Good old days

"The world is facing major changes unseen in a century." Although it has been a few years since the pundits spoke of the "L-shape", I believe that most people are not ready for a hard life because it is very different from the environment in which we grew up.

If you are a post-80-90-00 generation like me, you must be familiar with the arguments of some popular articles on public accounts: our parents grew up in extreme deprivation, so they were selfish, liked to hoard things, had double standards inside and outside the family, and followed the shackles of traditional etiquette, which created many family tragedies. As juniors, we can't be like them.

Whether you agree with this argument or not, we grew up in a society that was largely affluent, and we have the ability to think about more "high-level" topics than just having a good stomach, and many people probably agree with it.

For the vast majority of human history, humanity has lived in tragic wars, poverty, and unfreedom; It is extremely rare for the world as a whole to experience a longer period of peace, prosperity and openness, as in recent decades.

Three technological revolutions in almost a row underpinned this rare period of growth, so much so that Fukuyama could propose the "end of history" theory at the end of the 80s (an argument he has now begun to reflect). The majority of today's society was born in the 1980s or later, and there are few childhood memories of suffering.

"Cang Liao knows etiquette and etiquette". On the basis of globalization, some purely altruistic and internationalist currents of thought have emerged that have nothing to do with their own food and clothing, and go beyond the local community. Social stratification has changed from coarse to delicate, gender, race, sexual orientation and other issues that were originally "niche" have been given more attention, and some seemingly unbreakable "ancestral laws" have also been crumbling.

The concept of marriage and family is changing. Matchmaking, which is purely based on family conditions, and blind dates are no longer fashionable, and some are even calling for the dissolution of traditional marital relationships. "Raising children to prevent old age" is no longer good, children are independent individuals, and parents can no longer ask for "cost recovery" of parenting.

Indulging in virtual interactions, coupled with Gu Ying's self-pitying "love incompetence", has made the new generation of us have more needs to live and consume alone. Eating alone, watching movies, singing K...... If you want to make friends, you can also go online to find a completely desirable "stratosphere", or simply find "idols" and "paper people". It seems increasingly unnecessary to spend energy, compromise with real people, and build lasting connections.

Other "redundant backups" that are made in case of an emergency are also said to be thrown away. Most Chinese in 2008 still had extremely high savings rates, even as teachers said in class. When I looked back 10 years later, I suddenly found that not to mention savings, even the "six wallets" were all emptied and dedicated to the house.

Looking around, it is not surprising that many young people are burdened with heavy mortgages. All those who have not paid off all their debts are very tight in their daily lives, and they cannot afford to make the slightest mistake in their finances, and once they are unemployed for a long time and have no income, the planned happy life will be ruined.

As for the wave of "mass entrepreneurship" in the early years, we have said it for many years, and there is no need to mention it again at this moment. However, if young and middle-aged people fall into the pit of P2P loans, and if the elderly fall into MLM scams, the losses caused will be greater, more miserable, and more irreparable. In the year of 2018, countless upright, kind, and honest ordinary people and the entire family behind them fell because of this, which is extremely sad.

Just "born in peace" is enough for an entire generation to build their lives on a foundation that is deeply dependent on sustained economic growth and continuous improvement in income. How fragile such a foundation is.

Fundamental change

Now, at last, we need to prepare ourselves for what may be the first real adversity of our lives, and think about what we didn't want to think about and thought was impossible.

At the macro level, we don't talk much about it. However, when it comes to everyone's vital interests, the word "layoffs" has become a hurdle that cannot be bypassed.

According to a report by the China Times, since October 2018, about 2,000 companies have been deregistered every day in Beijing, up from a maximum of 500 per day. According to incomplete statistics, the number of cancellations of companies in first-tier cities such as Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen is basically the same as that in Beijing.

The number of jobs continues to decline, which means that it is becoming more and more difficult for us to maintain the same standard of living and social hierarchy as before, and even the competition has intensified, but we cannot even keep our jobs.

