A life captive to matter

Ye Kefei/Text At a time when material life is highly prosperous, "people are captured by materials" is a topic of great concern. The excessively fast pace of life, too much material demand, too involuted competition mode, and the bombardment of various information channels have made people fall into spiritual internal friction. Chicken Soup for the Soul, which advocates "simple life" and "return to nature", is also believed in by many people. They believe that in the past, when material scarcity was relatively scarce, life was more harmonious, and this was true for people and things.

Many people believe that a wood stove is more fragrant than a gas stove for cooking, that a bicycle can carry more than a car, and that a stove is warmer than a heater. From a scientific point of view, none of these claims may stand up to scrutiny, but from a psychological perspective, this "illusion" has long been ingrained.

The beautification of people's past life is a kind of thinking inertia. Scholar Wang Xiaowei hopes that in the book "The Depths of Everyday Life", through the portrayal of life, combing the heart from nostalgic images, through his own experience and the memories of his elders, he will review how those things that people are familiar with since the 1980s were born and disappeared. He tried to answer the question: Why were things so expensive in the past, even like family members, but now objects are commoditized, leaving only shriveled use value?

Let go of meaning

"The Depths of the Everyday" is not a nostalgic "biography of old objects". Wang Xiaowei hopes to "try to reveal how we used to live by clarifying the role of objects in society." The logic of the whole book is a play "Cinderella". After Cinderella's magic fails, she runs away, and the prince wants to discover Cinderella's true face, so he has to try the shoe with him. Life is similar, and the first face of life must be found through various objects. ”

Wang Xiaowei said frankly in the book: "It seems that in today's highly prosperous material life, people are more willing to return to the relatively poor past. Of course, I know very well that they don't really want to go back to the past, it just means that they really 'want' to go back to the past. This romantic idea of past life is particularly interesting. Part of the reason for wanting to go back in time is that I want to be young without having to bear the costs of modern life. In addition to this lazy idea, there is also a decent part to reminiscing about the past. This decent part lies in the fact that people today always feel tired of being burdened by external objects, tired of getting food, clothing, shelter and many things, and they want to return to the harmonious relationship between people and things. It's an anomaly to get tired with more things. People in the eighties and nineties also needed these things, and the basic category of electrical appliances was gradually becoming popular at that time, but it was not so boring. Every time something is added, it is often a hundred times more invigorating. In the past, I watched a TV from 100 schools, and the more I watched it, the more lively it became. Now everyone is guarding the big screen and often feels lonely. This element of loneliness is very complex and requires a meticulous psychochemical analysis to portray clearly. ”

The book talks about basic clothing, food, housing and transportation, covering all aspects of life, such as "living" starting from buying a house, telling about the relationship between people and houses, and ending with the relationship between people and space. Wang Xiaowei also mentioned the old objects and facilities in life, such as video halls and printing shops that have gradually disappeared, televisions that have gradually become "for the elderly", as well as schools and hospitals. Of course, there are also mobile phones and WeChat that modern people can't leave without.

All these have their own value, and they also have a profound impact on people's lives in a subtle way. But "The Depths of the Everyday" has quite excellent restraint, and does not let this exploration flow to cheap lyricism, thus avoiding chicken soup for the soul. Wang Xiaowei even ridiculed the kind of chicken soup for the soul-style search for meaning, and he said frankly in the book: "What is the meaning of life and what is a happy life, maybe it is a wrong question at all, just like asking a boy how he feels during pregnancy." Life doesn't have to be meaningful. We can't ask what we want to ask and we have to have something in life. Questioning the meaning of life is often a very arrogant thing, nothing more than to prove that you deserve to enjoy life. ”

In other words, only by letting go of the obsession with "meaning" can we truly appreciate life. If you realize the true meaning of life, you don't need to ask about "meaning". After all, "not summarizing life is usually part of a good life." Occasionally you can't sleep, try to sum up life, and create a lot of problems out of thin air, and summarizing life is usually part of a bad life. ”

What should be asked more is the "everyday", including those daily phenomena and daily necessities. They were once so deeply involved in people's lives, but they can fade away or even disappear altogether. Their "experience" is precisely to witness the changes in life.

Wang Xiaowei mentioned in the book that "have you eaten" is a very popular way of greeting the older generation of Chinese, but young people obviously do not have such a habit. This is because the older generation has a memory of hunger that runs deep in the bone marrow, and this memory influences their behavior patterns. Nowadays, people often ask "have you bought a house" when chatting, which is also based on the deep obsession in the heart, which is completely out of the consideration of security.

