The recent hot search looks dazzling, whether it is the Internet celebrity frog being expelled by the urban management, which has attracted the empathy of countless workers; or Roll Wang's colleague worked overtime for three years and finally left, which was evaluated by netizens as "not rolling, it is kindness to himself and his colleagues"; Or maybe it's the entertainment style of young people now, starting to focus on playing to the limit on short rest days. In fact, if you look closely, there is a dense sentence between the lines:
"It's hard to go to work".
For example, special forces tourism is to squeeze the spirit and body to the extreme, just to check in as much "to visit here" as possible on weekends.
Sleeping in a train sleeper on Friday night, he traveled three cities and eight attractions for two days, and returned tired of infusions. On the surface, it is living up to youth, but in fact, it is fiercely retaliating against the long and exhausting work, so that it is necessary to use extreme exhaustion to desperately distinguish the boundary between vacation and working days, and prove that you have indeed played.
On various social media, the most suitable medical beauty for Chinese babies' physique has long changed from Thermage and skinboosters to resignation.
Before resignation, tired and blind, after resignation, radiant and rejuvenated, the comparison chart of before & after netizens posted is really more shocking than before and after plastic surgery.
And this topic can make netizens send photos in response, it has nothing to do with the issue of beauty and ugliness, everyone is concentrating on accusations, how much the harm of work to people can be visible to the naked eye.
While young people resign in various fancy ways, there is also a trend of "drying fairy work".
You know, the "fairy work" that the post-00s yearn for today is either light manual work that is easy and has clear working hours, such as picking blueberries in New Zealand and working as a keeper in a zoo;
Or extremely stable elderly care jobs, such as librarians, dormitories.
While the previous generation took high salaries and development prospects as their preferred choice for ideal jobs, these young people suddenly put aside the baggage of struggle and turned to pursue "early retirement".
Recently, the concept of "bullshit work" proposed by American anthropologist David Graeber is also becoming more popular. Bullshit jobs are "meaningless and often harmful regularly paid occupations."
Such work occupies our lives and devours the time we could have devoted to self-improvement, and it does not bring growth, but only futile physical and mental consumption.
As a result, the more you do this kind of work, the more you will be trapped in such shit work.
Nowadays, there are two misconceptions about young people in the market, one is that they will only resign at will, and the other is that they will only work stuffy.
But this generation of young people has lost enthusiasm for work collectively, and it is not just because they are lazy or do not want to go to work. Behind this phenomenon is precisely because they are eager to find a sense of meaning in their work, hoping to engage in a career that they are willing to devote themselves to, so as to live a more sober and worthwhile life.
If you have searched for troubles related to the workplace, you will find that in fact, on Zhihu, such a group of migrant workers who actively seek meaning have already gathered. Their questions and answers seem to reveal the answers behind their career choices.
For example, in fact, some people's naked words are not impulsive, but carefully weighed career plans.
Faced with the 35-year-old spell, they have long begun to make various preparations.
As for the "volume", their attitude cannot be summarized as rejection, but is looking for and identifying a more meaningful and cost-effective "balance".
Because there is more reverse thinking about work, as well as affirmation and exploration of self, it may be more appropriate to call them "workers" than workers:
They are not satisfied with meaningless and endless part-time work, but are selectively and purposefully exercising and exchanging their professional skills and personal values, and they always bravely take the initiative and realize themselves rather than following the trend in the workplace.
And Zhihu supported them with a positive community atmosphere, a wide and deep discussion space, and a series of content specially created for professionals.
So, naturally, Zhihu became a pantry and arsenal for these professionals to exchange information, replenish skills, and answer questions.
Recently, Zhihu made a documentary called "This Professional". There may be no standard answer to how to solve their own internal friction and confusion, but at least a reference sample is provided.
Some of the four protagonists in the documentary are unwilling to live according to the established track and have the courage to take the initiative to choose their own careers and lives; Some have firm career aspirations and see work as a tool to achieve it.
Their choices may bring new emotional outlets and ideas to people with similar confusion.
Hu Gafeng, born in 1983, 40 years old immediately, a native of Lanzhou, Gansu, a family in Shanghai, with a mortgage and a baby.
Once, his position reached Ali P7, but he voluntarily left his job in internal friction to find the meaning of life.
But soon, he found that work is consumption, but it is also a social label that many people rely on to survive, without the aura of a big factory, his own skills have lost some kind of certification.
"Since I started looking for a job in November last year, I have to submit 2 or 30 resumes every day, but most of them have not been read, and I am quite desperate."
