Li Yu took leave to participate in the offline written test of the Third Age, and after answering the questions, he took the subway back to the company and continued to write the plan.

I was busy until eight o'clock in the evening, and sent the three versions of the plan to my immediate boss with the group mailbox, and at the same time copied it to the department leader according to the regulations.

Five minutes later, I received a reply from my boss, asking him if he could catch up with two more editions and hand them in before noon tomorrow to give customers more choice.

Li Yu checked the schedule and found that there will be a regular meeting of the department tomorrow morning, and the regular meeting will take at least an hour and a half, which means that he only has two hours at most to continue to make plans, and his work summary and work plan for the next cycle have not yet been written.

So he took twenty minutes to finish this part of the work, then got up, moved his body a little, went to the pantry to make a cup of coffee, rubbed his somewhat sore wrists, sat down, and began to continue writing a new plan.

When he finished another version of the plan, the time at the bottom right of the computer screen showed that it was already 22:59.

About half an hour ago, Li Yu's immediate boss had just left the office, took the elevator to the underground parking lot, and drove home.

So Li Yu also turned off the computer, picked up his backpack, and prepared to get off work.

When he clocked in in front of the attendance machine, half of the department was still gone, and the blue light emitted by the IPS screen was reflected on their faces, making their expressions look a little sluggish.

At the same time, most of the floors of another office building, across the street from the street, were still lit.

Li Yu's company is on the sixth and seventh floors of Block A, Li Yu glanced at the elevator, three of the four have stopped, and one is on the twenty-sixth floor at this time, he didn't want to wait any longer, so he went downstairs directly from the safe passage on the side.

As a result, when I went down to the fourth floor, I heard a faint sob.

Li Yu didn't see the owner of the voice, and only roughly judged that the voice came from the platform on the first and second floors.

Listening to the voice is a girl. I was talking to my family on the phone, crying while calling.

"I can't hold on anymore...... After graduating, I came here for three months, and I didn't work for seven days...... I work at least twelve hours a day, I am given any work to do, and the leader gives me the lowest score in the group, and training me in front of everyone is like training a dog. Mom, I'm really tired......"

Li Yu didn't want to embarrass the other party, so he silently withdrew from the corridor and changed to another safe passage.

I didn't meet anyone else this time.

Li Yu went downstairs smoothly, walked out of the gate, diagonally crossed the small square in front of the office building, turned right onto the crosswalk, and smelled a fragrance after walking a few steps.

The area around here is basically office buildings, and there is no shortage of people who work at night.

As a result, the itinerant vendors who smelled the business opportunities all rode tricycles and pulled gas canisters, and rushed over, and after nine o'clock in the evening, the roadside was full of all kinds of food stalls, rice noodles, wraps, chicken cutlets, ...... There's everything.

At this time, most of the chengguan are also resting, and they don't have to hide anymore, it is a good time to do business.

Li Yu ate half a bag of bread left over from the morning for dinner at five o'clock in the afternoon, and it happened that his stomach was a little hungry again, so he spent eight yuan to buy a box of vegetarian fried noodles.

After scanning the QR code to pay, he continued to walk forward with the hot fried noodles.

Li Yu's place of work is on the edge of the North Fourth Ring Road, but the rented house is outside the East Fifth Ring Road.

There is still a bit of distance in between, and the commute time by subway on weekdays is one hour and twenty minutes, especially in the morning rush hour, you have to go out ten minutes earlier so that you will not be late.

The reason why he lived so far away was because the rent in the east was cheaper, and secondly, because the rent could be cheaper, Li Yu rented a house at that time and signed a two-year contract in one go.

He used to be a 30-minute bike ride from where he worked, but he switched jobs a year ago to his current company, and he spent even more time on the road.

Fortunately, it didn't grow to the point where it was unacceptable.

After working for a long time after graduation, Li Yu found that there were fewer and fewer things that he couldn't accept.

When I walked to the bus stop, there were already six or seven figures standing there, and like Li Yu, they were all people working in a nearby office building. There are men and women.

Speaking from the heart, the white-collar workers who work in this CBD are generally quite online.

Especially women, many of them have fitness, their posture is very good, makeup is more powerful than one another, even in the crowded subway, they can still draw their eyebrows steadily, regardless of the forest, Japanese or Korean style can be easily controlled, walking on the street on weekdays, can always attract a lot of attention.

However, none of the four men on the platform now looked around, just lowered their heads and played with their mobile phones.

Some people are sending messages to their girlfriends, some people are reading novels and swiping forums, and some are watching vtuber live broadcasts. On the rectangular light box behind them, advertisements for real estate and medical aesthetic plastic surgery hospitals are scrolling alternately.

Ten minutes later, the No. 6 bus arrives at the station.

