Last year, a high-scoring American drama "Angry Life" resonated with many people. The heroine Amy Liu seems to be playing every "crazy" middle class - they seem to have a decent job and life, but behind the calm and glamorous, they are also full of confusion.
For the young people of today, such feelings often occur. When we get older, we should move on to the next stage of our physiology, but sometimes we feel that we are unable to do it, or that everything is going well but we always feel that something is wrong. Some are about the development space of the career, and some are about meaning and value.
Sentence | Hsiang-hsien
Edit | Yi Fangxing
Operations | Puffs
"I always feel that something is wrong"
For some, a sudden job change can mean an abrupt halt to the upward path.
Zhang Yuxuan, 30, is doing a job that others "dream of".
I can leave work on time at 6 o'clock in the evening, turn off my mobile phone, and go home directly. When he got home, he didn't bother with work, he threw himself into the sofa, watched a short video for two hours, and then moved to the bed, replaced the short video with an online novel, and could see it until two o'clock in the morning.
However, such a "comfortable" life is a kind of torture for him, "every day is muddy". In the counseling room, he spoke to the counselor about his pent-up anger: "I'm not happy with everything around me. ”
Such a change came from an unexpected personnel transfer.
Zhang Yuxuan works in the company's sales department, and his goal is to achieve a certain scale of sales. He built the entire business line from 0 to 1, and the business scale of less than 1 million a year has reached nearly 2 billion. According to the original plan, he will become a manager in another year. Although he often stays up late and works overtime, his performance and predictable growth make him full of energy.
But the change happened after a sudden change of department heads.
For a long time after that, "it was involuted meaninglessly". When the new leader came to the department, he was removed from the core business. One day, at the end of the report, Zhang Yuxuan opened the folder and found that the plan had been changed 23 times, at least 5 of which were overturned and rewritten, and in the final version, many of his ideas were all abandoned. In the end, countless late nights of overtime, many humble pleas, all seemed so pale, and a feeble anger surrounded him. He couldn't understand why he had worked so hard, but why was this result.
In times of pain and self-doubt, he also tried to seek understanding and support from his lover. He expects the two to sit down and talk about the troubles of work, even if the other party yells "If you can't get used to it, then you will resign", he can feel relieved.
But every time the other party hears it, he just takes it for granted, "The workplace is like this", and then responds lightly: "Then let's go have a good meal." All his complaints were like throwing them into cotton.
▲ All the complaints seem to be thrown into cotton. Photo / "Angry Life"
There are also people who are overloaded with work and get the lingering smell of class.
For example, Huang Ru, she also experienced this feeling of "always feeling that something is wrong". At the age of 29, due to the epidemic, she closed the bridal dress shop that had been operating in her hometown for more than five years, and went to Shanghai alone to switch to the advertising industry.
Every day is filled with work. Huang Ru often felt like she was sinking under the water, almost suffocated by work. What she looks forward to most is the two hours on the plane while she is on a business trip, and only these two hours can justifiably leave her work and take a breath.
Along with it, the most painful thing was the moment she landed, the moment the phone turned off the airplane mode - the new messages that kept popping up on WeChat hit like a rain of bullets, and she didn't dare to imagine that there would be a mess smashed over.
▲ Picture / "Please Find Me"
Others are anxious about the competitive pressure brought by newcomers.
Zeng Xueqing's state was even more confused. She can't even accurately summarize the difficulties in life, she always feels that those new recruits seem to be getting more and more creative, and only she "seems to be standing still". She always had an idea in her mind that she should learn something new.
In this way, after working in a large factory for several years, they seem to have become "mature workers", but they still "feel that something is wrong". The feeling of seeming decentness but "stagnating" is like boiling a frog in warm water. As a frog, you don't know when the water will boil, and by that time, you may have lost the ability to escape.
So, in the critical decade of their lives between the ages of 30 and 40, these people invariably thought of change.
fight to the death
However, there is no such thing as change without a cost.
Zhang Yuxuan thought about resigning naked, and then went back to his hometown to take the exam with peace of mind, and this life was spent like this. He also thought about enduring it for a few more years, anyway, he had endured it for so long, and used complete numbness to fight self-denial and doubt.
And on social platforms, at this age, people with the same pain also have similar troubles. Whether it is to leave the job and go ashore, or simply lie down, it is a choice, and the core lies in whether it can be self-consistent.
However, there are still some people who are not self-consistent who will choose the third path, and they will find a similar anchor point - graduate school.
▲ Studying for on-the-job graduate school has become one of the ways out for some inconsistently workplaces. Photo / Visual China
Bringing certainty with academic qualifications and cognition is one way to face uncertainty. Zhang Yuxuan began to analyze the reasons why he was not recognized. For example, if you have a colleague in the same department who has a good performance evaluation, she can quickly handle complex issues. And this level of cognition is also what he desires.
