Text/Yiyi
Editor/Three-Three
As the New Year approaches, there are more and more farces.
A nurse in Jinan, Shandong Province made a fuss on the whole network about "beating workers to the death, making it difficult for them".
What happened was simple. Because the nurse's takeaway delivery address was not written in detail, the delivery man could not deliver the food to his hand, and when the two were arguing about whose responsibility it was, the nurse suddenly became angry and yelled at the takeaway brother:
"You're at the bottom of society!"
Not only the takeaway brother, but many netizens couldn't tolerate such an insult and joined the discussion.
Some netizens said that people of this quality work in hospitals, which is the sorrow of society; some netizens said that people with a monthly salary of 3,000 ridicule those with a monthly salary of 10,000, where does they have the courage?
The nurse's angry denunciation also revealed a cruel truth: in fact, the mass media has long portrayed delivery workers and couriers as spokespersons for "low-level people".
People who have watched a lot understand that in the iron law of traffic, the miserableness of the rider is directly proportional to the popularity of the topic, and the status of the rider is inversely proportional to the frequency of interaction.
After all, stereotypes are the primary productive force.
The problem is that people don't seem to think that it is these downward, sympathetic glances that make some groups that are not considered at the bottom become the bottom of the crowd.
Pride and prejudice in takeaway
Guo Degang has a cross talk that says, you can't always look up, you have to die, you have to look down, you will live a happy life.
Looking down, it may be life wisdom or traffic passwords.
I don't know when it began, celebrity cos takeaway brother became a fashion.
In the past, a female host was accompanied by five bodyguards throughout the whole process of recording a variety show and delivering takeaways, and later a female director made her debut to shoot a takeaway brother living alone in an apartment on the Bund and was criticized for being "self-moved", and even a male star who previously announced his retirement from the circle also revealed in the live broadcast that he was "collecting rags and delivering takeaways".
As a big star, bowing down and riding an electric donkey, the bottom layer of cos is like playing a game with VR, thrilling, exciting, and fandom. In particular, if you live a hard life, you can create a "down-to-earth character" and show your strong empathy ability.
In the end, the clockwork Jiugongge Weibo, with a hot search of passers-by encountering direct shots, in exchange for fans sighed:
"Do you know how hard he tried?"
At the end of the day, do you think delivery people would expect a Porsche star to roll down the window and say "I understand you"?
Of course not.
What they expect is simple: more understanding, less complaints, and no sympathy. Instead of a good flexible employment, it has become a crossover of variety show stars; Nunu earns more than 10,000 yuan a month, and he has to be used as the bottom to consume.
The successive "cos fever" has uncovered people's first prejudice against riders - running a takeaway is a low-level labor that needs to be taken care of.
How common is the "Xi habit of looking down" mentality? It may be seen from a recent news.
On December 5, a security guard in a community in Qingdao had an argument with a delivery person, and the security guard stabbed the delivery man to death several times.
For such a vicious criminal case, there are a large number of voices criticizing the victims, using the "failure" experience of the delivery man's life as the bull's-eye.
Take a look at a few headlines:
"The 32-year-old delivery man who was stabbed to death by a security guard in Qingdao spent more than 1 million to study abroad"
"The Saddest Story of 2023: Ordinary People, Don't Be Dead"
"It's so sad! borrowed millions to send his children to study abroad, but he couldn't get a job when he returned to China, and he was stabbed to death after 6 days of delivering takeaways..."
Throughout the article, the murderer with the knife is invisible, but the victim is frantically mending the knife - ridiculing him for staying in school or having to do hard work, and even the details of life such as making wine on weekdays and eating potatoes, chicken, and salmon for three meals are also magnified, which has become a strong proof of "too ambitious" and "unrealistic" in the eyes of critics.
The spectators' fluttering sentence "He shouldn't go to deliver takeaways, he should be a white-collar worker" directly labeled the original sin of this young man who worked hard to make a living.
The subtext is that food delivery is inferior, and you make the wrong choice at your own peril.
Who is this to look down on?
The loss of focus of public opinion points out the second layer of prejudice against riders - running a takeaway is a life strategy, and it is not necessary not to choose.
At present, there are 200 million people in flexible employment across the country, including riders, anchors, online car-hailing drivers, online teachers, freelance writers, etc.
If a profession is defined by a single "suffering" and "misery", it seems to be sympathy, but it is actually another kind of discrimination.
Plato once said that it is not easy to sympathize, because sympathy itself contains contempt.
Who exactly is the "bottom"?
In the online world, people are always happy to create all kinds of "bottom layers"
The uncle of the blind date corner in People's Park said: "The monthly salary of 10,000 yuan is begging." ”
Weibo big V said: "In Beijing, an annual income of 1 million belongs to just getting out of poverty. ”
Xiaohongshu netizens asked: "The current situation of girls in 99, only 300,000 are saved, is it a failure?"
