A life of being poor and busy

Being poor and busy is what many people have the deepest experience of this spring and summer.

Due to accidents or low returns, some people find that they have become "poor and busy", and some people run away and struggle for half a life, and return without change. The hustle and bustle of young people's minds also makes them start to think about life.

Busy in vain

I have been working for five years, and the last time I broke the defense was when the property was urging me to pay the heating bill. The heating fee is not much, a total of 1000 yuan, I opened WeChat and Alipay, and found that the money does not add up enough to make up for the heating fee for a winter. After holding it back for two days, I asked my dad again, who had just paid my rent, for money. In addition to the heating bill, my father transferred me an extra 500 yuan and told me: "Be kind to yourself and buy something delicious." ”

   @林黛昱

I'm a North Drifter. I went home on May Day and rested for a few days. The family has opened a small shop, and my parents are nearly sixty. One day at noon, my mother was settling the accounts, and suddenly told me that the purchase was almost money, I opened the account, and found that the year-end bonus that had just been issued, in addition to all necessary expenses, only 10,000 yuan could be taken out, and the pocket was clean after spending.

Of course, my situation is definitely more than the next, but after all these years of hard work outside, I can finally help my family, but it turns out to be so useless. I was so confused that I felt like I was just getting to eat. I can't roll it up if I want to, I don't dare to lie down if I want to, it's so ordinary that it can't be more ordinary.

   @小A

Back when I first started working, I ate and lived at home, and I was a moonlight family every month. After 10 years of work, I became a manager, but the salary was about the same as that of the average employee, except that the 9-to-6 became 996, and I no longer had time to call my family. I'm still a moonlighter.

   @小蔡不菜

I feel like I'm working hard to make my job smoother tomorrow, but I can't make any real difference in my income. The fixed salary is paid every month, and sometimes even the "Huabei" of the previous month cannot be repaid.

I've been gnawing at the old, if it weren't for the elders, I wouldn't have been able to live so glamorously, without their help, I would be the most ordinary ant clan in society. As I've gotten older, I can't afford it anymore.

   @匿名读者

When I came to Shanghai, I found myself far behind the people around me. Most of them come from prestigious schools, are proficient in a variety of skills, and each of them shines brightly. I hope that through hard work, I can stand with them intellectually, at least. So began a crazy study program.

I signed up for a new media management course and took a Japanese language course. In 2019, I felt that coffee was the outlet, and I spent 10,000 yuan to participate in the coffee system training course.

My job is brand promotion, and I am the only one in the whole department, so I have to wear many hats, I am very busy, and I often have to answer the phone call of my boss after work. Even so, when I got home, I would get up and go to bed and study for four or five hours before going to sleep.

Realizing that all this is meaningless idling, is on the day of paying rent. I turned on my phone and found that my savings were negative, and I couldn't pay the rent at all, so I had to ask my parents for help. My father would always prepare the rent for me a month in advance, and I felt very lost whenever he transferred the money. In the past few years of hard study, apart from making myself "poor", what I have learned has not brought practical benefits to my life.

On the contrary, there were some negative effects, such as I became afraid to laugh. When I go out with my friends and have fun, I always think of the moment when my father transferred money to me, and it always makes me smile with guilt.

   @Hai sauce

Figure | Hai-chan is learning Japanese

After graduating in 2020, I went to a real estate unit, which was originally doing a good job, but the company suddenly closed down due to a thunderstorm, so I traveled to two or three cities to Hangzhou, joined a small company, and for various reasons, I was forced to leave within three months. During this period, I broke up with my girlfriend, quarreled with my parents, and squandered my savings from renting, and now I still have foreign debts.

Sometimes the rent can't be paid, and my parents will support me financially. Because I am the only child in the family, my parents have no complaints.

In today's days, I don't dare to buy what I want to buy, I don't dare to talk too much about the love I want to talk about, and my mentality is no longer what I scolded Fang Xuan when I graduated. Now I'm almost 30 years old and continue to struggle in a corner of society.

   @匿名读者

I'm currently studying for a Ph.D. in literature, which is a glamorous existence in the eyes of outsiders, but I'm actually busy every day.

Since last year, I have been writing a dissertation on young adult literature, and for this dissertation I read a lot of literature every day and didn't sleep until late. It took a year to finally write a thesis and submit it to my supervisor, who felt that my thesis was inappropriate and asked me to write a different topic, and my one-year work was so easily denied.