Not only that, but he is a single parent, and his mother and younger brother are very dependent on him. He also bought a house and had to pay off his mortgage every month. Such a status quo cannot support him to completely suspend his life to study.
So, at the age of 30, he began to apply for Tsinghua University's on-the-job MBA.
Others choose to actively press the pause button, eager to change completely. In Huang Ru's original vision, he set a long-term career direction for the future at the age of 30 and made a decision on whether to have children at the age of 35. Now at the age of 32, she suddenly realizes that what she really needs is to stop and think carefully. So, she chose GAP for a while.
During this time, Huang Ru decided to pursue a full-time MBA.
Others choose a more secure plan in order to balance their career and family.
Zeng Xueqing, who was confused at work, joined the work after graduating from her bachelor's degree, and she has always had a clear obsession with the hope of pursuing graduate studies. But now, her son has just turned two and needs company. In order to not affect her work and accompany her children, she chose to study for a part-time MBA at Shanghai Jiao Tong University next to her home.
Nowadays, more and more middle-class students see MBA as an important way to change. The data released by the Guanghua MBA program of Peking University also confirms this: in 2020, the proportion of students aged 26-30 in the entire program was 27.29%, and in 2022, the proportion of this group increased to 37.40%.
Another reason why people make this choice is also related to the trend of depreciation of academic qualifications in the times. In 2008, the number of college graduates in the country was 5.59 million, and fifteen years later, the number of college graduates in the country has doubled to 11.58 million in 2023. So, for many people, this is also a way to compensate for academic qualifications.
But all options come at a price, and an MBA is no exception.
▲ All choices come at a price. Photo / "Squid Game"
It's a near-last-to-last change, and the first thing that needs to be paid is a lot of money. According to statistics, among the 985 universities, nearly 95% of the part-time MBA programs have tuition fees of more than 100,000 yuan, and the tuition fees of MBA programs of well-known universities such as Fudan and Shanghai Jiaotong University even exceed 500,000 yuan.
Almost everyone asks themselves before starting an MBA, "Is it really worth it?" Zhang Yuxuan swayed for nearly a year, but it only took a week to seriously think about whether to make a decision and then act. Now that you've identified the need for change, let it happen first.
Tsinghua's MBA is nearly 400,000, which is not a small amount for Zhang Yuxuan. In order to study smoothly, he used all the original savings to buy a car to pay for tuition. But it was still not enough, so I had to rent out my new house and move back home.
Zeng Xueqing's tuition fee is also more than 400,000 yuan, her son is still young, and the family has more places to spend money.
And when it comes to Huang Ru, the cost conversion has to be done in a different way. Although the tuition fee is only in the early 100,000s, the two years of full-time mean that she will not have any source of income. Counting the annual salary, for Huang Ru in the past two years, the cost of paying is more than 700,000 yuan.
Find out
When people start to choose to change, there is a ripple effect in their lives.
Being successfully admitted to Tsinghua University brought Zhang Yuxuan more courage. He realized that he could change the status quo and simply change all the unsatisfactory parts of his life. He plucked up the courage to talk to the company's top management and decided to transfer to the business department again.
He also started making new friends, which made him feel like he was no longer alone on the road to change. After reading the MBA, Zhang Yuxuan began to actively break the circle of socializing. At the beginning of the school year, he added various group chats, and before they met, he took the initiative to add the WeChat of his classmates, and every time he saw a classmate, he would eagerly ask two questions: what to do and why he wanted to study for an MBA.
Zhang Yuxuan hopes to find his own answer through the vision of the ideal future in the mouths of others. For this answer, he rekindled the flame of struggle. Studying for an MBA on the job is more tiring than expected, and Tsinghua MBA homework is notoriously much, especially in the final week, when several papers are pressed on the top of his head, during that time, he is like a spinning top, tossing and turning between work and study. He squeezes out all his time every day to get his work and homework done.
Zeng Xueqing also went through the process of searching. As soon as she entered school, she participated in various club activities, and the WeChat list was filled with various group chats, each of which was densely packed with new news, but later she found that she had participated in too many clubs, and her energy was completely unable to cope with it, and she was even more confused.
Not only that, Zeng Xueqing was also disappointed in her MBA studies. For example, when I first signed up, the school held a publicity meeting, and the lecture invited many star tutors, and everyone's lectures were full of dry goods, but when it came to admission, Zeng Xueqing found that many were not star lecturers, and the lecture content was a little useless.
But with her hard work, she really found her way.