The official account 10w+ broke the article and said: "The first batch of post-00s have been listed and the bell has been ringed, and your peers are abandoning you." ”
There are two forces in the sound of the bottom layer.
The above is an "attack flow", and the nurse reprimands the delivery person for being a "defense flow". The former is intended to raise standards and create anxiety for others, while the latter is intended to lower standards and create a sense of security for oneself.
In the movie "Parasite", the most famous line is the sentence: Money is an iron, which can iron out all the folds of life.
Judging from the hard indicator of income, delivery riders are really not the humble "bottom people" in the mouth of nurses.
These days, a reporter in Shanghai has experienced running orders to investigate whether the new job security process is running through. Netizens were "poked in the lungs" by a small clip in the news-
9,000 yuan a month?!
According to the latest survey by Beijing Normal University, about 84% of the population has a monthly income of less than 3,000 yuan, and the proportion of the population with a monthly income of less than 5,000 yuan is as high as about 95%.
According to this statement, the income of this takeaway brother has far outperformed the market.
I don't know the big anchors who don't know the cost of eyebrow pencils, and they probably don't know that 95% of the anchors' monthly salaries are even enough for 60 "flower dollars".
From the perspective of the whole group, although the delivery rider does not have the magic of turning over overnight like the online anchor, it is much more stable - the upper limit is lower, and the lower limit is higher.
According to a survey by the China Research Center for New Employment Patterns, the average wage level of riders across the country is stable at around 5,000 yuan, and the average monthly income of food delivery riders in all provinces and cities is higher than the local monthly minimum wage.
It can be said that no one understands the gold content of the word "stability" better than today's workers.
Before, a college teacher ran to experience food delivery and had a simple conversation with the rider. A few lines hide the lightning and thunder of emotions in calm, comparable to the beginning of a realistic drama:
Once, Xing Bin asked a rider who was waiting for an order at the door of a restaurant, "What's the hardest life now?" ”
Answer: It is difficult to make money by delivering takeaways, and it is also difficult for the express center to engage in sorting, it is also difficult to move goods, and it is also difficult to carry floor tiles upstairs.
Xing Bin continued to ask: Are these things more difficult than doing construction work?
The other party said: Of course, it is harder than doing construction work, doing construction work, 200 a day for big workers, 18 to 200 a day for small workers, but can you get money? I had work for half a year, but I didn't work for half a year, and I worked until the end of the year, and the foreman ran away.
In the past, there were always people shouting that food delivery was a high-risk occupation.
But everyone ignores the common sense that poverty is also a great danger.
Knowing this truth is a delivery man in Shenzhen known as Brother Roar.
In the picture, this roaring brother couldn't help but shout excitedly in the face of the new rider who was embarrassed by the running order-"There is no shame in delivering takeaways! When children have no money to study, parents have no money to see a doctor, and creditors come to collect debts, you are ashamed!"
Later, a reporter dug out that the eldest brother was a Hunan boss before, and he contracted a project in his hometown in 2019, but he unexpectedly encountered Party A's embezzlement of public funds, resulting in a loss of money. He lost all his savings, sold the property in his name, and went into a lot of debt.
The good news is that at present, Brother Roar has paid off more than 40 debts and has become the "master" of many newcomers at the site.
People always have a preconceived idea that the delivery man is miserable, and making an ordinary job miserable is also a kind of colored glasses.
It is easy to fall into a strange circle: the upper class of society praises people, the middle class of society compares people, and the bottom society people step on people.
In fact, the world is panicking, only trying to break a few taels of silver.
Wouldn't it be good for us to save more money than miserable time?
Cyber Rider VS Real Rider
It is easy to explain why delivery workers and couriers are most likely to be regarded as "bottom".
After all, they are a considerable number, almost the most contact with manual workers in the lives of the middle class, and the most in line with people's imagination of the "bottom" - many of them will never have close contact with the laborers on several construction sites or the workers making screws on the assembly line in their lifetime.
At the end of last year, an article called "In the winter of 2022, I delivered food in Linyi City" suddenly became popular on the Internet, and the author was a lecturer at the School of Literature of a university.
As soon as the article came out, many riders who ran real orders jumped out to scold this contemporary Tolstoy.
Some people questioned the unreality of his part-time monthly run of 2,000 orders, and some pointed out that his sad and miserable tone was uncomfortable. What's even more poignant is that this teacher, who lives in the most high-end community in Linyi, just regards "experiencing the bottom" as a process of accumulating materials for literary creation.