Li Yu and several others swiped their cards to get on the bus in turn, found empty seats and sat down.

Many people may assume that the buses that run through the city late at night will be empty, but this is not the case.

In addition to migrant workers like Li Yu who work late to work late, there are also substitute drivers carrying small cars, scalpers carrying sleeping bags ready to grab shoes, bags and houses, young people who go to nightclubs to drink in cool clothes, or outsiders who bring their children to the big city for medical treatment with a sad face......

In winter, there are occasionally wanderers who pick up waste to get on the bus to keep warm, most of them are crowded in the last row, without saying a word, they get on the bus from the starting station, and sit until the terminal station before getting off, and the time is about two hours after sitting for a whole lap.

It's also the cheapest way they can find heating in the city.

Li Yu set the alarm clock, put on headphones, hugged the backpack into his arms, and then leaned his head against the window on the side, and after a while, he closed his eyes in the bump and fell into a light sleep.

Night No. 6 Road drove unhurriedly in the steel forest made of reinforced concrete.

Day after day, the same trajectory is repeated, just like Li Yu and most of the people who live in the city.

Li Yu didn't know when it started, and he always had a feeling of being trapped by something.

At first, he thought it was because his previous job was too boring, but when he changed to his current company, the feeling of being trapped before did not disappear, but became stronger and stronger.

The most obvious manifestation is the fading of the desire to communicate and curiosity.

Li Yu is not the kind of person who is particularly talkative, but he was definitely not as taciturn as he is when he was in school, and even joined a debate club in college and won several games.

However, after entering the workplace, Li Yu became less and less talkative day by day.

Because you don't know what you said in the WeChat group, or somewhere in private, it will be used by people with ulterior motives and turned into a dark arrow to shoot at you.

I don't know if those colleagues who are righteous on the surface and accuse everyone of the company's unreasonable system are the eyes of a certain leader behind their backs.

Be cautious in words and deeds, see more and say less, and say that Li Yu learned the first workplace survival rule.

As for curiosity, Li Yu also went to take the weird written test of the Third Age in the afternoon and suddenly realized that he seemed to have not read a book for a long time.

In the past, he was interested in history, geography, philosophy, and natural science, and he had found a lot of books and documentaries in private, and watched late at night with great interest, but after work, he found that these messy knowledge could not help him in the workplace.

In this city, everyone always cares about KPIs, those tables and numbers on the screen, how to make the boss see the results of their work, how to get a promotion and a raise, and fewer and fewer people will care about the things that do not bring benefits.

But you can't blame modern people for being too ignorant, because most people are already struggling to be alive.

Experts and scholars are constantly on the Internet all day long, saying that short videos, fast food literature, and junk mobile games are ruining a generation.

Yet they consciously or unconsciously ignore why all this is happening.

When you come home from overtime for weeks in a row, exhausted and dizzy, does your already overwhelmed brain want to be baptized by poetry and art masterpieces, or would you rather find some black silk to cool off?

In fact, even stand-alone games, Li Yu hasn't touched them for a long time, although it is a discount season, he will still subconsciously order this year's masterpieces.

But those games lay down on the hard drive after the download and installation were completed, and they quietly ate ashes.

Even watching movies, Li Yu began to fast-forward at twice the speed.

Of course, he wanted to escape from this life, but he didn't know where to flee.

If you want to settle in the city, you have to buy a house, and if you want to buy a house, you have to work hard, and no matter which company you change jobs to, overtime is almost inevitable.

And when you work overtime to become an occupational disease, you will find that the money you earned is just a drop in the bucket compared to the high housing prices.

Li Yu also thought about returning to his hometown, but he could hardly find a professional job in a third-tier town, where the salary was lower and the boss of a private company was even more unfavorable, so the only reliable option was to take the public examination.

Unfortunately, other people think the same way, so the difficulty of the public examination is getting bigger and bigger every year.

Some city neighborhood offices and auxiliary police officers are all graduate students.

Moreover, even if the difficulty is aside, small places pay more attention to human favors than rules, and after entering the public service system, they will still face overwhelming official documents and endless ideological construction......

Of course, even so, the examination is still a very good way out for the vast majority of young people who are adrift on the front line, including Li Yu.

It's just that Li Yu has to face another problem - if the feeling of being trapped still hasn't disappeared after returning to his hometown, where else can he retreat to then?

The longer he worked, the more he felt that society was like some kind of huge and complex machine, and the individual was the screw and parts of the machine.

No one cares what a screw wants to become, the vast majority of people are just roughly stuffed into the mouth of a screw that is not suitable for them, and then with a loud roar, they are thrown into an endless cycle of production and reproduction.

Until the polished flesh was blurred, completely embedded in the gap, and could no longer move.