「Core Tips」
I can't stay in the north, Guangzhou, and deep, and I can't go back to my hometown. Under the dilemma, the second-tier cities in the middle have become the choice of more and more young people.
Author | Chen Xiaoyan
Edit | Zhang Zirui
Go home for the New Year, do you want to come back again?
Less than 2 weeks before the Spring Festival, Internet workers in first-tier cities have to face this choice problem again.
Especially this year's Internet winter, so that the "left" end of the scale has a little more weight.
2 years ago, there was no cold wave, the big factories were still marching, and Kris, a post-90s girl, resigned as a product manager of a big Internet factory in Beijing and bid farewell to Beijing, where she had lived for ten years.
Kris said that since she was a strong child, she has always advocated a life of struggle in first-tier cities, but she did not expect to choose Chengdu one day. Bidding farewell to the first-tier metropolis, the saddest thing is the obstacle in my heart - leaving the house I just bought and renovated, leaving aside the circle of life and network resources in Beijing, and going to a completely unfamiliar city.
On the night of his departure, Kris took photos of every corner of his new home in Beijing and put them on his phone as a souvenir, ready not to come back for a long time. It was raining in good weather, just as she had been in Beijing ten years earlier.
If you give up the big factory and quit Beijing, will you regret it and leave regrets? Kris at the time also had no answer. The only thing she was sure of was that there would always be new paths beyond the siege.
Passers-by of the city
The idea of leaving a first-tier city usually stems from abnormalities in life.
Yuan Jing, who works in Shanghai, once felt the warning given by her body. The 26-year-old, who works for an Internet company, finished the plan at home overnight, got up from the computer, suddenly went black for a few seconds, and her heartbeat seemed to miss a few beats. After a simple wash, she showed up at the company again in the morning. In the afternoon meeting, Yuan Jing saw that people were a bit ghostly, so tired that she lost consciousness and couldn't hear other colleagues talking.
In this company, staying up late and working overtime is a common occurrence. Yuan Jing was a little afraid when she thought about it, and the "sudden death" commonly seen on the news may not be far away from her.
Liu Yi, an Internet advertising practitioner, has lost control of her life. At the end of nearly 12 hours of work every day, she often sweats and squeezes into the subway in Shenzhen, sometimes feeling like a sardine and sometimes like a walking dead.
The pressure of the KPI hangs above her head. Colleagues saw that she was too nervous and advised her to play with her mobile phone between work. Liu Yi refused, staring at the list of consumption amounts for the month. Until later, the boss asked them to sign an agreement, if they could not complete the performance in three months, they would be dismissed, at this time Liu Yi was suddenly torn off like a rope that was too tight. "I can't run so hard all my life." "I don't see the end in sight, I feel like I have to end this life," she said. ”
In 2020, the epidemic disrupted people's lives, allowing Liu Yi to start thinking about the issue of "stability" in advance. Shenzhen is clearly unable to provide an answer. In Liu Yi's view, buying a house and getting a hukou is just an admission ticket to the city. Whether the next generation can study here and take the college entrance examination is a sign that a person takes root. Liu Yi's uncle spent nearly 20 years trying to become a "Guangzhou native". Thinking of this, she felt hopeless. But this also made Liu Yi determined that if he could not stay in the big city, he must turn around as soon as possible.
Lin Yuan also did not get enough security in the big city. In 2015, Lin Yuan, a recent graduate, came to Beijing, initially doing operations, and later applied to become a programmer at an Internet factory. Lin Yuan was once an idealist, had heard the entrepreneurial story of Beijing, and believed that he was the next Luo Yonghao and Lei Jun. After working for a few years, he slowly accepted that like most people, he was just the most ordinary front-line worker, who was paid for his labor. But every year, countless young people flock to the city to replace older workers with cheaper time costs.
Lin was far from reaching the city's entry threshold. When I first arrived in Beijing, "the bustling streets and convenient public transportation felt like mine, very beautiful." A few years later, Lin Yuan found that he was still a "passer-by" of the city, and no matter how prosperous Beijing was, the rise and fall of house prices had nothing to do with him. Spending time is not a long-term solution, and Lin Yuan decided to leave Beijing at the age of 28.
