Wen 丨 新 entropy, Author 丨 苒一, Editor 丨 Yi page
After the National Day, Zhengzhou suddenly became cold, and it was always foggy when it did not rain.
On weekend evenings, Kodama takes out a small Japanese stove and a small milky white pot from the innermost side of the kitchen cabinet. Pour water and add the hot pot base, as well as the pre-cut shiitake mushrooms, apricot abalone mushrooms, and enoki mushrooms. A small fire is raised, and when the whole soup is grunting, you can soak up your favorite ingredients.
Sitting on the carpet with his back to the couch, sipping a beer, the round cat sleeping at his feet. At this point, she can ignore the messages in the work group. From a soft and light sip of beer to the sound of rushing water in the kitchen, all the bad things disappear in the process.
This year is the second year that Xiaoyu has lived alone. Two years of living alone is not as calm and beautiful as every day, and when an accident occurs, she often feels isolated.
The American writer May Satten described living alone in his Diary of Living Alone, "Only when I am alone, look around this room, and relive the conversations between the old times and it, can I fully taste the taste of life." ”
This "taste of life" mixes independence and loneliness, self-esteem and self-consistency among young people living alone. The life of living alone in Xiaoyu's understanding is "the coexistence of freedom and loneliness", a "mixture of active choice and passive acceptance".
Is living alone a stage in young people's lives, or is it a new way of life? What is the living life that young people want to live like? Perhaps the answer can be found in their stories.
<h2>Living alone is a process of being close to the self</h2>
"Living alone is more like a process of being close to yourself." The "self" that Xiao Yu is talking about is the real self that you may not have discovered yet.
Xiaoyu is an only child, she has not left her parents before college, and she has lived in a dormitory after college, and has never lived alone in the true sense of the word. After graduation, she withstood the pressure of rent, rented a single apartment in the old town of Zhengzhou, the room is not large, 30 square meters, the living room and the bed are next to each other, there is a small south-facing balcony, and a kitchen that can only accommodate the next person.
The balcony at home has a lot of light, and the first thing she does every morning is to pull the curtains open; Xiaoyu also buys a lot of beautiful cutlery and cups, cooks carefully every day, and often struggles for a long time about the question of "which plate to use for food"; she also adds a floor lamp, a bookshelf, and 127 books on it.
Most of the time when living alone, the days are plain and free, but the loneliness comes from time to time, and Xiaoyu finds the "low energy" self. The first time I felt lonely was a normal, repetitive off-work night that was repeated many times.
"It gets dark early in the winter, and when you open the gatehouse, it's pitch black and quiet, with only the occasional frolicking of children downstairs." That night, Xiaoyu did not cook for herself, and lay in bed after washing up early, trying to alleviate the loneliness by watching the drama.
After that, she often needed to resist loneliness in the evening, Xiaoyu said, "After graduation, I learned that freedom and loneliness coexist, and solitude also requires energy." ”
The appearance of the stray cat Qiqi brought her new energy.
Qiqi appeared on the way home from work, Xiaoyu did not hesitate, easily picked it up and brought it home, after which there was a "little thing" waiting for her to come home. But seven seven has become a "sudden event" in life.
On the weekend afternoon, there was a courier delivered to the door, and in the gap between the doors, Qiqi sneaked out of the house and walked slowly to the other end of the corridor. Xiao Yu didn't even think about it, and went out to chase the cat. As a result, the balcony window was wide open, the air was convected, and before Xiaoyu could take a few steps, the door was locked with a "bang", and the cat also ran along the corridor without a trace.
"It's over, the keys and mobile phones are at home," Xiao Yu thought to herself, "you still have to catch Qiqi back first." On the 12th floor, she climbed back and forth 5 times without finding the cat. I couldn't go back home, so I could only kick the slippers and ask for help from the property and call the locksmith. After several tosses, when I got home it was already 11 p.m.
Xiao Yu was still relieved that Qiqi could not go down, and then took the key to go out to look for it, and finally found Qiqi crouching on the side of the door of the resident on the same position on the 7th floor and his own home.
