What is the meaning of thrift?

Diligence literally means hard work and frugal lifestyle.

This idiom has three meanings:

The first meaning is to improve self-cultivation.

Diligence and thrift is a way of life for ancient scholars to cultivate their self-cultivation. For example, during the Three Kingdoms period, Zhuge Liang wrote such a sentence in his article: "Without desire, it is unclear", that is, without desire, it is unclear; "frugality can cultivate one's morality", that is, thrift can cultivate one's morality; "You can't work hard if you are slow", that is, you can't work hard if you are slutty and slow. These words are all about studying hard, working hard and living frugally. He believes that only in this way can you cultivate your lofty aspirations, make achievements in your studies and career, and have a noble personality.

The second meaning is the realistic social meaning.

A thrifty lifestyle can reduce some bad habits in human society, such as corruption, humanization of institutional problems (such as giving gifts to guests), money worship, hedonism and so on. These phenomena not only corrupt the social atmosphere, but also lead to the tension of social relations in the country, undermine social equity and decrease social productivity (the food safety problem we are reporting everywhere is an example, and the direct problem behind it is that merchants always want to make big money at a low cost, so they cut corners and adulterate fakes, and do not want to improve product quality through technological innovation, which is obviously a luxury and laziness. (Incidentally, frugality is also an important social life advocated by the China government at present. )

The third layer is the protection of natural resources (especially non-renewable energy)

This meaning is easy to understand, that is, the national condition of China is that there are many people and few resources, and the most direct consequence of excessive waste is to affect economic development and people's quality of life (for example, excessive waste of energy will lead to a shortage of energy materials, and we are definitely not used to the days without water and electricity). If many people become extravagant and lazy, the quality and efficiency of our resource use will be greatly reduced (the simplest example, for example, building roads, now you can see how many cities in the country are tearing down buildings to build buildings in this strange cycle, which is obviously extravagant and wasteful for the simple reason that they lack the spirit of thrift).