The growth and recession caused by the lack of innovation has turned the original mutual benefit and win-win game into a zero-sum game, which means that people-to-people, countries-to-countries, and social participants have put away their original warm faces, increased friction, and rampant anger.

The mainstream of thought in society will be more inclined to seclusion, abandon those delicate stratifications, and care for the minority because they can no longer afford it. Like the French "yellow vests", more and more revolts from the bottom are just to solve the most basic problem of eating. The world has slammed into the sky from the heights of globalization.

For everyone, a recession means that everyone is only for themselves, and the motivation to put away kindness and continue to be altruistic is gone. When self-preservation is a problem, no one has extra love to give to others, and the original skeptics will be proud of "stopping the loss in time", while more people will fall into accelerated retreat and trampling on each other.

What has pricked our nerves and hurt our most cherished sense of security over the past year? There may be many answers, but the bus in Chongqing that fell from the bridge into the Yangtze River is believed to be one of them.

Once the accident occurred, a large amount of on-site information was widely disseminated, causing panic among people. However, due to human self-preservation, we will quickly forget the impact of most events, and only the victims and their families will endure never-ending loss and grief. Although you have the opportunity to be on the hot search, it is you who ultimately bears everything.

Although we can still see that some groups, such as school students, may still be immersed in the simple and warm daily life, and they can also be excited about larger issues; But this may be due to the fact that they are still free of food and clothing, and have not yet withstood the severe test of society. That kind of test will come and it will be possible for them to completely and completely change their minds overnight.

It's a good thing to have a sense of crisis earlier.

Hopeless "self-improvement"

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, most Americans struggled, not because they were incapacitated, but because the circumstances in which they lived and the experiences they built on them fundamentally changed.

Among these changed survival experiences, there is such a one-

Hoping for self-improvement and knowledge accumulation can only cultivate temperament at best, and will not help much to improve the situation. Parents with school-age children will become more and more difficult to play if they want their children to follow the route of getting into a good university - finding a good job.

Originally, as long as you have more skills and more than others, you can guarantee better jobs and higher incomes. If you are unlucky, no matter how hard you work in the future, the final outcome will be not much different from those who once looked down on the "bottom of society".

At that time, there was a job seeker in a suit and leather shoes on the street in the United States who posted a sign and wrote: "I know three trades, I know three languages, I have been unemployed for three months, and I just want to find a job." ”

And the only thing that most people who have worked in a glamorous and decent job can do is to go out on time every day in their suits, even if it's just to hang out, or to go to a place where no one knows them, and take off their suits to beg for food.

Depression means that the legendary "equality of all" will be achieved in such a cruel way.

Today, more and more people sign up for classes, enrich themselves, and hope to master some new skills and new skills, so that they can become the so-called "U disk survival". No matter who the new owner is, he can successfully "sell" himself.

Some clichés and special "mourning" official account articles are written to the end, and they really can't be finished, and they basically end with "self-enrichment", "action" and "punch-in".

However, this may only benefit evangelists from all walks of life who "pay for knowledge" – Luo Zhenyu, the proponent of the "USB stick" slogan, will also broadcast his lecture live on Chinese New Year's Eve this year.

This kind of situation of filling anxiety with knowledge is very similar to that of the past, except that there were not so many people selling knowledge back then. In 1933, the American Library Association estimated that between 2 million and 3 million new borrowers had been added since 1929, while total book circulation had increased by nearly 50 percent.

To put it bluntly, it's like a group of girls who have established a value (whether right or wrong) that is, to dress themselves up early, so that they can "look good" and then "marry a good man".

They began to work on the vest line and hips, burned calories, and set in motion a brutal internal competition. However, who can they please in the end? There are few pits for "good men" to occupy, and it is useless to practice more.

People who now feel that their work is not good enough, or have just been made redundant, and are always thinking about improving their situation by "changing themselves and improving themselves", is similar to the above analogy!

No matter how hard you try to yourself and play beyond the norm, aren't you just killing each other among a large number of peers of the same strength, overcoming obstacles, just to maintain your original relative position?

