation Means Confronting Weakness

Internal cultivation is not merely about learning movements or breathing patterns. Much of the practice involves confronting the very tendencies that make fast and easy solutions so appealing in the first place: restlessness, impatience, distraction, emotional reactivity, and the discomfort of stillness.

To practice authentically is to develop:

• A sense of foundation and internal balance

• Solidity that is not shaken by external stimuli

• Emotional regulation and reduced reactivity

• Comfort with stillness and solitude

• The ability to be unrushed and present in each moment

These qualities cannot be downloaded, hacked, or rushed. They must be grown, slowly and deliberately, through direct experience and self-refinement.

This is why traditional practice often feels challenging—not because of its harshness, but because it demands honesty. It exposes the gaps in attention, discipline, and patience that modern life has conditioned into us.

The Nature of Real Progress

For those drawn to neijia, the internal arts, there must be a clear understanding and acceptance of one essential truth: there is no quick path.

The value of the practice, and whatever results one hopes to gain from it—whether health, clarity, resilience, or spiritual development—are the product of:

• Slow, steady practice

• Disciplined focus and effort

• Willingness to reflect, analyze, and refine oneself

• Commitment to traditional method rather than novelty

There are no fast-talking explanations that replace lived experience. No secret techniques that override time. No entertaining distractions that substitute for investment.

The internal arts offer something far more valuable than quick gratification: lasting transformation.

A Lifelong Path

The path of cultivation is not a program with an end date. It is a lifelong process of growth, adjustment, and deepening understanding. This is true not only in qigong and Taijiquan, but in nearly every meaningful endeavor in life.

Skill, health, insight, and stability are all built the same way: through time, effort, and consistent application. The greatest enemy facing modern practitioners is not physical limitation or lack of access—it is the temptation to seek what is quick and easy, and to allow attention itself to erode.

To walk the true path of internal cultivation is to resist that temptation. It is to choose depth over speed, substance over novelty, and patience over convenience.

In doing so, the practitioner does not merely train an art—they reclaim their capacity for focus, effort, and genuine transformation.