Nowadays, the possibility of a Ph.D. in literature publishing a paper on CSSCI with the signature of the first author is very slim, and only by publishing it with his supervisor and becoming the second author can it be successfully published. My supervisor has a total of 8 doctors, and only one person can publish with him, and just when I was fighting for this place, a classmate spent 120,000 yuan to buy the publication position directly in other academic journals. My parents were laid-off workers, and the family couldn't afford to pay for my posting.

   @猫猫

I live a busy life because I get deducted for performance regardless of my job performance.

I graduated in 2019 and then joined a start-up company, and my life began to become hopeless. The company's business is frequently "adjusted", and after nine months, the business is still at the theoretical level, and every month the company will try to deduct performance. This year, the company has not paid me five insurances and one housing fund for three consecutive months, I found HR to ask, and the other party replied: capital turnover is not open. Working in a crumbling company, I was tired every day, worrying about investors pulling back, having nowhere to get my salary, and dealing with some so-called relationships.

The leader found his brother-in-law to cut videos part-time in the company, but the work indicators were pressed on me, and if I couldn't finish it, my performance would be deducted. If the performance is on others, it will naturally be passive and slacking off, and the result is that his brother-in-law Meimei receives the money, and my performance is deducted in vain.

One day, I was so angry that during a video with my parents, I mentioned what happened to me at the company and blurted out that I wanted to leave my job. My idea was immediately opposed by my father, who angrily rebuked me: "Just try to be yourself, don't worry about it." When I heard this, I was devastated and disappointed. The company definitely can't stay anymore, but I'm still in a stalemate with my parents about resigning.

   @廿玖

Figure | Twenty Jiu received a notice of delay in the payment of wages

I am a clerk who gets up at 6 o'clock every day, catches the bus to work after packing, and arrives half an hour early every day. I am diligent and do not care about everything, because I can always resolve communication disputes, so I am often appreciated by leaders.

In April of this year, a college classmate I hadn't seen for many years came to my city on a business trip, and we met and I told her about my work and life, and she suddenly looked at me in confusion and asked me, "What is your motivation to work outside?" ”

After listening to her words, I fell into reflection. I am now 29 years old, and I am still a three-no-one, no car, no house, no object, and I will often fall into financial embarrassment. In 2018, my father suffered a back injury, and I couldn't turn over after being in bed for a few days, and I couldn't do anything but make phone calls. I couldn't take care of my parents when I was away from home, but they often came to worry about me. My classmates' questions added a layer of guilt to my busy life.

   @小小

butterfly effect

After graduating, I joined the film and television industry. At that time, it was the most raging period of the new crown, and the film and television industry was also in the cold winter. Seeing that a senior brother had a good income in a game company, I followed him into the game industry.

It's a very intense job, and I often stay up all night when new projects come in, and I try to get used to it. Once I was working overtime at home, and at three o'clock in the morning, my heart was pounding faster and faster, and my heart was hurting. I figured I'd have to sleep for two hours, in case I die suddenly in the rental house, and no one will notice me.

In Beijing, the expenses are very large, and the life is mainly barely maintained by consumer credit, and the rent is paid by my mother and sister. Once I paid the rent and didn't contact my mother, I asked my sister for emergency and asked her to borrow me 5,900 yuan first, and then my mother gave it back to me. As a result, my mother didn't reply to me for two days that day, and my sister didn't wait for my repayment and sent me a message to the effect that I was a little untrustworthy. My sister's words hit me like a heavy punch, I don't have the ability to make money, is there any problem with being a man? Thinking of this, I cried a lot.

   @时时刻刻

Figure | Once without working overtime, I saw the sunset through the barbed wire

Believing in the pie drawn by the leader, I worked hard. As a result, I got sick, and I spent a year of income curing the disease, but I was not cured.

   @Snow

After completing my master's degree in the United States, I desperately wanted to stay, mainly because my boyfriend was still studying in New York and I wanted to be with him. I majored in a relatively niche liberal arts, and if I wanted to stay in the United States, I could only find some odd and bits of part-time jobs, and it happened that the epidemic made it even more difficult to find a job. So I washed my face with tears every day in the anxiety of borrowing money to pay for rent.