Unlike Lin Yuan, Kris owns a property in Beijing, which is considered to be a home, but the house is not a master key. Towards the age of 30, Kris and other big factory employees face similar problems: either go up or be eliminated. However, there are fewer middle and high-level posts and fewer monks, which means that there are always more losers than successful people.
At that time, Kris spent most of his time in the company, not doing the work at hand, but busy dealing with interpersonal relationships, "being a person" more than "doing things". This drained her energy and didn't get a sense of accomplishment. If you want to be promoted, you must inject more energy into the things you don't like.
Kris has friends who have made their home in Beijing. After working hard for most of his life, the whole family hollowed out their savings and bought a school district home in Beijing, but life was not rich, and many things they wanted to do could not be done, and they could only exercise their ability to endure.
The sense of crisis accompanied Kris, and she had to keep looking for a way out until the idea of leaving Beijing appeared.
Longing for life
Lack of sense of belonging, high thresholds and high cost of living are the main reasons why young people leave first-tier cities, but Beijing's indigenous qiqi is not among them.
After graduating from Fudan in Shanghai, Qiqi stayed in Shenzhen Tencent for eight years. In his days as a programmer, Qiqi was not satisfied with his life state. She values independence and autonomy, does not like the form of clocking in and out of work, and is not willing to become an ordinary screw in a large factory. In 2013, the 30-year-old Qiqi left Tencent to become an insurance broker and returned to his home in Beijing in 2017.
Her family can't understand her decision, Fudan graduated, and entered such a good company as Tencent, a girl, why should she give up her glamorous and stable job and run to sell insurance?
But for Qiqi, the transformation to sell insurance not only became the beginning of her career turnaround, but also gave her the opportunity to leave the north and go deep. In Beijing, Qiqi has a one-bedroom apartment of more than 30 square meters. In the second year of becoming an insurance broker, qiqi's annual income exceeded one million. To outsiders, she had no reason to leave Beijing at all.
But none of this brought her satisfaction in life. Seven-seven Beijing classmates, in order to be able to drive a car, participated in the lottery with their father and two people, and it took eight years to shake a fuel car. The quota of new energy vehicles shaken by Qiqi has also been given priority to parents, and it is still very inconvenient to travel by themselves.
At the beginning of 2020, after the outbreak of the epidemic, the massage shops, cinemas, gyms and other leisure places near the community were all suspended, and the only entertainment became walking and circling downstairs.
Originally, Qiqi thought that as long as he changed to a larger house, he could solve the problem of happiness. But she went out and looked around the house, and all she brought back was a deeper sense of loss. In addition to the old and dilapidated, other houses with good environment and good supporting facilities are either remote or more than 10 million.
Later, Qiqi saw others in the circle of friends posting the house bought in Chengdu, which made her question her life even more. Qiqi began to have the idea of leaving Beijing. As an insurance broker, her customer acquisition channels are mostly online and are not affected by geography.
In 2020, Qiqi came to Chengdu. Most of the neighborhoods in the South End are built next to the park, creating the concept of a "garden city". Surrounded by rivers and lakes, the average price of houses is less than 20,000. This made Qiqi, who originally just wanted to come and see, move his heart and decide to stay. I moved to Chengdu in August and bought a car in September. In Chengdu, Qiqi realized the dream of living in a big house and traveling freely.
Chen Chao, a public relations company of the Internet company, also gradually completed the "downgrading of residential cities" after 2015. After graduating from university, he worked in Beijing for three years, then moved to Nanjing, and finally returned to his hometown in Wenzhou.
Leaving the big city, Chen Chao also encountered resistance. His parents were puzzled by his choice: "Why come back?" Not great in a big city? "In their opinion, the son has a decent job in the big city, and when he says it, he also feels that there is light on his face." Therefore, the village also pasted Chen Chao's photo on the wall of the ancestral hall as a publicity for the "deeds of outstanding young people".
But the other side of the brilliance is the hardship of wandering outside. A few years ago, the air quality in Beijing was not as good as it is now, chen chao suffered from coughing, and how much medicine he took did not work. Chen Chao often woke up in the middle of the night and lay on a small bed of one meter and two meters, and the room was cramped and could only put down one more table. After a few months, the cough dragged into chronic pharyngitis.
When he was in Nanjing, Chen Chao's income improved, but the company's atmosphere was getting worse and worse. Sometimes, the company's vice president scolds an employee in front of more than 200 people. Once, Chinese New Year's Eve, the leader pulled Chen Chao to work overtime, and he couldn't leave at eight o'clock in the evening.