Hu Gafeng has delivered takeaways and sold curtains at IKEA, "at least a job, let me know that this society still needs me." ”
But he also saw the limitations of selling curtains, "there is too much gap between effort and gain, but I still want to fight hard and do my own business."
So Hu Gafeng came up with an idea, it is better to rely on the operation planning ability he accumulated in the big factory, and his own natural science knowledge, to carry out a natural science course in the park near his home.
In order to design this course, Hu Gafeng recognized the plants in the park one by one, and also carefully designed interesting links according to different scenes.
"I was thinking that if the petals of this Tokyo cherry blossom fell a lot, I could use it for craftsmanship, and when I passed by the wheat cabbage, I could let the children take pictures here..."
"After all, it is not easy to start a business, but how difficult it is, and the degree of this difficulty, whether I can control and accept it, these are all things that I have to try."
The preset two-and-a-half-hour course is much more chaotic than Hu Gafeng imagined, some children directly pointed out that Hu Gafeng's understanding ability is not good, and some have been singing "Love you alone in the dark alley", without giving him the entrance to optimize the process.
But in the face of this dilemma, in the process of doing things down-to-earth, Hu Gafeng felt his own ability and personal value, and also understood that only by constantly refreshing the boundaries can he overcome age anxiety and career bottlenecks.
Similar to Hu Gafeng, there is also a native of Gansu born in 91, Wang Zhuanlan.
As a child, Zhuanlan grew up in a small village in Longnan, Gansu Province, and has always longed to see the outside world.
At the age of 14, she followed a fellow villager to Beijing to start working as a nanny, and after 16 years, from nanny to page designer, from a monthly salary of 300 yuan to a monthly salary of more than 10,000 yuan, she tasted the hard work of Beipiao.
In the past 16 years, Zhuanlan tried her best to stay in Beijing, but after getting married, she faced many problems such as settling down, buying a house, and going to school for her children.
"The child couldn't go to school, so at that time I wanted to come back and had no other ideas."
So the two returned to their hometown, her husband Xiaopan engaged in new agriculture, and Wang Zhuanlan became a full-time mother and self-media. Start your career from scratch.
Before returning, Wang Zhuanlan longed for a more idealized pastoral life, but as soon as his feet stepped into the farmland, real problems emerged one by one.
One of the most difficult things to solve was that the two clearly felt the irreconcilable difference between their perception and that of the locals: "We went to contract land and communicate with farmers, and they did not understand this centralized regional management of the fields. ”
Relatives in their hometown do not understand them even more, do not understand why they can abandon the aura of "Beijing" and "high salary" and return to the countryside. "They don't understand that we're renovating yards and farming, and they think it's not doing business."
But Zhuanlan and Xiaopan (Zhuanlan's husband) are self-consistent, they know that those external labels cannot make life really better, and they must use their hands to create a life that suits them, "even if they take root downwards, they are the force of upward."
"Our goal has always been not to farm as much land, but to sink our hearts and start a business from farming."
Whether it is Hu Gafeng or Wang Zhuanlan, although they have given up their previous high-paying jobs, their quality, experience and tenacity are still there, which is something that people can really rely on.
Even if they don't have a glamorous job in the secular sense, they all see self-worth in doing things. In Wang Zhuanlan's words: "It's like surviving in the cracks, and you have to catch it when you see a little sunlight." ”
36-year-old Zhang Xiuyu, who likes to play games, is currently a game interactive planner of a large factory.
Before entering the big factory and becoming the majority of the 9-to-5 society, Xiuyu was not very comfortable, he worked in a well-known game company, started a business 3 times, and had been doing improv comedy as a side hustle.
Although he tried many things, Zhang Xiuyu has always had a main axis: the story of creating his own game. Improvisational comedy is his fulcrum, and in real life he is the only place where he can tell the stories he wants to tell.
Because Xiuyu's previous work experience has taken some detours, now he is not engaged in first-line game planning, the leader is not much different from his age, and even said that his biggest shortcoming is his age.
When Xiuyu did her first job, she already knew that her dream of making games was very full, but after landing a job, there would always be less mystery. "In fact, work is just work."
"The first thing in the morning is to check the mailbox and feedback the opinions of various game producers, such as the font here is too big, the difference of two pixels here is not aligned, busy until 3 o'clock in the morning, cycling, riding from Haidian to Liuli Bridge."
And this journey of riding dead and flying is Xiuyu's most liberating moment outside of work.