Since then, Xiaoyu has gradually reconciled with loneliness, she said, "Loneliness and accidents are part of living alone, each feeling is staged, emotions come and go, just follow it." ”
Anin's life is more free than that of the average solitary person, because she not only lives alone, but also is a freelance writer. Looking at her orderly life now, I can't believe that her previous days were a mess.
Anin said, "When I first started writing, I really overestimated my self-discipline. "The house is full of fast food products, or order takeout; I don't want to drag it out once a week or two; I often drag out the manuscript while I am anxious...
The state of life and work without constraints often brings not a comfortable life, but a vortex of decadence due to the loss of a sense of order. After half a year of this kind of life, Aning really collapsed, "If you don't write well, the rent will not be paid." ”
A good life condition often only needs to start with a cleanup, throw away expired food and fast food products, clean up the messy clothes on the sofa, mop the floor clean, and the good mood is back, and Anin is determined to find the order of life. She began to refine her work to every hour of the day, making her own dinner and cleaning up the house every three days.
Anin made it clear that freedom of choice, you need to do time management more carefully than ordinary people, and people who lack willpower will become a "waste wood" in a free life. "Ritual for solitary people" and "freelancers looking for order" are essentially a truth that you may need to pay something for the sustainability of living alone.
<h2>Is living alone not the mainstream way of life for young people? </h2>
Young people like Aning and Xiaoyu, who live alone, released a set of data last year by the Ministry of Civil Affairs. In 2019, China's single population reached 260 million, more than the total population of the United Kingdom, France and Germany, of which 80 million are living alone, and this number is expected to rise to 92 million by 2021.
But at present, the definition of young people living alone has not yet been fully clarified. Is it a single person living in a suite that counts as living alone, or is it a combination of people living in a suite that counts as living alone?
In Europe and the United States, many studies on living alone refer to living alone in a suite, but Chinese research is mainly aimed at "empty nest youth", that is, leaving their parents to live, whether they live alone or several people, or live with couples are counted in the category of "empty nest youth".
Feng Xiaotian, a professor of sociology at Nanjing University, said in an interview with Sanlian Life Weekly that he did not agree with the concept of "empty nest youth".
In fact, the term "empty nest" is derived from the term "empty nest elderly", and "empty nest elderly" refers to the fact that after the child leaves home, the elderly parents are left alone at home, and this passive state does not apply to young people living alone.
Feng Xiaotian believes that "living alone" should be a one-person household, and there is no need to interact with anyone after entering the door, in order to be called living alone. In the country, excluding the situation that several people share a house, there are very few real solitary people.
In this way, there is no evidence of the increasing number of young people living alone in China, and the number of young people living alone seems to have yet to be examined.
Feng Xiaotian said, "It should be clear that the population is counted according to the hukou, and the data on living alone is not only for the young population, but also for people of all ages, so the increase in the number of one-person households does not mean an increase in the number of young people living alone." ”
But it is undeniable that the state of young people living alone will indeed exist for a long time, and living alone is always a mixture of independent choice and passive acceptance.
Before the reform and opening up, the relationship between urban residents and units was very close, and units usually provided accommodation for employees. After the reform of the economic system, the work unit no longer provides collective dormitories, so the problem of accommodation outside working hours is fully solved by young people. In this case, it is inevitable for young people to rent. In order to avoid disturbing each other, some people with good economic conditions will choose to live alone, so early solitude is a choice based on economic strength.
As successive generations of graduates poured into society, young people living alone became a class, and even a culture of society.
<h2>Living alone easily is a social achievement</h2>
In Europe and the United States, the culture of living alone came earlier. In the United States, more than 50% of people were single in 2015, and the population living alone accounted for 28% of the total household registration in the United States, making the single-person the second largest form of household registration in the United States.
The answer to the reason why so many Americans choose to live alone may be found in 2013 in "The Society of Singles" by Eric Crinenberg, a sociology professor at New York University. He concludes the book by writing, "In today's highly internet-connected, hyper-active, 24-hour social culture,...... Living alone gives us time and space to achieve efficient self-seclusion. ”
In his view, more people choose to live alone today because they can afford it, which means a better quality of life, a more independent mind, and a better level of education.