Netizen @Displacement Rider, who has been running a single for two and a half years, sent out a heavenly question:
"In various news media and short video platforms, I found out that the takeaway I delivered was so hard and difficult?"
The teacher looked at it: he didn't listen. I don't want you to think, I want me to feel.
Anyway, the shortcut for the upper class to experience life is to forcibly stuff the rider with a "bottom" identity card, and then hype up a wave of traffic.
In fact, the rider in the whirlpool of traffic, life is not so complicated, and even more free than you think.
For example, when white-collar workers poured 1L American keyboards and smoked. Your takeaway guy may be in - swing, autumn, and thousand.
For another example, when the merchant is slow to eat, the lively brother will go to watch people fight and watch the grandfather play chess.
If you encounter someone who is stuck and doesn't move, the honest brother will tell you directly - I'm tired.
If you are a little more heart-piercing, you may have picked up a camera of 100,000 yuan to shoot the sunset.
And the little brother said: "You can ride around every day, it's fun." ”
A netizen said it very well:
Don't think that they will only deliver food, they are also ordinary people with dreams and spiritual pursuits.
I remember that the overall champion of the third season of "Chinese Poetry Conference" is a delivery rider in Hangzhou. This poet-loving rider would recite ancient poems while waiting for a meal or waiting for a red light. He said, "I was able to recite a song, and I was very happy that day." ”
It can be said that poetry is a beam of light in his spiritual world.
With a halo like him, he still encountered the ridicule of netizens for "knowing so many poems, and he is not delivering takeaways".
This makes people wonder, how did the ordinary but hard-working life become what people call "reluctance"?
Food delivery is also a job. Can't ordinary workers be able to order elegant skills and hobbies? Taking a step back, how can a person who is materially rich but lacks spiritual world like withered grass compare with this little brother in Hangzhou?
In 2021, Meituan surveyed 100,000 riders and found that nearly 40 percent of them had a fixed property and nearly 30 percent had a car. 18.6% of the riders included skills training, Xi certification, academic qualifications and other items in their daily expenses, and nearly 5% of the riders enrolled their children in interest classes, such as programming, painting, Go, and swimming.
The data is really surprising, and I can't help but think of the novel "Beijing Folding", the garbage worker Lao Dao mentions the mentality of people in the "third space", two words - lying flat. "He became lazy and unkempt, and his cheeks drooped like a Shar Pei, making the corners of his mouth always look dissatisfied."
In my opinion, science fiction is really not realistic enough.
In the real world, who doesn't shout that they don't want to live anymore, but at the same time live harder.
You and I are mortal, and sympathy is better than respect
I don't know if you still remember, 7 years ago, there was an article called "Cruel Bottom Story: A Video Software in Rural China" that swiped the screen in the circle of friends.
The author enumerates the incredible wonders of the so-called "low-level peasants in China": self-fried crotch, eating glass, eating insects, children smoking, pregnancy, and the culture of "killing Matt" in the countryside...... A short video app was also pushed to the forefront by public opinion for the first time.
Every word in the text seems to call us: come and see, there is such a group of lower riba people doing such vulgar things!
This messianic down-looking mentality has a new variant today.
No, the weather is getting colder, and netizens have started a big discussion: Should I order takeout on a rainy and snowy day?
Some people called for being considerate of the takeaway brother and not ordering takeaway. As a result, the takeaway brother didn't appreciate this kind of "kindness" at all: "How can we make money if we don't order! ”
A commentator on Guangming.com told the truth: People have a lot of moral impulses, but in the market economy, they are often redundant and even harmful.
The logic of this "understanding" is like that of a good man in the village, who can't see a beggar asking for food, wants to drive out all the beggars in the city, so that he can have a peaceful conscience.
Zheng Shaoxiong, an associate professor at the University of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, also told a short story in the article "The Sacred of Labor that Is Gazed at and Ignored"":
There was a rider who went to the mall to pick up food, and when he walked to the escalator with the food, there were three young people on the escalator.
They were standing in a mess, but all of a sudden they were standing in a row, and then they looked at him and felt like they were saying "Brother, quick, I'll get out of the way, you go, you run".
He wanted to go slowly, because he was not in a hurry, he took an order.
But he was embarrassed and had no choice, so he ran away with the takeaway.
This story is very meaningful:
The gaze causes distortion, which in turn changes the behavior of the person being gazed.
In fact, for delivery riders, empty lyricism and overflowing sympathy are not as good as a thank you and a level-eyed gaze.
A rider who was interviewed by Lai Youxuan, a reporter from People, even sent a red envelope to the reporter after the article was published, saying to a reporter friend: "Don't write us very pitiful, we are not pitiful." ”
Therefore, don't let telling the story of the bottom being difficult and whipping the unscrupulous capital become a new form of "cool text".