In the past, items were more than just items

The "slow past" that many people miss is not necessarily a genuine desire to be slow, but a passive requirement in a period of material scarcity and knowledge scarcity. Wang Xiaowei mentions an example in the book that when he was a child, he often grabbed TV with his father. His father liked to watch American translated films, and he liked animation and martial arts, and the two often argued about it. If the argument was fierce, my father would turn off the TV in a fit of rage. At this time, Wang Xiaowei will pick up the remote control and press it wildly, wanting to turn the TV back on as soon as possible. His father would tell him that it was best to turn it on after five minutes, and that the TV should not be turned on and off all at once.

This detail will resonate with many "post-70s" and "post-80s", because in their own upbringing, parents often have this "five-minute standard" for home appliances. There is no actual scientific basis for this standard, but it is customary for that generation to follow it. From the early black-and-white TVs to the later color TVs and air conditioners, this is the case, and the frequent opening and closing of refrigerator doors is also a forbidden thing in countless homes. It is actually the mindset of the scarcity era, because any electrical appliance was not easy to come by, and many people think that an electrical appliance may last a lifetime, so they take care of it. But because the knowledge level is as lacking as the material level, they will love it in the way they understand.

But this "five-minute standard" does represent the slow pace of life and the resulting respite. Wang Xiaowei sighed: "Today's five minutes were suddenly lost, and in our lives, there are no more these five minutes." Everything is on standby 24 hours a day, ready to light up and ready for immediate use. All technologies no longer need to be taken care of by people, and they don't deserve to be bothered by people. Over the past few decades, everything has lost its preciousness, and even five minutes are worth resting. This may reflect a lot of changes in the logic at the bottom of life. ”

The hoarding of items by the elders is also a reflection of this kind of thinking, and many young people have sighed why the elders are reluctant to throw away anything, such as used tea boxes, old bags, etc., which would rather not be used for more than ten years, but also piled up on the balcony or cabinet. Wang Xiaowei recounted his experience of returning to his hometown, where he tried to take pictures of various old objects and leave them behind. He has a pair of plaster lions that he bought in high school, "The plaster is very inert, it doesn't get moldy or rot, but it still corrodes over time." The plaster had become very fluffy, and the entire surface was covered with tiny holes, and with a light blow, the lion's eyebrows and eyes all disappeared, which startled me, and I realized that time is actually quite sharp. ”

He also noticed that the handbag hanging from the door looked good, but when he touched it, it shattered and turned into powder. There is also a common washstand in the seventies and eighties of the 20th century, which used to be a place for countless families to wash in the morning and evening, but Wang Xiaowei's home has been lame, and the color has faded.

But on the other hand, a person's life is made up of things that he has used, is using, and has never used, but he already has, and when he looks at these things, he seems to see the old people. Moreover, "these objects full of the past are actually stored in the future." Old people often say that these things should not be thrown away, they can still be used in the future. This reminds me that what I don't need in the future really has nowhere to put it. For the elderly, it doesn't matter whether the old thing is actually used in the future or not, what really matters is to see yourself as a person with a future. ”

In other words, in the past society, objects were not just objects, not simply instrumentalized, but entrusted with people's understanding and longing for life, and were people's real partners. For example, when thinking of bicycles in those days, many people think of a father riding a bicycle with a child, or a husband riding a bicycle and his wife sitting in the back, and the child sitting on the bar in front, which means that the family is closely connected. But today, it has lost this meaning and has become a relatively pure means of transportation.

In the same way, many of today's objects do not have a close connection to the family, but rather play an isolation role. For example, mobile phones and WeChat seem to make it more convenient for people to connect, but they are actually isolated from each other. It's not uncommon for families to sit together and play with their phones.