Chen Chao knew that this was not the life he wanted. He told his parents, who did not understand him: "Live to see for yourself." ”
Peace of mind is home
Step back from the sea and the sky.
Moving from Beijing to Tianjin, Lin Yuan called the conversion "track." In Beijing, it is to compete with countless people with family backgrounds and excellent academic qualifications, "the main track is fighting, it is really difficult to get ahead."
Lin Yuan returned to his hometown for the New Year and found that his peers in his hometown lived a completely different life: stable work, a house and a car. On the other hand, if you continue to stay in Beijing, as a grassroots programmer, you may face a 35-year-old workplace crisis in the future, and if you set up a family in Beijing, you are not sure to win a good school district for your children. When parents are old, it is difficult to fulfill filial piety around them.
Therefore, in the second half of 2019, Lin Yuan refused the interview invitation of several Beijing factories and went to a company in Tianjin to join. After staying in Beijing, Lin Yuan was not willing to return to the remote "ravine" of his hometown. Tianjin is only a 30-minute drive from Beijing. After joining the company, Lin Yuan was surprised to find that many of his colleagues in Tianjin were former North Drifters, and the leader was also a former architect of Baidu.
I can't stay in the north, Guangzhou, and deep, and I can't go back to my hometown. Under the dilemma, the new first-tier cities and second-tier cities in the middle have become the most cost-effective choices.
In fact, the infrastructure and entertainment venues in many second-tier cities are not inferior to those in first-tier cities. When Kris arrived in Chengdu, he found that it was no longer just a leisure tourist place with "big bowl noodles" and "wide and narrow alleys". The infrastructure in seongnam is no different from that of first-tier cities. Some Internet companies also work overtime until eleven or twelve o'clock in the evening, and she sometimes suddenly feels that she is still in Beijing.
After settling in Tianjin, Lin Yuan changed from ordering takeaways to returning home on time to eat, and those days of resignation recalled like dreams.
When she was in Shanghai, Yuan Jing got off work, and when she walked back, she could always see the lights of thousands of homes in the community, but none of the lights were lit for herself. Many of her 30-year-old colleagues are still floating alone in Shanghai, like her future. In her work circle, there are very few men, and taking off the list has become a problem.
After returning to her hometown for a few months, Yuan Jing met her current boyfriend under the introduction of her friends. After work, she can date her boyfriend, eat and drink with friends, and go home to spend time with her parents on weekends.
For Chen Chao, the motivation to return to his hometown in Wenzhou is also a psychological change brought about by age. When they were young, they always wanted to go away, and when their parents got older, they began to covet the days around them.
Chen Chao married and settled down in Wenzhou, looking for a local girl. It only takes 10 minutes to drive home from work, which he could not have imagined after a two-hour commute in Beijing before. There was no time to cook in the evening, so the two of them went to their parents' house to rub rice together.
The ease of second-tier cities has also alleviated the anxiety and desire left over from the north, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen. This is the case with beijing's indigenous seven-seven. In Beijing, there seems to be no upper limit to material desires, far beyond her ability. Even if the annual income is millions, but the income is higher than her, there are people who are insufficient, which brings more anxiety.
But in Chengdu, regardless of income, many people have a higher sense of satisfaction with life. Do what you want to do in time, which is her biggest gain in Chengdu. Originally, all her energy was spent on work. Now, learning oil painting, baseball, drum kits, etc., those courses that originally felt "useless" are fully arranged on the schedule.
Kris had a similar experience. In the ten years of Beijing, she was accustomed to the busy and numb look of pedestrians on the road, and in the subway, everyone stared at their mobile phones, their faces full of exhaustion.
"Unlike Beijing, which chases desire and is tired of running for its life. In Chengdu, even a foot-pinching brother is easy to feel satisfied with life. This was what she found when she went to a foot massage shop.
The foot therapist told Kris that when he finished pinching his feet, he also asked his friends to eat supper and play mahjong. The happy look on the other person's face made Kris see another attitude towards life, an attitude that had nothing to do with money, status, not inward- and live well.
(At the request of the interviewee, all names in this article are pseudonyms)
Do you think leaving a first-tier city is a good choice?
Source: The Paper