Once, Xiuyu felt that his work could not realize his ideas, "I didn't do the main test at that time, so I resigned", and also reflected on his work status, "Sometimes, I also feel that the volume is caught in an addictive self-punishment mood."
But in the end, Xiuyu decided to return to the workplace. He sees the limitations of the self and strips away the idealism of his work, instead seeing it as a realistic anchor that helps him get closer to his personal ideals and self-actualization.
Today, Xiuyu is learning German, and he plans to apply to the University of Zurich to major in game design and continue to pursue his dream of creating game scripts.
Like Xiuyu, Niu Tian, who works at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, has questioned the meaning of work.
"After graduating with a PhD in 2017, I worked at the Academy of Social Sciences, and in the early three years of my work, every day seemed happy and busy, but I felt that something was missing."
For researchers doing desk work, obscurity is almost a foregone destiny. "Even if you write a paper, it doesn't necessarily have to be seen, it's not necessarily influential."
In order to fill this vacant sense of meaning, Niu Tian also works part-time as a group class instructor for fitness classes in his spare time. "You can quickly make others like you in a small gym, which will make you recognize yourself a little more and find a sense of value."
It is precisely because of the experience of part-time fitness coach that Niu Tian completed a paper called "The Identity Experience of Slash Youth" and won the award.
For Niu Tian, this is tantamount to an encouragement, which means that the value of work can be created independently, and the act of constantly trying and finding meaning is meaningful in itself.
And for Xiuyu, this feeling of finding meaning is "like a maze".
"Of course you feel like walls on all sides when you're in the middle, but you have to see other possibilities, and only then can you realize that life is not static."
For professionals, Zhihu is defined as: people who have superb skills in a certain field, and they have the corresponding knowledge, experience and skills.
Just like Hu Gafeng, who resigned from Ali and went from selling curtains to starting a business from scratch, Xiuyu, who is 36 years old and ready to return to university to pursue his dreams, and Wang Zhuanlan, who returned to the countryside from the city to build a more satisfying life, they are not satisfied with the so-called "part-time job", and have higher and more diversified demands for work, life, and life value, so they have the courage and determination to use their ability to create another life that may not conform to the social clock and secular concepts.
It is not the work itself, let the worker become the "worker". It is the mastery and self-confidence of skills in a certain field, the enthusiasm for using skills to realize personal value, and the pride and self-sufficiency of exchanging personal value for a better life, which constitute other meanings of the worker.
Today, this group of professionals is concentrated in the urban and tertiary industries, and has a higher education background. According to the mainland's population of 240 million people receiving higher education, and 350 million tertiary industry workers, plus advanced manufacturing and modern agriculture practitioners, it is estimated that there are at least 400 million potential "professionals".
Compared with the workers of the past, they have higher education and professionalism, and are gradually becoming the backbone of society.
And Zhihu is also becoming a charging station and base camp for this group of professionals.
As early as 2012, in the early days of Zhihu, founder Zhou Yuan wrote Zhihu's original intention, "Everyone is an expert in a certain field, Zhihu can help everyone to show their shining side".
On May 15 this year, Zhihu's first "515 Workers' Day" was officially launched. From now until May 31, Zhihu will launch the first character documentary "This Professional" featuring "New Professionals", and also release the "New Professionals Secret File" created by 65 Zhihu respondents, as well as a series of roundtable live broadcasts and other activities.
At the main venue of the Employees' Day, Zhihu not only has a secret file for new employees who provide a workplace survival guide, but also a new solution for opening after work. Starting from keywords such as dressing, commuting, food, office artifacts, and lifestyle, it provides one-stop answers and tips for this class of professionals.
The core positioning of professional discussions and the warm and positive community atmosphere are the soil for Zhihu to attract a large number of creators with professional knowledge, experience and opinions, and "knowledge experts" and "urban youth" are the general impression of Zhihu users.
Curious young people ask questions and find answers on Zhihu, and Zhihu will also help them find answers as their mission, and accompany them to grow into new professionals who are independent and have a new style in work and life.
Ending：
Romain Roland said that the heaviest burden in life is not work, but boredom.
The original intention of the vast majority of people's work is by no means interest and meaning, this sense of boredom and meaninglessness will accompany for a long time, how to break through this barrier, may be a lifelong problem to solve
Instead of demanding the meaning of work, it is better to unfold smoothly, feel where life is, use work as a tool to realize personal value, and learn from this group of contemporary professionals.
Know that you are never alone in your search for answers.