Zeng Xueqing began to fall in love with running, and felt a certain desire ignited in her heart, and began to participate in running training frequently. The preparation for the competition was more difficult than expected, and with the encouragement and company of her classmates, she trained to a level close to that of a professional athlete in a short period of time.
▲ "Lead" was filmed in the Tengger Desert (shot by OPPO Find X7 Ultra)
She found that she was so resilient that she had to train hard in the rain, even on a rainy day. During that time, her muscles were sore every day, and she had to have a massage every few days to relax. The resistance is also significantly reduced, as long as there is a cold around, "will definitely be hit", but even if you are sick, you still have to keep running.
In the past, she has felt countless times that "life seems to be standing still". And now, she was running and feeling the wind blowing in her face.
The track is still the wilderness
Nowadays, many people will ask the question, is life a track or a wilderness? Especially at the age of thirty or forty, no matter how much you yearn for the wilderness, life seems to have become a straight track, leading to that not-so-sexy future.
Zhang Yuxuan has fantasized countless times that he has a long to-do list if life suddenly stops. He wants to GAP for a year, travel to various places, and pick up his camera again to become a photographer.
▲ "City in the Windy" OPPO Super Image Creator Joy Wolf (shot by OPPO Find X7 Ultra)
These beautiful ideas are like parallel worlds, and Zhang Yuxuan sometimes even fantasizes about being laid off by the company.
However, the road under his feet seems to be parallel, and it seems to be quietly extending to himself in that parallel time and space. The learning process is like a window into which he can see the bigger world. In addition, he will still have the opportunity to participate in an exchange program abroad, so that he can fulfill his wish when he first graduated.
However, the anxiety of life remains. For example, he still doesn't see a path to promotion. The classmates in the class are all excellent, some became managers at a young age, and some succeeded in starting a business early. Every time he sees it, he wonders if the gap with his peers has widened again.
But that doesn't seem to be a bad thing, because it's because he insists on being awake that he feels the pain.
Zeng Xueqing's troubles also continued. She was already worried about her son's education and had been hesitant to start a business. She still couldn't make up her mind. But she knew that she might start her own business one day, because the idea never went away.
Someone commented, "People who study MBAs are unfortunate people who still don't give up." "Because, even if the outcome of the change is unpredictable, at least people are brave enough to take a step.
Huang Ru is the same, the smell of class on her body has disappeared. When she's not busy with schoolwork, she travels around the world, unlocking a new landmark almost every three months. Although the road ahead is still confused, she has gained a sense of relaxation in her heart, and as for graduating next year and looking for a job, she smiled heartily, "Let's worry about it next year."
Zeng Xueqing's feelings were particularly profound. When she runs, she moves her legs, and running seems to give stress an outlet. After the run, I can continue to go back to work and life.
It was also during the running process that Zeng Xueqing paid attention to the Asia-Pacific Business School Desert Challenge (hereinafter referred to as Yasha). This competition will be sponsored by OPPO from 2023, and it is also in the competition documentary filmed by OPPO that she saw the team members constantly breaking through themselves in the desert where they can't see the edge.
▲ "Reckless Running" was filmed in the Tengger Desert (shot by OPPO Find X7 Ultra)
As Zeng Xueqing saw, OPPO chose to run with the youth. OPPO has started a 5-year strategic partnership with Yasha. As a desert trekking competition among the MBA and EMBA groups of business schools in the Asia-Pacific region, the core meaning of Yasha is "moving forward".
After the change, Zeng Xueqing participated in a total of three Yasha competitions and gained a clearer sense of achievement. In 2023, she won the team championship and women's group A championship of the 11th Yasha Competition, as well as the women's championship of the Ninghai Cross Country Challenge BY UTMB 25km.
▲ "Xiangcheng" was filmed in the Tengger Desert (shot by OPPO Find X7 Ultra)
Not only the competition, OPPO has been interacting with young people. OPPO has set up joint laboratories with Peking University, Tsinghua University and other universities to bring more new industry information to young people and help them enter the workplace. Last year, OPPO also joined hands with China Europe International Business School to set up a China-Europe Teaching and Research Base, so that young people in the workplace can better understand the management thinking.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of OPPO's founding, and it is also 20 years of running with users. Now entering the new era of AI, OPPO still hopes to create a better life experience for every user, "the heart is bright, and the smile is forward".
After chatting with many people, Zhang Yuxuan finally discovered the fact that other people's ideas for the future can't really help him. The blueprint for the future, he can only rely on his own thinking. He's also starting to socialize less, but this time, he's proactive, not passive, as he did before.
He began to understand that he would keep making new choices, because he knew—
The answer must not be in place.
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