In the days when I borrowed money to get by, I often watched my boyfriend go into a trance, and I thought that if my relationship with him didn't come to fruition, the hardships I am suffering now would really be meaningless. This caused me to be constantly suspicious in my relationship, and I was going crazy when I heard the slightest bit about the possibility that we wouldn't be together in the future.

I've been doing counselling, but unfortunately counseling has not been effective in the face of financial pressure. No matter how high the level of the counselor is, no matter how much meditation he does, what good can he do for a person who has no money to eat and is living on the streets?

After the coronavirus, I learned from my boss that he would probably not pay me, and in an instant my mentality collapsed, and my body collapsed. For more than two months, I kept coughing and fever. At the time of the collapse, my boyfriend proposed to me to break up.

After a busy day, I became sober. Now my goal is to be an independent person and practice finding reasons to be happy when I am alone.

  @ Soft-shelled turtle big Gege

Figure | I walked in crowded Times Square

12 years ago, I graduated from university and entered a local state-owned enterprise, when my salary was only 1,200 yuan, I felt that there were still many possibilities in life, and I arranged a lot of study tasks for myself every night, and constantly took the qualification certificate.

After becoming the head of the department, life began to develop towards "poor busyness", and instead of improving, it began to become more and more embarrassing. My subordinate is an irresponsible and prickly person, while my leader is a person with extremely high standards of work. With such a subordinate, to meet the extremely high work requirements of my leader, my workload and pressure have doubled, but my salary has not increased.

Not only that, but the busyness also squeezed my spare time, causing some discord within the family. Sometimes I can only rely on my parents to help me with my daily expenses, and my husband's situation is not easier than mine, and sometimes I will give him a share of the money my parents need. One time my mother found out I was doing this, and she said that my husband was a "phoenix man who eats his mother's house", and I didn't know how to deal with it.

  @ saplings

The more this happens, the more inferior I become, and I dare not socialize or fall in love.

   @橘子

The length of service is getting longer, the price is rising, the rent is rising, but the salary is not rising. My friends who entered the workplace in the same year as me all have a monthly salary of more than 10,000 yuan, but they are still on the food and clothing line. If it weren't for the increasingly haggard face and several abnormal data in the physical examination form that reminded me that time was passing, I would have thought that time would have stopped in the year I joined. I began to wonder if there was any point in such a day. Anxiety and stress also multiply. At present, with my financial ability, my ability to resist risks is very poor, so I have no sense of security about the future.

Recently I quit naked. I was going to rest at home for a month, but I didn't expect that now I am still looking for a job after two months, the situation is tense, and my family didn't say it directly, but I feel that they are also anxious for me. I wanted to take advantage of the resignation to think about how I would live in the future, but the resignation did not bring me calm, but caused another kind of anxiety, fearing that the career gap would affect my future employment.

   @小椰

The poor are thoughtful

After working for so many years, most of the income is invested in renting, often for a whole year, and will be angry with landlords and agents. But no matter how poor and busy I am, I am willing to stay in the big city, because I will be treated as a monster when I return to the small city.

I'm 30 years old, unmarried, and have no partner, which in the eyes of my relatives back home already falls into the category of mental illness. Every time I have dinner with relatives, I will become the focus of criticism, "make do with it, find someone to marry", "Why are you reading so many books, in the end it is not that you are not married and have children". Chatting with my peers often "suffocated" me, everyone compares the number of children born with each other, as if everyone agrees that fertility value is the greatest value of a woman. Staying in a big city, people's concepts are completely different, and people around you will say, "You are only 30 years old, you are still young, you are in a hurry to find someone, and there are many single people in your forties and fifties." ”

Small cities come home from work every day, and there are only a few entertainment activities such as playing cards and smoking, which is a kind of life that can be seen at a glance, while big cities have abundant opportunities to enrich their spiritual world. I'm a teacher now, and most of my students aren't swayed by the rules of the world, and they don't look at me differently because I'm 30 years old and unmarried. The joy of working in a big city is not something that can be bought by spending money and living in a villa, and it is also fun to be busy as a dog.

   @天慈

After working for a while, I realized that for ordinary people like me, work is just a way to make money, and I won't have the luck to rise all the way up like Anne Hathaway in "The Queen Wears Prada". Now I think that instead of being lonely and exhausted in the big city, it is better to go home.

   @一颗猕猴桃

In 2016, I quit my stable job at a state-owned enterprise and switched to the film industry. Then the film industry was embattled, and soon I lost my job. In order to continue to live in Beijing, I borrowed 30,000 yuan from my parents, and I always wanted to pay them back, but I found that I couldn't afford to pay it back.