By raising everyone's overtime standards to 996 and then to 10106, little by little forcing everyone to pay the price they shouldn't have paid and keeping a position that may be extremely ordinary, this is the "involution" of workplace competition.

A large number of people with similar talents and superb abilities, in a smooth era, should have lived comfortably and deserved a reward commensurate with their abilities, but they had no choice but to waste their lives and talents in vain in the cannibalism of involution.

In his book Glory and Dreams, William Manchester wrote: "The decline of the middle class is heart-wrenching. Many of the workers who do rough work at the California reservoir are farmers, pastors, engineers, a middle school principal and a former president of a Missouri bank. ”

I don't think it would be surprising if kindergarten teachers all require a postdoctoral degree, or if a gatekeeper will also have a bachelor's degree of 211-985, or something similar.

Make friends with real-life people

Don't be in a hurry to ask, "Then we deserve to be poor without a job?" "Such a question.

Why can't we now tolerate a life where we suddenly save too much and suddenly become "poor"? One of the reasons, I believe, is that we have too many conveniences and comforts in life, which used to be obtained by spending money to buy them.

The abundance of material and spiritual food and the relative increase in purchasing power also make us more and more lonely.

The famous "Dunbar number" states that we can only maintain close relationships with a maximum of 150 people, which means that we "know who the other person is" and understand our relationship with the other person.

However, we took a large part of the 150-person quota and contributed it to remote idols who were real, virtual, celebrity, or grassroots. Chasing stars, eating melons and brushing Douyin has squeezed out interpersonal relationships in real life.

A follow-up survey conducted by Duke University, funded by the National Science Foundation, showed that in 1985, the average American said they had three close friends. This number dropped to 2 at the beginning of the new millennium, and by 2014 it was already 0.

Originated on the Internet, the relationship that has not come to the step of "rushing" for the time being, most of them are "dragonflies and water", once there is a major disagreement on a certain topic, it will be treated coldly for a while, and it will be found that the other party has cut off contact with you.

As for the physical or virtual idol that is far away from the ground, it is a kind of fantasy that is smashed out with money, and he/she cannot give specific, real and tangible care for your personal confusion.

If you can successfully "self-hypnosis" to forcibly interpret the words and deeds of idols as words for yourself, maybe it's okay; But you'd better pray that this live-action idol doesn't "get confused", or that the anime/manga you're chasing is not over and not "out of the air". Otherwise, you still can't escape the collapse of faith.

Relationships between strangers are cooling, and society is no longer friendly. So, you have to withdraw from the friendliness of the unfixed others, the concern for the grand narrative, and retreat into the circle formed by yourself and the people closest to you.

- This closest person, of course, does not have to be your parents and relatives, and if you don't have a partner for the time being, you don't have to rush to find it. It's just that individuals should try to make less bad friends with others, and make more friends in reality, or one-on-one, netizens with offline communication potential, and focus less on one-sided emotional dedication and rambling browsing.

Don't quarrel with others, and for those who have a stake, such as superiors and subordinates, you can avoid overdrawing "social currency" too quickly and burying hidden worries for your future; For people you don't know, you can minimize the chances of you meeting a sociopathic madman or spurring him to explode.

And those friendships and emotions that are real and tangible will also stand the test of time.

Online kindness may be pervasive, but if you embrace it, it can be even more harmful if it translates into online violence.

You can't just choose to believe the part of the Internet that agrees with you. If you choose to be dismissive of online criticism and violence, the effectiveness of netizens' praise of you will also be diminished.

Trust is the cornerstone of long-term relationships, but trust can only be built if you know that you will have repeated interactions in the future. Only two-way interaction between individuals can avoid the exacerbation and spread of mistrust.

The people around you are the most important thing, and they are the biggest motivation to support yourself. The more difficult the moment, the more they can keep you warm, try to survive and see the dawn of the future.

Finally, "if you are poor, you will be good alone, and if you are good, you will help the world." If you still have a high ambition and a bright future, when you can't achieve it, please bury it in your heart and never forget your original intention.

I wish you all peace and joy in the new year.

Written by LJ

All members

2018.12.31