Answer a netizen's message as usual. A friend left a message at the end of the two articles I wrote earlier, "Thinking of Pulling the Curtain from the Lower Bunk of the Train" and "The Younger Generation Has a Stronger Public Consciousness": "Now the 'Lei Feng Spiritualists' are rare, but there are more and more 'personal interests', is it a good thing or a bad thing? From your comments, it is obvious which faction you should stand on! Let go of the specific reasons (who is right and who is wrong), because this is not the main aspect that determines the direction of social development and progress, what we should pay attention to is 'moral orientation'. I often say, 'What kind of world do you want the future to be like (good or bad, needle-to-needle or harmonious), you can stand on whatever team,' because the world of the future is yours! That's right! The constant struggle over 'right and wrong' can only widen the barrier, and the happiest must be the online merchants who have earned more 'commercial traffic'!"
There are a lot of emotional things in this friend's expression language, but the meaning is a little unclear. Basically, it seems to say that this matter should not be argued about "right or wrong". I don't seem to have any disagreement with me on this point, and I don't comment on who is right and who is wrong, but I am saying that many of the practices of young people today are not wrong, and it is not wrong for us old people to have our own ideas. In fact, this is also one of the most important essentials of social science research, which is what I have written in my past article about "what is liberal arts" (you can search for the word "liberal arts" in my official account), that is, "there is no right or wrong in liberal arts, liberal arts have a position, positions are divided into right and wrong, and opinions must be exchanged". In fact, what I want to talk about in these two articles is that no matter what our own position and viewpoint is, even if we are unaccustomed to it and reluctant, we must accept the phenomenon of young people paying more attention to personal rights and public affairs as a social reality, because this is the inevitable product of social development, and it is an objective reality that is not subject to our will. And if I had to make a judgment about the future, I would believe that it would be a trend in the future, and it will be closely related to the broader social context of our industrialization, urbanization, and entry into the "affluent society". As for the importance we should attach to "moral orientation", this sentence is true, but morality is a high line, and we should not and cannot require everyone to achieve the kind of "moral perfection" that you aspire to, in fact, even the person who says this sentence will not meet this standard. Then, according to the requirement of "do not do unto others as you would have them do unto you", we should also put forward another requirement to the society, that is, "do not be stronger than others if you cannot do unto yourself", that is, if you cannot be a moral model, do not ask others to be a moral model. In fact, in the modern society under the background of industrialization and urbanization, we should pay more attention to the "rule of law orientation", we can implement the morality we advocate into one judgment after another, and use living cases to promote social progress, which is also a phenomenon of our social development in the past few decades that I have repeatedly mentioned in my articles: "Individual cases promote progress, and litigation changes China." ”
Let's talk about the topic I want to talk about today.
Nowadays, young people in big cities, especially those in the workplace, are more or less anxious, and this anxiety mainly comes from fierce competition and social pressure. Moreover, this situation becomes more prominent in large cities, or it is also a "by-product" of the fact that large cities in developed coastal areas have just entered a prosperous society. You may say, haven't we entered a "society of abundance"? Shouldn't it be easy for everyone? No, there is actually another side to our kind of affluent society, that is, this kind of "affluent society" has just been transformed from a "society of take-off", and this transformation is still unbalanced and inadequate, and it is still quite fragile in some areas and within a time frame. (I'll talk about the fragility of the current "affluent society" in a later article.) And it is precisely because we are still in a society of abundance with only one foot in some areas and the other foot still in the take-off society, that kind of fierce competition and social pressure in the take-off phase is still there, and at some point it will manifest itself quite severely. It is particularly important that it is precisely because the lives of some regions and some people have begun to enter a society of abundance, and the development of this society is unbalanced, so after the change of this frame of reference in people's social psychology, the heart will become more anxious, which has led to the fatigue and anxiety of people in the workplace, especially young people who have not experienced the stage of "scarcity society" and complete "take-off society". In fact, this kind of fatigue and anxiety is no less in our generation, that is, the parents of these young people now, but our generation has come from a society of scarcity, and we have suffered from hunger when we were young and suffered when we were young, so we don't feel so anxious about staying up until retirement.
This anxiety manifests itself in the behavioral orientation of young people, and several phenomena may occur, the first of which is "involution". That is to say, when facing problems such as narrow career promotion channels and shortage of high-quality resources for children's education, they have to make more efforts, but the results they face may be extremely uncertain and stressful. In the case of "involution", young people do not hesitate to take their time, energy and even health in order to fight for that little limited resource, and even so, they are always worried that others will work harder than themselves, so a vicious circle is formed, so all kinds of physical and mental diseases come to the door. Once, I watched a psychiatrist give talk therapy to a patient (by the way, because I was friends with this doctor, and I would also let him counsel me when I was under too much stress, so I watched as the doctor's assistant that day), and I saw a young man in his thirties crying like a child in front of the doctor. At that moment, I felt that it was so difficult for children now!
The second type is the "Buddha system". If "involution" is a "positive" coping strategy in the face of stress and anxiety in the workplace and life, then "Buddhism" is a "semi-negative" coping strategy. One of the characteristics of these young people is that they have no desire and no quarrel in words, but the anxiety in their hearts has not been reduced in the slightest, but their mentality on the surface is not so nervous, but according to my observation, they still have some "rolls" in private, but they are generally acceptable in the face of the uncertainty of the outcome. In other words, they are more psychologically resilient to stress. However, once they really face the pressure of "real knives and real guns", most of them will still "roll up".
The third is "lying flat". This is a relatively negative coping strategy in the face of stress and anxiety, which represents the resistance and avoidance of the phenomenon of "involution" by these people. These young people have chosen to give up competition and fight social pressures with a low-desire lifestyle, and they no longer pursue the traditional standard of "success" like their parents like our generation, but choose a less "high" quality of life that they can easily obtain, in exchange for psychological balance and tranquility. It should be said that this phenomenon can reflect the questioning of traditional social values and the redefinition of personal happiness by some young people.
If you ask me which of these three states is better, I'll tell you the truth, there's really no standard answer. If you look at my personal workplace experience, I belong to the person who subjectively wants to be "Buddhist", but objectively the most "involuted", because in my career, I have engaged in the heaviest mental work and worked overtime for many years. Although I hated working overtime the most, I had to leave my family and work hard for 30 years. However, if I look at it by traditional standards, my "involution" does have a reward, that is, I should be regarded as a "successful person" in the eyes of others, although I do not have such high expectations. Therefore, if I judge others by personal examples, there is a high probability that I will agree with "involution". After all, that's how I got all the way.
But, as I have repeatedly emphasized in this series of articles, our society is beginning to have one foot in the affluent society, and in this social context, our old standards of "success" and personal happiness are likely to be redefined in the minds of the next generation. I have said more than once that we need to look at our immediate neighbor Japan, and many of the problems that Japan encountered 30 years ago are similar to the problems we have today, and many of the phenomena in Japan today will most likely be the problems that we may encounter tomorrow. If nothing else, let's just talk about the phenomenon of the declining birthrate of the elderly and the lack of marriage and infertility among young people. In 1987, I wrote an article called "Japanese, Workaholics," but today's Japanese are no longer workaholics. One of the most typical words to evaluate the state of two generations of Japan is called "Showa boys, Heisei waste", which means that the older generation of Japanese are all workaholics with serious "involution", while the next generation of Japanese are basically "lying flat" otaku and otaku.
Hopefully, we won't repeat Japan's mistakes.
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