I am 30 years old this year, and I am afraid of more and more things, afraid of starving to death and exhaustion, afraid of living on the streets, afraid of dying before my parents. I was scared all day, and my weight increased by 40 pounds. There have been two suicide attempts, unsuccessful. At the end of last year, I put all my energy into fighting a lawsuit against my family, and the result of that lawsuit was most likely to be lost, I still spent three days and three nights, sleepless pouring legal documents. The reason why I am so concerned is because I can't afford to lose the case.

In the end, I lost the lawsuit, and for the next few days I lay in bed unable to move, feeling that life is actually meaningless, not that the numerator is zero, but that the denominator is zero. Miraculously, the moment I knew that I had hit rock bottom and was not going to get worse, I suddenly got better, and I felt relaxed and free. I still want to pay back my parents' money, but I am no longer as anxious as before, and I decided to do what I have in advance and pay it back slowly.

   @宾德

For the first three years after graduation, I worked as a temporary worker in the system, with a monthly salary of only 600 yuan, and I tried my best to be admitted to the system with a monthly salary of 2,000 yuan. In order to be more comfortable every month, I used my spare time to do a lot of part-time jobs, and even so, I didn't have any money left over every month after cutting out rent, eating, and personal contacts.

When I was about 30 years old, my parents learned about my part-time job outside the home and began to take the initiative to subsidize my living expenses. That year, my parents' retirement salary went up, and they were happy to shoehorn money into me, and I didn't refuse. After knowing that no matter how hard I tried, I would not have extra savings, I became a complete Buddha.

The Buddhist mentality didn't give me room for promotion, but it allowed me to avoid nasty intrigues, and I became in a good state of mind and body because of it. The good state was recognized by my parents, who used to prefer my brother who was determined to climb up the ladder in the system, but now, they prefer me who has learned to live comfortably.

   @月月

After graduating from university, he came to Chengdu from his hometown in the north to work, determined not to become a gnawing old man.

In Chengdu, my monthly salary is 3,500 yuan, and I go to work at 9:30 in the morning and arrive home at 11 o'clock in the evening. In the past two years, I have changed jobs three times, and my salary is all used for basic food, because I can't afford to pay the rent by myself, I also spent 20,000 yuan on my parents. My family is from the countryside, and 20,000 yuan is enough for me to catch chickens and dogs at home and live comfortably for two or three years, but now I am working hard all day.

Suddenly one day I figured it out. I have worked hard in the past few years, and I still need help from my parents, but it can't be said that my work is in vain, after all, I have seen the scenery of another way of life. Becoming numb can make material life better, but how can I appreciate the world when I become numb?

   @无名人士

Sometimes I feel that I am too late to understand, and I regret that I fell into consumerism in the first 3 or 4 years after graduation. At that time, because I felt that I was still young, I had to spend money when I should spend money, and I felt that I should be better for myself while I was young. This kind of wrong "free and easy" consumption is probably the main reason why I fell into poverty. There is no way to go back from the past, you can only look forward.

After graduating from university, I worked in other places, and now it has been 6 years since Beipiao. In Beijing, I am eligible to buy a house here after paying social security for 5 years, but with my conditions, I cannot buy a house in Beijing unless I rely on my parents.

This year, I watched a video on station B, which said that some people went to the big city to work hard, and in order to take root in the big city and buy a house, they emptied their parents' wallets, ridiculing that they are the real "gnawing old people" who are not as good as eating their parents at home and living with their parents. I don't want to be the kind of person in the video who has worked hard for years and hollowed out his parents. Now, I save as much as I can and tell my parents that they don't have to plan to buy a house for me.

I am more economical, abstain from unnecessary consumption, and try to save limited money for myself and my parents. While experiencing the happiness of having a "small treasury", I was anxious about how long I could live with such a rich life, after all, 35 years old is not far from me, and legend has it that it is a hurdle in many people's careers. Time is limited, and I hope that after waking up to this, I can hold on to myself.

   @宁静

I get a salary of less than 5,000 yuan a month, I have no savings, and I can't take out money when my parents need it. But I know that there is no point in anxiety, and there are no pros and cons to struggle, as long as you are worthy of yourself.

   @辰逸辰

- END -

Curated | Li You

Edit | Wen Lihong