The situation in China may be more complicated. Sanlian Life Weekly once pointed out that while China continues to enjoy individual freedom, it also needs to face the end of the traditional unit system and the traditional state welfare system it represents, as well as the adaptation to the new social security system.
In other words, when the previous generation still enjoys the stable work of the public institution and the stable life of the unit, the next generation lives in the one-child policy, and at the same time needs to face and adapt to the uncertainty of life brought about by the change of work, as well as the transience of interpersonal relationships.
Wang Yidan, School of Sociology, Central China Normal University, also pointed out in the research conclusion of "Individualized Research on Urban Solitary Youth" that social individuals have indeed experienced structural changes from "total society" to "individualized society". This change has also led to a change in the concept of young people from "living for others" to "living for themselves". This has been followed by an increase in young people's sense of self-identity and a decrease in their sense of self-sacrifice.
In addition, Shen Yang, an associate professor in the Department of Public Economics and Social Policy at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, said in an interview that the phenomenon of living alone in China is also related to China's second demographic transition. Rising individualism, delayed marriages, declining fertility rates, and rising cohabitation and divorce rates have all led to an increase in the single population, and singles and solitary living have a strong correlation.
At the same time, the use of network information technology has also built a "absent space" real-time technology for young people that can communicate in the "absence" of the body, which compresses the time distance and frees social relations from the restrictions of "here and now". The coexistence of "presence" and "absence" has greatly changed daily social life.
Closely following the culture of solitude is the "one-person economy" boom, around 2016, there have been one-person food restaurants, self-heating food and other products that focus on single young people; RIO has also launched a micro-drunk series, with the "one-person wine" slogan, the pet market has also developed rapidly.
<h2>Young people may aspire to cohabitation</h2>
In many people's minds, "living alone" is often associated with words like "loneliness" and "apathy," but Cronenberg's findings are very different.
Most of the stories of the more than 300 people he interviewed who lived alone were full of freedom, and they really wanted to be able to arrange their lives according to their own wishes. But at the same time, these people who live alone are more willing to interact with friends and neighbors and more willing to go to public spaces to communicate with strangers than married people, and these results prove that many traditional ideas are wrong.
At the same time, young people living alone does not mean that it is more difficult to find a partner or marry later, there is no necessary connection between the two, so Feng Xiaotian also pointed out that young people living alone cannot be considered a vulnerable group, let alone tacitly believe that this is a social problem that needs to be solved.
People pursue solitude because living alone is in line with the most sacred modern values of today's society that we pursue, but few people want to live alone forever, which is not the ultimate goal of life, but a reliable choice before starting a relationship or after ending one.
So what kind of shelter do young people need? Maybe it's not a shared house, or a solitary, but a co-living. German sociologist Georg Zimmer pointed out that although the biggest feature of the relationship between people in contemporary metropolises is distance, too close to fully enjoy personal space, too far away from the necessary contact between people will disappear.
Mori Hiroshi, who has lived alone for 3 years, agrees with this view, and he has moved four times around the past three years, from finding a comfortable house at the beginning to hoping to find a house with seven or eight friends, two or three kilometers away. He said, "This does not disturb each other, and of course the daily gathering does not make me feel too lonely." ”
This concept has long been popular in Sweden. In the 1930s, Swedes realized that people living alone wanted to stay in touch with those around them. So since then, Swedish planners have begun to conceive of collective housing, with a communal cafeteria on the second floor where people can eat with their neighbours and place orders in the room if they don't want to.
Similar "cohabitation" ideas have also emerged in China. For example, the 706 Life Lab in Shanghai and Guangzhou tried a residential life experiment on "shared community". Under the premise of ensuring the quality of tenants living alone, many activities and rules have been designed to re-consciously construct real dialogue and real communication relationships.
Similarly, Beijing's sweet potato community has transformed the original underground neighborhood committee activity room into a community center, allowing young people to maintain normal and comfortable social interaction between neighbors in the process of living alone.
This interdependent state of life is making true independence possible.
Note: The characters in this article are pseudonyms.