Shouting "I'm single but my CP must get married", how deep is the tension youth torn?

Lao Tzu's "Blessings and Misfortunes Depend on Each Other", Su Shi's "Great Wisdom as Foolishness", Lu Xun's "Commemoration for Forgetting"... The arrangement and combination of two words with opposite meanings into new words, which in turn produces the special effect of contradiction and conflict, has been an idiomatic expression since ancient times. Nowadays, this discourse expression method is gradually sought after by online youth, and has expanded from the online discourse circle to real life. From the earliest "pain and happiness" and "local tycoons" to recent years of "punk health" and "exquisite poverty", a large number of youth buzzwords with contradictory expressions as the style have been formed.

Whether it is a scream or a wandering

In the identity role, many young people are full of urgent expectations for upward mobility, but a large gap has been formed between them and their actual status. The complexity of the external environment and the limitations of their own capabilities have spawned their ambivalent mentality: on the one hand, they are at a loss, and on the other hand, they are eager to change the status quo. Under the pressure of social survival, the anxiety of some young people about identity roles has further fermented.

In order to cope with this anxiety, some young people use "contradictory expressions" to seek the possibility of breaking the blocked status quo, such as "active waste", "Page social people", "small town problem makers" and so on. This contradictory expression reflects the rebellion and deconstruction of the conflict between identity and reality, and the attempt to self-psychological adjustment and establish a psychological buffer zone.

Similarly, in daily consumption, tempted by consumerism, some young people are delusional to concentrate their full strength to catch up with the trend to the greatest extent. "Riding a bicycle to a bar, the province should spend flowers", even if you are "too poor to eat soil", you must pursue "taste" and "refinement", and live a "delicate and poor" life.

There are also some young people who see through the illusory scenes depicted by consumerism and firmly choose "comparison-type frugality". The original meaning of the comparison is to "blindly follow the trend and compare regardless of its own objective conditions", but combined with the concept of "living frugally and moderately", it constitutes an irony and self-deprecation of the "exquisite and poor" consumption model. "Even if they are poor, they must be beautiful as stars" and "both love and dislike, want to have and want to stay away" have become the truest contradictory portrayals of their consumption.

Alienated and intimate, true and false

Many young people are obsessed with the efficient convenience and ease of virtual social networking due to their concerns about "saying the wrong thing", "don't know what to say" and "too much disclosure of their true hearts". As a result, "real social fear, online talk" and "online hilarity, offline solitude" have become the norm.

It is precisely because of the ambivalence of "wanting to express but not daring to express", such online buzzwords as "cloud door-to-door", "self-deprecating chat" and "enthusiastic social fear" appear frequently. "Enthusiastic social fear", that is, "not good at socializing but yearning for socializing, but after trying, I still think that a person is good". In contrast, "self-hi chat" refers to falling into a self-hi mode when chatting, they do not force the other party to respond to themselves, and think that expressing their views has achieved the purpose of chatting.

These Internet buzzwords reflect that some young people overemphasize their self-will in social interactions, using "I" as the main body to declare "I say therefore I am". As a result, the social rituals of some contemporary young people are increasingly moving towards the "twist" situation of alienation and intimacy, true and false.

Contradictory expression extends from social to marital love. In the traditional view of marriage and love, singleness is usually a passive and unavoidable choice, but with the emergence of negative social news such as domestic violence and partner infidelity, some young people have built a higher and higher psychological defense line, and have begun to "voluntarily" not fall in love and fear marriage. Thus, the "active single" came into being.

However, not marrying or not loving is not the true expression of their hearts, and there are still a large number of "CP youth" (CP refers to couples in movies and television and variety shows, which are not necessarily true in reality) addicted to "CP", shouting slogans such as "I can be single for a lifetime, but my CP must be together", by staying away from reality and watching others' intimate relationships to obtain love satisfaction, and pin romantic love on others. In essence, many young people have not given up their yearning for pure and beautiful love, they long for intimate marriage and love relationships, but they hate the troubles in marriage and love.

In the whirlpool of contradictions,

Contradictory expressions are everywhere

Today's "contradictory youth" is also performing a feast of aesthetic contrast. Some cartoon characters take "ugly" deeply into people's hearts, they are ugly through the butt-like face, depressed and wrinkled facial lines, etc., but with their round shapes and innocent expressions, they make people feel pity.

In addition to the contrast in appearance, some young people have also begun to advocate the concept of "the extreme soil is the tide": the big flower jacket has appeared on the fashion show of the international film festival, and the band from the county town claims that it is "better to get the slag than to be vulgar". They uphold the deviant aesthetic and curiosity psychology, and combine "ugly disgust" with "cuteness", "soil stagnation" and "rushing tide" into an "aesthetic contradiction" in which vulgarity and elegance are mixed and beauty and ugliness are integrated. This contrasting pursuit expresses the fierce tension between aesthetics and ugliness, and subversion and deconstruction as a way to be different and highlight personality.

In terms of health, when the "996" overwork culture is prevalent in society, in the face of high-density and high-intensity work, night battles and dietary imbalances have become the norm in the lives of some young people, and they have to use health products as a "miracle medicine" to make up for their excessive loss. An unhealthy lifestyle is intertwined with the idea of "sparing life", giving birth to the self-deprecation of "punk health". "With the most expensive skin care products, stay up the night at the latest", "spicy strips and honeysuckle fly together, beer and goji berries are the same color", this strong contrast not only vents the revenge pastime of fast-paced life, but also shows the selective helplessness of having to cherish your own health under the pressure of real survival.

Contradictory expression will be the youth career view, consumption view, social view, marriage and love view, aesthetics, health concept of the contradictions and conflicts, through the confrontational language to fully highlight, more and more young people as their own label and self-proclaimed. The great changes of the times have wrapped young people into the vortex of contradictions, a group of people with huge pressure and vitality, on the one hand, eager to have roots, on the other hand, eager to have wings; On the one hand, obedience is lazy, and on the other hand, resistance struggles. Spirit and matter, desire and reality are tearing and competing in them all the time.

In this regard, we need to deeply explore the ambivalence of young people and the causes behind them, screen out the factors that have a dissolution and centrifugal effect on the mainstream discourse system, provide a good recipe for bridging contradictions and transcending new spiritual pains, and actively guide young people to continue to struggle and bravely undertake the mission of the times. (The author is a Ph.D. from the National Cultural Industry Research Center of Central China Normal University)

Source: Half Moon Talk