A truly simple life is not about abandonment

In the past, people did not deliberately chase the urgent need for technology, they needed more to "cherish things". As the book says, "In my limited communication with my parents, I roughly understood that the so-called 'modern life' should be roughly synonymous with 'good life'." When the 'post-60s' generation was young, they were not particularly rich in material resources, and their understanding of modern life was once limited to 'electric lights and telephones, upstairs and downstairs'. These things have long been realized now, but I have observed that they do not feel particularly happy in life. The happiness that comes from the convenience of modern life is often achieved through the memory of bittersweet memories. ”

It is undeniable that many old people are always living in the old mind. The book mentions the evolution of Chinese dress, from the ancient tailor-made, to the bell pants of the seventies and eighties of the 20th century, to the suits that were worn at will regardless of the occasion, until today's young people pay great attention to dressing. If the dress of young people pursues "beauty" or "special", then the dress in the eyes of the old man is given more meaning, the book reads: "In the eyes of the elderly, a kind of clothing corresponds to a reality: Lenin's suit corresponds to the vigorous world revolution, and the suit corresponds to China's great strides into the world", but in the world of young people, "it is very troublesome to wear the costume in "One Piece", we clearly know that the reality corresponding to this costume is virtual, not happening in the moment, and the costume does not match reality. In the eyes of older generations, this is often a manifestation of schizophrenia. ”

Wang Xiaowei concluded that this may be an arrogant prejudice of the old man, "The old man accepts a kind of inertia of life, thinking that the reality is set by others, and he just wears the skin of the set scene." Young people are more self-conscious of their subjectivity and want to set their own reality. It is inaccurate to say that cosplay is only out of curiosity and aesthetic taste, it may show the disdain and confrontation of young people towards the current reality, and also show their imagination and production capacity for parallel reality. ”

The same is true for diet, the eating habits of many urban elderly people are already quite healthy, the intake of coarse grains is quite high, and the taste is also very light, but the heart is still quite hungry for fatty meat and other foods. This is because eating fatty meat used to be a luxury during their formative years. This complex is not unique to the Chinese, early European immigrants hunted bison on the North American continent, threw away all the lean meat, and selected fat cattle to eat. As for the love of lean meat, it is actually a picky eater with abundant food.

"Older generations are more than willing to share memories of hunger with younger people," the book says. 'Extreme hunger' is full of transcendence, in fact, there is no way to convey it directly, the main thing is to experience it with your heart. It is said that when the stomach first starts to get hungry, people will become restless and look everywhere for food; If you are hungry again, your sense of life will decline, your spirit will become stagnant, and you will become like a plant. If you continue to starve, you will suffer from edema and soon die. During the difficult period, the situation in some villages in Henan and Anhui was very serious, and it was mainly the peasants who went hungry, while the people in the cities were provided with food rations and could still feed themselves. The starvation of peasants is not new, and the harvest may fail due to drought and flooding, but an important cause of famine is distribution. ”

After the production was delivered to the households, the problem of hunger was solved, and the farmers were able to eat enough. But as the book says, "The effects of hunger don't disappear immediately, hunger is a chronic disease, and its effects on people are continuous." ”

This "cherishing" of everything in times of material scarcity is often seen as a "love of life", but this is largely an illusion. is also delusional, and there may be the popular "breaking away".

When it comes to "people are not burdened by things", many people think of renunciation, believing that as long as they get rid of superfluous things, they can make people happy. But "The Depths of the Everyday" obviously does not accept this kind of life of renunciation, Wang Xiaowei believes that if a house is empty and there are only a few things, then it is not suitable for life. Material renunciation does not necessarily bring inner peace, it may simply be a deliberate rejection of life.

Real life should be vibrant, and it needs to be decorated with a variety of objects. It's like those photos that depict the warmth of the family, never leaving the kitchen where the sun shines in, and those bottles and cans.

Therefore, modern people are burdened by things, in essence, they do not cherish things enough, and only regard them as discarded commodities. Therefore, if you want not to be burdened by things, the most important thing to do is not to throw away things, but to restore the relationship between yourself and objects, "not simply using a thing to achieve a function, we are 'communicating' with things." ”

Therefore, "the true value of nostalgia is to remind us that mobile phones, and the promise of modernity behind them, are not enough to achieve lasting happiness", and that "the harder and harder life path is related to the narrow attitude of adults".

The book reveals a truth that many people originally understood but deliberately ignored in the involution: "The mainstream narrative tells you that you work hard and hard to learn unfamiliar knowledge in order to become a good person one day." There is a sequence of values embedded in this narrative, which denies the legitimacy of current life. For rural children, studying hard is to jump out of the farm, which puts their rural life at the bottom of the value sequence...... All people in this society feel lacking and inadequate, unable to accept their own ordinariness and slackness. It may seem exhilarating, but the well-mannered narrative lurks a systemic violence that seeks to eradicate all non-modern ways of life. ”

But in fact, the sense of meaning and fulfillment that human beings pursue is not based on the progress of science and technology, nor does it come from material abundance, but from the depths of daily life.